Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign sic-2

by Tom Clancy

  After walking for several hours, the pair were crossing one of the many dirt roads that paralleled the border, when a truck roared up out of the night. Eberly and Griffith dropped to the ground, but on the flat featureless surface of the desert, they were still exposed. As it neared them, the truck slowed, but the driver either did not see them or was alone and in no mood to be a hero for Saddam. The truck resumed its speed and drove off.

  Shortly, Tom raised another F-15 combat air patrol aircraft on his radio. Easily convinced that they were the crew of Buick 04, the fighter, call sign Mobile 41, did not ask them to authenticate. He told them to wait while he flew south, but promised to be back shortly. He never returned. When it hit them that he wasn’t coming back, their frustrations rose to an all-time high and their spirits dropped to an all-time low.

  About two in the morning, they made out the dim outline of a building ahead of them. It was not far away, and there were no lights. No one appeared to be around. When Eberly, now desperately in need of water, announced that he was going to see if he could find something to drink, Griffith cautioned against it. He’d remembered a survival training dictum about avoiding buildings. Besides, he explained, they must be close to Syria. In fact, maybe they were in Syria and just needed to go a little farther to be sure.

  But Eberly’s thirst proved too desperate for such cautious considerations, and he approached the building.[63] Since Griffith didn’t want to risk separation in the dark, he followed close behind. Suddenly, gunfire erupted from the top of the building. Someone had obviously been on guard — and doing a good job at it. Then maybe ten other troops came rushing out of the building, all firing wildly in the air or else in the general direction of the two airmen. If they were trying to scare the two Americans, they did an excellent job.

  Both raised their hands and shouted, “Don’t shoot! We are friends!”

  Who knows? they thought. These guys might be Syrian.

  That hope was dashed when they were hustled inside the building and into a small room with a prominent picture of Saddam Hussein on the wall. This was a bad moment for the two American airmen.

  The room was packed. In addition to the Americans, there was a flock of seventeen-year-old Iraqi privates, commanded by an Iraqi second lieutenant who appeared to be perhaps twenty-one. Though the Iraqi troops were greatly aroused by their find, they made no move to harm their captives, who, by this time, had concluded they’d run into an Iraqi border patrol guard post about a mile short of their destination. (After the war, Tom Griffith learned that it was fortunate they hadn’t reached the border area. It had been mined.)

  After a time, the Iraqis handcuffed the Americans, loaded them into a white Toyota pickup, and delivered them to a larger fort nearby, where they were met by a first lieutenant. Like the border troops, he and his soldiers showed no hatred and treated the two Americans in a civilized manner. Though they did their best to ask questions, they had little success, as the Iraqis spoke no English and the F-15 crew spoke no Arabic.

  The Iraqis then delivered Griffith and Eberly to a larger office, where they were met by an Iraqi captain. Also present were a group of officers, one of whom spoke broken English. “I am a doctor,” he explained, then examined Eberly’s neck wound.

  After conducting an inventory of the Americans’ survival equipment (it had been taken from them when they were captured) and writing down their names, the Iraqis made some halfhearted attempts at interrogation. Questions like “How far and how fast can your aircraft fly?” brought truthful but useless answers, like “Well, it depends.”

  By 4:00 A.M., Griffith and Eberly had been fed and given water. Then they were handcuffed again and placed facedown on the back of a flatbed truck, which carried them to the outskirts of a nearby town. There they stopped at a modest house surrounded by a brick wall, the home of a general, their guards explained. An Iraqi captain and two guards led them past the general’s white 1975 Chevy Impala and inside. Soon the three Iraqis showed them into the general’s office, seated them on a sofa, then waited with them for the general. A few minutes later, the general, in his bathrobe, greeted them. Like their previous captors, he treated them civilly; when they asked if they could get some sleep, he had them taken to a room with two cots. There they were allowed to rest for the next four or five hours.

  Now that they were alone, they took the opportunity to put a story together for serious interrogations. In order to keep the Iraqis from probing the defensive strengths and weaknesses of the F-15E, they decided to deny they’d been shot down; it would be easy to claim an electrical fire was the culprit. In any case, they were far from certain about what had actually bagged them (though it was likely a surface-to-air missile).

  As they waited in the general’s home, they were visited by a number of curious and not unfriendly guards. One who was especially friendly had studied petroleum engineering and spoke good English. “This is a terrible war,” he confided earnestly. “Don’t you agree?” And, “What do you think is going to happen? Something bad, no?”

  But then a heavyset guard appeared, with a far more hostile attitude. “We are going to ask you a lot of questions,” he announced, “and you must cooperate,” implying by his tone serious penalties for noncooperation. As he warmed to his task, his comments grew more and more argumentative: “Why did you start the war?” Or, “You are all going to perish.” Or, “You are all helping Israel.”

  Later that day, they were handcuffed and blindfolded, led outside, and loaded into the backseat of a six-passenger pickup truck. When the truck started up, their blindfolds were removed and they were taken into town. There the streets were lined with civilians chanting Arabic curses. They both bore up well under this (After all, they thought, words can’t hurt us, especially if the only ones we can understand are “Saddam! Saddam!”), until a young man hurled a rock through the truck window. Then it became Oh shit, I’m scared! Get us out of here, Lord!

  Somehow that demonstration ended without serious consequences, and they were taken back to the general’s house for phase one of their interrogation.

  In the beginning, the questions were simple: “Are you able to evade a missile?” And they answered in kind, “Well, that depends.”

  But the easy part of their captivity soon proved to be over. They were cuffed, blindfolded, loaded back into a truck, and driven off. The setting sun behind them told them they were headed east, toward Baghdad. They traveled all night, were handed off from one military unit to another. Near morning, Tom Griffith was able to sneak a peek: a road announced in English, “Baghdad 20 km.”

  When they reached their first place of confinement in the capital (where it was, they never learned), they were split up. From then on, the interrogation was conducted by professionals.

  The next days were not pleasant. Though the questioners were well-versed in technical details—“What was the dispense rate you had set in your ALE-40 chaff dispenser?”—they hadn’t the faintest notion of how American culture worked or how Americans looked at life. One day, the interrogator sat down and announced smugly that George Bush had died, expecting Griffith to break down in tears. Instead, he feigned anguish: “Oh, Christ, that means Dan Quayle is president!”

  As the days passed, Griffith was moved from cell to cell and from jail to jail. He quickly lost track of where he was and where he’d been, until one day he was moved to Baath Party headquarters and confined in the cell next to CBS News reporter Bob Simon, who had been picked up on the Iraqi side of the lines, where he’d been trying to scoop the press pool. This had not been a smart place to get caught, since the Iraqis were now convinced that he was a spy and were preparing to execute him — a fact that did not thrill Tom Griffith. Could it mean he was on “death row”?

  Meanwhile, by February 25 the Black Hole had picked the last targets in Baghdad, and the Baath Party headquarters became one of the few that were acceptable to Schwarzkopf after the Al-Firdus bunker tragedy. During this strike, a bomb fell short of its aim point and b
lew in the walls of the prisoners’ cells.

  “Oh Christ, I’m going to die in prison!” Griffith cried out to himself, certain that the bombs would set the building on fire.

  Three other bombs struck farther away, on the other end of the building, destroying nearby cells (which, fortunately, were empty). Doors were also blown open, temporarily freeing a few POWs, who immediately — and unsuccessfully — went combing the rubble for cell keys that would let them free the others.

  Since the building was now a total loss, the inmates were rounded up and sent to military facilities, where they were housed in groups instead of single cells. Tom Griffith was locked up with Jeff “Sly” Fox, who had been captured on February 18.

  “How’s the ground war going?” Griffith asked.

  “It hasn’t started yet,” Fox answered.

  “Ohhhhhh!” Griffith groaned, with a despairing look.

  “Hey,” Fox replied, “don’t worry. The air war is going great. It’s not going to be much longer until we get out of here!”

  Welcome words indeed. Griffith had by now lost twenty-five pounds. All the old heads in prison were suffering from dysentery, and there was no way to keep clean.

  Two days later, it was strangely quiet outside the cells. They could hear no bombers flying overhead. No AAA guns were popping off at F-117s. At first, the POWs thought this was because of weather aborts; but in the morning, the blue sky and warm sunshine made it clear that the bombing had stopped for some other reason. Each POW prayed it was for the right reason: that the war was over.

  Very shortly after that, the prisoners were given soap and wash water, there was more and better food, and a barber came around to give them a shave — an Iraqi shave, dry with a rusty razor. (No wonder so many Iraqis wear beards, Tom Griffith told himself.)

  “I think you will be going home soon,” an Iraqi officer announced on the fourth of March.

  Is this a trick to get our hopes up? Griffith wondered.

  But later that day, a bus arrived for Griffith and his fellow prisoners — two special forces troopers, the Army drivers, Specialists Melissa Rathburn-Healy and David Locket, who’d been captured during the battle of Al-Khafji, and two other aircrews. Soon afterward, a representative of the International Red Cross conducted them to the Nova Hotel, where the international press was waiting. After politely thanking them for bringing the captives to safety, the Red Cross representative firmly sent the Iraqis packing (thereby making himself an instant hero in the eyes of the now-former POWs), and the Americans were asked to identify by name any others in captivity (the sins of Vietnam were not going to be repeated).

  Then for Tom Griffith it was a bus trip to Jordan, a flight to Oman, and the hospital ship Mercy off the coast of Bahrain. Dave Eberly went from Baghdad to Riyadh, and then to the Mercy for a longer stay.

  On the Mercy, Griffith’s first priority was a phone call to his wife in North Carolina. Though he woke her up at 4:00 A.M., she didn’t seem to mind. Tom was safe and coming home!

  ★ Meanwhile, the failure to rescue Eberly and Griffith did not improve the already strained relations between aircrews and the Special Operations force units tasked to rescue them. The memory still burned after the war, as is evident from this comment about the Griffith and Eberly tale from a 4th Wing F-15E pilot: “Our DO and his backseater were on the ground for three and one-half days in western Iraq. Nobody’d go in and pick them up, and they eventually became prisoners of war. Before the war, the Special Operations guys came down to talk to us. ‘No sweat,’ they said, ‘we’ll come get you anywhere you are.’ That, from my perspective, was a big lie. After my guys were on the ground for three and one-half days, and they didn’t go pick them up, we basically decided that if anybody went down, they were on their own. Nobody was going to come and get you.”

  Chuck Horner concludes:

  The combat search-and-rescue mission involves lots of heartbreaking decisions. In Vietnam, we tried so hard to rescue all downed pilots that on some occasions we lost more aircraft and aircrews than were saved. CSAR is not a no-risk situation. It requires rescue crews that take risks that are far beyond those normally expected in combat operations. Sometimes you have bad luck, as was the case when a U.S. Army helicopter carrying Major (Dr.) Rhonda Cornum was shot down during an attempted battlefield rescue of a downed A-10 pilot, killing three crew members and leading to the capture of the survivors. Sometimes you have good luck, as was the case with Devon Jones.

  The good luck, I hardly have to say, is not the product of luck. It comes from trained aircrews keeping their cool and evading capture. And it takes commanders who are hard-hearted enough to leave a downed airman to the mercies of the enemy when it is likely that more men and women will be killed or captured.

  In Desert Storm, there was a failure to fully coordinate these aspects of the CSAR mission. While there were at times brilliant rescues, the aircrews were far from confident in the system. The next Chuck Horner to fight an air war had better pay close attention to the way he (or she) organizes and controls the employment of his or her combat search-and-rescue efforts.

  11

  Punch and Counterpunch

  At this point, the focus began to shift from pure air superiority, but it is important to repeat this fundamental: airpower is not discrete, it flows. While it is useful to talk about the discrete elements of airpower (such as gaining control of the air, battlefield interdiction, or preparing the battlefield — that is, limiting the enemy’s ability to harm friendly forces), such talk has limits. One element does not stop and another one start. There may be greater or lesser intensity directed toward one or the other of them, but during any slice of time, all will be working.

  In Desert Storm, once air superiority was assured, greater attention was given to battlefield interdiction and to preparing the battlefield — but all the while, air superiority was never ignored.

  ★ Battlefield interdiction — isolating the battlefield — is a classic role of airpower, and was a natural goal for General Schwarzkopf to set for Chuck Horner.

  In the case of Desert Storm, battlefield interdiction meant preventing the resupply of Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait and southern Iraq. If the enemy was denied access to resupplies of food, water, gasoline, ammunition, and medical supplies, in time he would be rendered helpless. The length of time this form of interdiction warfare took to become effective was the big question.

  Answering it depended on the answers to many other questions. How well is the enemy supplied when combat begins? What is the tempo of combat and the demands that tempo will make on his store of supplies? How effective is aerial interdiction on resupply throughput? And so on. During the war in Vietnam, efforts to isolate the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese regular army in South Vietnam failed, both because of the inefficient use of airpower and because of the crude, yet determined, supply system of North Vietnamese forces.

  That failure was not repeated in the Gulf conflict.

  In order to attain classic battlefield interdiction, General Schwarzkopf expected Chuck Horner to bomb the bridges on the roads and railroads running from Baghdad to Basra and on to Kuwait City. Trucks and military convoys (and indeed any likely vehicles) were to be targeted by fighter-bombers patrolling the desert south of the Iraqi capital. Iraqi aircraft would not be allowed to fly; and whenever they attempted to, they would be discovered by AWACS radar and immediately attacked by Coalition fighter pilots.

  However, because of the limitations of classic battlefield interdiction, American planners began to look at new — and potentially quicker — ways to isolate the battlefield. They came to ask: “Can we paralyze the enemy by isolating his fielded forces from their sources of information and from their command and control?” In other words, “Can we practice information warfare against the Iraqi army of occupation?”

  In the Iraqi dictatorship, with its fears, suspicions, and terrors, independence of thought or action is instantly uprooted and punished. A military commander who shows ind
ependence, no matter how successful, becomes a threat to Saddam Hussein and his few close advisers. Success itself is a threat, since it encourages independence and popularity. Thus, battle plans are scripted with the oversight and approval of Saddam, and deviation from the script is not allowed.

  This raised a question in the minds of the air planners: “What if we can isolate the Iraqi ground forces from their supreme leader in Baghdad? Would they become paralyzed? Would the deployed forces in the field freeze in place, awaiting capture, rather than maneuver about the battlefield and oppose Coalition liberation forces?”

  Because modern military command and control is accomplished primarily via electronic media — telephones, radios, and computer networks, connected by satellite, microwave nets, telephone lines, and high-data-rate fiber-optic cables — Horner’s planners targeted the connecting links. Thus, Coalition bombers attacked telephone exchange buildings, satellite ground stations, bridges carrying fiber-optic and wire bundles, and cables buried in the desert. Even had there been ASAT missiles available, individual satellites would not have been targeted, since both sides in the conflict used the same satellites.

  To stop the radio and television broadcasts that connected Saddam with his army and his people, transmission towers were bombed, but this effort was only partially successful. The problem was in stopping low-powered radio broadcasts emanating from more or less primitive stations scattered throughout the countryside.

  Interestingly, the Iraqis themselves put very tight limits on their own radio transmissions, in the apparent belief that the Americans would either listen in on them or target the radio emitter locations. Though this successfully denied intelligence to the Coalition, it also put a chokehold on command and control of their deployed forces.

  A telling consequence of the information war (as reported after the war by Iraqi POWs) proved to be the inability of Iraqi headquarters in Baghdad to provide intelligence to the Iraqi Army leadership in the field about Coalition ground force deployments and maneuvers.