All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  Gene spent the next several hours coordinating the rescue. He had his sensor operator search the ground for Taliban while he maintained enough altitude to keep a good line-of-sight signal to relay information to inbound aircraft. The Predator was perfect for this job, he thought. Bombers and fighter jets arrived to provide top cover, but because of the threat of surface-to-air missiles, they couldn’t descend low enough to be of any use. He and his crew were in no danger in Nevada, and the B-52s and F-15Es and F-16s were left to carve infinity-shaped contrails in the blue sky above. By letting the airframe act as a glider and easing back his throttle—the Pred’s Rotax engine sips only a few pounds of gas an hour when managed properly—he was able to stay on site for the length of the extraction, even as jets came and went as they called bingo themselves. They simply couldn’t loiter like he, and when the math told him his margin for error was now truly spent, he turned the Pred and limped home.

  That was real flying, he thought with satisfaction. He had time, as a young officer, to really develop his airmanship, his “air sense,” to work his way up before pulling combat air patrols. He had twenty-four months of flying under his belt before dodging Saddam’s pitiful anti-aircraft fire in Iraq’s southern no-fly zone for real. Now the whole system was on its head. The new Predator pilots are pipeline grads and don’t have any previous flight time. They get twenty hours in a Diamond DA20, and then it’s straight to the simulator and the war in Vegas. So few assets for training, they only learn to run the mission once the Predator is airborne, just pass off control without even knowing how to take off or land! They learn it later, and then forward deploy to the launch and recovery elements in Bagram, where all they do all day is lob Preds in the air and catch them on the way back.

  His hardest landing ever was in a Pred. That might sound funny, but it’s true. One night, he got called out to the box to land in a hellacious crosswind on a single runway. He was the senior instructor pilot on duty, and so it was his job. Every measurement was out of limits, but the Pred was out of gas, orbiting for hours waiting for the winds to change; land the plane now, or ditch it in the desert. He crabbed it into the wind like he would a little Cessna, the sensor ball slewed so it was as if he was looking at his left shoulder. It was all mental gymnastics, flying the airplane down on final, and then, at the last minute, he kicked out the rudder, swung the bird square to the runway, told his sensor operator to lock the ball forward—remember, he can’t even move his own eyes, he has to get his partner to run the video—and he lined up the crosshairs on the center line, kept it banked right, saw the runway leap in and out of view in the wind, and Gene is leaning back the whole time now, canted in his seat like he’s actually in the plane, flaring, flaring, flaring, not stalling, not stalling, I’m going to be long, one wheel down, keep up the nose, aerobrake, aerobrake, no no I got it, drop the nose. Taxi.

  The new guys don’t move around in the seat. Sometimes they look at him like he’s crazy. But that’s what they lose when they skip twenty-four months of pilot training. The air sense.

  Gene checked his gauges again. Another hour before he passed off this Pred to land.

  “Hey, guys, have we found that ODA team yet?” he asked his ops cell.

  “No. Turbo is on searching now.”

  “Can I swap for him?”

  “No, bro. Your shift is up. You’re out of here.”

  Gene looked at his watch. Twelve hours gone. Another pilot approached the back of his chair, and he handed over control to the incoming crew. He left his briefing materials in the ops cell, grabbed his bag, walked out of the control center, and picked up his phone. Four messages, from buddies from his fighter pilot days, in town for the RED FLAG exercises. RED FLAG is the Air Force’s crowning achievement, an ideal two-week war consisting of the world’s most realistic air-to-air and air-to-ground combat flight training. Several times a year, flying squadrons of all types descend on Nellis Air Force Base, Eagles and Strike Eagles and Raptors and Vipers and Bones and Buffs filling the air over the desert like an ever-shifting flock of blackbirds.

  The message from Gene’s bros said they got in a day early. No crew rest for three days. Come out to meet them.

  It was late. Or early, depending on how you were counting. If he went home to get changed, he would never leave. So he stepped out into the heat and found a pair of jeans and a shirt in his car and got changed in his squadron admin office and then drove down to the Strip. Traffic was thick on Las Vegas Boulevard no matter the time of day, but he fought his way into a secret corner of the Caesars Palace parking garage and found his bros at the craps table just like they had said. He wasn’t gambling, but they were, and he hung with them, so he got his Coors Original for free anyway. They were on a tear and tossing back rum and Cokes like it was their J-O-B and Gene never heard if it was mechanical or hostile fire on the MH-53. He never spotted Taliban, but that didn’t mean anything. There were survivors, two ambulatory, five badly injured, they said. It was a long flight back to the hospital. If only he could have done more, but you always bet on black, motherfucker, you always bet on black. I hope they find the ODA team tonight, I’m sure they will, Turbo is good, you guys remember Turbo, he was with us in UPT, had the scar on his forehead. Head? Did you say head? I’ll take some of that! No, I can’t have another beer, I gotta fly tomorrow. Call me, we’ll meet again. And he bumped a waitress on the way out but found his car and got on I-15 at Flamingo to 95 and drifted into the endless red-roofed subdivision suburban. He pulled his car up to the consolidated steel mailbox and unlocked his bin. It was stuffed full, three days’ worth at least. He flipped through the first several envelopes, bills and credit card applications and rental property flyers, tossed the bundle on the front seat and drove up the rest of the way to his house. A familiar notice was trapped in the front screen door: a warning from the home-owners association that his grass was too long. He opened the door, flicked on the lights, and dropped the notice and mail on top of a tumbling pile of their predecessors on the kitchen counter. He checked his watch. If he hit the rack now, he’d get just enough crew rest. He got undressed as he made his way to his room, set his alarm, collapsed on his bed, fell asleep, woke up, and peered out the window. The sky was brightening, but the sun was still behind the eastern mountains. Better run before it’s blazing hot. An easy five miles of familiar sidewalk and sidestreet. He panted up the driveway, took a quick shower, and found every one of his flight suits in a dirty pile on the floor. He threw them all in the washer, express wash cold, made coffee, and ate a bowl of cereal, and when the wash was done, he put on the still-wet flight suit and made his way to his car. There was another crumpled uniform on the passenger seat that he had forgotten. Oh, well.

  When Gene arrived at the command center, there was a buzz in the air. Twice as many analysts and staffers were crowded into the ops cell. The base commander was hanging in the back, watching over the floor with his squadron commander, the operations group commander, and several other colonels. Gene checked in, and his boss flagged him down.

  “You have thirty minutes to get up to speed and then the seat is yours.”

  The seat was the GCS seat, the hot seat, the seat his buddy Turbo had been strapped to since Gene left fourteen hours ago. Turbo’s video was up on the big board, and every face in the command center was fixed on it, watching rooftops in a remote town. A pilot’s work/rest cycle is severely regulated, but the general had already waived the rules, and so Turbo was well into overtime, coordinating a sophisticated strike on a target off the JPEL hit list. But Turbo had troubles with his aircraft, had lost signal in weather, lost sight of the target over a low ceiling, and his strike assets—Vipers, Strike Eagles, and some Hornets off the boat—had kept running out of gas. While they ran to the tanker, Turbo briefed in new assets, and then delays forced them to call bingo as well.

  Gene watched over Turbo’s shoulder, listened to the radio, got the bare minimum background brief, and then swapped in so Turbo could go home and collapse. Checki
ng in and assuming control of the mission was like wandering onto the Indy 500 track in the middle of the race, and Gene was instantly buried. New weather was coming in, and chop at his altitude was bouncing the sensor image. The VOIP phone rang: F-16 rep needed an update on the replacement two-ship that should have just arrived. Targeteers in the ops cell were arguing about whether they had followed the correct vehicle. Gene needed to confirm. Three mIRC chat windows open, update update update, to CJSOTF J2 and J3 and the CAOC battle captain. Gene’s headphones never stopped broadcasting: AWACS, Vipers, Strike Eagles, CAOC, ops cell, the base commander: “Gene, we need to hurry up.”

  They call it a helmet fire. Task saturation, when it becomes humanly impossible to do everything that needs to be done. Good pilots practice identifying what will kill them first, dealing with that, and then moving down the list. But sometimes, you can’t move down the list fast enough. A helmet fire is when a route clearance package is hit and then the response team is hit and the wounded pile up and Max is bleeding out and the helo medevac needs to be called but the Navy EOD team is checking for more secondary IEDs and doing a post-blast investigation and forgets that Chris Frost is still wounded in the back of the truck. You can get a helmet fire in the jet, Gene knew, feel like you are just hanging on to the tails while the engine roars and that’s when you get behind.

  Now the same thing was happening. The strength of the Pred is that you are on the ground, out of personal danger, and able to make calm, rational decisions. But now the connectivity was too much.

  We need to change the strike order again, Gene. Weather is moving up low ceiling forecast. Tell the Bones to get out of the cons, we don’t want to telegraph this. Gene, can you confirm white hot and not black hot on the IR feed? Oh, Vipers may have that reversed. Targeteers still working sedan confirmation. Confirm what? Reconfirm the 9-line. Chat windows in flat screens SATCOM VOIP mIRC to TOC helmetfire UHF DUDE 21 confirm helmetfire CAOC slew the ball helmetfire helmetfire helmetfirehelmetfirehelmetfire

  Then, his phone rang.

  Gene’s squadron commander on the headset: “Don’t answer that, Gene. That’s the boss. I told him to leave you alone.”

  Gene knew who he meant: the boss, two-star in theater, commander of all Air Forces in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Calling him on the phone, ignoring the sanctity of the cockpit. This had all gone too far.

  He had to settle down. It would have been easier if he could just take the shot himself, but he had no munitions onboard his Pred. And no mIRC in a fighter jet, only a radio and the paper card from their preflight mission brief, so he had to talk them through every nuance of the shot. He coordinated with every strike asset, forced the targeteers to confirm the target, rematched all the intel himself, rebriefed the gunship on each shot, and then officially requested permission to strike.

  The sedan trickled down the road.

  An autonomous robot? A human in the loop? Try two or three or a hundred humans in the loop. Gene was the eye of the needle, and the whole war and a thousand rich generals must pass through him.

  “Hey, Gene, good to go, cleared to engage, but they want to change the order of the strikes again.”

  These Fighter Mafia guys, who grew up complaining that the F-4s over Vietnam were flown from the White House, would never dare interfere in an air-to-air fight like this, Gene thought. What was unacceptable in their own fighter culture they had made commonplace with the Pred. Gene reconfigured and requested permission and received more mission changes, and he reconfigured and requested permission and received another round of parameters, and he reconfigured and …

  Gene was done. He threw off his headphones and in so doing, kicked everyone out of his cockpit.

  I know this mission better than anyone else at this point, he thought. This is the right target. I’ve already switched it three times. I’m just going to execute the last thing we planned.

  The pickle button was Gene’s alone. If he fucked up, he had the wings on his chest and he’d fry at the trial, not them. If they wanted to fly the fucking plane, they could come out and do it themselves.

  After seven hours in the objective world, fifteen minutes in helmet fire time, the first flash of light in his video monitor. Finally. The gunships would shoot squirters for another hour. Did they get the right guys? To find out, he’d be on station long after the strike aircraft landed, watching, picking up as much evidence as he could from the air.

  Gene established an orbit and thanked his sensor operator. Again. Saved his ass every time he fucked up. But what about the ODA team from yesterday? Did Turbo ever find them? No, the ops cell said, he didn’t. Search was ongoing, three control stations down.

  Gene spent the rest of his shift returning his Pred to base and then flying a replacement out to assist in the search. By now it was clear the team had run into trouble, though no one yet knew what kind, and search and rescue crews were on call to pick up the team once they were located. Gene had just about gotten his Pred on station when the factory whistle sounded. Shift up, clock to punch, time to go. They should stay, Gene thought, work straight through, twenty-minute naps. Until they found this team. This is why it was better to be deployed, launch and recover the airframes. You saw nothing but the GCS and your bed, did nothing but fly and sleep. But you can’t do that here. Searching for the team was now another guy’s job. You trust them, these pilots were family, but, well, better to stay.

  He walked out of the control center and picked up his phone. Six messages from his fighter bros. He put the phone in his pocket and walked out into the dark heat of the parking lot. The ODA team was probably freezing, even this time of year, caught in the mountains. Or worse, overrun by the enemy. Two days, no contact. Gene drove down the highway and took his exit, and, as he passed Safeway, he realized he was out of milk. He pulled into the parking lot, found the milk at the front of the store, and the ODA team probably had enough food for another day or two, if they took MREs instead of extra ammo or bang. A man behind him in line tapped him on the shoulder and said thank you for your service because Gene was still wearing the flight suit, but what about the helmet fire? And he hadn’t found the ODA team in two days. Gene left Safeway and drove past his mailbox and stuffed in his front door was a bill for cutting his grass and a seventy-five-dollar fine from the home-owners association. He opened the refrigerator and discovered two gallons of milk. He put the new gallon inside and smelled the open one and then tossed it in the trash. The trash stunk too. He took off his flight suit and paced and paced and turned on the TV and then turned off the TV and then he lay down in bed and fell asleep and woke up and was momentarily disoriented. What time was it? The sun was shining. Heat radiated from his bedroom window. But what does that mean in the bright, seasonless desert? What day was it? Shit, what month was it? They were blurring, bad now. It was day four in his shift week, but the shift weeks were ever shifting. How did guys with wives and kids do this? He checked his phone and found three new messages. He rolled out of bed and threw on shorts and a T-shirt and ran his five easy miles. The heat drained him and renewed him. He took a shower, shaved, went looking for a flight suit. It took him a while to remember they were all still in the washing machine from the day before, spin-stuck but only half-damp. He put one on, put the rest in the dryer, and got in the car and drove to work. Had they found that team last night?

  Across the street from the main entrance to the base was a group of protestors. He had seen Code Pink around Las Vegas, and honestly, didn’t mind them. He had been at a lot of events where they show up, and they do their protest, they have a point, they yell and show their signs, but they leave when asked. They aren’t out of control, are respectful even. Not for the first time he was tempted to stop and talk to them, but he didn’t think it would go well. He imagined it.

  Gene: Why do you hate drones?

  Them: Because they kill people.

  Gene: Would you rather we carpet bomb people with a B-52?

  Them: No, we don’t think we sho
uld be dropping any bombs.

  Gene: Well, that’s a different point, isn’t it?

  When people say they hate drones, what they mean is they hate war. Well, I’d like world peace too. But if we do go to war, shouldn’t we use minimum force and the best information? Why demonize the thing keeping soldiers out of harm’s way? The answer, which nobody wants to admit, is that they think without dead Americans, or at least Americans at risk, there would be far more dead Iraqis and Afghans. They can’t say it, but that’s what they think. That American bodies are a flotsam driftwood dam, holding back a raging river. For years we’ve been using cruise missiles, one-way drones that get launched from a Navy ship and fly for hours and go to a single preprogrammed spot, and that’s okay? Cruise missiles really are the autonomous robotic version of Slim Pickens in a B-52, but who protests? Now that we actually have more control, can stop a mistake before it’s too late, we’ve discovered a moral problem? In the control station in Vegas, he had no self-preservation instinct to distract him from making the best possible decision. How does putting bad guys outside his door make him more effective?

  But Gene didn’t stop and have that conversation. He drove through the guard post and along the road paralleling the runway, the Eagles and Vipers and Raptors and Bones launching to play RED FLAG war games. I wonder if my bros are flying today, he thought, before parking and entering the control center and grabbing a quick cup of coffee before work.

  Hard to believe that on 9/11 they all still thought they had to deploy the pilots and GCSs to the war zone to do this job. Saddam actually shot down a Predator the morning of 9/11, not that anyone remembers that now. But on that particular day, Gene had a deployment drill. He had gotten up at 0330 to go sit in a hanger, pretending to fly on a C-130 to set up a new Predator mission in a foreign country. During the exercise, while they were killing time on their fake flight, a colonel rolled in a TV on a cart and turned it on, and the towers burned and he said everyone should go home but keep their bags packed. Gene deployed again right after. They were flying from Kuwait then, over southern Iraq, and suddenly they had to work in two theaters, the new war in Afghanistan and the same old no-fly zone drag. They made that work, with satellites and fiber optics, and that’s when they realized: if we can fly over Afghanistan from Kuwait, we can do it from anywhere. The mission started small at Nellis, then doubled at the backwater Indian Springs Airfield north of Las Vegas. The Springs grew so big so fast they renamed it Creech Air Force Base. Now they could fly up to sixty-five simultaneous missions, all over the world. They had come a long way in a decade.