Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

At war over Afghanistan, an Air Force captain called Snitch learned to live with the fact that his moment of genuine alarm had been preserved on audio. Snitch is one of the thirty-six crew members of the 391st Fighter Squadron, the Bold Tigers, a force of twelve F-15 Strike Eagles out of Mountain Home, Idaho. He is a slender, cheerful man in his early thirties, with brown eyes, short brown hair that looks as if it just came out from under a helmet, and freckles that still show under a dark tan. He grew up in Wisconsin, graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1992, and spent two years in Alaska as an Air Force criminal investigator. Hence his nickname. (The fliers in this story asked to be identified only by their call signs, to protect themselves and their families.) Snitch is a backseater, a weapons-systems officer, or “wizzo”—and something of a laser-guidance artist, so he’s plenty secure with his skills. He also has a good sense of humor. But Snitch was annoyed to have his moment of panic become a squadron joke—especially the hundredth time he heard it. The fear was certainly defensible. Snitch knows pilotese and speaks it with the best of them, but the first time you see one of those surface-to-air motherfuckers corkscrewing up right at you… well, something primitive takes over.

  For Snitch the joke was also a point of pride. Not many of the other guys had to dodge SAMs in this war. Besides, the joke was useful. It reminded the entire squadron, whose members saw this engagement as the greatest turkey shoot of all time, that there were real hazards up there, and that the long stretches of cramped, tense routine in the bubble cockpits of their jets, where even traveling at the speed of sound could get tedious, demanded an unflagging vigilance.

  “Holy shit! Missile launch!”

  It happened like this:

  Snitch and his pilot, Slokes, had been airborne for hours, doing what the fliers of the 391st call the Kabul-ki Dance, circling Kabul with the full force of the U.S. air armada. They had completed the long night flight to Afghanistan after traveling down the Persian Gulf southeast from al Jaber (none of the Air Force personnel would disclose the location of their desert base outside Kuwait City, but it was widely reported during the conflict), avoiding Iran’s airspace, rendezvousing with tankers over the Gulf of Oman to refuel, making a sharp left turn at Gwadar to cross over Pakistan and the great jagged peaks of the Siahan Range, and finally making their way northeast to Kabul. On daytime missions this same flight would reveal hours of dusty red-brown mountain ranges, miles and miles of hostile nothing, a seemingly endless expanse of saw-toothed ridges, a country harsher and emptier than any they had ever seen. On nighttime missions like this one they flew enveloped in darkness, under stars and a moon that seemed close enough to dodge. When they reached Kabul, in east-central Afghanistan, they joined the scores of American warplanes operating at various altitudes. At 20,000 feet the F-15s waited for “fragged” targets from Boss Man, the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft that choreographs the terribly complicated and dangerous dance of the modern air assault. A target is fragged when it is assigned to be hit. Depending on its importance and the potential for “collateral damage,” or civilian deaths (and thus political fallout), getting a target fragged may mean running all the way up the permission chain to the White House. On that mission Snitch and Slokes had already hit several targets and were given another, time-critical one: a SAM site just outside the city that had unwisely lobbed a missile into the dark sky full of American warplanes, revealing its position and thereby sealing its fate.

  Their Strike Eagle, a sleek two-engine jet, the premier precision air-to-ground attack instrument in the U.S. arsenal, was still carrying five 500-pound laser-guided bombs, called GBU-12s (GBU stands for “guided bomb unit”), and Slokes and Snitch were still eager for a chance to lay into something. To be sent home carrying bombs was the worst. With comic futility Slokes would plead with Boss Man, “Please, sir, can I ask somebody else?” Nobody wanted to face the three-hour flight back to Kuwait with packages undelivered—it made the flight longer and burned fuel like crazy; and to face the crew that had worked like dogs to ready the aircraft, load the bombs, and paint love notes to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar on the ordnance was a full-bore bummer.

  Working with the AWACS coordinates, Snitch quickly located the SAM site in his target pod, and Slokes maneuvered the jet into the approach. They felt the familiar push of their backs into their seats, and the lurch of their guts against their spines, but both were much too busy to think about the discomfort. Snitch couldn’t have said if the jet was upside down or right side up. His nose was glued to the green of his eight-inch target monitor. Manipulating the laser with his hand control, he cleared Slokes to “pickle”—release the bomb. The pilot pressed the button that gives the jet final permission to drop a bomb once it has calculated the perfect trajectory, and fractions of a second later the thing was off. Slokes banked the jet to the left as Snitch, gently nudging his hand controller, kept the laser zeroed; his pod stays fixed on the target no matter how the jet moves. The bomb hit “shack on,” or dead center, and the SAM launcher vanished in a satisfactory black splash on the monitor. Job well done…but then up out of the burning mess spiraled a missile that the GBU had evidently cooked right off the pad.

  It was then that Snitch famously exclaimed, “Holy shit! Missile launch!”

  Slokes immediately threw the jet off its course, and Snitch punched out some chaff and flares (the chaff distracts radar guidance, and the flares confuse a heat-seeker), after which ensued thirty weighty seconds—or, as Snitch puts it, “half the known age of the universe”—of listening to each other’s nervous breathing in the headphones, waiting to be torn into oblivion, until the pilot of a trailing jet commented, in perfect pilotese, “It burned out co-altitude.”

  “Holy sheepshit!” Slokes said, breaking the silence.

  “I got that in the pod, brother,” Snitch said, meaning that the event was digitally preserved and they could show it off later.

  “Fuckin’ party!” Slokes said, deep into the euphoria of being shot at and missed.

  “Fun” is a word not often applied to warfare. It’s unseemly; you aren’t supposed to enjoy yourself while killing people. But the high-intensity enthusiasm of the Bold Tigers was unmistakable. They are young (most of them in their twenties), slender, fit, smart, patriotic, highly motivated, exhaustively trained, and crisply able. They are all in love with flight, with riding their silver bullets to the edges of the sky, peering down at the broad curvature of the earth, feeling the great surge of supersonic engines beneath them. Given the chance to show what they could do, taking on a cause that both inspired and excited them, added a tincture of danger to the heady mix. It’s no wonder the pilots and wizzos of the 391st came to feel that this was the time of their lives.

  What is most telling about Slokes and Snitch’s brush with danger is that it was memorable at all. The Bold Tigers trace their history back to the days of flying P-47s in combat over Europe in World War II. The unit has known times when being shot at was all too common, as was being shot at and hit. But the days of jousting with the enemy in the sky, of flirting daily with death in the clouds, are all but over—and have been for some time. At the dawn of World War II the French pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was already mourning the flying duelists of the Great War and anticipating the tremendous bombing raids that would define the coming conflict. The fighter plane was being replaced by the flying truck, and war seemed to call less for aerial artistry than for the capacity to deliver or endure wave after wave of bombs. Saint-Exupéry could not have foreseen today’s conflicts, in which bombing has become an exercise in precision and fighter pilots (or, in the case of the Strike Eagles, fighter crews) are essentially technicians who—the close call of Snitch and Slokes notwithstanding—fight wars that are nearly stripped of passion and danger. Combat has become a procedure, deliberate and calculated, more cerebral than visceral—even if it does still have its moments. The modern American air war is almost never about air-to-air combat. Squadrons like the 391st now go t
o war virtually unopposed. Few nations have the capability to contest American fighters in the sky, and those that do would probably fare badly. Air warfare as practiced today by the U.S. military is about delivering weapons accurately and with impunity. The goal is to destroy an enemy’s ability to make war, with minimal risk above and minimal carnage and destruction below.

  Given the ineffectiveness of surface-to-air missiles in recent conflicts, those on the receiving end of this juggernaut are left with few weapons. Perhaps the most powerful one, apart from suicidal acts of terror, is the world’s indignation. Victimhood affords the enemy a claim to higher moral ground. The shedding of enough innocent blood can eclipse the meaning of even the noblest cause. So civilian deaths are trumpeted by the enemy with each new air assault. Whether in Iraq, Bosnia, or Afghanistan, the number of casualties is often exaggerated. Western journalists are given tours of shattered neighborhoods and villages, where images of real death, dismemberment, and grief counter the Pentagon’s antiseptic videos of guided bombs striking toy houses and cars. These images stir outrage in the United States and Europe and fuel the now familiar rearguard American movements to stop such bombings and end such wars.

  The astonishing precision of modern American weaponry deflates this outrage. Compared with other “bomb-delivery systems,” such as the old B-52s and the F-16 Falcons, the Bold Tigers in their Strike Eagles are artists of aerial bombardment. They worry less about being shot at than about missing their “dimpie,” or designated mean point of impact. Slokes subscribes to an adage he read in a history book about pilots in World War II, which goes, “God, please don’t let me fuck up…but if I do, please don’t let me fuck up and live.”

  B-52s—or “Buffs,” for “Big Ugly Fat Fuckers”—drop the less accurate, less smart joint direct attack munitions, or JDAMs. In the Afghanistan campaign they took off from Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean; cruised way up to somewhere in the “Bozosphere” (meaning “way the fuck up there”); and, visible from below only as bright white contrails, opened their bomb bays and let fly. They are the wholesale-delivery teams of the modern air-war industry. F-16s, direct heirs of the single-seat combat-fighter tradition, are sleek and cool, excellent for providing air cover for bombers—but there was no call for that over Afghanistan. The Bold Tigers affectionately call F-16s “Lawn Darts,” because that’s what they look like, because they carry relatively light loads, and because if their single engine fails, they perform a graceful nosedive straight into the ground.

  In contrast, the Bold Tigers are hunters. They prowl around in shoulder-held-missile territory, skimming the terrain, looking, as they say, to paint their bull’s-eyes right on terrorist assholes. These crews are the sharp end of the most effective death-and-destruction delivery system ever devised.

  The air campaign that was waged over Afghanistan is of a significantly higher order than the one conducted over Vietnam, where flying a fighter-bomber was still essentially a solo act. Today’s air assault is a feat of aerial coordination. From early October of 2001 until the following January the sky over Afghanistan caterwauled with warplanes and support aircraft from the British and American Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force—so many that the greatest danger faced by crews like those of the Bold Tigers was colliding with one another or being clipped by JDAMs from above.

  At the highest level, in orbit hundreds of miles up, were scores of satellites. Below them, at 40,000 feet or so, were the Buffs and B-1s, which dropped more than half the bombs used on Afghanistan. There were EA-6 Prowlers to jam enemy communications. There were A-10 Thunderbolts and AC-130s for close air support, and air-rescue teams in helicopters—Pave Lows (MH-53Js), Black Hawks (UH-60s), and Jolly Green Giants (HH-53s). Finally, there were the strikers—the F-15s, the F-16s, and the Navy and Marine Corps F-18 Hornets and F-14 Tomcats, which delivered laser-guided precision bombs. There were also the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), armed with cameras and missiles—drones like the Predator (RQ-1), which made a name for itself for the first time in this conflict. Add to these dozens of Extenders (KC-10s) and Stratotankers (KC-135s)—flying gas stations that enabled the armada to stay aloft for hours and hours. And last there were Boss Man and its British equivalent, Spartan, whose job it was to coordinate the whole Kabul-ki Dance.

  Over Afghanistan the twelve Strike Eagles of the 391st usually carried nine GBU-style bombs, including, on five occasions, the GBU-28, a 5,000-pound bunker buster. The Bold Tigers were the busiest of three Air Force fighter squadrons in the war; they flew 230 sorties from October 17 to January 6. The squadron’s eighteen crews (thirty-five men and one woman, a twenty-six-year-old wizzo nicknamed Baldie, who had a full head of medium-brown hair), backed up by about 230 maintenance workers and munitions experts, delivered a goodly portion of the precision bombs dropped in the war. This small group of fliers played a major role in dismantling a totalitarian theocracy and chasing al Qaeda back into the hills.

  The F-15 is an old aircraft, older than many of the crew members who fly it. Originally designed as a single-seat air-to-air fighter, it made its debut flight in 1972. It was the first operational jet with enough thrust to actually accelerate in a vertical climb. Sixty-four feet long and forty-three feet wide from wingtip to wingtip, it is slightly larger than a deluxe tour bus and considerably less accommodating for its crew. Adding a seat behind the pilot’s became useful for bombing missions, because the additional systems required for finding and hitting targets were too much for a single flier to handle. Apart from all of its electronic wizardry, the twin-tailed jet consists of little more than fuel tanks and two huge Pratt & Whitney jet engines. The cockpit is tight. Instruments fill the displays in front of both pilot and wizzo and line panels to the left and the right. There is enough room for the fliers to stretch their legs forward, but not enough to raise their arms far over their heads, and little room to shift from side to side. Fearing deep-vein thrombosis on such long flights, doctors teach the crews isometric exercises to perform in the cramped space. The seats, which are attached to ejection rockets in case of emergency, have no cushioning, because any space for it would allow the hard shell of the chair to hit a flier’s backside on ejection with enough impact to crush a pelvis or snap a spine. With an average sortie length for the squadron of about ten hours, the crews put up with sore rumps.

  And insistent bladders. That issue did present itself, especially on the longer flights (the record was fifteen and a half hours). Urination was a struggle even for the men, who are provided with “piddle packs”—tube-like plastic bags with a powder inside that turns urine into a gel. In theory, piddle packs are easy to use, fitting right over the tip of the penis; but the crews are wearing flight suits, heavy jackets (the air temperature is subfreezing at altitude), G-suits, and survival vests (with loaded 9-mm pistols), and are strapped down in spaces no larger than the backseat of a Honda Civic. More than one crew member had to strip down mid-flight and bring his skivvies home in a plastic bag.

  It is even worse for women. The Air Force has been working on the concept of a woman’s urinating in a cockpit for several years now, and if Baldie is a fair judge, it has not yet solved the problem. Poor Baldie. (Her nickname comes from the fact that she is married to an F-16 pilot and thus “Bangs a Lawn Dart Driver”: BALD-D.) Sitting just a few feet in front of or behind a male flier, a woman is forced to disrobe in an immodest series of contortions, exposing her hands and hindquarters to the stinging cold, and then has to negotiate a funnel attached to a bag. It’s little wonder that Baldie became known as the “super camel,” for her holding ability. (“I did sprint to the bathroom a few times the second we landed,” she says.) Bowel movements? Too horrible to contemplate, and no accommodations whatsoever. The bowels are easier to regulate, of course, and during the Afghanistan campaign Imodium became a staple of the Bold Tiger diet; but dining on not always familiar food in a foreign land has been known to create digestive emergencies that can confound even the strongest over-the-counter medications. One flier ear
ned the nickname “B-NOK,” for “buck naked over Kuwait,” when seized by a call that had to be answered. He relieved himself into a small cardboard fast-food container with the jet on autopilot. Most of these fliers can strip, crap, and fly all at once—a proud accomplishment. These are not the kinds of skills they package in the “Go Air Force” pitch.

  The crews gladly accept their discomfort. Baldie announced her career intentions at age four. They were reinforced two years later, when her father was doing some contract work for NASA in Providence, Rhode Island, and one day brought home a collection of colorful prints of jet aircraft. He gave them to his daughter, who, thrilled, declared that in the future she was going to fly one. (She has recently started pilot training.) Slokes, a big, boisterous, confident man with short-clipped blond hair, is the son of a World War II fighter pilot, but he swears that this had nothing to do with his desire to be a flier. He attended the Air Force Academy because he got in, and because it was free. He aimed to be one of the twenty grads each year whom the academy sends on to medical school, and he had a GPA to qualify, but along the way he got a chance to fly. The stethoscope could not compete with the throttle. Snitch wanted to go to flight school when he graduated from the academy, but imperfect eyesight initially eliminated him from both the front and backseat. Undaunted, he applied for a waiver and started his job in Alaska as a criminal investigator for the Air Force. When the waiver was approved, he was torn. He liked his work, but in the Air Force the most prestigious job is in a bubble cockpit. His commanding officer, noticing how avidly Snitch watched the fighters take off and land every day, asked, “So, Lieutenant, what was it that brought you here in the first place?”

  “I was waiting for my waiver to come through,” he said.

  “And…?”

  Super Dave, a balding, fair-haired wizzo of thirty-four, was raised on a dairy farm in Virginia. His goal had been to design airplanes, until a friend took him up in a Cessna: he was hooked. Push, a tall, lean Army brat with dark hair and blue eyes, accepted an Air Force ROTC scholarship as a means of paying his way through Duke University. It was not long before flying in an F-15 eclipsed his enthusiasm for civil engineering. Two Fish, who flew with Baldie, wants to be an astronaut. An Air Force Academy grad with a master’s degree in astrodynamics, he is aiming to keep alive a family tradition—his grandfather worked for NASA. Tank is on the same path. Growing up in Minnesota, he used to cut the lawn of a pilot who took him up in a plane a couple of times. He earned his pilot’s license as a teenager, attended the academy, and is working on getting a graduate degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Washington.