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

by Mark Bowden

  Their commander, AJ, a trim man with a pink complexion who seems uncomfortable when not in motion, is an older version of them all. In his forties, AJ is the kind of man who could long ago have moved on to more lucrative employment as a commercial pilot but who has never been able to shake the thrill of flying fighters. An Air Force brat whose father was a wizzo on missions over Korea and Vietnam, he has moved around so much in his life that he’s not sure where he comes from. (“I think I’m from Idaho,” he says.) AJ has an unabashed sense of commitment to his country.

  Despite the high level of talent and motivation, flight crews are, by virtue of being flesh and blood, one of the weak links in the war machine. The Air Force tries to regulate them like delicate instruments, with pills to clog their bowels and pills to clean their bowels, “go” pills to speed crews up and “no go” pills to slow them down. The crews are pampered, not out of kindness but out of necessity. The job demands a great deal of mental and emotional clarity. So the base at al Jaber is by no means a hardship post. Crew members share air-conditioned mobile homes with a bathroom and a shower, cable TV, a DVD player, and PlayStation 2. They have hearty food, workout facilities, and an officers’ club with a paperback library, twenty La-Z-Boy recliners, a big screen for movie viewing, a popcorn machine, and snacks (but no alcohol). The cable TV carries all the major networks and European MTV, and—perhaps owing to the generosity of the installer—receives unsolicited X-rated fare late at night. AJ got to see more of his beloved Green Bay Packers’ games that fall than he ever gets to see at home in Idaho.

  The crew members were entitled to one fifteen-minute satellite phone call home each week, and unlimited Internet access, resulting in constant e-mail traffic with spouses, family, and friends. Some of the fliers got in trouble for revealing too much in their excited stories. They quickly learned that the recipients were forwarding their private electronic messages to other friends, who forwarded them again, until the crews were getting return mail from perfect strangers all over the world. Each crew usually had a sortie to Afghanistan only every three or four days, and although they also flew missions over the no-fly zone in Iraq, there was still plenty of downtime. When she wasn’t dropping bombs, Baldie, ever the multitasker, spent much of her time completing course work for a master’s degree in engineering from Oklahoma State University. (Her professors FedExed her videotapes of their classes.) Some of the fliers drove into Kuwait City on occasion to dine out at restaurants or shop at the Western-style malls. AJ and some others even attended an air show in Dubai, the third largest in the world. War was never like this before.

  Chaz, a lieutenant colonel who served as the Bold Tigers’ ops officer, had the job of keeping the squadron flying, which involved artfully managing rest and maintenance. A longtime wizzo from Mississippi, blond and stocky at age forty-three, he would review charts, ask questions, listen intently, and, above all, peer deeply into the eyes of the young crew members while trying to decide if they were rested and alert enough to fly. They all wanted to fly as often as they were allowed, but Chaz made up his own mind about it. He was less interested in what they said than in the look in their eyes. If he didn’t like what he saw there, if he saw jumpiness or flatness, they were grounded.

  With all the direct hits recorded by the Bold Tigers in the campaign, Chaz is proudest of a shot that missed. “One of my young wizzos got disoriented while his bomb was in flight,” he says, smiling beatifically. “He directed it into a dirt field. That’s good judgment, good training.”

  For the Bold Tigers flying over Afghanistan, the most excitement came at the beginning of the campaign. The squadron flew its first sortie of the war on October 17. After leaving Kuwait, two F-15s felt their way into unfamiliar space out over the Persian Gulf on a perfectly black night, their initial objective to find an Extender, because they couldn’t make the long flight without repeated refueling.

  AJ flew alongside an F-15 piloted by Slokes. Each jet carried nine 500-pound bombs. It was just over a month after the attacks on the United States, and both crews felt a strong sense of purpose heading off to war. There was a powerful urge to act. Wearing night optical goggles, known as NOGs, they occasionally saw the green outlines of a carrier force in the smooth black waters below. But for Air Force planes carriers were not an option for refueling; they needed to find an airborne tanker. Fuel management was critical, and on that first flight AJ was nervous. “Whenever a pilot tells me he gets bored on a long flight,” he says, “I tell him he should learn to worry more.” They had to maintain enough fuel to fly to a friendly base in an emergency, which meant they had to keep topping off their fuel tanks in the air. AJ, working with an AWACS, was finally able to spot an Extender before the sortie would have needed to be aborted. They took no chances after finding the big tanker. They just slowed down and flew alongside it over Pakistan and into southern Afghanistan.

  In the early days of the war the Bold Tigers tended to rendezvous over Kandahar, near the Pakistani border in the southeastern corner of the country, where they would wait for a fragged target. At that point they faced plenty of antiaircraft artillery, or “triple A.” The shots would come in bursts of three to five. The Zeus (ZSU-23) snaked up, a twisting line of orange light. KS-19s, which fire 100-mm shells, were more worrisome; sometimes when the jets were under 20,000 feet, a shell would burst in a sudden white flash above them. That got the attention of the crew, like someone flipping on a floodlight in the darkness. The 57-mm guns sent up red tracers that usually fizzled well below the jets. But the smaller rounds came up faster. The shells rose as brightening balls of light. The crews worried when they saw out their canopy a ball centered on their plane rather than sliding away; that meant it was bearing straight at them. At 20,000 to 30,000 feet they were pretty much out of range, but in a country with 12,000-foot mountain peaks even that altitude wasn’t completely safe. It was always a comfort to be flying at night. Flying that high, they could be spotted only as a faint moving shadow on the stars.

  On that first sortie they were given a target in Jalalabad, a two-building radio relay station inside a walled compound. Snitch had already typed the ground coordinates from Boss Man into his computer, and once over the area he pointed his target pod in the general direction. He then began to search his video screen for the radio relay station, trying to pick up visual clues from the surrounding neighborhood based on the description he had been given. Some descriptions were better than others. When he had the ground coordinates before beginning the mission, he would draw himself a map that made it easier to locate the target. This time he hadn’t made a sketch, because from his preflight target study it looked like what Slokes had called “a dog-balls target,” meaning it stood out conspicuously.

  When they flew into the air over Jalalabad, their jet noise alerted ground defenses, and the sky erupted around them with triple A. They heard no sound, just saw lines of light and sudden flashes of white, yellow, and red around and above them. AJ and his wizzo hit their target on the first pass, but Slokes and Snitch had trouble pinpointing theirs. In daylight the target may have stood out like dog balls, but they had arrived at a time of night known as “thermal crossover”—that is, the point when ground temperatures had dropped enough to match the temperature of the buildings. Because the imaging equipment in the target pod was thermal, Snitch had a hell of a time making the target out. Three times Slokes swung the jet around and flew back into the light show, as Snitch tried to zero in on the building.

  “Come on, dude, we need to get these bombs off,” Slokes urged.

  Snitch knew from the first two passes that the building would become more visible the closer they got. The GBU was equipped with a laser sensor in its tip, and with small steering mechanisms in its fins, called servo motors, to redirect its flight. So he could release the bombs before the building was completely visible and then steer them in as the picture came into better focus. He approximated the target and told Slokes, “Captured, cleared to pickle.”

  Slok
es pushed the button, and the first bomb dropped. Snitch then placed the cursor on his screen at the precise spot he wanted it to hit—“painting the target,” the fliers called it—and fired his laser. The wizzo guided the bomb directly into the second building.

  Both crews, first elated, grew sober. They had spent years practicing, so bombing was routine, even sport. Now they were dropping real 500-pound bombs on real people. Packed with high explosives, encased in hard metal designed to fracture into hot shrapnel, a GBU-12 would vaporize anyone or anything within a few yards of its detonation, which would be seen as a black splash on Snitch’s screen. No one inside a radius of about 200 meters would be likely to survive the shock wave and shrapnel. A safe distance (behind cover) was considered to be 500 meters—a meter for every pound of explosives. No matter how accurate the crews were, they could only hope that they were hitting appropriate targets; they were only as good as their intel. They all tried to imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of their delivery. An American pilot captive in Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War, who survived a GBU-12 hit on the prison where he was being held, said the approaching bomb made a sound like tearing canvas. (Older bombs, less aerodynamic, whistled.) Then came the click! click! click! of the servo motors as the bomb was steered home, followed by the loud static noise of the laser ionizing the air around it. Then WHAM!

  The adrenaline rush faded on the long flight home. The pilots and wizzos talked, popped go pills as necessary, and checked and rechecked their navigation. Sometimes they broke out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or croissants they’d provisioned from the mess hall. Mach One can feel like a crawl in the final hours of a nine-hour sortie.

  It was hard in the beginning to tell if they were making a difference. One of the first sorties that seemed to strike a blow came about a week into the campaign, when two Bold Tiger Strike Eagles took out the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Propagation of Virtue in Kandahar, which intel later assured them was a big deal. “We want you to hit a building,” Boss Man said. When Super Dave plotted out the coordinates, he saw that it was in the center of Kandahar.

  “Oh, boy, this is going to be good,” he told his pilot, Curly. The targeting directions were somewhat vague. Super Dave was told to look at his screen for a big intersection, and to aim for the large building on the northeast corner. He was trying to memorize Kandahar (that’s how he spent the long hours on the flight over), and one thing he knew for sure was that the city had lots of intersections. He told the controller that he needed better information.

  “The building has columns,” the controller said.

  There was no way, looking straight down, that they were going to see columns. So Super Dave and Fang, the wizzo in the other F-15, went to work on the problem. Comparing the global-positioning coordinates with the infrared image on his screen, they asked for clarification from Boss Man, and finally zeroed in on a building that was several city blocks long. Super Dave’s first bomb hit the domed front corner of the structure. The two jets took their time, making runs just as they did in target practice. On the video of the sortie the targeted end of the building collapses neatly, folding in on itself, more like the object of a professional demolition than the victim of an improvised bombing run.

  In those early days of the campaign there were more targets than time to hit them, and sometimes the crews found themselves being pushed to do more than they thought wise. The crews classified missions by priority: low (could be put off until another day), medium (time-sensitive), or high (urgent because U.S. forces were under fire on the ground). In high-priority circumstances the crews were willing to take bigger risks, including flying off to remote areas without knowing whether they would be able to find a tanker to refuel, and flying low over lofty mountain ranges where they knew they would be vulnerable to shoulder-fired SAMs.

  For low- and medium-priority missions they learned to dicker with the AWACS. Push was the wizzo on an early sortie when Spartan, the British AWACS, assigned his and another F-15, flying wing, a target in Tarin Kowt, a city north of Kandahar. It was described as a Taliban headquarters building, housing government leaders. The jets had been in the air for hours, earlier in northern Afghanistan, and were low on fuel. They knew that the target area was fairly distant and that tankers were unlikely to be in the vicinity. They didn’t relish the prospect of having to make an emergency landing somewhere in northern Pakistan, which is what Spartan recommended. So they bargained. If Spartan would assign them two tankers, they’d do the job. Push remembers wondering whether this was the right thing to do. The crews discussed it among themselves and concluded that if the target was of high enough priority to put them in this situation, it was worth a couple of tankers. They sweated it out for a few minutes until Spartan coughed up the tankers, and then they flew north.

  In the end they destroyed their target, but it was a stressful ride home. When they landed at al Jaber, concluding a thirteen-hour sortie, their group commander was waiting for them on the tarmac. That had not happened before. It signified something either very good or very bad. Maybe the brass were displeased with their dickering.

  But when the men climbed down from their cockpits, it was to handshakes and praise.

  The war gave the crews opportunities to stretch their skills, to try things they had never attempted during practice. Two Fish and Baldie were midway through a sortie when an AWACS assigned them an important target, a convoy of trucks. Baldie estimated the speed of the vehicles to be 100 miles an hour. (“How fast would you be driving down the road if you knew that an F-15 was trying to kill you?” she asks.) She made a rough calculation of where the trucks would be when the bomb reached the road, and cleared Two Fish to pickle. Guiding the GBU with her laser, teasing it along with her hand controller, like a kite at the end of a string, she put it right through the lead truck’s front grille.

  “You have just been killed by a girl,” Two Fish said.

  Few things are more satisfying in war than watching the enemy employ outmoded tactics. Snitch and Slokes, flying over Kabul one night, stared in wonder as all the city’s lights went out in a matter of seconds. An alarm had obviously sounded, and someone was throwing main switches at a power plant. The lights went out in four sectors—one, two, three, four. Just like that the entire city went black, which would have made perfect sense, say, twenty years ago, when technologically primitive Soviet MiGs were overhead. But turning off all the artificial light had the effect of reducing the “noise” in the fliers’ NOG reception. It gave them a clearer view below.

  What was the human cost of all this state-of-the-art expertise? The Pentagon does not attempt to tally casualties among enemy combatants, but given how many bombs were dropped and targets destroyed, the numbers in Afghanistan had to be well into the thousands. As for innocent victims, there are likewise no good estimates. Casualty counts are effectively propaganda, so they are all suspect. Human-rights groups, many of which oppose war categorically, say thousands of innocents died. Marc W. Herold, a professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire, who has a decided antiwar bent, used primarily media accounts but also interviews with refugees to calculate that the two-month campaign produced at least 3,767 civilian casualties. But that number appears to be grandly inflated. A study by the Project on Defense Alternatives, a nonprofit academic defense-policy group, using fewer data but more stringent categories than Herold did, estimated 1,000 to 1,300 civilian deaths, and a New York Times investigation last summer put the total closer to 400.

  No bombing campaign—no matter how sophisticated or scrupulous—can completely avoid mistakes, whether from errant bombs or faulty intelligence. Given one target in a crowded urban neighborhood, Slokes warned Boss Man, “Make sure you got this one on tape.” He did not want to be held responsible for the consequences. They all knew that mistakes could take the lives of kids sleeping in the wrong houses, people crossing the wrong streets. Some of the Bold Tigers wrestled with this grim knowledge. Baldie, who flew
five bombing missions and describes herself as “a Catholic who goes to church every Sunday,” sometimes found the consequences of her work “hard to think about.” After viewing sortie videos she would brood over the fact that the job she had done that day had killed some people and ruined others’ lives. The first bomb she dropped in Afghanistan missed. She had aimed at a tank but made a big crater in the side of a nearby mountain instead. She knew that a miss like that over a city or a town could have terrible consequences.

  By any account (including Herold’s), the bombing campaign in Afghanistan hit fewer unintended targets than any other in history. Pentagon analysts say that more than 75 percent of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan exploded where targeted, compared with fewer than half in the Persian Gulf War, in 1991, and in the much-touted bombings over Serbia in 1999.

  For the Bold Tigers the deaths of innocents were part of the price of war. As long as they believed that the war was necessary and was improving the lives of millions oppressed by the Taliban, that cost was acceptable. Baldie recalls an interview with a Taliban official that aired on CNN. He was asked by a reporter how his regime could use an Olympic soccer stadium to hold public executions, in which men were hanged from goalposts and women were shot at the goal lines for offenses such as adultery. The mullah mistook the moral question for a practical one. He protested that if only international money were available to build a separate stadium for executions, then soccer matches might be able to resume in the current one. Baldie was so appalled that she later found those remarks comforting when she steered home her bombs.