was a pass I wanted to make only once. I got a steady cross on the truck and hammered down on the pickle button. It seemed an eternity before the 500 pounds of missile began to move off the rail. In reality it was less than a second, and as it accelerated towards the target, I pulled off hard and began jinking. It was going to take 20 seconds for impact, so I waited a few seconds before rolling the jet over.
The impact took me by surprise. The missile slammed directly into the trailer and set off a series of secondaries like I have never seen. Fire reached for the sky like the Fourth of July.
“Unbelievable,” was all the ever-cool Dirt could muster. Most importantly, the AAA shut down instantaneously and Dodge 62 could call for his next mark. Completely out of bombs, I returned to place two Willy Pete rockets on the site. Dodge 62 dropped good CBUs before the flight returned to base.
Because the British Harriers worked alongside us at Gioia, I was able to compare notes with Dodge flight the next day. Reviewing the film from their EO targeting pods, we made a startling discovery. The long-range artillery tubes we took out were actually launchers for Frog 7 surface-to-surface missiles, similar to Scuds.
It was incredible to watch as the Frog launchers exploded under the rain of CBUs. We counted secondaries off five launchers, all pointed towards the Macedonian border.
All told, Dirt and I, the Canadian CF-18s, F-15Es, and British Harriers destroyed five artillery pieces, an APC, five Frog 7 launchers, and an ammo-storage trailer. Not bad for a day’s work.
This Time It’s Real
After flying numerous pseudocombat sorties over Bosnia during several earlier deployments in support of the no-fly zone, the 81st FS received orders to return to Aviano AB, Italy, to fight what was certain to be a shooting war over Kosovo. I sat in the back of the 81st FS briefing room on that cold and rainy February afternoon. I listened to the deployment brief, ready to go to war and fight for what is right in the world—but my name was not on the Aviano deployment list.
“What do you mean I have to ask my boss if I can deploy with the squadron?” I asked incredulously.
Lt Col Kimos Haave replied, “Devo, you work for Colonel Jouas (ops group commander) now, and he will decide if you can deploy with the squadron. Of course we would love to have you, along with all your experience.”
I had several regrets leaving my job as the squadron’s assistant operations officer in November of 1998 and taking over as the chief of the 52d OG’s Standardization and Evaluation (Stan/Eval) Division at Spangdahlem AB, Germany. I felt as though I had been set up by being assigned to take over the Stan/Eval shop just one month before a major inspection. I also missed the Panthers’ camaraderie and their day-to-day operations. Stan/Eval made it through the inspection with an “excellent” overall, and I still flew training missions with my family—the Panthers. But because of my new job, I was no longer a sure bet to deploy with the Panthers on what was sure to be a great chapter in the history of the A-10. With all the maturity and poise I could muster, I watched my squadron mates deploy to Aviano AB while I stayed behind. My plan, if the war lasted that long, was to swap out in two weeks with Capt David S. “Ajax” Ure, my assistant in the Stan/Eval shop. I had my doubts.
After the longest two weeks of my life spent watching the air strikes on CNN and hearing about the heroics of my squadron mates during the rescue of the downed F-117 pilot, I was afforded an opportunity to go to Aviano for just three days. Not being one to quibble, I jumped at the chance and packed my bags. On 5 April I would fly my first combat mission over Kosovo with Maj Joseph A. “Lester” Less. Due to continuing poor weather over Kosovo, no A-10 pilot had yet been able to employ munitions. As I performed my walk-around, inspecting the live weapons on my Hog, I was more excited than I had ever been about a sortie. I had flown lots of missions over Bosnia with live weapons, but this time it was real. We could actually shoot something today. We launched as a two-ship AFAC mission over southwest Kosovo.
As we flew into Kosovo, the first thing I noticed was how beautiful the country was. The landscape was magnificent—a wide, green, fertile valley surrounded by majestic, snowcapped mountains on all sides. I could see why generations have fought and died over the right to live in this country. The weather that day was exceptional. You couldn’t buy a cloud. The sky was clear—except for the smoke from all the beautiful villages 20,000 feet below us that had been set ablaze by Serbian forces. The roads leading to the southern border of Kosovo were jammed with refugees fleeing the country. As they approached the border, they were forced to leave their cars and walk with little more than the clothes on their backs. Their abandoned vehicles stretched from the Albanian border to more than 20 miles into Kosovo. Seeing the villages being burned and the mass exodus of refugees firsthand made me want to aim my 30 mm gun at the ground and kill those responsible for this devastating crime against humanity. But on this mission I didn’t get to fire the gun or drop any weapons. Although we saw several vehicles moving in and around burning villages that we suspected were Serbian military and police (VJ/MUP) forces, we did not find any hard-and-fast “military” targets. After two hours of scouring the countryside and witnessing the carnage, we returned to Aviano with all our ordnance. Frustration was mounting in the Panther clan and at the CAOC. After the first day of really great weather in the KEZ, not one bomb had been dropped. Less than 24 hours later, all of that would change.
Kimos “We Are Going to Kill Something Today” Haave
I had never seen that look in Kimos’s eyes before. Normally a very mild-mannered family man and exceptional leader, Kimos revealed a different side of himself that day. As the mission commander for the 6 April CAIFF package, Kimos briefed the pilots assembled in the 510th FS briefing room in Aviano like a football coach giving a locker-room pep talk to a team that has narrowly lost every game that season. He was the coach, and this was his final game—he would not retire a loser! After his brief, I was ready to go out and do some damage to some Serbs! After that mission I called him Kimos “we
We were Bull 11 flight, AFACs for an 18-ship package that included British GR-7s and French Super Entendards as strikers. After the tedious two-hour flight down the Adriatic Sea to Kosovo, we refueled over Macedonia and began searching for targets. The weather was like yesterday’s, ceiling and visibility OK (CAVOK). We set up a search pattern around the town of Rogovo. The first target we acquired was a military scout vehicle parked on a hillside. Kimos rolled in and marked the target area with two rockets to allow Cougar Flight, two British GR-7s, to acquire the target and employ BLU-755s. Unfortunately the Brits’ bombs hit well short of the target. With the vehicle now on the move, Kimos rolled in and employed a Maverick missile while I covered his attack. He scored a direct hit.
We went on to employ against a petroleum, oil, and lubricants (POL) storage facility and a military-vehicle compound near Pirane (a small town located near a rail line about halfway between Orahovac and Prizren). Kimos coordinated an attack by Griz 81 flight, a second two-ship of GR-7s, on the vehicle compound while I coordinated with ABCCC for clearance to attack the POL site. Griz flight dropped CBUs on the east side of the vehicle compound, which contained about 15 personnel carriers. We dropped our remaining bombs on the west end, destroying all the vehicles in the compound. Both Kimos and I employed everything on the jet that day: Mk-82s, Mavericks, and even the lethal GAU-8 gun. Not a single shot was fired back at us. I started to get a false sense of security. It felt like another routine training mission except for the fact we were dropping live weapons. Unfortunately, the rest of my sorties over Kosovo would not be as easy.
The true significance of this mission was not the targets we destroyed. Those attacks by no means turned the tide of the campaign. The significance was the effect that our two A-10s had on our maintenance personnel when they saw their aircraft pull into the de-arm area with empty missile rails, empty bomb racks, and bullets missing from the gun. The significance was also in an attitude change among the Panther pilots after hearing that we actually employed this time. Things would never be the same. Milosevic’s days were now numbered because the
