and the good-bye was certainly something I will never forget. The thought of never seeing my family again did cross my mind, but I quickly reassured myself it would never happen to me. I figured being a prisoner of war (POW) was the worst thing that could possibly happen, and that would be a long shot.
I finally made it to Gioia del Colle on 20 April, having stopped at the Azores and Spangdahlem en route. The flight down from Germany to Italy was truly spectacular with beautiful views of the Swiss Alps and the Italian coastline. It was hard to believe that just across the Adriatic a war was being fought and people were being killed. It was even harder to believe that I would be in the thick of it all in less than 48 hours—but that’s another story.
Showing Our Support
I experienced OAF from a different viewpoint than that of the pilots—a support perspective. Support personnel, for example, range from the maintainer who fixes the jet, to the services person who finds places for people to eat and sleep, and to the communications personnel who ensure that pilots can talk to the ground or to a home unit.
When I stepped off the airplane, I was handed three hats. As the chief of personnel for the contingency operations team, it was my job to ensure accountability for all people deployed, to get more bodies when we needed them, and to assist folks with those parts of their professional military lives that extended beyond fighting the war—testing for rank, medals processing, performance reports, and so forth. As the executive officer, my job was to keep things organized and tied together so the group commander could concentrate on the big stuff—bombs on target and winning a war. As the protocol officer, I had to ensure that everything was ready for any high-ranking visitors who would pass through Gioia.
When I arrived at Gioia, about a week after the airplanes landed, I was amazed at the ingenuity of the people already in place. The Italians gave us two floors of an old dorm to use as office space. It was still full of beds, dressers, and nightstands. The members of the 40th EOG had stacked the mattresses in two rooms at the end of the hall, turned the bed frames on their sides, removed the closet doors from their hinges, and laid them across bed frames to form “desks.” In some cases the beds were left in one piece behind the desk to act as “chairs.” Nightstands were stacked two high and in rows to form a counter for the operations desk.
We all quickly adapted to our new office space, and the mission was unaffected. It was actually nice having everyone together in one location. At a home base, the support guys are rarely around when a jet lands, so they feel slightly removed from the mission. Not at Gioia! The pilots had to walk down the “support” hallway to drop off their flying gear, and the transportation, personnel, and civil engineering troops would come out into the hallway to ask how the flight went. Most of the time the pilots were more than willing to take the time to swap stories and play hero with the younger troops. It really built up camaraderie between the officers and enlisted folks.
Support personnel had to accomplish many tasks while the pilots flew their missions. Being in charge of the comings and goings of more than 900 folks was no easy feat, but the Air Force has a deployable computer system designed for just such a task. Of course, in the 100-plus days we were there, we never received all the parts required to make the system operational. We didn’t have to resort totally to stubby-pencil tracking, but I did have to design a database to meet our needs. Support folks fixed thousands of such problems as this with equal ingenuity.
When I wasn’t trying to track our people, I was getting ready to host our many visitors. One might think Gioia del Colle was too small for most people to find, but we had our share of “very important people.” Secretary of the Air Force F. Whitten Peters and Lt Gen Michael Short, joint forces air component commander, were two of the highest ranking US people to visit. Our visitors were not limited to Americans. The British were on the bottom floor of our dorm/office building, an arrangement that prompted Prince Andrew to pay us a visit as well during his tour of RAF operations. He appreciated the chance to see an A-10 up close and to talk to some of our members. Rock star Joan Jett also made a support appearance at Gioia, puting on a wonderful concert for the troops.
As an executive officer, I tried to deal with the minuscule things that go unnoticed to the untrained eye, such as storing mattresses, allocating office space, and playing peacemaker between operations and support personnel when they didn’t understand each other. I also dealt with all the administrative paperwork that goes hand in hand with any organization.
There were big problems to deal with and not-so-big problems. One of the funny inconveniences of our deployment was the lack of a place to wash our clothes. The Italians didn’t have Americanstyle laundromats, and the hotels charged ridiculous fees to wash even a shirt. The extra money the Air Force was paying us to cover expenses like this wasn’t going to hack it. People came up with some humorous solutions to the laundry problem. I heard of some pilots taking showers while wearing their flight suits so they could wash them at the same time. Others discovered the additional floor-mounted sink in their bathroom (known to most European travelers as a bidet) and used that to wash their clothes. Now is that creativity, desperation, or just cheapness? A few people mailed packages of dirty laundry to their wives, who usually returned clean clothes. I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of those packages! I am sad to say this little problem was never really solved.
There was definitely an upside to being deployed with this group of professionals. Walking around the area and talking to the airmen about their different jobs was enlightening. I’ll never forget the looks on the faces of the maintainers when their jet came back clean. The pride was evident: they bragged to one another, just as if they had dropped the bombs themselves. They were also concerned if a jet was late returning or if they could see the bombs still hanging as the A-10 came in to land.
After we had been in place a few months, things slowed down just enough to give the senior leadership a chance to hold a few meetings. Lt Col Chris Haave was the 81st commander, referred to as Kimos in most of this book—but support officers typically didn’t call pilots by their call signs. Colonel Haave briefed the troops on how we were doing against the Serbs and what impact the A-10s were making. He showed gun-camera videos that depicted bombs being dropped on targets, and he described a typical mission. Folks were on the edge of their seats. For the most part, these airmen had never been close to combat, and the briefing made it all the more real. Having a lieutenant colonel thank a group of enlisted and support officers, while explaining how they were really contributing to the war effort, made us feel needed and appreciated. It sure made coming to work for 12-plus hours a day more worthwhile.
Chapter 4
ENEMY ACTION
Introduction
The Serbs who were occupying and cleansing Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian population were cunning, adaptive, flexible, and intelligent adversaries. We felt no particular animosity for the Serbian people or the unfortunate young soldiers who were perhaps pressed into serving in Kosovo. We did feel a singular animosity towards those we witnessed burning and shelling villages, and for those who tried to shoot us down.
The Serb forces’ actions and reactions to KEZ operations can be likened to a boxer with a rope-a-dope strategy: unable to defeat NATO with brute strength, they used delaying tactics to parry the allied knockout blow on fielded forces while continuing to land punches in their ethnic-cleansing efforts. Another useful analogy is that of a
