The F-16CGs carried targeting pods and could drop laserguided bombs. My intention was to slow down the Serbian army’s search for Vega. I selected the intersections of major lines of communication, near where I believed the survivor to be located, as potential strike targets. Still, I was concerned about the availability of gas on the tankers and didn’t know when we would need the strikes, so I decided to keep the F-16CGs on ground alert until we needed them. From Aviano they could hit those targets within an hour. As it turned out, we never launched the F- 16CGs because low-level clouds over Serbia would have made it impossible for them to see their targets and the initial survivor coordinates proved to be in error by more than 40 miles.
The F-16CJs carried the HARM and had the “Wild Weasel” defense-suppression mission. It was their job to keep the radar-guided SAMs in the belt around Belgrade from shooting us down. I wanted the F-16CJs to launch ASAP. Those six jets would join the eight F-16CJs already airborne that had been a part of the strike package when Vega 31 was shot down.
I concluded the briefing in 20 minutes. Joe Bro and I then powwowed and updated our information before we stepped to our jets. Our job was to support Sandy 30. My individual call sign and, since I was the flight lead, our flight call sign was Sandy 51; Joe Bro’s individual call sign was Sandy 52. Joe Bro and I planned to come off the tanker with a full load of fuel just as Sandy 30 flight would be reaching its bingo fuel and required departure for the tanker. We had no idea how long the rescue would take. Using this strategy, Buster and I could swap out being the on-scene commander and ensure that a Sandy flight would always be with the survivor.
Joe Bro and I stepped just as Buster and Slobee, Sandy 30, were taking off. I thought that the timing should work well. Meegs and Scrape’s two-ship, Sandy 41, would get airborne in another 30 minutes. I performed the preflight inspection on my A-10. The jet was configured with two IIR Maverick air-to-surface missiles, seven white- phosphorous (also known as Willy Pete) rockets, seven night-illumination rockets, and 1,000 30 mm rounds for the gun. We were not carrying any bombs, but Meegs and Scrape had CBU-87 cluster bombs if we needed them. I climbed into the jet, and, while performing my cockpit checks prior to takeoff, I heard Meegs relay on the victor radio that Buster had contacted the survivor and had an updated position for him. When I pulled out my map and plotted this new set of coordinates, my heart sank. Vega was south of Novisad and just west of the suburbs of Belgrade—in the heart of Serbia.
My heart was pounding a mile a minute as I took off from Aviano AB. This base in northern Italy, located at the foot of the Dolomite Mountains, provided a spectacular view at night, particularly when I put on my NVGs. The weather was clear, with a big full moon overhead. Unfortunately, the weather did not remain clear for long. Twenty miles south of the field I entered very thick clouds as I continued my climb to altitude. Looking at my wing, I could see that I was picking up some light rime ice. Though not dangerous to flight, the ice was degrading my weapons as it covered the seekers on my Mavericks and AIM-9 air-to-air missiles. I continued my climb to flight level (FL) 290 to get above the clouds and start subliming the ice off my missiles.
Magic, the call sign used by the crew of the NAEW, gave me a vector to the air-refueling track. I sent Joe Bro over to a separate frequency to contact Moonbeam for an update. Moonbeam was the ABCCC EC-130 aircraft that also served as the airborne mission coordinator during CSARs. It had responsibility for coordinating with the CAOC and Magic to ensure the timely flow of all the resources the CSAR operation needed.
Except for the icing and the survivor being in the suburbs of Belgrade, things were going pretty well. However, I was in for a shock when I keyed the mike to transmit on my UHF (uniform) radio—it was dead. I desperately tried to reset it by switching it off and on. Nothing. This was not good since the UHF was my primary radio and the survivor had only a UHF radio. In frustration I beat on the radio trying to pound it into life. Nothing.
I was over Bosnia—cruising at 300 knots in silence. I turned my radio off, raised my eyes up to the stars above, and prayed, “Lord, I’ve never prayed to you like this before, but I need your help like I’ve never needed it before. There is a man on the ground out there who needs me, and I can’t help him if this radio won’t work. Lord, I need you to fix this radio, because I can’t do it by myself.” I gently turned the radio back on and heard the angelic voice of Magic, wanting to know why I hadn’t responded to his radio calls.
Under my breath I said, “Thank you, Lord,” and keyed the mike to respond. Once again the UHF radio went dead. The A-10 carried three radios: UHF, VHF-AM, and FM. The UHF and VHF radios have good range, but the FM was good for only a few miles and useful only between jets in the same flight. I called Joe Bro on our interflight Fox Mike: “Two, my UHF is dead. I need you to talk to Magic.” I left my UHF off for a couple of minutes and then turned it back on. I could hear Joe Bro talking to Magic. At least I could monitor UHF. This was going to be painful but workable. I could hear what was being said on the radio, but I had to call Joe Bro on Fox Mike and have him relay my calls on UHF. This just proved what the Rolling Stones said: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you’ll get what you need.”
We continued to the tanker track located over the center of Bosnia. The A-10 was not designed for high- altitude flight. Loaded with munitions, we could not refuel above 20,000 feet. Fortunately the KC-135, Franc 74, was at FL 200. Descending out of FL 290, I picked up Franc going in and out of a broken cloud deck. We pulled in behind him just as he reentered the clouds. My refueling went without a hitch, but Joe Bro had trouble opening his air- refueling door. He had some icing around it and couldn’t get the handle to move. I still don’t know how he did it. We were flying at night, in the weather, and he was on the wing of that KC-135. While still flying the aircraft, Joe Bro unstrapped from his ejection seat to get better leverage on the handle and somehow forced the air-refueling door open.
Coming off the tanker, we climbed out of the weather, leveled off at FL 270, and turned east towards Serbia. I contacted Sandy 41 (Meegs) on victor, and he told us to continue to the Bosnia-Serbian border. Meanwhile Sandy 30 (Buster) had located Vega 31 and had everything ready for the rescue—everything, that is, except the helicopters. We were still waiting on the two MH-53 Pave Lows and, as I learned later, an MH-60 Pave Hawk. Initially Meegs had not been able to get hold of them, and when he finally raised them he discovered that the helos, call sign Moccasin, did not have the fuel on board to execute. The helicopters had been airborne about as long as Buster had been. Instead of launching at the time I had passed through the CAOC, they launched 90 minutes earlier and had been holding in Croatia, just east of the Serbian border near the first set of wrong coordinates. Later I learned that the time passed by the CAOC had been given in local time instead of Zulu time (Greenwich mean time). Local, or Central European, time is two hours ahead of Zulu time in March, so Moccasin thought he was already half an hour late and requested permission to launch immediately. This simple mistake, by someone not familiar enough with combat operations to know that all times in combat are expressed in Zulu, turned the rescue into an all-night affair and nearly cost the survivor his freedom.
Buster aborted the pickup and sent everyone to his respective tanker—everyone but Joe Bro and me. The survivor, Vega 31, was concerned with the life of his radio’s battery and turned it off for 45 minutes while the helicopters refueled. Joe Bro and I were the only ones with gas, so our job was to monitor the survivor’s frequency in case he needed to talk to us. I set up a north-south holding pattern just west of the Serbian border, where we listened and waited. We were in dangerous territory, near the place where an F-15A had shot down a Serbian MiG- 29 Fulcrum just two nights before. I focused my attention to the east, where the MiG bases were located. Although the weather over Bosnia was bad, I could see into Serbia and make out the lights from the villages and towns all the way to Belgrade. A thunderstorm was building over Belgrade, which prevented me from making out the lights of that city. As the minutes ticked away, I watched the weather rapidly deteriorate. It appeared that the clouds over Bosnia were now pouring into Serbia. A very low cloud deck was moving east, and I could see town after town disappear beneath a blanket of clouds. Why did Moccasin have to launch early? We’d have had Vega 31 out of there by now. There was no way an A-10 Sandy could fly beneath that cloud deck—nor was I sure that even Moccasin could still make it.
While I was contemplating such negative thoughts, Joe Bro added a new thought: “Hey, what’s that to the west?” I looked up to see two contrails heading our way. They had to be a set of friendly NATO fighters from the Bosnian CAP. We watched as they began to perform a classic pincer maneuver. I thought they must have been
