After briefing maintenance on what had happened to aircraft 956, I moved to the spare and started getting it ready to go. Running through the after-start checklist, I saw the squadron commander pull up. He jumped out of his car and got on the maintainer’s headset to talk with me. After asking me what had happened, he told me, “Good job” and “Go ahead and shut down.” I was relieved; there was no way we could make the tanker times, and I did not feel the need to push my luck twice in one day. Fortunately for me, nobody had been able to attack any targets that morning. I only had to take grief from Buster for about 24 hours for ruining his day.
About eight months later, I was attending a safety ceremony at the Pentagon. Maj Gen Francis C. Gideon Jr., chief of Air Force Safety, was one of the generals in attendance. Coincidentally, he was the test pilot who had ejected from an A-10 after both engines flamed out while test-firing the gun. We sat and talked for a few minutes about what had happened and then discussed a few shortcomings in the boldface procedures. He asked what had helped me work through the emergency. I thought the things that contributed most to my getting through that experience were fear, luck, and divine intervention.
Chapter 8
MY TURN IN THE BARREL
Introduction
My first time in combat was one of my significant life experiences, as it has been for most military professionals. Our OAF stories show just how strange some of those combat experiences were. We had a close view of OAF combat, a closer one than some of our support teammates and fellow strikers who employed precision-guided munitions from relatively high altitudes. Their combat duties often kept them focused on interpreting their sensors and radarscopes, but we Hog drivers (and other FACs) watched with revulsion as Serbian atrocities unfolded before us. We spent most of our time putting eyeballs and ordnance directly on enemy troops whose identity we confirmed firsthand with our gyrostabilized binos.
The war was very real for our maintainers, who worked in shifts and hustled 24 hours a day to launch, recover, and reload our jets—and to repair the two combat-damaged Hogs. Some of our noncombat experiences, on the other hand, seemed unreal. Even when we were flying over the KEZ and working 12-hour days, we still slept in nice hotels, ate in restaurants, and sunbathed at the hotel pool.
Most of our pilots and maintainers had no previous combat experience. That included both colonels and both squadron commanders at Gioia del Colle, who received their baptism of fire over Kosovo. I will never forget Dirt Fluhr’s radio call on 7 April: “Hey, they’re shooting at us!” as we checked out a convoy of civilian and military vehicles northwest of Prizren. Our reaction that day was similar to many battlefield responses recorded in history—a warrior’s training takes over, and he acts aggressively and dispassionately to eliminate the threat immediately.
Many of our first combat experiences included shouldering the mission’s heavy responsibility and acquiring the “I’d better not blow this!
AFACs knew that the responsibility to find and accurately identify enemy forces was all theirs. They also knew that incoming fighters trusted them implicitly; they expected to be talked-on to only valid targets. Likewise, the fighters knew that their obligation was to hit valid targets only. Due to the unpredictable nature of locating and identifying the enemy, strikers would normally have to wait at their contact point until the AFAC could find a target. The strikers would often consume most of their available fuel and become anxious to unload their ordnance by the time the AFAC was ready to direct their attack on a target. Attacking quickly required that the strikers have complete trust in the AFAC. Not once did any striker question the validity of any target during the dozens of attacks I directed.
Okay, Two, Big Eyes Out!
“Okay, Two, big eyes out!” came the flight lead’s simple yet meaningful order. I was flying on Capt Jim “Meegs” Meger’s wing, and we were about five seconds from crossing the Kosovo-Albania border. This would be my first-ever combat mission. I had been flying the A-10 for only 10 months; not only was this my first combat mission, but it was also my first flight without a grade sheet. Less than two weeks earlier, I finished my mission-qualification training, kissed my wife good-bye, and boarded a plane with Lt Glib Gibson, another new wingman. We were excited because we would finally join the rest of the squadron in Italy. We had heard many stories of the great time to be had in Aviano and expected to experience unbounded fun between flying peacekeeping missions over Bosnia- Herzegovina. Instead, as we quickly learned, we were going to war.
At first the A-10 was tasked for nothing more than covering CSAR alert and a little CAS alert. Since I was not a qualified Sandy, I was told that I would probably not be needed. Capt Buster Cherrey had pulled me aside prior to the first bombs falling and had given me the choice of staying in Aviano or going back to Germany, where I could get some flying, at least. I initially thought that I should go home, fly, and spend more time with Cheryl, my wife of only seven months. However, I finally decided to stay and help if I could. By the time I got back to Buster to tell him my decision, he had already decided to keep me there. Since the A-10 did fight, I was very happy with that decision.
So there I was—flying into Kosovo to find and kill a real enemy who was, most likely, trying to find and kill us. I remember thinking to myself, “What am I doing here so soon?” That thought quickly gave way to the realization that I really needed to have “big eyes.” I spent nearly all of my time scanning the ground for AAA and SAMs while we were on the other side of the
More missions came. Except for often being tired, I found myself quickly getting used to the combat-ops tempo. I flew mostly early morning sorties; I went to bed at about 1930 hours and got as much sleep as I could before my 0200 wake up. Each time I flew, I felt—and rightly so—that it was my responsibility to keep my flight lead and myself alive. However, as fatigue built up and challenged my discipline, I was tempted to stop clearing and slip into the more exciting task of looking for targets. I often had to remind myself that it was my job to be looking for threats and that the AFAC would find the targets.
On several occasions the AFAC did find targets. I was flying with Maj Lester Less on an AFAC mission and instead of looking in Kosovo, we began our search in Serbian proper—in the Kumanovo Valley. As we approached the town of Vranje from the south, Lester found an area he wanted to search more thoroughly. A few moments later he keyed the radio and excitedly half-yelled, “Okay! Okay! We’ve got military vehicles down there!” We both felt an immediate surge of adrenalin. Neither of us had ever fired weapons in combat, and Lester decided to use a Maverick missile to kill one vehicle and have it serve as a mark for me. His missile was a direct hit, allowing me to verify that the vehicles I saw were the same ones he meant for us to attack. He told me to drop two bombs on a row of four trucks in the same area. As I positioned myself to roll in for my Mk-82 delivery, I thought about how much I did not want to miss those targets. This was for real. I wanted to know that I could do it right, but even
