Battle Born

how young they were as well. The crew chief, Master Sergeant Chris Bowler, was a fifteen-year veteran, but his assistants, one buck sergeant and one staff sergeant, looked fresh out of tech school. In reality, they had twenty- five years of B-1B experience between them.

The first order of business after reviewing the 781 and briefing the crew chiefs was a “FOD walk,” where the flight and ground crews walked out from the wheels along the Bone’s taxi path to check for anything on the ground that might get sucked up into the engines when they taxied. Every bit of the aircraft parking ramp was meticulously swept and checked for FOD twenty-four hours a day, and the chance that the flight crew, who were busy mentally preparing for their upcoming mission, would actually find anything on the concrete was fairly remote.

But this was a “crew” thing, something the crews did together for their bird. The aircraft “belonged” to the crew chiefs until the aircraft commander signed the 781, at which point the aircraft “belonged” to the flight crew until the crew chief signed the 781 after the maintenance debrief and took control of it again. The FOD walk was a kind of symbolic act, something they did together for the mutual benefit of “their” war machine. For a brief period of time, they were not officers or enlisted personnel, not fliers or ground-pounders — they were Aces High.

Once they parted after the FOD walk, shaking hands, giving high fives, flashing their squadron “gang sign” at each other — three fingers jammed downward in a dunking motion, signifying the 111th — and shouting their squadron motto, “Aces High: Penetrate, Decimate, and Dominate,” they became “flight” crew members and “ground” crew members again. But the bond between them would never be broken.

Patrick followed the crew offensive systems officer, or “O,” John Long, as he did a preflight of the Bone’s three weapon bays. As briefed, the bomber was fully loaded. It was as exciting for Patrick to be out here now, preflighting a bomb bay filled with live weapons, as it was years ago when he was the bombardier in charge of all the explosive power in the B-52 Stratofortress and later in the EB-52 Megafortress.

Long counted the bombs in the forward bomb bay. “Twenty-eight Mark 82 AIRs, ready to go,” he said. The bottom of the bomb bay was ten feet overhead, so there was nothing for him to do but count the weapons and check for any obvious malfunctions or damage.

The five-hundred-pound Mk82 was the second smallest high-explosive bomb carried by the Air Force and the smallest weapon carried by the B-1. Its basic design hadn’t changed since the 1950s; in fact, many of the more than one million Mk80-class weapons still in the inventory were leftovers from the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. The Bone’s Mk82 AIRs (air-inflatable retarded) were modified for low-altitude delivery with the BSU-49/B Ballute tail unit, which was an air-inflatable mushroom-looking canvas parachute that would slow the bomb down enough to allow the bomber to escape the detonation and blast effects without damaging itself.

The weapons were loaded onto slanting racks in a confused-looking array, with bombs tightly stacked atop one another. It seemed impossible that those racks could fold and flip out of the way before the bombs above them released, Patrick thought. Twenty-eight five-hundred-pound bombs safely leaving the bomb bay, separated by only one-fifth of a second. Amazing. He knew precisely how they worked, of course — but studying the engineering on paper was much different from actually seeing the bomb bay jammed with more than five tons of explosive power.

“These are my babies here,” John Long said proudly as they reached the center, or intermediate, bomb bay. This bay held a rotary launcher loaded with eight inert two-thousand-pound GBU-32 JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) guided gravity bombs, the deadliest nonnuclear weapon in the Bone’s arsenal.

Although radar level bombing from the B-1 had always been very accurate, JDAM gave the Block D Bone its only near-precision bombing capability. Target coordinates were fed to a global positioning satellite/inertial navigation system computer strapped onto each bomb, either by manually entering the geographical coordinates by computer keyboard or by feeding the coordinates from the Bone’s bombing computers and attack radar. When the bomb was released, it would steer itself to the target coordinates, using movable control surfaces on its tail. The Bone’s rotary launcher could spit out eight JDAMs in a little over sixty seconds.

Using only its strap-down inertial navigation system, JDAM was normally accurate to within two hundred feet, even if released from an altitude of thirty thousand feet. But if the bomb could lock onto at least three GPS navigation satellites as it fell, its accuracy increased to sixty feet. If it locked onto eight satellites for at least seven seconds, which it could do if released from high altitude, the bomb’s accuracy increased to less than twenty feet — and with a two-thousand-pound bomb, that was guaranteed to wipe out any target smaller than a three-story house.

What’s more, the bomb could glide as far as fifteen miles if released from high altitude, so it was not necessary to release it at a specific point in space. That meant that the B-1 could fly anywhere within a fifteen-mile diameter “basket,” from any direction and at any speed, and start pumping out JDAMs as fast as the rotary launcher could go — and each bomb would automatically find its own target, even if the target was behind it. On a large target complex such as an airfield, military base, city, or weapons storage area, eight different targets could be attacked on the same bomb run by one bomber within sixty seconds, with accuracy second only to laser-or TV-guided bombs or missiles, day or night, in any weather or battlefield conditions.

“You like JDAM, do you, Colonel?” Patrick asked.

“If it wasn’t for JDAM, I think we’d be out of business,” Long replied. “Every other attack plane in the inventory except the Bone and the B-2 stealth bomber has a precision-guided bombing capability — even the lousy little F-16 can launch Maverick missiles. Even with all its payload, range, and speed advantages, what good would a Bone be if it took three bombs to destroy a target that one bomb from an F-15E or F-117 stealth fighter could destroy? With JDAM, we come close to pinpoint bombing accuracy without having to use a datalink, forward-looking infrared, or laser.”

Patrick nodded, appearing to agree — though it was all he could do to keep quiet. The Joint Direct Attack Munition was indeed a good weapon. It was cheap, it worked well, and it modernized the huge supply of one-and two-thousand-pound bombs still in the inventory. But there were a dozen next-generation weapons available for the B-1B bomber, and at least another dozen weapons Patrick and his teams at Dreamland were working on, third-and fourth-and fifth-generation stuff, that made JDAM seem as effective as cavemen throwing rocks. Patrick only wished he could tell this young bombardier about the innovations they were about to unleash.

They moved to the aft bomb bay, which was loaded with ten CBU-87/B CEM (Combined Effects Munition) dispensers. This was the primary wide-area antiarmor and antipersonnel bomblet used by the Bone. Each dispenser carried over two hundred two-pound bomblets. When released, the dispenser would spin rapidly, scattering BLU-97 bomblets over a wide oval-shaped area. The bomblets would float down on a tiny inflatable parachute, then detonate at a preselected altitude above ground.

The kill-and-hurt pattern of this tiny two-pound bomblet was enormous. A shaped charge warhead, capable of penetrating four inches of steel, would shoot straight down, designed to cut through the light armor atop a tank or armored vehicle. At the same instant, a hundred tiny steel fragments would shoot outward, capable of shredding light vehicles within fifty yards and injuring soldiers over a hundred yards away. Finally, a ring of sponge zirconium would ignite, scattering burning pieces of white-hot metal over two hundred yards away and igniting brush, fuel, buildings — or humans — with ease. One CBU-87 could cut a swath of death and destruction the size of eight football fields.

After Long completed his inspection, they climbed up the steep ladder behind the tall nose landing gear into the crew compartment. Patrick followed right behind. He had to keep from grinning like a kid stepping onto a roller coaster. He couldn’t believe how excited he felt. After all the bomber missions he’d flown—why?

Go with it, he told himself, and he broke out into a big shit-eating grin. It was exciting because it is exciting. It felt fun because it is fun! Yes, it was dangerous. Yes, this crew had a mission to accomplish, and Patrick was their judge, their jury — and, in a very real sense, their executioner. But they were also going to fly one of the deadliest planes in the world and drop enough real live no- shit high-explosive material to wipe out an entire brigade of enemy armor. It was the ultimate job, the ultimate game, the ultimate kick in the pants.

Savor it, Patrick told himself. For once, forget about the responsibility and the mission and savor the excitement you are about to experience.

Despite the fact that the B-1B was over 140 feet long and its max gross weight exceeded 230 tons, there was just enough room inside for four crew members in ejection seats plus a little storage space. Rinc stowed his jacket in a cubbyhole above the entry tunnel and his gear in a little step built behind the center console, pre-flighted