Meanwhile, they had a problem. The Sandys were again nearly out of gas. It would be their third in-flight refueling of the day. As they flew away, they promised Jones they’d be back after they filled up.
As it happened, they almost did.
Heading south, Johnson and Goff ran into headwinds. These — and their gritty determination to find Jones — had left them too low on gas to make it back to Saudi Arabia and a tanker aircraft (for obvious reasons, tankers stayed on the Saudi side of the border). When AWACS put them in contact with a tanker, Johnson asked it to fly north to rendezvous with him; the tanker pilot refused. The rules said no tankers in Iraq, and this tanker pilot was going to follow the rules.
Now desperate, Johnson pointed out to the tanker pilot that he just might fly over to him and transfer a full load of 30 mm ammunition into his KC-135. Of course, he wouldn’t do such a thing — and actually he couldn’t. He didn’t have enough gas to fly that far south. For whatever reason — fear, or more likely conscience — the tanker pilot headed across the border and into Iraq for a rendezvous with the nearly empty A-10s. Either way, just then he became a hero to the A-10 drivers.
Though by this time Moccasin 05 (the Jolly Green Giant rescue helicopter, flown by Captain Tom Trask) had returned to its forward operating base at Ar’ar just south of the Iraqi border, its crew had not totally given up the search, and they were monitoring their radio when Sandy 57 made contact with Jones, and later with the tanker. While the A-10s sucked gas out of the KC-135, they launched and headed north. Soon they were joined by the two A-10s.
On the flight north, AWACS controllers vectored them around Iraqi SAM sites in their path. Before long, they were talking to Jones.
The Moccasin 05 crew were going over rescue procedures with the Navy pilot when Johnson and Goff spotted an Iraqi radio direction-finding truck racing toward the pilot’s hiding place; and as Sandy’s 57 and 58 turned their attention to the Iraqi truck, Moccasin 05 swooped down on the pilot, his arms waving like mad. The A-10s rolled in and strafed the Iraqis with their 30 mm cannons, and, in Jones’s words, “the truck vaporized.” It had been close.
As Johnson pulled off the burning truck, Jones was jumping out of his hole in the desert less than a football field away and running to the waiting helicopter. It was a sight Johnson would never forget.
Though many people deserved praise that day, in the end it was the determination and guts of Captains Johnson and Goff that made the mission successful. Nearly nine hours after they’d climbed into them, the two exhausted pilots climbed down from their A-10s.
Months later, their country would reward Paul Johnson and Randy Goff for their efforts on what had started out as a boring day sitting combat search-and-rescue alert. Johnson received the Air Force Cross, the Air Force’s second-highest medal, and Randy Goff was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
The Jones rescue was difficult, but it worked. Too many CSAR missions did not come off so well. The most notable of these failures occurred on the night of January 19, when an F-15E hunting Scuds was shot down by an SA-2 missile.
THE ODYSSEY OF TOM GRIFFITH
Tom Griffith was a weapons systems officer, assigned to the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing, flying F-15Es, and first deployed in the rushed chaos of early August to Thumrait Air Base in Oman.
Still locked in his memory is the anxiety of mobility processing, when no one knew where they were being sent or what to expect when they got there. This was swiftly followed by the greater anxiety of imminent war, when he was handed a real gas mask and a real atropine injection pen (which protected against nerve gas).
In Oman, he endured the hot August days and nights, putting up tents in a dust storm, eating MREs until the kitchen tent was set up, sitting alert in a jet loaded with wall-to-wall cluster bomb units. August became September, and he endured that, too.
But when September became October, he was needed back home at Seymour Johnson AFB. So he left Thumrait and went home to train new crew members and spend Christmas with his wife and four young children. Or so he thought.
In December, when the wing was moved up to Al Kharj and a second squadron of F-15Es was deployed into the theater, Tom was at the top of the list to rejoin the unit. Later in December, the call came.
Leaving quickly, he discovered, was a hell of a lot easier than leaving slowly. In August, he just said goodbye and raced off. This time there were days to take last looks at his wife and children. This time there were hundreds of awkward moments when “we don’t talk about it,” until the actual leave-taking finally brought painful release.
Al Kharj — known to Americans as Al’s Garage — was a desolate place. The recently erected neat and orderly tent city did not improve its charm. But when Griffith arrived, he at least had the advantage of experience. The truly new guys, fresh from warm beds, Little League baseball with their kids, and Friday-night beer call, had to endure the barbs and hazing of the old heads, who’d suffered through the desert summer and fall. But not Tom Griffith.
Then December became January, and Griffith, like every aircrew member facing his first combat sortie, had to come to grips with a question that lay heavy in his heart. It was not,
On Tom’s first mission, he and his pilot, Colonel Dave Eberly, the wing DO, hit a radio transmission tower used by the Iraqi air defense system. It wasn’t pretty, but the strike went okay, and the Iraqi bullets missed them. Other F-15Es hit a nearby airfield, and he watched the seeming miracle of their escape from the waves of tracers thrown against them. Though the naysayers had predicted drastic losses, all the F-15Es came home that night.
After that the confidence swelled their hearts. “Hot shit! We did it! Everybody came back!”
Relief and confidence made everyone bolder… which instantly evaporated when one of the jets was lost following an attack on Basra. He was shaken again when a Wild Weasel tasked to support Griffith’s second mission was unable to find the tanker. It tried to land at fog-shrouded King Khalid Military City, but ran out of fuel and ideas. The crew ejected safely.
Though the losses put a chill in the aircrews, their worst fears had still not been realized. Thus, when a rushed, all-out strike was called against the Scuds in western Iraq, Griffith took in stride the inevitable confusion that accompanied this last-minute change in the ATO, and went about the job of planning his attack while briefing with Dave Eberly.
As usual when higher headquarters threw planning changes at operational people, confusion reigned. This wasn’t helped when the WSOs feverishly crammed in last-minute target and route studies, which made the crews late getting to their jets. After all, it was their
The pilots only had to work their machines.
That is, a pilot only had to get off the runway without breaking anything, lift the gear handle, avoid hitting the KC-135 during refueling rendezvous, hang on to the boom while gas was pumped, then follow the WSO’s orders and put the jet into a small piece of sky at a speed and heading that would enable the bombs to hit their mark. Once that was done, he could fly back to a tanker, and then home.
During most of the mission, the WSO had it easy. That meant he could do busywork checking out systems or helping with the tanker join-up (if the pilot gave him control of the radar). Later he’d feed the route coordinates into the navigation system, which gave the pilot steering orders in the form of a small circle on his HUD. The hard part came when he took control of the radar and searched ever-smaller pieces of landscape below. When he’d found the target area, he’d work out where the bombs must impact by making a radar picture of the area (this looked like a fuzzy black-and-white photograph), and comparing that with the materials he had studied before takeoff or with
