without firing a round, when they came upon a prepared defensive position consisting of fortified rifle and machine- gun positions. As they proceeded slowly into the apparently abandoned complex, the FAC noticed movement in a nearby trench. Suddenly, a few Iraqi soldiers leapt out of the trenches, threw down their weapons, and started running toward the American vehicles with their hands over their heads. Just as suddenly, an Iraqi machine gun a little farther away opened up on the surrendering Iraqis, cutting them down from behind. At that point, the FAC, seeing one of the Iraqis writhing on the ground, called for his Army driver to move ahead. Disregarding his own safety, the FAC climbed out of the forward hatch of his vehicle, picked up the wounded and badly bleeding Iraqi, and, shielding him with his own body, carried him back to the vehicle. After the driver had pulled back to safety, the FAC did what he could to prevent shock and stop the loss of blood, but it looked very likely that the Iraqi had had it. His flesh had been torn from his arms and legs, and he’d lost a lot of blood. As the Army driver rushed them to a forward medical aid station, in a weak voice, but in clear English, the Iraqi explained that he was a doctor who’d trained in America before he was drafted. When the U.S. Army doctors at the aid station heard that one of their own was wounded, even though he was an Iraqi, they took heroic measures to save his life; and they were successful.
BLUE-ON-BLUE
Friendly fire — blue-on-blue, fratricide, whatever you wish to call it — has been around as long as war. During the Gulf War, we put greater efforts than ever before into reducing this tragedy. Though we tried hard, and can take satisfaction from our efforts, it was a battle we did not win. The blue-on-blue statistics from the Gulf War are shocking. After-action reports of U.S. Army deaths indicate that about half of their losses were caused by friendly fire, and over 70 percent of U.S. Army tanks and APCs that were hit were hit by friendly ground fire.
In the Gulf, the majority of friendly-fire incidents occurred ground-to-ground; that is, people on the ground were hit by fire from ground-bound platforms.
On the other hand, there were no air-to-air blue-on-blue incidents — the result of stringent rules of engagement, modern technology, aircrew discipline… and luck.
Here is a story to illustrate all that:
Captain Gentner Drummond was an F-15C pilot assigned to Boomer McBroom’s 1st Tactical Fighter Wing at Dhahran, and he looked every inch like the central casting dream of a fighter pilot — tall, slim, handsome, steely- eyed, with a soft Oklahoma drawl. Of course, his name, “Gentner,” was a negative. It should have been Spike or Rip or Killer.
At any rate, this misnamed, but highly talented, fighter pilot was leading an element on MiG CAP south of Baghdad the first night of the war, when AWACS called out a bandit — high-speed, low-level, headed south out of the Baghdad area.
Gentner came hard left and rolled out on the vector he got from AWACS. He then pointed his antenna down and got an immediate lock on a target heading south 1,000 feet above ground level at very high speed. He began pushing the buttons on his stick and throttles that would identify the target and tell him whether or not it was friendly, and if friendly, what type of aircraft.
In the meantime, AWACS was calling for him to shoot.
Gentner knew that the AWACS controller had access to intelligence information from the Rivet Joint Aircraft that would confirm that the aircraft was Iraqi. Still, there was room for doubt.
As the F-15 pilot streaked through the night at 30,000 feet, he worked his system on the target. Time was running out. In a few moments, he’d be inside R minimum, which is the closest in range he could get to the target and still use his AIM-7 missile. There was still no ID.
Meanwhile, the AWACS controller was ordering Gentner to shoot.
He decided not to. He wanted to be sure in his own mind, and he figured that his altitude advantage would allow him to perform a stern conversion. That way he could get a better ID of the target, and then down it if it was an Iraqi.
Pulling his Eagle around hard left and down, he screamed into the night and pulled up alongside a Saudi Tornado on his way home from a successful strike deep into Iraq.
For this act of restraint, Gentner received a Distinguished Flying Cross — that is, he received it for
In fact, his was not the only such story, yet it is typical of the stress our aircrews had to endure, as well as the high standards of conduct expected of them.
? Unfortunately, our record in air-to-ground combat was not perfect.
More than twenty friendly ground forces, U.S., Saudi, and British, were killed by weapons delivered from the air.
Thus, during the confusion at the Battle of Al-Khafji, a USAF A-10’s Maverick hit a U.S. Marine armored vehicle, a Marine A-6 bombed a Marine convoy, a Marine gunship attacked a Saudi National Guard armored car, and an unknown aircraft strafed Saudi troops who had wandered into a free-fire zone. Later in the war, a pair of Air Force A-10s attacked two British armored personnel carriers, Army Apaches destroyed two Army APCs, and our airmen destroyed two more British armored vehicles.
Lives were lost in each of these tragic events.
Though all were great tragedies, when placed against the total of air-to-ground attacks, their numbers were quite small — especially compared with other wars. Moreover, we must also weigh in the lives of friendly ground forces saved because air attacks on the Iraqis were so devastating. Of course, no saving of friendly lives makes any loss of friendly life “acceptable” to a commander. Mistakes happen, to be sure, but every effort should be made to prevent needless killings.
? The officer I tapped to work the fratricide-prevention problem was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Bob Phillips and his fighter Weapons Tactics Team. Joe Bob and his team of eight fighter weapons school instructors had arrived early in February, after General “Tiny” (six feet four and three hundred pounds) West, the commander of the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis, had offered them, both to augment our staff in Riyadh and to capture Gulf war experiences. They’d come not as experts—“We’ll tell you how to win this one”—but as field hands. After the war, they could go home to train others, using what we had learned in the only school for combat — war.
With typical fighter-pilot confidence and enthusiasm, Joe Bob and his team went to work. They had a big question to answer: if we had four incidents at Al-Khafji, how many would we face when five corps were unleashed on the Iraqis?
Here are some quotes from Joe Bob’s notes: “Working the CAS problem hard. Basically, the mechanics of generating the flow and communication are OK. We’re working backups for traffic jams. We have a shortage of airborne FACs and need tighter rules for TICs [troops in combat] situations. Seems that we have forgotten the need for fighter pilots to have guidance on ordnance type and distances from friendly forces, unwise delivery modes, etc., for TIC contact. Also, have only twelve OA-10s [airborne FAC aircraft] in theater — not enough to provide coverage for a hooba of this size. We are working out procedure and agreements with the corps commanders to keep the Killer Scouts employed both inside and outside the FSCL. Inside the FSCL, the attack aircraft must be under control of a forward air controller and prevent attacks on friendly forces and to hit the targets the Army wants hit. Outside the FSCL, the attacking aircraft is cleared to strike without any additional control. He may use J-STARS or Killer Scout, but a FAC is not required.”
By mid-February, these efforts were starting to make sense. As previously mentioned, we developed preplanned FSCLs, so that no matter how fast the ground war went, we could stay ahead of it. The more than 2,000 U.S. Air Force people assigned to work forward air control with the ground forces (except for the British and Marines, who provided their own FACs) would be adequate for that job, and our shortage of airborne forward air controls would be augmented by the Killer Scouts. Using AWACS, Joint STARS, and airborne command-and-control aircraft of the USAF and USMC, we were able to meter the flow and provide the needed control that would let us put bombs on target in a timely fashion, while avoiding friendly forces. Though it was a huge and complex
