Mohammed extinguished the aircraft’s exterior lights, and now, the only light came from the eerie glow of the cockpit displays.
Meanwhile, Sultan watched his moving map display, which showed them where they were located at any given time. He watched with fascination as the Saudi border with Iraq began to approach.
When they flashed across the border at 200 feet above the desert, Sultan sadly concluded, “Well, so it’s war!” and armed up his weapons dispenser.
On the radio, two squadron mates called that they were three minutes behind and low on fuel. Sultan ordered them home, as they could not possibly catch up, and they must not be late. Meaning: Sultan and Mohammed were now alone.
Mohammed then said to his pilot, “We’re on track and on time.”
Sultan looked ahead, but saw nothing except darkness. At thirty-five miles out, he concluded they were headed for the wrong target, or else nothing was there. At twenty-five miles, the supporting Wild Weasel launched a high-speed antiradiation missile at a SAM radar, and suddenly night turned to day, as thousands of tracers lit the night sky.
In his surprise, Sultan cried out, “My God, look at this, Mohammed!”
But Mohammed, ever the quiet one, had nothing to say about the show. And anyhow, he had more important things to do than gawk at fireworks; he had the exacting work of putting the crosshairs on the target.
At fifteen miles, Sultan asked his mate if he was happy with the target. Meaning, is the radar picture good enough for an accurate release of their weapons?
“See that big fire?” Mohammed answered, meaning the SAMs and tracers rising from the airfield ahead. “That’s it.”
It’s a beautiful thing when your WSO is cool, while you are thinking you’ll never see your wife and children again.
Sultan then realized that it was time to pay more attention to what he’d been sent out to do. At the same instant, it occurred to him that he was likely to die. Thinking he’d better let Mohammed have a vote, he asked, “Mohammed, we can turn back. It’s up to you. Will you go with me?”
The taciturn Mohammed replied simply, “I’ll go.”
Then Sultan repeated the Islamic prayer uttered by those about to die.
As they neared the target, Mohammed got a perfect placement of the crosshairs on the runway that was their target.
Meanwhile, Sultan had grown concerned that the terrain-following autopilot might give a fly-up command because of all the debris being thrown up in front of them. He toggled off the automatic flight system and began to hand-fly the aircraft, easing it down to below 100 feet.
His preplanned attack had him flying across the runway, so bombing errors would be canceled out by the long string of bomblets carried in the JP-233 dispenser. However, since the other Tornadoes tasked to cut the runway would not be coming, he made an instant decision to fly down the runway to ensure it was rendered inoperable for its entire length. Even though this change in plan would expose their aircraft to the maximum gauntlet of enemy fire, he knew he had to do what he had to do.
Slamming his jet around in the night at hundreds of miles per hour, only tens of feet above the ground, he lined up on the long runway now located somewhere in the holocaust of bullets and rockets shooting into the sky. He pressed down with his right thumb on the red button on top of the stick, and the fire-control computer initiated the process that would dispense the runway-cratering bomb over the target.
The jet flashed into the bright streaks from the bullets and rockets meant to kill them, and Sultan spent his longest six seconds, flying down the Iraqi runway.
Then they were streaking back into the darkness and Sultan was about to sigh with relief, when he heard a loud thump, and the aircraft made a shudder. He froze, certain they had been hit by the antiaircraft fire. He nervously checked his dials and lights to see where the problem was.
He shouted to Mohammed on the interphone, “We’ve been hit!”
“No, no,” Mohammed answered with his usual cool, “that’s just the empty weapons dispenser.” The dispenser automatically jettisoned when all the bombs were gone. Then he implored his fearless leader, “Please turn back, or else we are going to Baghdad!”
Filled with relief, the pilot pulled his aircraft around to a southerly heading and climbed away from the place of terror and death toward home.
As they crossed the border into the safety of the Kingdom, Sultan and Mohammed were filled with pride — and with gratitude that they hadn’t screwed up. A month earlier, Sultan had gotten into trouble for doing an aileron roll during a night flight. But now as they crossed the border, he made a series of celebratory rolls to the right and then to the left. They were both alive!
At home in the shelter, the crew debriefed to a wildly enthusiastic ground crew. They had successfully brought off a lot of firsts for their young air force.
The next day, I reported the success of their mission success on worldwide news. Their attack had been so precise, I said, that you couldn’t have placed their munitions more accurately if you had driven them out to the runway in a pickup truck.
Meanwhile, after the laughter and crying, General Turki sent Sultan and Mohammed home and told them to take the next day off, which they did; but these combat veterans quickly discovered that in war you don’t relax, except through exhaustion. After they returned to the flying schedule, they flew thirty missions.
Let me add that after his first experience of low-level ground fire, Sultan demanded that they stop flying low-altitude bomb runs, and Turki backed him up. This paid off, for the only Saudi Tornado lost in the war ran out of fuel trying to land in fog at the King Khalid Military City forward operating base (where there was no approach control capable of handling such emergencies).
Some jobs require heroes. Someone has to set the records for others to follow. The hero is afraid, sure: afraid of enemy fire, afraid of being killed, but most of all afraid of screwing up and letting his mates down, afraid of failure. In spite of their fear, Captain Sultan and Lieutenant Mohammed fought the people like me at headquarters who failed to give them adequate warning, fought the weather that dark and stormy night, fought the disruptions that left them the sole aircraft to attack the target, and fought the Iraqis, who had not yet learned to fear and respect our Coalition airpower. They fought and won.
Thank God for heroes.
BUILDING COALITIONS
The key ingredients to forming and maintaining a military coalition are common purpose, political leadership, and military forces that can work together.
The common purpose removes the tendency to define national interests, as in, “What’s in this for me?”
The coalition that fought in the Gulf had one common purpose, to liberate occupied Kuwait. Sure, there were other national interests at stake. For the Europeans, it was access to affordable oil. To the Arabs, it was national survival. Nevertheless, the overarching purpose, the one used to goad the United Nations into action, was to stop the rape, murder, and robbery of one nation by another.
It’s easy enough to say that we need to have a common purpose. The trick is to understand and articulate it. Or, as General George Marshall said, “The hardest thing to do is define the political objectives of war. Once that is done, a lieutenant can lay out an appropriate military strategy.”
? The political leadership President Bush provided the Desert Storm Coalition was critical to its success. Because he listened to and consulted with the political leaders of the Coalition nations, they were confident that their views and concerns were being considered as the Americans formulated policy and actions. The outgrowth of
