Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

more mature, more sober in their outlook. No more whining questions. They’d had their innocence baked out of them in the hot sun, dulled by the night combat air patrols, scared out of them by night practices and by large-scale rehearsal missions in the increasingly bad weather. They knew now they were going to war — an event they’d trained for all their professional lives and feared they’d never experience. They were going from the practice field to the Super Bowl. Some would not make it, yet they were not afraid. Neither was there much joy (though there was laughter) — a condition caused not by the threat of war but by loneliness and separation from loved ones.

No longer were we carefree, fun-loving fighter pilots.

On 15 January, I wrote my wife,

“This may be my last letter for some time. My mental attitude will likely be such you won’t want to hear from me anyway. Some days lately I could puke. There are so many people who have no clue about air, people who are jealous because we have the predominant act in this circus. They spend all their time trying to get their two cents in at the expense of getting the job done.

“I try to keep our operations stable and work to stay above the petty crises, because I know that when the shooting starts, the nervous Nellies will run away.

“Forgive such a shitty letter, but we are entering a big game and I have a thousand details to attend to. Perhaps when the rest get doing their wartime thing, I’ll have more time. Till then, know in your deepest secret place, I love you so very much.”

III The Thousand-Hour War

8 Storm!

Chuck Horner tells what happened next:

I arrived in the TACC shortly after 0100 on the seventeenth of January 1991. The war, scheduled to start at 0300, Riyadh time, was moments away.

The January 15 U.N. deadline had come and gone. Even the added teeth of President Bush’s threat —“Evacuate Kuwait or face military action”—had produced no concrete results (though there’d been a flurry of diplomatic activity). This didn’t surprise me. I was sure Saddam wouldn’t back down, if for no other reason than he had dug too many trenches, piled too many sandbags, and poured too much concrete in the desert. He must have figured he held a winning hand, which had me worried about an ace up his sleeve. Yet how could he, I’d asked myself over and over, when we hold all four aces?

President Bush had sent a message to General Schwarzkopf: The start of the liberation of Kuwait is up to you, but make it as soon after the fifteenth as possible. The CINC had in turn delegated that responsibility to me. And I had chosen the early hours of January 17 as the best moment to launch the aerial assault.

This plan was based on a single factor. On that date would occur the least possible illumination in the night sky — no moonlight. Our F-117s were virtually invisible to radar, but they were visible to Iraqi fighter pilots; and they were particularly visible against the backdrop of a moonlit sky. They were attacking the toughest, most heavily defended target ever struck from the air — Baghdad. We were going to give them every possible advantage.

? Knowing that I’d get very little sleep in the next days, I’d gone home to the USMTM compound next door at about 2100 that evening to try to sleep… until midnight, anyway. But sleep did not come. I was too keyed up, too tense. I lay there in the empty apartment (Yeosock and Fong were working at ARCENT and my aide Hoot Gibson had gone to Al Dahfra to fly in combat), trying to get some rest, wondering what I had forgotten, wondering what I had missed that would cost the life of a pilot. Sure, I knew some would die, but I wanted to be certain I had not made the mistake that cost them their lives.

There had been no last-minute phone calls to General Schwarzkopf, or to anyone else. These would not have been appropriate. We didn’t want an increase in communications traffic to tip off the enemy that something big was in the works, though I am sure they expected something after the fifteenth.

Shortly after the deadline passed, wheels had been set in motion. And on January 16, B-52s from the 2d Bombardment Wing of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, armed with conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs), had departed Barksdale AFB, Louisiana (an event duly reported on CNN). The Mighty Eighth would go to war once more, this time under command of the Ninth Air Force. Quite a turnaround from the days of SAC rule. Seven B-52s were to fly a round trip of 14,000 miles in thirty-five hours (the longest combat mission in history) and fire thirty-five CALCMs at eight targets — military communications sites and power-generation and transmission facilities.

Why send B-52s all the way from Louisiana?

In any war, there were many time-sensitive targets, that is, targets we wanted to hit early — command- and-control nodes, Scud storage areas, airfields, and so on — all of which we wanted to close down quickly so we could hit our other targets more efficiently as assets (fighter-bombers) became available after turnaround. Therefore, it made sense to plan the opening moments of the war to include as many strikes as possible, as quickly as possible; and cruise missiles, though expensive, gave us the ability to hit many targets simultaneously.

In this war, cruise missiles were fired not only from B-52s but from battleships and submarines (thus showcasing the Navy). The Air Force’s B-52s and their cruise missiles were the first to take off and the first to fire a shot in anger (thus showcasing the Air Force’s emerging Global Reach Global Power doctrine). Ordnance from Army Apaches was the first to explode. And Air Force F-117s were the first to penetrate the airspace of Iraq. Lots of firsts for everybody.

Our tankers, AWACS, and fighters flying the air defense combat Air Patrols and training sorties had been flying near the Iraq border every day and night since August 6 (and the RSAF had been doing that alone before we got there). These flights had been carefully increased over the past weeks, so Iraqi radar operators looking across into Saudi Arabia would not be alarmed at the large numbers of radar returns. What they didn’t see were hundreds of aircraft, primarily tankers and bomb-laden fighters, orbiting farther back from the border at altitudes below the Iraqi radar’s line of sight over the horizon.

The first wave of these were deep-penetrating aircraft — F-111s, F-15Es, Tornadoes, F-16s, A-6s, and more F-117s. These had the range and large bomb loads needed to hit Iraqi command-and-control bunkers, Scud launch pads and storage areas, telecommunications and radio facilities, and airfields. They were complemented by F-15Cs, F-14s, and air defense Tornadoes, which would orbit above Iraqi airfields, waiting for Saddam’s Air Force to rise to the defense of its country.

Also prowling over Iraq were a host of vital support aircraft — EF-111s to electronically blind Iraqi radar, Wild Weasels and Navy A-7s, equipped with high-speed radiation missiles to physically blind surface-to-air missile radar, and Special Operations helicopters, waiting near Baghdad to conduct pickup of downed aircrew. Throughout the night and next day, RF-4, U-2, RF-5, and TARPS-configured Navy/Marine aircraft flew reconnaissance and provided battle damage assessment of our opening strikes.

Backing up all of this were countless KC-135, KC-10, KC-130, and A-6 refueling tankers orbiting ever closer to the Iraqi border as the first wave of fuel-thirsty fighters and bombers returned from deep inside Iraq.

While airpower was striking the heart of Iraq, its army in the KTO did not go unnoticed. Waves of B-52s from England, Spain, and Diego Garcia began an unceasing avalanche of flaming iron upon the Republican Guard and other Iraqi troops. The rising sun brought another form of terror, as deadly A-10s dove down with their Maverick missiles, 30mm guns and bombs on tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, artillery, supply depots, and air defense SAMs and AAA guns.

Worse was to come, from thousands of other aircraft — versatile F-16s, often quickly turned around at