someday I would probably have to explain my actions to God, and there was no suitable explanation. When men are imperfect — and God knows we are — then there better be a forgiving God.
Well, it was time to suck it up and go to work. And that’s just what we all did.
? As we were waiting in the TACC, Mary Jo was eating dinner with her mother, who was visiting from Cresco, Iowa. Sean Cullivan, our aide, came in and announced, “Mrs. Horner, the war has started.” Like many others, she and her mother left the dinner table and went into the family room to watch television. Like many others, they stayed glued to the TV for the next six weeks, morning, noon, and night. The “CNN Effect” bloomed into full flower during this war. (Interestingly, CNN became a major source of intelligence for us in the TACC.)
? The radar display showed our strikers creep, at 500 to 600 knots, toward their targets. As we watched, someone announced that CNN’s Bernard Shaw was reporting live from Baghdad that the guided missiles were beginning to land on their targets. In my office on the third floor was a television with a CNN hookup. Meanwhile, the critical F-117 strike against the telecommunications building in Baghdad that was the core of Iraqi command and control was about to occur. We called it the AT&T building. Bernie Shaw’s reports were relayed to the United States over Iraqi telephone commercial circuits that passed through this building.
I asked Major Buck Rogers, one of the key Black Hole planners, to go upstairs and turn on my TV and let me know what happened.
The critical bomb impact time over target was to occur at 0302. As the second hand of the big clock on the wall swept toward the designated TOT, I talked to Buck on the hot line that connected my position in the TACC to my office on the third floor. The success or failure of this one F-117 mission, this one bomb, would tell a lot about how our air campaign would fare. If Iraqi telecommunications were destroyed, the air superiority battle became manageable: blind the enemy air defense system, and isolate the elements from the brain, and it is no longer a “system” but individual weapons operating in the dark.
Now we were hearing of the gunfire over Baghdad, intense and seemingly endless streams of bullets and missiles rising from atop every building and open area of the capital. I prayed for the F-117 pilots.
And then, just as the second hand swept past the twelve on the clock, Buck reported, “CNN just went off the air.” That was it. The AT&T building had taken a mortal blow. The report of our success flew across the somber-quiet TACC, and as it did, all of us came out of our shells of silence. Everywhere there was backslapping and boisterous talk. We had gone from the pits of anxiety to the heights of self-confident self-congratulations. (To me it had been close to despair. Fighter pilots are control freaks. When we are not in control, we feel hopeless.) It was a wonderful moment.
Yes, we had a long way to go before the ordeal would be over. But we were off to a good start.
Report after report of mission success began to roll in. It was like putting a puzzle together; as the pieces came together, a picture began to take shape. Each target destroyed added to the picture we had been imagining.
More important, all the aircraft, save a Navy F-18, on a suppression of enemy air defense mission, returned to their bases.
It wasn’t all smooth that night: Some of our 160 tankers ran out of fuel for off-load, and thirsty fighters had to find someone else to give them jet fuel. And the base at Taif, just south of Mecca (home to the F-111 fleet, all airborne striking vital targets across Iraq), was closed due to dense fog.
I was on the point of giving out commands, and then stopped. I needed to have faith in the commanders, in the AWACS crews, and most of all in the aircrews in each fighter. They knew how to figure out what needed to be done and then do it. If I got involved that would only add to the confusion and create dependency. Sure, I’d stay on top of the situation, but I had to let others make the decisions I dearly wanted to make. I had to delegate to others, watch them wrestle with problems that my experience made easy for me, and then watch in amazement when they found solutions I never even considered.
The air-to-air engagements were especially hard to stay out of.
Think about it. You’re a pilot who loves the complex ballet of an aerial engagement. You’ve trained for thousands of hours. Every cell in your body knows how to detect the enemy, bring your aircraft and your flight’s aircraft into the fight, engage the enemy aircraft with your weapons, and herd your team safely out of the fight toward home or into another engagement.
Now you are sitting in a room where a large display shows every aircraft in the battle (except F-117s). You see the friendly fighters going about their appointed rounds, delivering bombs or searching for Iraqi interceptors. All at once new blips appear, as a pair of Iraqi fighters scramble from their airfields. A microphone on the table in front of you connects you to AWACS and then to the fighters. You know almost as much as the AWACS knows. It would be so easy to pick up that microphone and direct, “Have Eagle flight kill the two fighters that just took off from Baland”—a fighter base in Iraq near Baghdad. All I had to do was say it, and it would be done. Even though it’s a no-brainer for the AWACS controller and the F-15 flight leader to handle it, yet I feel good. I even feel important. And we win.
But no. I’m not going to do it the Soviet way, which is the Iraqi way, with the general sitting in a bunker somewhere and telling the pilot where to fly and when to shoot.
The microphone stayed on the table. And Aim 7 missiles, illuminated by F-15 radar, homed in on the Iraqi fighters and blew them out of the sky. Pennzoil 63 and Citgo 65, Captains Kelk and Grater from the 33d Fighter Wing’s 58th Squadron, got kills on the opening night of the war, shooting down a MiG-29 and a Mirage F-1. As the Iraqi blips faded from the screen, the AWACS control team on my left called out, “Splash two,” to a cheering crowd.
? The plan unfolding that first night had worked, and all of us were uplifted. In retrospect, I think all the folks at home were also uplifted in those early days, as the reports of success vastly outnumbered the painful reports of casualties or mission failures. After the war, people who do not understand or take time to study this part of the battle, thought it was easy, that we easily seized control over Iraq. I will admit our people made it look easy, but it wasn’t, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Meanwhile, my immediate concern now was to keep our folks from losing their intensity.
At the 0730 shift change, even as I congratulated those who were going off duty and brought the oncoming day shift up to speed, I admonished both shifts not to let up. We had a long, hard battle ahead, and they needed to remain grimly determined. “Our job now is to worry,” I told them. “Our job now is to work longer and harder than ever, to be disciplined, be hard-nosed. Do not let the Iraqis up off the floor. Kick the shit out of them.” Then I tried to put a smile on their faces with the inane blessing, “Have a good day.”
And it was.
? During the first twenty-four hours, we flew 2,775 sorties. We hit thirty-seven targets in the Baghdad area, of which most (about fifteen) were designed to sever communications used by the Iraqi military. The rest hit targets such as the electrical grid and the national headquarters of intelligence, the military, the secret police, and other leadership targets. We had about 200 sorties against airfields, 175 against Scud targets, 750 interdiction sorties against the Iraqi Army and its supplies, 436 CAP or defensive counter-air sorties, 652 offensive counter-air (these included the Wild Weasels and airfield attacks), and 432 tanker sorties. (The USMC called their AV-8 sorties close air support, but by definition that was impossible, since CAS takes place within the FSCL, and their sorties flew beyond the FSCL, which was the Saudi border.)
Our biggest day was February 23, when we flew 3,254 sorties, one-third of which (995) were interdiction in the KTO. Overall, we flew 44,000 sorties against the Iraqi Army, 24,000 sorties to get and maintain control of the air and protect our forces from Iraqi air attack, 16,000 refueling sorties, and 5,000 electronics warfare and command-and-control sorties.
The opening moments of the war demonstrated that we were able to get to our targets and destroy them and for the most part return safely. We had some air-to-air kills, and probably no losses to enemy fighters on our side. That boded well. Though I expected good results over time, I really didn’t expect such good results so soon. Even if we had lost two or three aircraft, I would have marked the opening night as a success.
Still, I knew we were in for a long haul. We had trained for a fifteen-round fight, and I figured it would go the full fifteen — or, as I had told Secretary Cheney, six weeks. So I didn’t read too much into our early
