Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

Arabia. At 1109 Saudi time, Ratchet-75 should have passed Ar’ar at 21,000 feet, four minutes behind the leader, Ratchet-73, and two minutes behind number two, Ratchet-74. At 1128, Ratchet-75 should have been ten minutes south of his jamming orbit, which was located due west of Baghdad halfway to the Jordanian border. He never got there. At 1129, two F-15Es heading south over southern Iraq at 31,000 feet saw an aircraft below them ejecting eight to ten flares. The night sky was lit up by the flares and the blaze of afterburners, as the aircraft rolled out of a hard left turn and began a series of “S-turns” as it descended sharply. Twenty seconds later, the F-15s saw the aircraft eject three more flares, soon followed by a huge fireball as the aircraft hit the ground. The lead F-15E, Pontiac-47, began an orbit over the crash site, while his wingman, Pontiac-48, went to the tanker track to refuel. A little over three hours later, a Special Operations helicopter, Sierra-43, arrived on scene and the rescue team examined the wreckage. They confirmed the loss of the EF-111, its pilot, and the WSO.

Though we will never know what happened, it was reasonable to conclude that the crew of the EF-111, like other -111 crews, had radar warning signals or visual sightings that indicated an Iraqi interceptor approaching for a kill. Once again, the AWACS picture was clean of enemy aircraft, and once again, F-15 aircraft were in the immediate vicinity.

It seemed that Baghdad Billy had finally achieved a shoot-down.

Everyone in the TACC was upset; and — not surprisingly — there was blaming and finger-pointing.

In the hall the next morning, Buster Glosson lit into Chris Christon, whose intelligence shop had passed unedited reports of the phantom interceptor to all the aircrews, thereby giving the story credibility. Chris fought back. As he saw it, his job was to get the word out. If the EF-111 aircrews had observed something, he reported it to the other units. And it was then the job of the local commanders to make sure the aircrews didn’t do anything extreme, like a low-altitude jink-out at night.

Both Buster and Chris were right. It was Chris’s job to get the word out. And it was Buster’s job as the fighter division commander to worry about the lives of his aircrews.

But the real blame was mine. I should have been more forceful about dispelling the Baghdad Billy myth right from the start. I should have seen that a crew would get so engrossed with defeating the apparently real threat that they succumbed to the ever-present killer, the ground. My failure meant two needless deaths and bitter tears for the families of the crew of Ratchet-75.

The message went out to knock off defensive reactions to Baghdad Billy.

The incident wasn’t a total loss. It inspired a song:

BALLAD OF THE F-111 JOCK BY MAJ. ROGER KRAPF

I’m an F-111 Jock, and I’m here to tell
of Baghdad Billy and his jet from hell.

We were well protected with Eagles in tight
but that didn’t stop the man with the light.

RJ and AWACS, they didn’t see,
as BAGHDAD BILLY snuck up on me.

Then I found a spotlight shining at my six
and my Whoozoo said, “HOOLLYY SHEEIT.”

I popped some chaff and I popped a flare
but the Iraqi bandit, he didn’t care.

I had tracers on my left, and tracers on my right,
with a load of bombs, I had to run from the fight.

I rolled my VARK over and took her down
into the darkness and finally lost the clown.

When I landed back at Taif and gave this rap,
CENTAF said I was full of crap.

I’m here to tell you the God’s own truth.
That Iraqi bandit, he ain’t no spoof.

You don’t have to worry, there is no way
you’ll see Baghdad Billy if you fly in the day.

But listen to me, son, for I am right.
Watch out for BILLY if you fly at night!!!

There were other — far less tragic — confusions and mix-ups.

On one occasion, an F-15 pilot from our base at Incirlik in Turkey was lined up on an Iraqi jet ready to squeeze the trigger, when an air-to-air missile flew in from the side, turned the corner behind the Iraqi, and blew the target out of the sky. Chalk up one for the 33d TFW from Tabuk. Not the least bothered, the Incirlik-based F-15 turned his attention to the Iraqi’s wingman and fired an AIM-7 radar-guided missile. It zeroed in on its target and exploded; but much to the amazement of our pilot, the Iraqi jet emerged serenely from the fireball. The intrepid American then fired a heat-seeking AIM-9, which again engulfed the Iraqi in a fireball; and again the Iraqi emerged and flew across the border into Iran. Our pilot may have been luckier than he thought, however. The Iraqi aircraft was either damaged or it ran out of fuel, and the pilot ejected shortly after escaping.

But more often the wins were clear-cut.

Not all our potential aces flew air-to-air fighters. In February, the A-10s at King Fahd bagged a couple of Iraqi helicopters while looking to bomb Iraqi tanks and artillery. Captain Swain, on the sixth of February, and Captain Sheehy, nine days later, observed Iraqi helicopters flying very close to the earth. Bad tactic, helicopters close to the ground stand out clearly to a fighter pilot. Both A-10s used their 30mm guns to dispatch their targets. Up until then, it was normal for the Warthog community to take cheap shots from their interceptor brethren in F- 15s. No more. To flag the change, sometime around the middle of February, the A-10 wing commander, Colonel Sandy Sharpe, called the F-15 wing commander at Dhahran, Colonel John McBroom, to offer his A-10s to fly top cover for the F-15s, in case they wanted to do some bombing. After all, it only made sense, now that the A-10s had two kills to the F-15 wing’s single victory. Boomer McBroom was not amused, but hundreds of A-10 pilots howled with glee.

The last kills of the war took out Iraqis flying combat sorties against their own people. In late March, an Iraqi Sukhoi jet fighter and a Swiss Platus propeller-driven PC-9 trainer, pressed into dropping bombs, were flying in