Pilots Relive 1st Combat: ‘Most Scary Thing. . .’

They lifted off on a moonless night on runways etched in the Arabian desert from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, bound for a rendezvous in Iraq that would mark the beginning of war.

The aerial armada that sped toward Baghdad just after midnight Wednesday played out a deadly ballet choreographed to tip the combat balance in favor of allied forces in the gulf even before the rolling of the first tank--and marked a new chapter in the most timeless saga of warfare: a man, a machine and a faceless enemy.

The stories of the pilots who flew more than 1,000 sorties that night and the next day, showering Iraqi military targets in a deadly firestorm, provide the only first-hand accounts so far of the showdown between Iraqi troops in Kuwait and a 28-nation international alliance that overnight became the Persian Gulf War.

“It’s an exciting one to have under my belt,” said U.S. Air Force Capt. Genter Drummond of the First Tactical Fighter Wing. “The same adrenaline that a young hunter has on his first hunt . . . a little apprehension, a little fear, a lot of excitement.”

F-15 pilot Capt. Steve Tate described his dramatic encounter with an Iraqi F-1 Mirage, one that ended with the Mirage catapulting to the ground in pieces, probably the first air kill of the war.

Tate said he zeroed in on the aircraft with his Sparrow air-to-air missile when the opposing aircraft locked in on the tail of an another American F-15.

“My number three (the other F-15) had just turned south, and I was headed northeast on a different pattern,” he said. “I don’t know if the bogey was chasing him, but I locked him up and fired a missile.”

Almost instantly, he said, he knew he’d scored a hit.

“When the airplane blew up, the whole sky lit up,” he said. “It continued to burn all the way to the ground, and then just blew up into a thousand pieces.”

As he turned home, Tate could see in the distance the outline of Baghdad, “like a huge blanket of Christmas lights. . . . The entire city was just sparkling at us.”

British Flight Lt. Ian Long recalled his feelings: “It was the most scary thing I’ve ever done--absolutely terrifying. There’s no other thing like it. You’re frightened of failure, you’re frightened of dying. It’s everything. You’re flying as low as you dare, high enough to get the weapons off, but you push it as low as you can over the target just to get away as fast as you can.”

The U.S., Saudi, British and French pilots who deployed in the silent hours of the night described a countryside below them that suddenly erupted into a fantastic flash of light as bombs and missiles exploded below and tracers lit up the night sky.

“Baghdad just looked like a Fourth of July party--all kinds of fireworks going off,” said one American flyer.

“There was sort of an undercast, so the light that came up was magnified . . . ,” said U.S. Air Force Capt. John Doucette. “You could see the AAA (antiaircraft artillery) come up, and see the bomb burst under the undercast, and it kind of rippled underneath. To see those two actions going on at the same time, you knew that one was aimed at you, and you knew the other was aimed at them, and yet it was all the same kind of light rippling through the sky.”

Saudi and Kuwaiti pilots streaked off to provide air cover for Iraqi-bound U.S. and British planes and deliver their own weapons to selected targets in Iraq and Kuwait.

It marked one of the first times in modern history that Arabs have gone to war against Arabs.

“We know we are fighting for something we believe in,” explained Saudi Lt. Mohammed Ahmari Dhafer. “We are not occupying other countries, we are obeying the orders for peace, and that’s it.”

Prince Abdullah ibn Khalid Saud, a Saudi Tornado pilot, was up flying a routine combat patrol mission when he received a special radio code ordering him to land.

“As a matter of fact, we didn’t know that it was the code for war until we landed. And then we were told to go up again.”

At air bases throughout the Persian Gulf, a cloak of secrecy had descended Wednesday evening to prevent any word of the impending attack from leaking out. Base telephone systems were shut down to outgoing calls. Pilots were told of the missions in the afternoon, their mechanics not until much later. But something was clearly in the wind.

Squadron commanders ordered troops to begin taking anti-nerve gas pills every eight hours, a sure sign that someone was worrying about Iraqi chemical missiles. Planes began fueling up and taxiing out onto ramps.

“It was very, very close hold,” said Air Force Col. John McBroom, one of the highest-ranking officers to fly the mission into Iraq and Kuwait. “In this entire wing, only the pilots and six other people knew up until four hours before we went. So there was no word whatsoever.”

Col. George Walton, hand-picked by his commander to lead the 35th Tactical Fighter Wing’s F-4G Wild Weasels into combat, emptied his pockets of personal belongings. If he was captured, they would find no more than his dog tags.

“I’ve been saying prayers since we got here,” Walton said Wednesday night as he finally climbed the ladder into his cockpit.

As the Weasels began taxiing out for takeoff, dozens of ground crew members lined up on the flight-line to cheer them on, led by the wing commander, Col. Merrill Karp.

“Hey, Bud-man. Hit ‘em hard!” Karp shouted as one of the sleek aircraft pushed forward out of its spot-lit parking space. The electronic warfare officer leaned down and raised his fist into the air, thumbs up.

Suddenly, jets began streaking down the runway, the orange-blue flame of their afterburners trailing behind them into the chilly night sky.

As plane after plane screamed over the Saudi desert toward Baghdad, ground forces camped out below urged them on silently. It was more than brotherly affection. The lives of the Marines and Army soldiers preparing to storm into Kuwait depends on how successfully the air assault wipes out Iraqi missile launchers and helps dig out tanks and troops entrenched in defensive positions along the border.

“Go, Air Force!” yelled Marines from Task Force Ripper, the unit that will spearhead operations in Kuwait, as the jet aircraft roared in the night sky overhead. “Good luck, fly boys,” murmured one.

An astounding stream of aircraft poured over Kuwait and Iraq: Air Force F-15s, F-16s, and F-4Gs fighters, A-10 tank killers, F-111s and F-117 Stealth fighters, Navy AV-8s, F/A-18s, A-7 and A-6s, EA-6-B electronic jamming aircraft, four kinds of aerial refuelers, French Jaguars and British Tornado jets, Army Apache attack helicopters--and the dreaded “Rolling Thunder” B-52 bombers.

Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles began returning fire, scoring at least three hits, according to Pentagon officials.

But most pilots described a delicate aerial dance in which they crept over Iraq, delivered their deadly deposits and sped away, dodging missiles along the way.

“We ran through the target boundary, and as we approached the airfield boundary, we saw their weapons go off just to our left-hand side, and that was quite an amazing sight,” said the British lieutenant, Long. “We ran our weapons just down the right side of them . . . “

“We were trying to avoid tracer coming off the target, so we were trying to avoid that by going left,” interjected Flight Lt. Gerry Durkee, Long’s navigator. “All you could see on the right was just a mass of white explosions, yellow explosions.”

“As the bombs come off, you just run. Run like hell,” said Long.

Then there was the refueling operation on the flight back, a nerve-racking rendezvous with a giant refueler in a bank of clouds so turbulent that both planes were bouncing through the sky and could barely make contact.

At 5:15, the first of the Wild Weasels began touching down and taxiing to a halt.

“It’s good. It’s late. I’m tired,” said Walton as he climbed down out of the cockpit. His oxygen mask had traced deep furrows into his face, and his voice sounded fatigued.

As sunrise began to break through the clouds around the air base, Walton and his fellow pilots filed in for debriefings while the second wave of flyers climbed into the pale light--F/A-18 fighter-attack jets leaving for a fresh assault.

This story was compiled in part from Pentagon combat pool dispatches.