Searching for Answers in a Tragedy

From 15,000 feet, the U.S. Air Force pilot looked down from his F-16 cockpit on the struggling columns of refugees and the flaming desolation that blotted the Kosovo landscape--the very definition of “ethnic cleansing.”

At the end of a string of burning villages and houses, the pilot said later, he spotted what he thought were three military trucks. “I’m convinced now that’s the [Yugoslav army and police] forces working their way down . . . and they’re preparing to set this next house on fire.”

He verified his target with infrared sensors. He made repeated passes over it. Then he let loose a 1,000-pound laser-guided bomb.

He hit a civilian vehicle, NATO admitted Thursday, a day after the attack.

The U.S. fighter pilot also set off the most serious crisis of confidence in NATO’s three-week air war to stop Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s apparent campaign to drive all 1.8 million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

NATO scrambled Thursday to explain what had gone wrong--providing reporters with a tape of the unidentified pilot’s debriefing was part of that effort--but its account raised as many questions as it answered.

Exactly where did the attack occur? How did NATO’s account of the accidental bombing of a single vehicle on a dirt road square with the video shown on Yugoslav television of many bodies and wrecked tractors and trucks on a long stretch of paved road? NATO officials shrugged and promised more answers today.

“What the Serbs are showing is not what we are saying,” said Col. Konrad Freytag, a NATO military spokesman.

Around 1 p.m. Wednesday, the pilot told his debriefers, he lingered over the town of Djakovica, where he spotted what he thought was a convoy of ethnic Albanians driven from their homes by the Serbs, and clogging the road to the west of the town.

“I moved north from there to look and see what the reason was for the flood of refugees down to the town of Djakovica,” the pilot remembered. “And what I found was a series of villages set on fire, entire villages set on fire.”

North of Djakovica, the pilot said, he saw a torched village that looked as if it was about to burn out. Farther south, he found a village being destroyed by a “fresher fire.”

Following a road that runs southeast into Djakovica, the pilot said he saw no villages, only individual homes--”and every house on that road was set ablaze.”

To the east of the town, 60 vehicles were stacked up, perhaps filled with Albanians fleeing or expelled from their homes.

Backtracking north, the pilot said, he found a house that had just been set on fire, “and I spot a three-vehicle convoy moving southeast about a click [kilometer] from the freshest burning house.”

“I talk my wingman’s eyes onto the convoy and explain to him what I’m seeing there,” the pilot said. Both aviators looked, and “we see three uniformly shaped dark green vehicles, look like deuce and a half [2 1/2-ton] troop-carrying vehicles. They come to a stop at the next house down the road.

“And I’m convinced now the [army and police] forces [are] working their way down toward Djakovica and the refugees, and they’re preparing to set this next house on fire.”

With his infrared sensors, the pilot said, he made several passes over the vehicles to be sure they were military. He made two passes, he said, to further verify “both with my eyeballs and my targeting pod, IR [infrared].”

“And at this point, this is about 25 minutes into building the whole picture of the destruction . . . I make a decision at that point that these are the people responsible for burning down the villages that I’ve seen so far.”

Targeting the lead vehicle in the trio, the F-16 pilot fired the 1,000-pound bomb, guided to its target by a laser beam fired from the plane. By then, his wing-mate was getting low on fuel, and so the two planes decided to return to their base.

Before leaving the area, the pilot radioed the whereabouts of the trucks to headquarters and to the forward air controller coming in to replace him.

The new pilot found three large trucks in the middle of a housing compound next to the convoy that had just been attacked. “And he proceeds to execute a buddy-laze attack on those vehicles,” the F-16 pilot said, using fighter pilot jargon to describe a projectile fired by one plane and guided to its target by a laser beamed by another.

NATO officials in Brussels failed to tie up all the loose ends left after Thursday’s explanation. They admitted being confused themselves, and said they were having a hard time getting information from NATO military high command in Mons, Belgium.

“The only thing the military is owning up to is hitting one truck, and I don’t know if that would produce 75 dead, frankly,” a senior NATO official said, referring to Yugoslav media reports of great carnage.

NATO military officials, although expressing great regret for the misdirected bomb, said there would be no change in their tactics in Kosovo. “This action was carried out by a professional air crew, according to the rules,” said Gen. Giuseppe Marani, NATO’s chief military spokesman. “These sorts of things will happen.”

Despite the mistake, and an earlier attack on a bridge that killed 14 passengers on a train crossing the span at the time, NATO officials insist that their campaign in Kosovo has been as sparing of civilian casualties as possible.

“Our Operation Allied Force was launched to save civilians’ lives, not to expend them,” said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea. He defended the actions and instincts of the F-16 pilot.

“He dropped his bomb in good faith, as you would expect a well-trained pilot from a democratic NATO country to do,” Shea said.