‘Friendly Fire’ Put in Docket

The two pilots were alone in the dark battling fatigue, battling fear, scouting an enemy that seemed to mass and melt away in the shadows of the hostile land beneath.

Wedged into the cockpits of their F-16s, they raced through a moonless midnight, a routine overnight patrol southwest of Kandahar. They swallowed “Go Pills,” stimulants prescribed by the Air Force to keep them alert. On they flew, on and on, for hours, on and on, alone.

Then, from below: A flash.

The arc of tracer fire. Balls of flame that looked to be coming right at them.

Maj. Harry Schmidt called mission controllers cruising the region in a radar plane to report surface-to-air fire. He asked permission to strafe the ground with his cannon. “Stand by,” the controller told him. “Hold fire.”

Flash. Flash. Schmidt reduced speed and swept lower. He squinted through his night-vision goggles.

“I’ve got some men on a road and it looks like a piece of artillery firing at us,” he reported, according to transcripts released by an inquiry board. “I am rolling in, in self-defense.”

He readied his 500-pound laser-guided bomb. “Bombs away,” he announced, and dropped it, right on target. At that very moment, a ground commander radioed the radar plane: “Kandahar has friendlies.... Get [the F-16s] out of there.”

As he pulled up and soared away, Schmidt radioed the pilot in the other fighter jet: “I hope that was the right thing to do.”

The bomb Schmidt dropped killed four Canadian soldiers and wounded eight as they engaged in live-fire training on Afghanistan’s Tarnak Farms range on April 18. A military inquiry has recommended charging Schmidt with involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault and dereliction of duty. If convicted, he could face up to 64 years in prison.

The pilot in the companion F-16, Maj. William Umbach, has been accused of the same criminal offenses.

Though he did not drop the bomb, Umbach was serving as flight commander, in charge of the mission. He too could face 64 years.

It is the first time the U.S. military has recommended criminal charges for wartime “friendly fire.” In taking that step, authorities said the pilots acted recklessly and violated rules governing use of force in Operation Enduring Freedom. Critics, however, have suggested the Air Force caved to political and diplomatic pressure from incensed Canadians.

The decision to prosecute has roiled the pilots’ hometowns of Sherman and Petersburg--small rural communities in central Illinois decked out in American flags. In more than two dozen interviews there last week, the outrage was unanimous.

“They should leave those pilots alone,” said Angela Marvel, 36, indignant as she shopped for children’s clothes. “It was an accident. Accidents happen all the time.”

“They’re over there flying for our country. They’re fighting our war.... And now, they’re the fall guys,” said John Russo, 71, commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in nearby Springfield.

“When you’re traveling 6 miles per minute in a fighter and you look down and see firing, you don’t have a lot of time to make the right decision,” said state Rep. Raymond Poe, a Republican. “Everyone around here feels, if we were up there, we probably would have done the same thing.”

Schmidt and Umbach served with the Illinois Air National Guard’s 183rd Fighter Wing, based in Springfield.

Schmidt, 37, a celebrated Top Gun pilot, was a full-time guardsman, the pride of his squadron. In fact, the Springfield fighter wing had courted him for months, eager to land a pilot described by both his peers and his superiors as “well above average.”

A former instructor at the Navy Fighter Weapons School, he had more than 3,200 hours of military flying time.

Umbach, 43, a commercial airline pilot, was a traditional part-time guardsman, training on weekends. Logging 3,000 hours of military flying time over two decades, he had earned a rating as one of the Air Force’s most experienced pilots. Shaken by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he volunteered for deployment overseas and had been flying sorties nearly every other day for a month before the bombing.

Holding court over a 7-Up at the Springfield VFW, Army veteran Jerry Helfrich called the pilots’ prosecution “a travesty.”

Through thick cigarette smoke, his buddies grunted assent. After all, they pointed out, friendly fire has torn up battlefields in every major conflict--and it has always been considered a tragedy, not a crime.

Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was fatally wounded by one of his own men during the Civil War. U.S. bombers in World War II accidentally killed the American general in charge of Army ground forces--and 110 of his soldiers--as they prepared for the D-Day invasion.

In the Persian Gulf War a decade ago, 35 of 146 Americans who died--nearly 25%--were killed by friendly fire. During the campaign in Afghanistan, U.S. airstrikes mistakenly have killed more than 1,000 civilians, including dozens at a July wedding in a remote village. And four months before the Canadian deaths at Tarnak Farms, a B-52 dropped a bomb directly on U.S. forces near Kandahar, killing three Green Berets and at least two dozen Afghan allies.

“War is ugly. War is nasty. War is cruel. These things happen,” said Russo, an Army veteran who said he was strafed accidentally by the U.S. Marines during the Korean War.

He has started a legal defense fund for the pilots. Illinois Gov. George Ryan, also a veteran, has urged folks to contribute.

“If Maj. Schmidt felt he was in imminent danger, then that’s what he thought,” Russo said. “I’m not going to pass judgment on him. And no one else should either.”

After exhaustive investigations, American and Canadian panels determined that multiple errors contributed to the tragedy, from a breakdown in flight discipline to poor mission planning to “peer pressure” on Schmidt to “build credibility for [his] squadron” and prove his skill in combat after weeks of flying uneventful sorties over Iraq and Afghanistan.

The coalition Board of Inquiry, the joint U.S.-Canadian panel that backed criminal charges against the pilots, found that Schmidt “misperceived the caliber, trajectory and distance traveled of the munitions”--which were not, in fact, aimed skyward at the F-16, but were rather fired along the ground in a drill that posed no threat to the planes.

When Schmidt first spotted the flares, the proper course of action would have been to accelerate, climb and leave the area, the board concluded. Instead, Schmidt slowed down, descended to well within range of any surface-to-air projectiles, and circled around his perceived enemy.

That was a direct violation of standing rules of engagement, which stated that “aircraft should NOT deliberately descend into [the range of anti-aircraft artillery] to engage and destroy.”

Rather than waiting for controllers to check whether friendly forces were in the area--a process that involved querying commanders on the ground--Schmidt invoked self-defense almost immediately. Less than two minutes elapsed between his first report of anti-aircraft fire and his “bombs away” call.

Schmidt later told his superiors he felt an imminent threat; he believed the unidentified figures on the ground were targeting Umbach’s plane. Yet the board found no evidence that he had alerted Umbach to the presumed danger. Umbach himself apparently did not think he was in peril. He took no evasive action and did not request permission to use his weapons.

In fact, Canadian transcripts show that minutes after the bomb drop, Umbach radioed controllers in the distant radar plane with a question they could not possibly answer: “Can you confirm that they were shooting at us?”

Two minutes later, Schmidt reassured him: “They were definitely shooting at you.”

“It sure seemed that they were tracking [the planes] around,” Umbach replied.

Schmidt then tried to explain what he had seen through his night-vision goggles that provoked such a swift and lethal response. “I had a group of guys on a road around a gun,” he said, “and it did not look organized like it would be [if it were] our guys.”

The joint U.S.-Canadian inquiry concluded that even if those “guys on a road” had been the enemy, dropping a 500-pound bomb would have been an inappropriate response for such a small target.

The board faulted Umbach, a veteran with 20 years of military experience, for failing to halt or delay the bombing.

After the first sighting of flashes from the ground, he did radio a warning to Schmidt: “Let’s just make sure that it’s not friendlies.” But he did not query mission controllers about allied forces in the area, did not direct Schmidt to withdraw to a safe altitude and did not even confirm that he and Schmidt were looking at the same target.

As it turned out, they weren’t. Discussing the location of the presumed enemy on the radio moments after the bombing, Umbach said: “It seems like it was right on a bridge. That’s kind of where I was at.”

“Yeah, not quite,” Schmidt replied. And then, after a pause: “I hope that was the right thing to do.”

“Me too,” Umbach answered.

The inquiry board concluded “by clear and convincing evidence,” that it was not right, that the pilots “acted with reckless disregard for the foreseeable consequences of [their] actions.” Air Force brass have not elaborated, letting the lengthy report speak for itself.

The officers have not responded publicly since the charges were filed against them Sept. 13. Their attorneys, however, maintain that the men honestly--and reasonably--believed they were under attack.

The pilots “were required to make split-second, life-or-death decisions without benefit of detached and calm reflection,” said Schmidt’s attorney, Charles Gittins.

Without disputing the facts laid out in the board’s report, the lawyers insist that the pilots acted appropriately in self-defense. And they argue that personnel involved in planning, coordinating and controlling the mission bear significant responsibility for what happened.

Indeed, the joint U.S.-Canadian board found that multiple mistakes were made outside the F-16 cockpits.

The fighter squadron Schmidt and Umbach were assigned to in Afghanistan did not have a consistent policy for briefing pilots on what they might encounter. Pilots did not get up-to-date maps showing airspace restrictions or military activity on the ground and had “insufficient information to execute their assigned mission,” the board found.

In a fatal breakdown of communication, controllers in the radar plane apparently did not know that the Canadians would be training near Kandahar that evening, even though the Canadians had filed appropriate information a week in advance. The pilots also had no information about the nighttime exercise.

And Col. David Nichols, the pilots’ commander, “bred a climate of mistrust” within his squadron that led his men to doubt the mission controllers assigned to approve their use of force, the board found.

Though the U.S. military inquiry concluded that there were failures at many levels before and during the disastrous mission, only the pilots were recommended for court-martial. The panel stipulated non-judicial punishment for Nichols; his case is pending.

Meanwhile, Schmidt and Umbach have been ordered to report to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for an Article 32 hearing, similar to a civilian grand jury proceeding. At the hearing, which could open as early as next month, military authorities will present the case against the officers; their lawyers will offer their defense.

Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, will then decide whether there is enough evidence to court-martial the pilots on the most serious charges. He could also dismiss the case altogether or press ahead with lesser charges that would bring short jail sentences, fines or bad-conduct discharges for the pilots.

*

Charges of Scapegoating

In central Illinois, in conversation after conversation, one word ricochets with bitter force:

Scapegoat.

“[These] are two of the finest pilots and Americans I’ve come across in my 12-plus years of service,” said Staff Sgt. William Kaltenbach, an F-16 crew chief who serves with Schmidt and Umbach.

“It is unfortunate,” he said, that the tragedy has largely been blamed on the pilots alone “when a mission is planned, coordinated and executed by so many more.”

Among civilians and soldiers alike, there is widespread grumbling that the pilots were singled out to appease the Canadian government. There are angry whispers that the Pentagon is going after the little guys to deflect attention from a major lapse in command-and-control.

The pilots “appear to be at risk of being treated as diplomatic pawns and scapegoats,” Springfield’s State Journal-Register said in an editorial last week. “We are frankly flabbergasted by the severity of the military’s response.... This is not the My Lai massacre--this is a horrible mistake. Could it have been prevented? Certainly. But does the sole responsibility rest with these pilots? Absolutely not.”

Schmidt’s attorney has suggested that the criminal charges may be motivated by “an inappropriate political agenda.” Even some of the victims’ relatives in Canada have expressed concern that the pilots are being treated too harshly.

“I’m not interested in revenge,” the father of one of the slain soldiers told a Canadian newspaper.

“I don’t want [Schmidt] to go to prison,” said the grandmother of another victim.

One expert in international law predicts that Schmidt and Umbach will not face the maximum penalty and may well avoid a court-martial altogether. A trial “could give the Pentagon a black eye” because it would air testimony about other failures in Operation Enduring Freedom, said Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois.

Plus, Boyle said, “if it got to a formal court-martial with a jury of their peers, my guess is they would stand a good chance of acquittal.”

Even if the pilots avoid prison, the criminal accusations have derailed their careers, burdened them with legal bills--and set a precedent that deeply troubles many military personnel.

“We must be allowed the freedom to make split-second decisions, for lives depend on it,” said firefighter Kevin Schott, who serves with the accused pilots in the 183rd Fighter Wing.

“We always hope and pray that the decisions we make are the right ones,” Schott said. “[But] we will never eliminate mistakes. I will stand proud and tall to salute Maj. Umbach and Maj. Schmidt.”