For Every Airstrike, There’s Plenty of Groundwork

When Lt. Christopher “2-Cents” Cochran blew up two Iraqi storage depots Wednesday, he was striking at the enemy in the names of those who built the bombs, fueled the plane, powered the catapult that launched him and operated the arresting cable that snagged him back aboard.

Cochran’s flight was the 12,220th sortie launched from the Lincoln since it left its home port of Everett, Wash., more than eight months ago to put firepower behind the Iraq disarmament demands laid down by the White House.

Each of those flights represented the culmination of hundreds of man-hours. From the air tasking order issued the night before by war planners at a base in Saudi Arabia to the debriefing with intelligence officers after landing, each airstrike is an intricate compilation of small skills, big-picture strategy, sweat, elbow grease and endurance. Each strike chipping away at Iraq’s eroding armor is the synthesized sacrifices of unseen warriors from the Pentagon down to the pump room.

“It was a great day for flying,” said Cochran, an opinionated -- hence his call sign -- pilot who missed his first wedding anniversary Aug. 4.

Getting his flight scheduled and the paperwork rolling required the work of Cynthia Saenz, a petty officer third class whose 3-year-old son has gone from incomprehensible babbling to inquisitive chattering during her absence.

One of more than 200 members of Cochran’s “Fist of the Fleet” squadron that flies F/A-18C Hornets, Saenz makes sure all the pilots get enough nighttime flights to maintain their qualifications.

Prepping the plane involves a dozen “maintainers” in their color-coded shirts: green for mechanics, brown for plane captains, purple for refuelers, blue for those who do towing and parking, and yellow for traffic controllers.

“You have to make sure everything’s good -- the canopy, the fasteners, the switches and the wires,” said Fernando Ortega, a New Yorker who’d rather be playing video games with his brothers than combing over his umpteen-hundredth plane.

Once the fuel is in and the electronics checked and the hatches shut, the red-shirted weapons technicians attach the laser- and satellite-guided missiles to the wings’ undersides. Just before the pilot arrives, about 40 minutes before takeoff, the red shirts return to arm the weapons.

“We take out the pins and make sure the fins are tight, then we prep the Gatling gun so the pilot can shoot from the cockpit if he needs to,” said Evan Schell, an aviation ordnance airman from Seattle. He has missed several family birthdays and holidays because of the extended deployment.

Wednesday, Cochran suited up in the riggers’ shop, checked over the Hornet with Ortega, then climbed in the cockpit and taxied to the No. 1 catapult for the noon launch.

On the flight deck, Lt. Cmdr. Jim Morgan, the “shooter,” led the flier through the final steps before the Hornet got airborne, guiding the plane over the catapult shuttle and signaling for full engine power before takeoff. Morgan, who recently earned an MBA, says the war zone overtime means he’s missing his family, his drums and about $120,000 a year in income he would be earning now if he were home and out of the Navy. Cochran took off for the base target site, stopping for in-flight refueling before flying off to drop his two GBU-12 laser-guided bombs on the storage depots just a few miles northeast of Baghdad. Three hours after being hurtled from the carrier, he was back and preparing for landing. Below the Lincoln’s 4 1/2-acre flight deck, Petty Officer 3rd Class Semaj Deans was checking the hydraulic spoolers that feed out the arresting cables to be caught by the planes’ lowered tail hooks.

“We catch about every 30 seconds, but it really only takes 15 or 20 seconds for the wires to snap back,” the 20-year-old Mississippi native said after Cochran snagged the No. 3 wire -- the preferred point of capture among four cables. During Deans’ protracted absence from home in Everett, he missed the birth of his son, Devejae, his first child, whom he had expected to see delivered nearly two months after the ship’s original return date of Jan. 20.

As Cochran approached the flight deck, the squadron’s landing signals officer, Lt. David Killian, stood on a narrow portside platform at the stern of the carrier grading the touchdown on its form and adherence to safety standards. Killian, who laments having missed the winter holidays with his Virginia family and is looking forward to the Fourth of July, gave his fellow pilot the aviator’s equivalent of an “A” on the landing.

Green shirts and brown shirts checked the engines and attached chocks and chains. Cochran headed in for his series of debriefings -- in reverse order of the target, intelligence and weather discussions he went through before takeoff.

Two hours later, he was starting the cycle all over, with the nightshift maintainers drifting into their shops, gathering their tools and pondering what was happening at home in their absence.