Basher Five-Two (2 page)

We dressed for our mission in a locker room of the
squadron building. First we removed the Velcro insignia patches of the winged dragon and bald eagle from our flight suits. If we were captured, we didn’t want the enemy to know the names of our units. According to a famous international treaty called the Geneva Convention, which all nations are supposed to honor, in time of war you don’t have to tell the enemy anything more than your name, date of birth, rank, and serial number. Article Five of the U.S. Military Code of Conduct contains the same rule. Both Article Five and the Geneva Convention are supposed to help prevent the abuse of anyone who is captured. Of course, we all knew that in the history of war, nations had often violated such rules, sometimes using torture to extract information.

For anyone serving in the military, particularly as a fighter pilot, the risk of being captured was always a reality, but it wasn’t something my fellow pilots and I dwelled on. In the several years that NATO had been flying sorties over Bosnia, only one pilot, a British captain in a Harrier jump jet, had been shot down. He had parachuted safely into Muslim territory, been captured without a struggle, and been returned by the Muslims to NATO forces the next day. I didn’t think there was too much to worry about. On the other hand, I knew from our intelligence, or “intel,” officer that things had been heating up. Intel officers had special information about
the enemy that could help a pilot in the sky. We had been told that NATO planes had recently destroyed one of the Bosnian Serbs’ weapons piles. In revenge, the Serbs had rounded up 350 unarmed NATO military observers throughout the country and made them hostages. The Serbs had physically tied the captured men to their other weapons depots, daring NATO planes to attack again.

In Bosnia, you could never be sure what would happen next. But you knew all the three factions in the civil war could be ruthless.

After removing my insignia patches, I squirmed into my G suit. This was a special tight-fitting brace or girdle that I wore over my flight suit. It wrapped around my stomach and my legs. The purpose of the G suit was to help me resist the forces of gravity—what pilots call G forces. On earth, normal gravity is one G. On a roller coaster, on a steep plunge, it’s possible to feel three Gs. In an F-16, the rapid acceleration and sharp turns a pilot go through can mean pressure up to nine Gs. If someone weighs 100 pounds normally, with the pressure of 9 Gs it’s as if he weighed 900 pounds. That much pressure naturally causes blood to flow from the head into the rest of the body. When that happens, a pilot can easily black out and have a fatal accident. The tight fit of the G suit, however, makes it harder for the blood to leave your head and flow into your stomach and legs. In addition, as a
pilot you are taught to strain or contract your leg and stomach muscles when going into steep turns—extra insurance against blacking out.

I dropped my Swiss Army knife into a chest pocket and put on my survival vest, which included a two-way radio. I holstered my 9-mm semiautomatic Beretta pistol under my armpit and tucked my Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receiver into another pocket. Into my G suit’s right shin pocket I shoved an evasion map and a “blood chit.” This was a note from the U.S. government, printed in eleven languages, including Serbian and Serbo-Croatian, that promised to pay money to anyone who hid me from the enemy.

I buckled my parachute harness over my vest and placed my helmet in a cloth helmet bag, along with a card that listed my mission number, takeoff time, radio call signals, and Alpha frequency for both receiving and sending radio transmissions. I would carry all that onto the plane. I also made sure I had my flashlight and earplugs and checked my life-support gear.

Just before we had entered the locker room, Wilbur had asked me to verify our search-and-rescue (SAR) plan, in case, he said, one of us had to eject. Because the likelihood of an air accident seemed so small, not all pilots bothered to review their SAR plan in detail before every sortie. It was something you ran through in three minutes. Wilbur, however, was a perfectionist. He insisted
that each of us recite the full procedure in detail, starting with the moment we had to parachute to the ground and hide from the enemy. We also reviewed the two radio frequencies for communicating. One was called Guard, the international distress channel, on which the whole world could hear you, including the enemy. The other was Alpha, one of the two SAR channels on our handheld radios, the frequency of which we changed often to give us more privacy than we had on the Guard channel. Wilbur and I agreed on a secret code if we had to radio in our GPS coordinates over Alpha, so that the good guys could find us but not the enemy. Taking the extra time to run through every detail satisfied Wilbur and left the plan fresh in our minds.

Though I had no idea of it at the time, something else happened that morning that may have helped prepare me for the ordeal ahead. An article entitled “The Will to Survive” was posted in the men’s room, which was near the ops desk. For some reason, I had never read it. This morning, however, I had a few extra minutes, and I found my eyes skimming the article. It told the stories of two similar survival crises with very different outcomes. One story was about a man traveling in the Arizona desert who, injured in an accident, got lost and went for eight days without water. By the time rescuers found him, he was so dehydrated that everyone concluded he should have been dead. But his will to survive was so incredibly
strong, he probably could have gone even longer without water.

The other story was about a civilian pilot in Alaska whose single-engine plane went down on a frozen lake bed. The man radioed for help but wasn’t sure whether anyone heard his transmission. He wasn’t far from shore, and from his footprints it appeared to rescuers that he had walked toward the shore but had never bothered to build a shelter or start a fire. Instead, he returned to the plane, picked up the gun that was in his survival kit, and killed himself. Rescue helicopters came twenty-four hours later, having heard his radio transmission. Because he had assumed the worst, because he had given up on himself, the man had thrown away his chance to survive.

For the briefest of seconds I wondered how strong my will was. But the question dissolved into more immediate concerns. The planes were ready, and it was time for our sorties.

One of the last things Wilbur and I did was chow down on a pizza, which we shared with some enlisted men. Having skipped breakfast, I was hungry and could have eaten a lot more.

Moving toward the van that would take us to our F-16s, I discovered I’d left my flight jacket back in my locker. I’d never been that forgetful before a mission, but rushing back and wrestling off my vest and other gear so that I could put on my jacket seemed unnecessary. Climate
control in the F-16 was perfect. You could turn the heat up or down with a dial. I decided I could live without my jacket for one flight.

The van driver dropped off Wilbur and me by our planes. We made separate visual inspections of our aircraft before climbing into the cockpit. The 47-foot-long, 30,000-pound (fully loaded with fuel), single-seat, single-jet-engine F-16 was a marvel of engineering. It had been designed and built by General Dynamics back in 1978 and had gone through several updates over the years. The F-16 was small and compact compared with other fighter jets, but it was very popular with air forces around the world. More than half of our own air force’s fighter planes were F-16s. Its weapons and defense systems made it superior to the Soviet MiG, one of its famous competitors for speed and power, and its long-term safety record spoke for its keen performance.

In my years of training before the Air Force, I had piloted almost a dozen types of civilian aircraft. I was rated to fly all of them, but none was more exciting or challenging than the F-16. Besides its smooth ride, it was smarter than Einstein. The F-16’s brain center was an advanced computer inside the aircraft. A separate targeting pod could be added to the underbelly of the plane that would “talk” to the computer inside. This pod relayed information through my cockpit instruments that helped me find and lock on hostile targets that were miles
away. The targeting pod also could send out a laser beam to mark ground targets, which would help me guide my bombs more accurately. In addition, the F-16 carried an electronic countermeasures pod, which could block or jam enemy radar.

Under its smooth, gunmetal gray skin, the F-16 was designed to hold as many weapons, and as much fuel, as possible without hurting the plane’s speed and ability to maneuver in the air. Under each wing was an air-to-air missile along with a 500-pound laser-guided bomb; each wingtip held another air-to-air missile. In the fuselage was a 20-mm Gatling gun, for use if an enemy plane came within close range or if I had to fly low to fire at a land target. Since our missions over Bosnia were more defensive than offensive, and because we wanted to be as light and as fuel efficient as possible, we didn’t carry the four additional 500-pound bombs an F-16 normally held. They were hardly necessary. While I wasn’t looking forward to combat, I knew I was ready for any hostile situation.

One unique feature of the F-16 was the one-piece bubble canopy that sat over the entire cockpit. Its sleek shape acted as a perfect windscreen, and it allowed a pilot clear views in almost all directions. For strength and resilience the canopy was made of a high-tech material called polycarbonate. If an unfortunate bird was to find itself on collision course with the canopy—a common problem in
the sky—the polycarbonate wouldn’t shatter dangerously the way the old cast-acrylic canopies had. Instead, it would absorb the impact of the bird by bending inward, then magically reshape itself. It may sound silly, but to make sure the polycarbonate canopies were “bird safe,” the aircraft manufacturer tested them by shooting four-pound frozen chickens out of a high-speed cannon, hitting the canopies at over 300 miles per hour! While safe from a shattering canopy, a pilot in the air still faced the danger of the momentary dent left by the flying bird. If a plane was moving at 500 miles or more, a good-sized turkey vulture could actually hit the canopy hard enough to knock out a pilot. That’s why it was necessary to maintain some distance—the size of your fist, at least—between your head and the bottom of the canopy.

The cockpit of the F-16 was not exactly designed with extra luxury room. As I climbed in and straddled my legs around the center instrument console, I placed my feet on the rudder pedals and strapped myself in. The snug cockpit fits like a glove. It also makes you feel as if you’re part of the sky. Unlike the cockpits in other fighters, the F-16’s cockpit projects out and over the front of the plane, so most of the fuselage is below and behind you. With the gorgeous views from the one-piece canopy, sometimes you’re tempted to forget you’re even in a plane.

I plugged my air hose into my G suit. When I started
making sharp turns in the sky and the G forces kicked in, the air hose would automatically turn on and fill the various pockets or bladders of my G suit—two on each leg and one at my stomach. Filled with air, the G suit was another way to help keep blood from flowing from my head into the rest of my body. After inserting the air hose, I hooked my shoulder harness clips to my parachute risers. Clipped to my hips was a canvas package that contained a survival rucksack, a deflated life raft, and a small “hit and run” secondary survival kit. This package was part of the seat pan on which I sat. If I ever had to eject from the plane and use my parachute, the seat pan, along with my entire seat, would fall away, but the canvas package would stay clipped to my hips. It contained the gear that, if the parachute landed me safely, I would need to survive.

After fastening my lap belt, I put on my helmet and oxygen mask. With a thumbs-up signal to the ground crew chief to pull away my cockpit ladder, I made a final review of my lineup card, which detailed my flight mission information.

“Fore and aft clear … fire guard posted … chocks in place?” I asked over the intercom to the crew chief. Chocks were blocks that were placed in front of the wheels so that the plane wouldn’t roll.

“Roger,” he answered. “All ready for run-up.”

I turned on two switches, one for electrical power and
the other to start a small engine that would, in a few moments, turn over the main jet engine. My left hand moved the throttle from Off to Idle. With a whine building to a roar, the main engine, a GE-100, came to life. After more ground checks, one by one I activated all of the plane’s systems.

Once I was in the air, the instruments on my center console would indicate airspeed, altitude, attitude (the plane’s reference to the horizon), and bearing. Just over my left knee, a radar screen would show me if there were any no-fly-zone intruders. Above that screen sat my threat warning system, which would let me know if my plane had been tagged by hostile radar. If that happened, I knew there was a real possibility of a missile attack. A rectangular keyboard pad was perched above the instrument console, along with buttons for my two radios. There was also a head-up display (HUD), a clear glass panel directly in front of me, that gave additional information to help with navigation and weapons targeting.

After exchanging more hand signals with the ground crew chief, I was directed to move my plane forward. I fell in line behind Wilbur. There was a last-minute stop to allow for a final systems and weapons check by the ground crew. Finally, we were cleared for takeoff and I taxied onto the runway.

No matter how many flights I’d made—and I’d flown more than 800 hours in an F-16—each takeoff was an act
of magic that never grew old. Maybe it goes back to my fascination with speed, or just a deep appreciation of the F-16. As I moved my plane to one side of Wilburs so that his jet exhaust wouldn’t blow on me, Wilbur received takeoff clearance for both of us from air traffic control. Then Wilbur gave me a signal to turn up my engine to ninety percent of full power. After I scanned my instruments for any last-second warning lights, I watched Wilbur roll down the runway at full thrust. Within seconds, an orange flame shot out the back of his plane, indicating that his afterburner had kicked in. The power of a takeoff is so incredible that, even if you’re a good distance behind and to one side of the departing jet, your plane shakes like a leaf. By the time I had blinked and straightened in my seat, Wilbur had become a small red dot against a deep cobalt blue sky.