Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [48]
Fuj was steady. I felt I was a bit more nervous. I kept thinking, Well, this is the real deal.
We flew north toward our target, an airplane maintenance hangar at the Shaibah military airfield, southwest of Basra. I wasn’t thinking about how many Iraqi soldiers or civilians might have been in that hangar late that evening. I wasn’t thinking of the politics of the war. I’d just spent five years training for one purpose: to drop bombs on a target when my country asked. Now I was going to try my best to do just that.
As we got to within fifteen miles of the target, I looked over my left shoulder and saw a white dot snaking through the sky and coming directly at us. It was a Russian surface-to-air missile fired by Iraqi forces.
Earlier, I had turned down the volume on our plane’s antimissile countermeasure system because another U.S. plane had been tracking us with its radar, and the resulting noise had been a distraction. I had forgotten to turn the volume back up, so I never heard the warning about the missile.
But now the thing had my attention. “Fuj,” I said, “there’s a missile coming at us.”
“Roger,” he replied. “Tracking the target.”
The missile got closer. “Fuj, this isn’t good,” I said. Again he told me, “Tracking the target.”
“Fuj, I’m going to have to do a last-ditch maneuver to beat this thing!”
His job was to run the weapons systems and track the target. So that’s what he did. “Roger, tracking the . . .”
OK, I heard him!
I’m sure my heart rate shot up. In addition to high explosives, this kind of missile had an expanding rod, which is a circular wire-cutting device designed to slice through an airplane and its crew.
We hadn’t practiced for this. You can practice dropping bombs, flying low in formation, dealing with bad weather in mountains. But there’s no good way to prepare for a real surface-to-air missile.
We were at about 15,000 feet, and I rolled inverted, added full power, and planted the stick in my lap, trying to confuse the missile into avoiding us. It worked. The missile missed us and exploded above our aircraft. I saw the flash as it detonated, but fortunately, as I scanned the engine instruments, I could see that it hadn’t done any damage.
I was relieved, of course, but now we had a job to do. We had to drop those bombs. Fuj remained focused, never taking his head out of the radar boot.
Just then, damn it, I spotted another missile. Having survived a near miss with a Russian SA-6 surface-to-air missile, there could be no worse feeling than to see a second one coming your way.
I did the same last-ditch maneuver that worked earlier, and the missile missed us. I was pleased. Having learned from my encounter with the first missile, I avoided the second one more easily. It was on-the-job training. As Fuj and I encountered this fusillade, another A-6 in our strike group jettisoned his bombs and high-tailed it home. He’d seen the missiles guiding on and detonating near us, and he wanted no part of it.
We were able to get the nose of the plane climbing again, so we could get back to the right altitude to roll into our 30-degree dive and drop our bombs. If Fuj hadn’t been so focused through those two missile attacks, we’d never have been able to hit the target.
When we came through the clouds, with our target ahead of us, it was a sobering sight. It looked as if all of Iraq was on fire, and we were about to add to the chaos. At 6,000 feet, I pulled the trigger, directing the computer to release the bombs. The airplane hangar was destroyed.
Now we had to get back safely to the USS Midway out in the Gulf. Our planned egress route was the same as the route we took to the target, but there was no way I was going to fly back through