(Translated by https://www.hiragana.jp/)
The First Shot
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20080517050321/http://www.af.mil/news/airman/0703/air.html
Airman Logo Banner Home Features Features Features Departments Departments Covers Covers Back Issues Back Issues Favorites About Airman About Airman About Airman Related Links Features picture - no caption Magellans of the Sky Snapshots from the War The First Shot Bashur or Bust Up from the Flight line The Long, Winding Road
The First Shot

by Tech Sgt. Mark Kinkade
opening photo by AFP Photo/Ramzi Haidar

As Ram 01 and Ram 02 banked toward Baghdad,
the morning sun rose outside the left side of
Maj. Mark Hoehn’s F-117 Nighthawk fighter jet. To his right, the evening moon still hovered full and bright over the Tigris River below.

Normally, such a sight would have been cause for pause, Hoehn said. But on this particular morning, he had other things on his mind. He was about to start a war.

“If it hadn’t been for the fact that we were over enemy territory and facing a severe anti-aircraft threat, it would have been a magical moment,” he said. “I was a little preoccupied.”

That magical moment came just minutes before Hoehn and Lt. Col. Dave Toomey, in a second F-117, dropped satellite guided bombs on a bunker in Dora Farms, a compound near the Tigris. They fired the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and their target was Saddam Hussein.

March 19, 2003, 12:30 a.m.
They call them “Nighthawks” for a reason. The F-117 is a slow-moving jet compared to the sleeker F-15s and F-16s that routinely patrolled Iraqi skies during Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch. Sheathed in black radar-deflecting materiel, the aircraft looks like a large fly buzzing across the desert sky when the sun is out.

But at night, the Nighthawk is an invisible knife slicing toward the enemy’s jugular. It moves almost invisibly and low to the ground, darts and cuts on a dime and delivers with a lethally accurate punch.

The Nighthawks of the Black Sheep Squadron, deployed with the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing to a base in Southwest Asia, sat quietly on the flight line. The war hadn’t started yet, and, with morning fast approaching, the squadron was shutting down operations for the day to configure aircraft for normal combat operations.

Maj. Clint Hinote, a Nighthawk pilot deployed as a mission planner on Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley’s Combined Air Forces Component staff, sat in the dining facility chatting with friends and fellow pilots. A few minutes before, he had briefed Moseley on plans for the first few days of the pending air war.

“I was pretty tired and taking a break when one of the guys from the time sensitive targeting cell came in and told me I was needed back on the [planning] floor,” Hinote said. “When I got there, I was told we needed to get two jets ready for a strike on a leadership position. The word had come from the Pentagon.”

The Pentagon had an opportunity, and President George W. Bush was facing a decision. An intelligence report said Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusai were in a bunker in a little-used residential palace in Dora Farms, a section of suburban Baghdad. A successful strike would decapitate the Iraqi military leadership and probably shorten or even pre-empt the coming war.

Ordinarily, short-notice missions are difficult for the F-117 planners. The Nighthawk is designed for special missions, and those usually take time to develop. Normal mission planning cycles can range from 18 to 20 hours from planning to putting bombs on target. Anything outside that range is unusual and difficult to accomplish.

Hinote and the Black Sheep had four hours to put bombs on target — from the minute he arrived on the planning floor. Hinote and the other planners grabbed a draft plan for short-notice taskings, called “Silver Bullet” missions, he said.

The clock was ticking.

12:45 a.m.
Moseley hung up the phone when Hinote entered his office.

“Here’s the answer I owe the president,” Moseley said to Hinote. “Can we make this strike happen, and what are the risks?”

The risks were formidable. The Nighthawks would enter Baghdad airspace without protection. The aircraft don’t have defensive capabilities, and fighter escorts would peel off before arriving over the target to avoid alerting air defense batteries.

And the air defense batteries were some of the heaviest in the world, Hinote said.

“The Iraqis basically brought their entire air defenses to cover Baghdad,” he said. “The place was bristling with missiles and anti-aircraft [batteries].”

Time was not on the Air Force’s side, either. The mission would take about four hours from launch to bombing, and sunrise was expected at just after 5 a.m. That meant the fighters would be on the outskirts of the city as the sun lightened the sky, exposing them to anti-aircraft spotters like bats in a bright room.

Cloudy skies over Baghdad would help, but that would also pose a problem for the pilots when looking for the target.

And, the aircraft were configured for combat operations, not strike missions, and the plan called for using modified bunker-buster bombs the pilots hadn’t used before.

Hinote told Moseley the plan would work. He offered a series of options, including a plan calling for two stealth fighters to penetrate Iraqi airspace and hit the target.

“I felt confident we could do it,” he said. “If we could make sure the logistics worked out, it would be tight, but we’d pull it off.”

Moseley approved the plan, and Hinote went to work. He contacted the Black Sheep and told them they had a job to do.

1:00 a.m.
Hoehn was reviewing plans for the next day’s missions when the call for pilots came in at the squadron. Someone handed him a set of coordinates and asked him to find the target.

It didn’t take long for the pilot to figure out the F-117s would be going to Baghdad. The war, he thought, was starting.

“I knew by the nature of where we were going that this was going to be significant,” he said. Neither pilot knew Hussein was the target.

Within minutes, Hoehn and Toomey were putting together their portion of the mission. On the flight line, maintenance crews and support people prepared the Nighthawks for a mission they knew nothing about. All they knew was they had less than two hours to get the aircraft airborne.

“The maintenance area was a swarm of activity,” Hoehn said. “They wanted to pull it off as much as we did. Those guys — maintenance, munitions, support — just teamed up and made miracles happen.”

The mission plan called for each fighter to drop two bombs on the bunker. The bombs — EGBU-27 Advanced Paveway III bunker-busters — can be guided to the target using either laser or satellite guidance. They were designed to burrow underground then detonate. The problem: The bombs were unknowns. They had only been tested once, and neither pilot had flown with them before.

“The munitions had to be dropped two at a time,” Hoehn said. “We didn’t know if that would work. They could collide with each other or tumble off course. We simply didn’t know what this munition did. It was a little nerve-wracking.”

In fact, just six hours before mission preparation began, the Air Force tested the bombs in the United States. Fighter aircraft dropped the munitions in the same configuration the Nighthawks would use. The tests were a success, and the Black Sheep scrambled to get their hands on the test information before the mission launch.

3:00 a.m.
With the planes loaded and the pilots ready, Ram 01 and 02 launched into the night sky toward Baghdad.

At about the same time, a pair of Navy EA-6B Prowlers flying patrol in the region was tasked to meet the Nighthawks en route to Iraq. A couple of Air Force F-16s flying no-fly-zone missions was also called as escorts.

Another Prowler, from the USS Constellation in the Arabian Gulf, joined the package as the seven aircraft met up with a KC-135 tanker to refuel the Nighthawks.

“We’d been in radio silence for most of the flight,” Hoehn said. “No one knew what we were doing, and I hadn’t said anything to [Toomey] because I was having problems with my communications set up. I had to talk through the boom operator to see if the mission was still a go.”

The tanker “dragged” the pair toward Baghdad, then broke off and headed away. The Prowlers and Falcons stayed with the Nighthawks for a while longer, then peeled away to let the pair slip into Baghdad airspace.

When the pair was about two hours from target, Navy ships in the Arabian Gulf and elsewhere fired a battery of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The launches were timed to reach Baghdad within minutes of the bunker strike, if all went well. If not, Hoehn and Toomey would find themselves in a rain of Tomahawks.

5:10 a.m.
Both pilots wanted to get to the target before the sun broke the horizon. The sun was bleaching the desert sky a bright orange as it crept over the horizon.

“At altitude, it gets very bright,” Hoehn said. “That’s not a good time for a stealth fighter. We needed to get to target quickly.”

Toomey broke away from his wingman and headed down toward the target. As his fighter dropped under broken skies, Hoehn banked in and raced to Dora Farms from the east.

Toomey also noticed the brightening sky, but had other problems to contend with. His jet had a weapons system malfunction. He didn’t know if the munitions would work, or even deploy. He ducked under a wave of broken clouds over the target and opened the bomb bay doors, making the Nighthawk visible to radar over an area that had 50 surface-to-air missile systems and more than 200 anti-aircraft artillery sites defending it.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘This is not going to be good,’ ” Toomey later told reporters.

5:30 a.m.
Both pilots released their weapons. The satellite tracking systems guided the bombs to a series of buildings in the compound. As the Nighthawks peeled off the target area, Hoehn could see flashes of light in his canopy as explosions tore the compound apart and the anti-aircraft batteries started firing.

Hoehn flew west out of Baghdad. Toomey also skirted out of the air space as the Tomahawk missiles began hammering the city.

They flew on, not knowing where the other pilot was, or if the other had survived the attack. Hinote sat quietly in the command center waiting for word of the mission.

“The first thing we saw about it was on television,” Hinote said. “We actually got confirmation from Sky News. We were pretty excited, but still didn’t know what was going on with our pilots.”

Because the planning timeline was so scant, the pilots had to “find” refueling on their own.

Toomey located a KC-135 refueling no-fly-zone patrols in the east and gassed up for the return trip. Hoehn linked up with the tanker that dragged the pair to Baghdad.

The tankers were in contact with the mission planners and kept the staff apprised of the status of the fighters. Everything had worked out well. The Nighthawks were going home.

The pair landed in the bright sunlight of a Southwest Asia morning. The first thing Hoehn did on landing was hug his crew chief.

Although they quickly got back to business, Hoehn will always remember the first strike in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“How many times in a lifetime,” he asked, “does an individual get to take the opening shots designed to liberate a country?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“How many times in a lifetime does an individual get to take the opening shots designed to liberate a country?” asked Maj. Mark Hoehn, one of the two F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter pilots who fired the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Freedom with a strike on a Baghdad bunker March 19. Hoehn, shown here at the Air Force Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., recently, is now an instructor at the 49th Fighter Wing’s new stealth fighter weapons school at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first of two F-117s lands at a forward deployed air base after dropping the initial bombs in the war with Iraq. The aircraft deployed from Holloman for Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.

Smoke covers the presidential palace compound in Baghdad March 21 during a U.S.-led air raid on the Iraqi capital. Smoke billowed from a number of targeted sites, including one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. “How many times in a lifetime does an individual get to take the opening shots designed to liberate a country?” asked Maj. Mark Hoehn, one of … The first of two F-117s lands at a forward deployed air base after dropping the initial bombs in the war with Iraq. The aircraft deployed from Holloman for Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.