
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?”
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