What were you So you were like roving around in a kill box?
Well, it was a target area. We had a, we had a location air
maps had about 8075, a 120 sqrt 247, I don't know, contact
points on our map. We carried them out the side of
the Texas, believe it or not. We had it folded up very well.
And there's a story behind that at some point.
But the maps would, they would say go to contact point this and
look for this intersection or whatever.
And then they'd say near contact point this.
There would be coordinates. You put your coordinates in and
look on the map yourself, the grid coordinates or the lat long
and go, yeah, I see that it's close to a row.
There's a little bit of a hill behind there.
Let's watch for this, this and this whatever.
So yeah, it was, it was the kill box idea was there, but we did
not have, we were not assigning kill boxes yet.
They just told us hit your target.
You can't find a target. If you don't see your target or
it's been destroyed, go to the next available target.
I see a truck on the road, it's moving.
It's a military truck. Guess what?
I'm going to shoot it because that's what that's what you do.
You just go find the next target or I'm going to drop bombs or
whatever. And you just keep going.
And then, you know, we come back and you know nothing.
Luckily nothing was out of the ordinary, No hits as far as
battle damage and like that. So we felt pretty good that the
system we had so far was working and that's probably the the
after the first day, the first two days it probably we had a
good idea what we were up against.
We had a better idea. We hadn't, we hadn't hit all the
hot spots yet. We were getting close so.
Can you describe the, the, the process then for going through
a, a visual ID or positive identification of the target
before you drop on it? I mean, I, I know that there
were unfortunately some blue on Blues that that occurred during
Desert Storm. Could you talk about that too?
You know, what, what, what, how do you, how do you make sure
that as best you can that when you drop?
Because if you're 10,000 feet, I'd imagine it's difficult to ID
1 truck or one APC. Pretty much, but usually your
target is surrounded or as close to things that want to kill you.
AAA sites, ZSU or fixed sites, Sam's both shoulder fired and
mounted. And so that wouldn't again,
there's there's two processes. The first process is the war
itself started. The second, the second process
was when the ground troops were engaged.
See, before this time they said we're going to run six weeks or
or so of air to air, I mean, of air to ground.
Just get everything softened up. Well, that's like a feeding
frenzy to a bunch of sharks. Guess what?
We're the sharks and so is everybody else.
So it was not a any problem. I was not concerned about any
friendlies whatsoever. If you're up here in you're
north of that black line, guess what, you're not friendly
anymore. I don't care what kind of badge
you're wearing now. When the Army started moving and
they started doing troops and contact and that's that kind of
stuff. Oh, buddy, the rules changed.
Everything changed. Everything changed.
So, yeah, you would roll in and generally your target would be,
you would be able to see it enough that you would know what
you know, what was there and what the threat was.
It wasn't a matter of, to me, it wasn't a matter of, well, that's
the exact right target. Now let's see, only two of those
guns are shooting right now. Maybe I should wait till the
3rd. No, you won't.
You're going to drop a a stick of 6 mark 80 twos across that
puppy with the radar fuses and you're going to watch them blow
up the bits and then you're going to come back around and
straighten what's left. That's just how you did it and
you do you kept doing it until you ran out of bombs, bullets or
gas and that's just what what you had to do.
I mean, that was the beginning. We needed to kill as much of
that AAA and then at armour as we could in the first few weeks
so that when the army did show up that that was, you know, they
would have a little bit better time.
They still had. It's amazing how much Iraqi
forces came out of the woodwork when the army came in.
Those things were not that they were, they had to be driven in
somewhere else. But the ones that we saw, it was
a, a junkyard. It was a Soviet junkyard all
over southern, southeast Iraq and Kuwait itself.
We just, we killed everything and moved everything and didn't
think twice about it. Why wouldn't they're trying to
kill us? And that was a mentality back
then. Papi, can you?
Can you talk a little bit about weaponeering?
Can you talk about weaponeering? You talked about dropping Rock
Eye some Mark 20. What different types of CBU
could you drop? You know, was was rock eye like
a good one for both armour and like light skinned and infantry?
You know what if you wanted to take out some tanks, what would
you prefer to drop? What?
What was the weaponeering piece? Basically your your weapons load
depended on a what was available, you know, and what
was on sale at Walmart. They got all they got a big deal
on some low what low the the mark 80 twos with the the tail
pins. At one time we were dropping
mark 80 twos with the tail pins. The old snake eye from Vietnam
that had a metal band around the wing so they wouldn't come pop
loose when you let drop the jet because we needed the we needed
those bombs and that's all they had.
So again, whatever's on sale at Walmart is what you drop.
However, we carried Rock Eye, we carried our standard low was 6
mark 80 twos. I did.
I have carried 8 or 9 before. In that scenario, if you were
doing something different against troops or whatever,
whatever you're doing Combined effects munition, that was the
newest CBU entity. I dropped a few of those.
And then CBU in general, just just generalised clamshell CBU
of different sizes and what else.
We didn't have any kind of precision guidance.
It was Kentucky windage and Tennessee elevation that we
would dial in the mails, we'd roll in whatever, go off and go
from there. The first thing I would do is
get to a target area. If I found something that was
worthy, I would drop, you know, drop the bombs.
I want to lose, you know, however many 1000 lbs of bombs
off this jet so I can manoeuvre then now that that buried on the
target area. If you're going to drop, if
you're going to drop against say buildings and you know, things
that could be behind the buildings or inside the
buildings, yeah, that's something you want to keep an
eye on you. That's it's kind of depended on
what you what you're carrying. They they started giving us more
combined effects, munition and CDU as the war went on because
we were starting to run out of fuses for the Mark 80 twos
because of some other issue that can be explained later.
But anyway, they did a good job. The CBU did a great job.
If I'm going up against armour and not thin skiing but just
armour in general, anything I carried would take them out.
But Mr Maverick did the best job.
Always has, always will #2 if Maverick doesn't get them, you
go in high angle stripe Swiss cheese and that's, that's just
more visual if you will. But Maverick can go places that
you can't see sometimes. And that's the kind of the
weaponeering part of it. We had both EO and IR Mavericks
and later on we had D model Mavericks which were infrared
with A, I think we paid extra $2.00 a piece or something to
get that little lock on at a, at a fixed point.
You could put it through a pane of glass almost.
It seemed like you could just want to go on the bottom right
of that window. Look there, there it is.
It's all a big bunch of smoke, I guess.
I hate it. Yeah, that sure did.
But they, I don't ever remember having the wrong load, if you
will, because whatever I had, as long as I, I mean, I've got the
gun, I've always got the gun. As long as if it doesn't work,
I'm probably going back because I'll drop some bombs and maybe a
missile or two. But if the gun doesn't work, you
know, worky, you know, flight, that's, that's going to be what
you're going to do your, do your, your, your job with.
And it doesn't always work out that way.
Get gas being what it is and stuff.
It's it's kind of tough, but. I was strife below if if you
couldn't go below 10,000 feet, how easy or difficult was
strife? It was called, it's, it was
something we practised in the, in the past, probably 20% of our
training at, at England Air Force Base and in the hall in
general, 25, maybe in maybe 30 in places.
We'd go through stages of low threat tactics and we'd
practise, we'd employ high and high angle strife was, was very
accurate as long as you didn't get too high.
But 10,000 feet, that's pretty high and that made it tougher.
So you couldn't really go in at 10,000 feet and stray without
going below 10,000. So you had to go up even higher
Nosebleed and come in. I did that once, but it was, it
was a mover on the road heading north out of a border crossing
with Kuwait and Saudi. And it was a military vehicle.
And I noticed me and Mad Dog were flying together.
I was a wingman at the time. I was on his wing at the time.
And I go, hey, I got a mover on the road down here.
He goes, yeah, I see it. You want to get him?
I go, sure. So he stays high with cover.
I roll in. As I roll in my, you know, scope
there gives me the my HUD gives me the wind direction, OK.
And it moves based off a lot of wind.
Well, my TVV, my total velocity vector vector thing was off to
the side. It was outside of the vertical
limits of the HUD, which meant that it was greater than 60 side
about 70 knots of wind. And that's the only way I could
come in was given the the weather we were having at the
time and where I was shooting from.
And so I just roll in, put my old, you know, Kentucky wind
engine, Tennessee elevation, which is how like you are to
shoot when you're in Kentucky. And I just give him about a two
second burst, pull off hard left, hard right, you know, jink
and then get back up and get him visual.
I look back and I see, I look back just enough to see the
bullets hitting right smack in front of the truck.
I mean, it was like you probably got a few in the hood, but it
was that I missed the cab. I was waiting for the cab, of
course, but the truck goes into the ditch.
It stops and I'm like, well, they slowed it down anyway.
Maybe I blew a tyre. We're back at the chow hall
after the sorting, after the day's over.
Mad Dogs was there eating there, you know, mystery of meat and
rice. We got black powder on her face
and from wearing the Kim suits and whatnot and we're all kind
of grungy looking and kind of down, you know, but kind of
yeah. He goes.
I bet that guy bought some new seat covers.
What are you talking about, man, though a guy you straight.
He said I bet he had to buy a new seat covers after that.
I'm like, I hope he didn't buy anything.
I hope he's dead. But that's, you know, that's
just part of it. It did work, but he wasn't a
useful tool when going back to what you go through.
When the army got involved, the rules changed drastically and we
had to adapt quickly. And sadly that didn't always
happen. You know, you're aware of the,
the British forces that were hit by, by an ATM with probably a
maverick. You know, I didn't hear about
that from our flying world. I did not hear about that until,
oh, probably a day after it actually occurred.
And we just got a general briefing.
Hey, make sure that you know where your FAQ is, you know
where the good troops are, you know where the bad guys are,
because this is not if this is not acceptable.
I never knew, never knew what squadron, what group, but it was
an A10, sadly, that fired that missile.
You know, it's it's terrible. I did find out through mystery.
A year later. I'm at T38 pilot instructor
training at Randolph Air Force Base.
I've flown once or twice and I come in, there's a note on the
board. Captain Brogl.
Oh, great call Colonel so and so at legal and I'm like legal,
what have I done now? Nothing.
So I go, OK, sure, I'll get that.
I'll get the debrief, get the debrief first because I'm, I'm
learning. So I'm going to get the debrief.
I call back over and well, Colonel's not available.
So his associate, another Colonel, I think said I'll take
care of that for you. We just found out he goes, we
just found out that your jet tail number had been replaced on
this certain, certain day at the towards the end of February.
And that your jet, you were the first jet we think that
contacted the fact that was involved in the shoot.
And it was a, a a British fact that it was was doing the the
call in. And so I'm like, OK, yeah, I
remember that swordy. Well, he said, why do you
remember? He said, well, I said because I
was leading to ship, we were armed to the teeth with bombs
and everything else like we always were, but kind of a
little bit extra today. And all the fact wanted to do
was see if I could see the orange panels.
And that's all he asked for. And I, you know, I didn't,
didn't know there'd been an accident.
I didn't know anything. I just let and I didn't give him
any grief. I mean, he, we checked in, did
the nine line, exchanged information, blah, blah, blah.
But he said, yeah, can you see it?
You're at 10,000 feet at the time.
Well, that restriction had zipped at that point.
But we were, we were coming in. I think we're about 7500 or so
just so we can get a roll into a base if we needed to pop in.
And he said, he said we're looking, can you identify this
orange tag? First of all, do you see the
armour moving? Do you see the vehicle moving?
I go and he gives me a location based off of his IP, the initial
point. And I go, yeah, I got it, got a
visual, two out of visual. He said you're cleared to roll
in, do not drop. You're not cleared to drop.
I go, fine, that's great, roll in, see if you see it.
I rolled in at that altitude, couldn't see it.
Pull it off 2. See if you see it on on on Fox
mic. See if you see it on two.
OK, he rolls in, I'm covering him.
Boom. No, OK, we'll drop it down.
We'll drop it down to 5000. I dropped it down lower and we
kept going. Finally, about 40, about 4000
feet, you could break out some kind of arrange something on top
of the vehicle, but it because it wasn't on the very top
covering stuff and stretched out, it was kind of very
difficult to see. And if you're 4 miles away,
which you're probably going to be with an, a Maverick, an
average Maverick shoot 3 1/2, four miles away, you're not
going to be able to see anything.
So that was, and I didn't find that out until a year later they
said, OK, so you, you didn't drop or shoot.
We, I said we did not fire the first bullet the entire story.
We did not drop a single bomb. We did not fire any missiles.
Nothing came off our jets. We had to fly back to KKMC, get
get gas and go, do, go do something else.
And we did like we went to Scud Hunt and then one of the eastern
Iraq areas. So lots of fun.
But I didn't know that they didn't.
Nobody, you know, pulls you aside.
Hey, did you know what happened to that today or this sorting or
that sorting? No, I didn't back then.
I didn't know. They didn't tell us that stuff.
You just go out and pull your sorting and, you know, get
another one. Keep going.
That's what we were doing. But that was, yeah, my heart
goes out anytime there's a friendly fire, but especially
that one. That was just not.
I don't know what was going on. I can say to this day, I do not
know what group the pilot that was that fired that vessels
from. We were never told.
Nobody ever said, hey, don't bother this guy or that guy or
don't talk about this or that. It was just silence.
And that's the, I guess that's part of the the conflict, but
it's, it's sad, it's not a good thing.
Papi, you, you've mentioned a couple of different mission
types then. So you've, you've got this
interdiction role you then you're then supporting the
ground forces as they push the Iraqis back up north.
You mentioned scud hunting. It sounds like you're doing
destruction of enemy air defences that the striking.
Oh yeah. Anything.
Yes. It's, it's, it's a very wide
range of things to be doing. Then were were you, you talked
about training all the time when you were back in Louisiana.
I mean, were you, were you training against all those types
of missions? Were the things you were being
asked to do in the desert then different?
Was scud hunting somehow different from doing anything
else? What?
No, we never even thought of scud hunting.
We never even thought of of even dreamt in our wildest dreams of
attacking an SA-6 or an SA2 or a fixed or a mobile launcher.
You know, other than whatever pops up in, in the battle area,
we didn't do any of those missions, didn't train for any
of them. As far as direct now indirectly,
yes. You know, we, we took an 8 ship
once against 24 ships against the Republican Guards.
We wanted to smack them. We didn't want to.
We were told we wanted to. So we did.
We go in, I think we went in for no kidding, for we were in the
line basically a breast, not a breast. 4 hogs spread out.
They go in, everybody locks up, fires, everybody peels back.
Second round comes back, do do it again first, first round guys
come back in with a second missile.
We we plugged them pretty good and it was not our we would
never have done that, not never. But it was been rare to have
done that because in in Eastern or in Western Europe, no, you're
not going to do that. You're going to live.
So yeah, we didn't do any of that.
That's what was weird, a high threat war, radar guided threats
in a low threat. I mean a low threat war in a
high threat environment. That's not the place you want to
be. And I think that when Bush too
decided to go back in and know three, I guess it was to finish
the job, so to speak. That didn't last long.
But they probably faced a little bit different.
You know, we, we tried to blow up as much as we could, but he
was able to, to restore a lot of his weapons and whatnot.
So it made it tougher. But yeah, as far as us being
ready for that, Oh, goodness, no.
Are you crazy? You're going to go out and kill
an SA-10. You got a death wish.
Now, having said that, again, like I said earlier, if
something popped up, you know, an SA9SA8, whatever SA 13 pops
up and and we know it's something's around we entail,
we're going to shoot it and kill it.
Sure, but planning on doing that as a primary mission.
Oh goodness, no, that's all we had to go in and kind of brief
that up tactically. We did talk about tactics a lot
before the war, just what we would thought we would do and
not everything we thought we would do ended up happening.
So we had to adapt and that was part of the mission.
I mean you took off no thought what you're going to do before
the war started in January, early January, I took off with a
2 ship and we're going to go out and just round about, you know,
screw around basically Saudi Arabia, try to find some targets
and do some stuff and do some maverick work.
That kind of stuff I get, I call ready and get to check in and
get OPS on the back radio. But hey, give me a call.
Yeah, boss, what you want? Hey, you got a new target ready
to copy, Roger. Yep.
Copy it down. Yep.
West of a hardball.
Yes, yes. Of the hospital to the east.
Yes, yes. Whatever the case may be, find
this this point and contact this fact while you're there.
This isn't peacetime. This is before the war started.
A couple weeks before the war started, roughly an F16 to crash
the night before, and they were trying to find the crash site.
So they were going to use us as their eyeballs because they
didn't have the bill to get a helicopter or whatever.
We go up there and get a hold of the fact.
Yeah, he said. You see the there's an army
hospital and tents just on the one side of the hardball.
On the other side of the hardball there was a disturbed
piece of sand that had a greenish colour to it.
It looked just like someone had lost a missile and he had gone
straight into the ground and then exploded.
And then he just left with a little dimple there and, and the
dirt and it was multi coloured or one colour.
It was like a Chrome coloured green.
And I go, hey, till you see that he goes, yeah, unless I'm going
to roll in dry, just see what we got.
And I roll in and yeah, I tell the fact.
I said till you're cleared. I come back around back, Yeah,
here's your here's your right across the road.
There's your crash site right there.
He said yeah. Do you see any kind of a
direction I go maybe a little bit from one this one angle, but
not much. It was a fairly high angle
impact right in the ground. Apparently the the poor guy had
gotten, but he just got there in country the month or two prior
and he'd gotten a fauna night sortie like a low level and he
got this disoriented off the lights off the canopy or
something, which happens in the hog too.
And it's not you know what I mean, But it was sad that that
that was your job to go out and find the crash site.
That too late. That's really interesting.
I think that's, I think it was General Wolf.
He was the Air Force chief of staff.
He I saw a presentation he gave to the Academy when he became
chief of staff and he talks about that.
He said it was his friend and he said he he died relaxed because
he thought he was flying an after banner up to the stars.
Actually he was flying an after banner and he just spits right
in and never. It shows you the, it shows you
the, the it's a different world at night with with that
environment. That's what makes it different.