In Whom Do We Trust?
In early January 2003, I command a squadron of over 500 operations and maintenance personnel and 18 C-130 transport aircraft based in Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas. Our mission is to deliver combat troops and supplies anytime and anywhere, either by parachutes out the back end of the plane, or by landing on whatever flat surface is available. A mantle of trust drapes my shoulders. My loyalty is unquestionable, but I’m hesitant to reciprocate that trust.
I’m cynical about a war twelve years earlier, where we declared victory but allowed a tyrant to resume his role as the leader of Iraq. I’m jaded over a presidential election that took the US Supreme Court weeks to adjudicate. I’m frustrated because I just returned from a deployment to Afghanistan where it seems our country is no closer to finding the mastermind of 9-11, and instead, appears to be manufacturing reasons to shift our focus from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein. Poised at the prime of my operational career, I’m so wrapped up in how to keep my team at the leading edge of the fight that I offer nothing but complaints towards those working at the strategic level. When anyone over the age of fifty tries to give me the big picture, I stare at them like they’ve got a dick growing out of their forehead.
My midday summons to my commander’s office doesn’t help.
“I don’t have the details. All I know is we’re not stopping short this time. Be prepared to head out in less than a month. Questions?” My boss might be under the age of fifty, but his lack of specifics about our upcoming deployment just outside the border of Iraq inspires little confidence.
I stride across the street to my squadron, mulling over my boss’s words. So much for commander’s intent. The only useful information I cull from our meeting is I need to have my squadron ready to deploy to the Middle East in less than a month. I smile, then check to see if anyone’s watching the newest squadron commander talking to himself. I don’t need more guidance. I might not control where we’re going and what we are fighting for, but I’ve sure as hell got a unit that knows how to get out of Dodge, set up an operating base, and get shit done.
We spend the next five weeks prepping the crews with airdrop training at night and short-field landings on unimproved surfaces. My ops officer runs that training and I make sure I hop in the aircraft commander’s seat enough that I’ll be ready to fly in the lead wherever we end up going. I study the crews flying with me. Although I am the senior and most experienced aviator in the unit, commander duties keep me out of the cockpit and on the ground more than other pilots. I need a crew that’s been flying their asses off. Not just to make up for my recent lack of flight hours, but also because when the shit hits the fan, I need a crew I can bond with—one that I trust.
The basic crew on a C-130 is six: pilot, copilot, navigator, flight engineer, and two loadmasters. We’ll probably take a mechanic if we land in the combat zone, but I’m not worried about who that will be. My maintenance leaders will send me the best airman they got. I’ve already filled most of the flying crew, as well. My enlisted positions are senior NCOs that earned their rank through performance and common sense. My navigator used to fly with me in my last unit when I was a major. The toughest decision I make before departing our home base is who will be my copilot—my number two. My staff recommends two lieutenants to fly with me before we leave—so that I can make the choice myself. Andy Smith and Deanna Franks.
My ops staff assumes I’ll pick Andy. I suspect the only reason they don’t just assign him to me is so I’ll think I’m deciding and not them. Andy’s a good ol’ boy with a reputation for smooth flying, a raunchy sense of humor, and the ability to make a crew bond quicker than a middle-schooler’s tongue on a frozen flagpole. You can count on him to buy the first round, know the name of the girlfriend of the youngest guy on the crew, and fly better than half our aircraft commanders. A week before we leave, I take him out on a night tactical airdrop training mission and let him fly the plane for twenty minutes in formation. The rumors about his flying instincts are true. Hands of glass.
On the run-in to the airdrop, I run our plane one hundred feet higher than we plan. I do it on purpose, gauging Andy’s reaction. He doesn’t say a word. He is supposed to—the copilot keeps the pilot on airspeed and altitude while backing the navigator up to make sure the plane is going in the right direction. On the return flight to base, Andy rips a fart, tells a bad joke, and has the whole crew laughing—including me. We have an hour left on our mission and are scheduled to practice short-field landings using our night-vision goggles. This is an aircraft commander qualification and I’m the one doing the landings. After the whole ‘silent Andy’ thing with my airdrop altitude, I consider coming in high on the short-field landing just to see if he will point it out. But these night assault landings are nothing to mess around with, so I table that plan.
I screw it up anyway—carrying too much speed across the overrun. When I pull the power, we float out of the zone, my wheels touching six hundred feet down the runway instead of the required five hundred feet or less. I should take it around, but don’t. Mashing the brakes, I lift the throttle handles and pull them into reverse, bringing the plane to a stop.
“Nice, Sir!” Andy bobs his NVGs up and down like an agreeable grasshopper. “You just got it in the zone.”
An endorphin rush blooms in my chest and I quell it. The hardest thing about command isn’t the increase in responsibility, but the people always telling me what an expert pilot I am, calling me an awesome commander, and hinting how much they like me. Every time it happens, I get that rush; and it takes all my effort to remind myself I’m not invincible just because I’m in command.
Am I wrong about my botched landing? Did I land in the zone? I turn to our flight engineer, who sits behind and between us pilots. His goggles sway back and forth. Truth. I landed long.
Two nights later, I fly the same profile with Deanna Franks, my other copilot candidate. Deanna’s reputation precedes. When it comes to hands-on flying, everyone in the unit considers her the best copilot. She won the Triple Nickel Award in flight school for flying an evaluation where she was never more than five knots off airspeed, fifty feet off altitude or five degrees off heading for the hour-long flight.
But she’s also known for what she’s not. Not one of the guys. Not like she acts anti-social or anything, but she just doesn’t seem to be interested in playing the game when it comes to aircrew hijinks. The jokes about each other’s mothers disappear, nobody burps, and if someone has to cut loose after a round of bad burritos, you can be sure no one else will laugh about it.
Our airdrop mission with Deanna goes on time and on target. I don’t get the chance to test her reaction to my flying one hundred feet high because she never lets me. At fifty feet error, she calls it out, and I return to altitude. When the navigator mixes up on a turn, Deanna knows exactly where we are and steers us back on track. I let her fly the plane home, and she flies a rock-solid formation lead. When complimented in debrief, I fess up and tell the other two crews the copilot was flying, not me.
I decompress with a beer at home, my usual method for sleep enhancement, and ponder who I want flying in my right seat. Andy’s good. I like him and so does the rest of the crew. He might be just what we need to bring our crew together for the mission. But what is that mission? I’m not convinced our nation’s leadership knows. My boss across the street claims not to know. All I can do is trust my crews will do the right thing when they finally find out what that thing is.
“Nice, Sir!” Andy’s praise after my botched landing rings in my head. Fucking can’t trust him, either.
My crew—with Deanna in the copilot’s seat—deploys to Oman a week later, and we shuttle supplies around the Gulf, waiting for the war to start. I get the call to grab a flight to Qatar, where headquarters plans the mission everyone’s whispering about. At the end of the day, I fly back to Oman with big news for my unit. We’re going to lead 50 C-130s over the top of Baghdad International Airport and airdrop paratroopers and equipment from the 82nd Airborne for the initial invasion of Iraq.
The planners pick a date at the end of the following week—a night with the least amount of moon. The last thing we want is to be highlighted across the Baghdad sky like Santa’s reindeer, our slow-moving aircraft easing pickings for Iraq’s antiquated anti-aircraft artillery. I brief my unit on the mission early in the day so we can use the afternoon for sleep before our late-night alert.
The wake-up happens on time, a hand shaking my shoulder, rousting me from atop a dank sleeping bag spread across my cot. My crew only suspects something is off when we enter the operations building. Instead of a crowded room of bleary-eyed aircrew, it’s just us—my crew of six. When I ask the obvious question, no one knows why—only what. My tactics shop gives us the lowdown.
“The mission over Baghdad has changed. No more airdrop. They’ve found an Iraqi Air Force runway called Tallil that we can use. It’s only a half-hour flight into Iraq from the Kuwaiti border. We think the runway is clear. You guys are going to take a runway-opening team in tonight and everyone else is going to fly up to Kuwait, pick up the Army dudes, and fly them in behind you.”
I nod. “What happened with the airdrop? Why the last-minute change?” The captain briefing me that the start of the war has completely changed in the last eight hours was twelve years old the last time we attacked Saddam Hussein. Should I call headquarters and check myself? I take a breath. These are my guys…trust them.
“Fuck if we—sorry, Sir. They haven’t told us why. They just sent all the planning stuff and told us to do this. When you pick up the team in Kuwait on your way in, the Army intel team there is supposed to give you more information on the field.”
“Anybody tell the loadmasters? They’re going to need to re-rig everything in the back end of the plane.”
My young captain, he of the errant F-bomb, turns to his planning partner and raises his eyebrows. The other guy shrugs.
“Shit. I don’t think so, Sir. We’ve been working on this.”
I turn to my copilot, Deanna. “Go let them know the new mission. Chad and I will start planning.”
“Got it, Sir.”
I’ve not questioned my final copilot decision once on this deployment. Deanna’s flying continues to be flawless and when they told us our crew would lead the assault on Baghdad, she buried herself in the planning, memorized the mission, and emerged as the leader of our group of copilots. The reason I can send her out to the ramp to pass a message instead of planning this new mission into Iraq is because I know she’ll tell the loadmasters exactly what they need to know and she’ll instantly catch up when she returns to help plan.
Three hours later, we’re airborne out of Kuwait, after loading up the runway-opening team and their trailer. Intel updates us on the Iraqi runway status while we load the plane. Best they can tell, the runway surface is rough, with potholes and loose gravel, but there’s no evidence they’ve erected any obstacles to discourage planes from landing. Of course, the photos are several days old.
We run our combat entry checklists, don our night-vision goggles, and drop to three hundred feet above the desert floor. It’s dark—pitch black. Something to do with that original plan of picking a moonless night, I remind my crew. Now that we’re going in low, I’m wishing we had a bit of moonlight so the night goggles would work better. I set my radar altimeter at 250 feet so I’ll have a warning if we inadvertently descend too low. The desert air—fetid, like we’re picking up the smell of the shit used to fertilize village crops—jets from the vents, but fails to prevent the sweat soaking the inside of my body armor.
Fifteen miles from the field, the terrain features pop out in black and green contours. The city of Nasiriyah lies just northeast of our runway, its lights confirming we’re on course, and the gunfire flashes in and around the town remind us we’re not in Kansas anymore. They also remind me that headquarters was wrong about no fighting reported near the airfield. We turn early to intercept the runway course and as we roll out on a seven-mile final, our navigator lets us know he’s picked up the landing surface on his ground-mapping radar.
At five miles to go, I yank the throttles to idle, slowing the aircraft to a speed that allows us to drop our landing gear and flaps. As the airspeed drops to 130 knots, I spot the runway in front of me and point the aircraft toward the first hundred feet, while scanning down the strip for obstacles.
“How’s the runway look?” I call over the intercom.
The navigator leans over Deanna’s shoulder and keys his mike. “Looks clear.”
I start out of the three-hundred-foot altitude I’ve maintained since the border on a three-degree glide slope toward the landing zone. It’s not like we have to land in a five-hundred foot zone for this mission, but I need an approach that allows me to stop quickly if we encounter an obstacle or take the plane back in the air if we call it off.
Passing through a hundred feet, Deanna breaks from the checklist. “Bank left! Land there!” she calls out—not in a panic, but not tentatively either. She’s giving me an order.
I get the adrenaline rush again, but this time it’s not from someone providing praise, but from the fear of being wrong. What if Deanna is wrong? But there’s no time.
I roll the lumbering cargo plane into a thirty-degree bank turn and then immediately counter-roll to line up with whatever Deanna’s finger points at. A broad, paved surface opens in front of me and I’m already in a flare when I realize what’s happened. We’d lined ourselves up on radar on the long, narrow taxiway, thinking it was a runway. When we were close enough to identify it, we’d seen what we wanted to see—a long paved strip—and missed the fact that there were several equally long strips to the left of it, including the main runway.
As the wheels touch down, I smash on the brakes, cover the nose steering wheel with my hand and turn my head slightly toward Deanna. “Thanks for—”
“Pothole on the right. Turn your way!”
I whip my head back to the runway and twist the nose steering wheel gently, angling away from the hole, and bringing the aircraft to a stop. My heart still pounds, but the cramping in my gut has disappeared. We’re on the ground.
The next thirty minutes seem like five. The commander of the runway-opening team tells us where he wants to set up. We keep the engines running while the loadmasters unload the trailer. The dank desert smell, so distinct at altitude, now assaults us through the open doors and ramp. In the cockpit, we’ve got that post-adrenaline relief thing going on and we’re high-fiving each other.
“First US aircraft in, baby…Red Devils lead the way,” our flight engineer croons. Across the cockpit our ever-stoic copilot, Deanna, wears a big grin plastered underneath her night-vision goggles.
“Pilot, load?” The loadmaster’s voice pitches high over the intercom.
“Go ahead, load.”
“I’ve got three unidentified personnel approaching the plane opposite from the set-up team. What do you want me to do?”
In my side window, I try to spot what the load sees. “Do you have your 9mm?” It’s a stupid question. We all have our weapons strapped to our chests.
“It’s pointed at them. Do you want me to shoot? They don’t look like they are trying to attack. One of them’s carrying a box or something. The other two have their hands raised.”
Like my reaction to Deanna’s command, my response is immediate. “Your call. Not unless you think they’re a threat.”
The figures are US Army aviators. Turns out, we aren’t the first US aircraft into Iraq for this war. These guys’ helicopter crashed near the field two days ago and holed up, waiting for the good guys to arrive so they could get a ride back to Kuwait. We help them load the helicopter’s black box, get them strapped in, and take off for our low-level return to Kuwait.
The helicopter pilot stands behind my seat on the flight back.
“What was your plan if we didn’t show up?”
“Wait for someone like you to show up. We knew you would, eventually.”
“Do you think they had a plan to get you guys?”
“Don’t know,” the helo pilot says. “Don’t trust those headquarters guys. All you can depend on out here is your crew.”
I look across the cockpit at Deanna. She’s scribbling coordinates on her kneepad, but seems to sense my eyes upon her. She turns her head, but I can’t read her expression under her night-vision goggles.
“You ready for the Combat Exit checklist, Sir?”
I pause for a second and then nod. “Yep. Crew, pilot: Combat Exit checklist.”