Punk's War

by Ward Carroll

  “Yeah,” Rex returned with a cagey grin as he gestured toward Holly. “She’s right there.”

  Porky started to contort his face in disbelief, but he politely caught himself as he fished around inside a green helmet bag. “You need to wear this once we clear the perimeter of the compound,” he said to the young intelligence officer. “The Saudis get real offended if they see a female without one of these on.” He removed a black veil from the bag and handed it to Holly. “It loops around your ears like a robber’s mask.”

  Holly held the veil between her thumb and forefinger as if she’d just been given a dead rat. “I’m not wearing this,” she said.

  “C’mon, Holly,” Rex implored, “don’t make trouble here. Just wear the mask.”

  “No.” She handed it back to Porky. “That thing’s an insult.”

  “You’re not in Kansas anymore, Holly,” Porky said. “You know what they do to Saudi women who refuse to cover their faces?”

  “I don’t care,” Holly declared defiantly.

  “They behead them.”

  Holly paused for a few seconds and weighed her personal convictions against life without a head. “All right,” she said disdainfully as she took the veil back from Porky, “I’ll wear it . . . but under protest.”

  “Good choice,” Porky said. “Now let’s go.” He climbed into the driver’s seat of the closest van, a dark blue Ford Econoline, while Rex took the shotgun position next to him. Punk and Holly were joined in the back seats by Sticky, the electronic warfare rep for the team. Beatnik manned the far van, a maroon twin of the other vehicle, accompanied by Hoot, the E-2 rep; Bird, the Hornet rep; Gozer, the air wing strike operations officer; and Dancer, the combat search and rescue expert.

  The two vans snaked slowly along a bumpy dirt road for just over a mile. At that point, the drivers stopped at a Quonset hut and instructed their passengers to disembark. A team of helmeted sentries dressed in desert cammies emerged from the hut, wrapped in Kevlar body armor and armed with rifles. One of them held a long pole with a mirror attached to the end of it. Another led a large German shepherd by a leash.

  The security detail painstakingly went over one van and then the other. Once convinced that neither vehicle was venturing off the base with a bomb strapped to it, and that none of the occupants was a terrorist, the head sentry allowed the party to get back into the vans and drive away.

  After another slow, bumpy mile they came to a four-lane divided highway, which Porky turned onto, immediately accelerating the van to a cool hundred-mile-per-hour pace with Beatnik four car lengths in disciplined trail.

  “Ah, the open road,” Porky remarked with satisfaction.

  “Not much out here is there?” Punk observed.

  “Nope,” Porky replied. “We’ll pass though one small town along the way, but the rest of the trip is just like what you’re looking at right here. Nothing like it—miles of highway and no traffic at all. I’m spoiled now; I’ll never be able to drive in the States without losing my mind again.”

  “How long have you been here?” Punk asked.

  “Seven months; I’ve got five to go.”

  “Is this all you do?”

  “Officially, I am the Fifth Fleet Naval Liaison at Al Kharj,” Porky said. “But, yeah, this is all I do. I’m like a fireman—lots of down time until the alarm goes off. Beatnik and I just hang out in our tent, play cards, go to the gym and work out, and wait for a call that a group needs to get to Escavah Village. We just got the word on you guys this morning, which is actually the most heads-up the knuckleheads at Fifth Fleet have given us in months.”

  “What is this Escavah Village you keep talking about?” Rex asked. “Is that Riyadh?”

  “Escavah Village is on the outskirts of Riyadh. Like Al Kharj, it’s in the middle of nowhere, which is where the force protection boys like our bases to be. The Saudis originally built the village to lure Bedouin tribes out of the desert and into the factories, but the nomads didn’t go for it. So when Joint Task Force Southwest Asia was looking for a more permanent home after the Gulf War, the Saudis ushered the contract signers to Escavah.”

  “So where were you before this good deal?” Punk asked.

  “I’m not sure I should answer that until I get to know you better,” Porky said mysteriously. “Excuse me for overreacting, but I’m getting kind of tired of being judged out of context by people.” He drummed on the steering wheel for a few seconds. “So, let me ask you something.”

  “Shoot,” Rex returned.

  “Do you think farts are funny?”

  “Ah, sure,” Rex offered congenially, without fully considering the question. “I mean . . .”

  “What kind of fart?” Punk asked.

  “Just farts in general,” Porky replied.

  “Because there’s a big difference in the various presentations . . .”

  “Okay,” Porky allowed, “I’ll take that as a yes.” He looked in the rear view mirror. “And you two?”

  “I guess . . .” Sticky said reluctantly, as if he’d sacrificed all self-respect by answering the question.

  “I’m not playing this stupid game,” Holly groused, veil flapping with the consonants.

  “I’ll take that as a yes, too,” Porky said. “You see, in the last few months I’ve done a lot of soul searching here—there’s something about the desert that clears your head and lets you think straight. I’ve organized life’s lessons into a list of maxims. Maxim number two is never trust anyone who doesn’t think farts are funny.” He reached into the console between the front seats, removed a pair of wraparound-mirrored sunglasses, and slipped them onto his face. “Fart haters are a strange breed, all right—repressed and whatnot. And they judge . . . they do judge.”

  “What’s Maxim Number One?” Rex asked.

  “I don’t have a Number One,” Porky replied. “Deciding on a paramount maxim felt a lot like the sort of pressure that landed me over here, and I’m trying to unload that. Anyway, to answer your original question, I used to fly Hornets.”

  “Used to fly Hornets?” Punk asked.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Hold it,” Rex interjected. “You’re Hornet Porky!”

  “In the flesh . . .”

  “You haven’t heard of this guy, Punk?” Rex asked over his shoulder.

  “No,” Punk returned. “Should I have?”

  “Porky’s the guy who . . .” Rex stopped himself. “It’s your story, Porky. Why don’t you tell it?”

  “There’s not much to tell, really,” Porky reminisced. “I almost killed the President of the United States.”

  “Oh, I did hear about that,” Punk admitted. “Weren’t you doing an air show or something?”

  “Yeah,” Porky recalled, “the president and his wife came out to the boat for a few hours during an exercise off the coast of Florida. I was the show’s live ordnance bombing demonstration with four thousand-pounders strapped to my jet. I don’t know how much you guys know about the Hornet, but it has this great feature where the pilot can manually enter a range for weapons impact from a point designated through the heads-up display. It’s great for close air support missions where your target is usually called by the forward air controller in reference to something else more visually significant. So, for the air show, once I started my final bomb run, I was going to designate the ship and then have the bombs hit two thousand meters abeam, far enough away to be safe, but close enough for the onlookers to feel the boom. Unfortunately, when I entered the digits for the impact range from the ship I left out one of the zeros.” He humbly threw his hands up. “As you might expect, at only two hundred meters away, the explosion threw some shrapnel across the flight deck. Luckily, the secret service had enough time to cover the president, but one small chunk of steel ripped a sleeve of the leather flight jacket the first lady was wearing, a gift from the secretary of the Navy, who’d been standing directly to her right as the bombs went off. I was on my way over here a week later.”

&
nbsp; “Did they take your wings?” Punk asked.

  “Yeah,” Porky replied with resignation. “I might have gotten away with it had the VIP been an ambassador or a state senator or something, but not the president.”

  “Politics . . .” Rex decreed in sum.

  Without warning to the passengers, the lead van left the smooth asphalt of the highway and took off into the untamed desert, followed closely by the second vehicle. Summarily shaken from slumber, Rex feared their driver had also fallen asleep, but a check on Porky, followed by a look out the front windshield and down the barely defined dirt road they were now plying, assured him that their fallen angel of a tour guide was in control.

  A mile down the road they came to another checkpoint, a bigger and more permanent building than the Quonset hut at Al Kharj. Again the passengers were directed to get out of the vans, but this time they were led to a bench and made to sit down. Sentries drove the vans into twin bays that resembled automotive service garages, complete with lifts. Once both vans were within the confines of the building, the doors to the bays were lowered, shielding the inspection procedure from any onlookers.

  “Boy,” Punk said, “these guys are hard core.”

  “Who are they afraid of?” Dancer asked. “The Saudis are on our side, right?”

  “Don’t forget that the barracks in Dharahan was blown up a few years ago,” Porky said. “That’s what drove us to Al Kharj. Dharahan was a relatively nice place, just across the causeway from Manama, but as you’ve seen, the Air Force’s primary airfield is now in the middle of nowhere.” Careful not to upset the sentries by rising off the bench, Porky stretched his arms and legs in front of him while remaining seated. “Our popularity here has waned in the years since Desert Storm. In fact, you’ll discover when you start strike planning today that the Air Force’s greatest fear is that the Saudis won’t let them launch strike missions against Iraq from Saudi soil. That makes all those jets you saw lined up along the flight lines at Al Kharj worthless.”

  “You mean we risked American lives and spent a shitload of tax dollars here protecting their sovereignty not that long ago, and now we can’t even launch from their country?” Sticky asked.

  “Don’t try to figure it out,” Porky warned. “It’s the Middle East.”

  The small auditorium’s complement of officers created a wave of desert camouflage fatigues and khaki flight suits as they rose out of their seats upon the general’s arrival through the main entrance at the back of the room. Although Rex had wanted to swing by the supply tent and attempt to use a single flight jacket to barter for eight sets of I-was-there desert cammies complete with floppy hats and suede boots, the multi-step check-in process through security and the lodging office had barely afforded the team enough time to jump back into their flight suits and make it to the kick off. As a result, the air wing team stood in olive green, a stain on the gathering’s sand-colored quilt.

  The general strode down the center aisle followed by his aide, who separated from the procession once his boss successfully climbed the five steps leading to the stage. The general grumbled “carry on” and made his way to the podium as the audience took their seats. He grimaced and shielded his eyes against the lights with one hand while tapping the microphone twice with the other.

  “Welcome to Escavah Village,” he started, “home of the Joint Task Force Southwest Asia. I’m the commander of JTF-SWA”—jay tee eff swah—“Major General Frank Bullock, United States Air Force, but that’s the last time you’ll hear me mention my service.” He hit the podium with his fist and a squeal pierced through the speakers until he steadied the microphone. Punk sensed the crowd wanted to laugh but chose not to. “This is a joint task force. Joint. Not an Air Force task force. Not a Navy task force. Not a Marine Corps task force. I don’t care what service you’re in. In the next few days, you are going to work long hours planning a war that we could be asked to fight very soon. My guidance to you is simple: Choose the best weapon for the job. Don’t worry about politics; don’t worry about news coverage. Worry about your bombs on the right target; worry about getting home safely; worry about winning.

  “Now before you break up into your strike planning teams, let me see a show of hands. How many of you have flown combat sorties before?” Roughly two dozen of the two hundred officers in the room raised their hands. “Okay, not that many; just as I suspected.” The auditorium darkened, and the general was bathed in the stark white light of a single spotlight for a short time, silver hair appearing bright white in the view from the seats, and the lines on his face accentuated by wide shadows. Punk furtively glanced to either side of him at the faces of his teammates to gauge their reactions to the drama. All sat transfixed by the glow, so he joined them.

  “I’d like to tell you a story,” the general said. “It’s a story about a pilot’s first look into the face of war.” He grabbed the microphone from its stand on the podium and began working the stage like the star of a one-man Broadway show. “This exposure came relatively late in the officer’s life: He was a full colonel. And as he stepped for his first combat sortie, he was sure twenty-one years of preparing for war had, in fact, prepared him for what he was to experience. In fact, the colonel was pleasantly surprised when he didn’t feel nervous as he launched out of the coastal air base in Saudi Arabia. The event seemed just like an exercise, and you know we military professionals like to say our exercises are just like the real thing. He attributed his lack of nervousness to good training and blessed the American taxpayer for the dollars wisely invested in him over the course of his career.

  “The rendezvous and tanking went like clockwork. He had three fully-mission-capable F-16s on his wing and all the SAM suppression and fighter cover a mission commander could ask for as the division pushed out to the north. He felt alive and cocky and thanked God and the President for the opportunity to do their bidding.

  “Their targets were the hangars at the south end of the airfield at Tallil, an area that hadn’t seen much action the first day of the war because the coalition’s focus had been on Baghdad. As the flight got deeper into Iraq, they heard the AWACS and Eagles calling out MiGs. MiGs! the pilot thought. There really is a war going on here. And then their radar warning gear started singing angry songs and SAMs started coming up at them. They were suddenly four sorcerer’s apprentices: every missile they defeated was replaced by two more and then four more and so on until the sky was striped near solid with brilliant white plumes. Dash Four in the division, a young first lieutenant, wound up at the top of his third evasive maneuver too slow to do anything but watch the missile with his name on it guide toward him. His last words over the radio were: ‘I love you, Gloria . . . ’.” The general paused to allow the quote to echo through the room.

  “The colonel looked to his right and saw the first lieutenant’s jet explode. He wanted to stop the game, to hit Restart and try again, but as he watched the fireball that used to be an F-16 tumble toward Iraq, he understood for good that death in combat was irreversible. And the missiles kept coming.

  “The colonel fought to keep airspeed on the jet as he dueled with another SAM. He heard ‘Devil Two’s hit, ejecting!’ on the radio and saw a chute open below him. Between jinks he wondered if the pilot would be taken as a POW or shot in his straps before he hit the ground. He wanted to call ‘mission abort,’ but he was already at the roll-in point, so he made his bombing run. His mind was Jello now, and he couldn’t recall flipping any switches, but the bombs came off. He looked back over his shoulder as he pulled up and saw the explosions erupt on their mark, but he didn’t feel the elation he’d expected. The charm of war was gone. And to make it home, the two remaining Falcons still had to fly back through the same SAM envelopes they’d just gone through.

  “Well, the colonel made it back to his base in Saudi Arabia. And as he walked back to the hangar to debrief, the exhaustion of post-mission let-down hit him and he forgot about the glory of bombs on target and MiG kills and hoped tomorrow he could hav
e a day off to pray for a speedy end to the war.”

  The general moved back to the podium and slipped the microphone into its stand. “Gentlemen, I was that colonel.” He paused and grimaced slightly as if the memory tortured him. “War is no joke. Plan well.” With that, the room came to attention again, and the general stepped back down from the stage and marched out the main door.

  The walls were closing in on them now. “Can you escort the B-52s or not?” Rhino the F-117 pilot asked gruffly, patience threadbare from twelve straight hours of strike planning.

  “Where do they need us?” Punk asked as he mindlessly smoothed the front of the new desert cammies Rex had obtained for him and slowly moved to the closest of the six large charts mounted on the walls of the planning room.

  “From the Straits of Hormuz, here,” Rhino said while scribing the heavy bombers’ route with his index finger on the chart, “to their cruise missile launch point up here in the northern part of the Gulf.”

  Punk wearily squinted at the master time line scrawled in dry erase marker on the board against the adjacent wall. “What’s the window?”

  Rhino checked one sheet among the pile of mission planning documents strewn about the conference tables. “Eighteen hundred zulu to twenty-two hundred zulu.”

  “Goddam it,” Punk snapped. “That totally screws up Strike Package Delta.”

  “What’s Strike Package Delta?” Rhino asked.

  “Four Tomcats against a missile storage facility at Al Damin Nahya.”

  “What kind of bombs?”

  “Precision guided. GBU-12s.”

  Rhino pulled out a spreadsheet labeled “Asset Apportionment,” and ran his finger down one of the columns. “We can assign that target to a division of F-15Es out of Al Kharj.”

  “We’re undoing work we’ve already done here, Rhino,” Punk entreated. “Why don’t we let the F-15Es escort the B-52s?”