Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  “One more thing to remember: Not only can you pick the candidates best eligible for promotion, but you are also charged with the task of recommending that candidates be removed from extended active duty. What’s the criterion for removal? That, my friends, is up to you. Be prepared to fully justify your reasons to me, but don’t be afraid to give them either. Again, it’s part of the awesome responsibility you have here.

  “One last reminder: it is still our Air Force. We built it. I’d guess that most of the candidates you’ll look at didn’t serve in Vietnam, so they don’t have the same perspective as we do. Many of our buddies died in Vietnam, but we survived and stayed and fought on. We served when it was socially and politically unpopular to wear a uniform in our own hometowns. We played Russian roulette with nuclear weapons, the most deadly weapons ever devised, just so we could prove to the world that we were crazy enough to blow the entire planet into atoms to protect our freedom. We see the tides turning in our favor—but it is up to us to see that our gains are not erased. We do that by picking the next generation of leaders.

  “It is our Air Force. Our country. Our world. Now it’s our opportunity to pick those who we want to take our place. In my mind, it is equally important a task as the one we did in creating this world we live in. That’s our task. Let’s get to it. Please stand, raise your right hand, and prepare to take the oath of office to convene this promotion board.” General Ingemanson then administered the service oath to the board members, and the job was under way.

  Norman and the other board members departed the small theater and headed toward the individual panel meeting rooms. There was a circular table with comfortable-looking chairs arrayed around it, a drymarker board with an overhead slide projector screen, a bank of telephones, and the ever-present coffeepot and rack of ceramic mugs.

  Norman’s seven-member panel had five rated officers—four pilots and one navigator, including one officer who looked as if he had every possible specialty badge one person could have: He wore command pilot and senior paratrooper wings, plus a senior missile-launch officer badge on his pocket. The flyers all seemed to know each other—two were even from the same Air Force Academy class. To them, it was a small, chummy Air Force. None of the flyers wore any ribbons on their uniform blouses, only their specialty badges on one side, name tags on the other, and rank on their collar; Norman almost felt self-conscious wearing all of his three rows of ribbons before deciding that the flyers were probably out of uniform.

  Introductions were quick, informal, and impersonal—unless you were wearing wings. Along with the flyers and Norman, there was a logistics planning staff officer from the Pentagon. Norman thought he recognized the fellow Pentagon officer, but with almost five thousand Air Force personnel working at the “five-sided puzzle palace,” it was pretty unlikely anyone knew anyone else outside their corridor. None of the panel members were women—there were only a couple women on the entire board, a fact that Norman found upsetting. The Air Force was supposed to be the most progressive and socially conscious branch of the American armed services, but it was as if they were right back in the Middle Ages with how the Air Force treated women sometimes.

  Of course, the five flyers sat together, across the table from the nonflyers. The flyers were relaxed, loud, and animated. One of them, the supercolonel with all the badges, pulled out a cigar, and Norman resolved to tell him not to light up if he tried, but he never made any move to do so. He simply chewed on it and used it to punctuate his stories and jokes, shared mostly with the other flyers. He sat at the head of the semicircle of flyers at the table as if presiding over the panel. He looked as if he was very accustomed to taking charge of such groups, although each panel didn’t have and didn’t need a leader.

  The supercolonel must’ve noticed the angry anticipation in Norman’s eyes over his cigar, because he looked at him for several long moments during one of the few moments he wasn’t telling a story or a crude joke. Finally, a glimmer of recognition brightened his blue eyes. “Norman Weir,” he said, jabbing his cigar. “You were the AFO chief at Eglin four years ago. Am I right?”

  “Yes; I was.”

  “Thought so. I’m Harry Ponce. I was the commander of ‘Combat Hammer,’ the Eighty-sixth Fighter Squadron. Call me ‘Slammer.’ You took pretty good care of my guys.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So. Where are you now?”

  “The Pentagon. Chief of the Budget Analysis Agency.”

  A few of the other flyers looked in his direction when he mentioned the Budget Analysis Agency. One of them curled his lip in a sneer. “The BAA, huh? You guys killed an ejection-seat modification program my staff was trying to get approved. That seat would’ve saved two guys deploying to the Sandbox.”

  “I can’t discuss it, Colonel,” Norman said awkwardly.

  “The first ejection seat mod for the B-52 in twenty years, and you guys kill it. I’ll never figure that one out.”

  “It’s a complicated screening process,” Norman offered disinterestedly. “We analyze cost versus life cycle versus benefit. We get all the numbers on what the Pentagon wants to do with the fleet, then try to justify the cost of a modification with its corresponding …”

  “It was a simple replacement—a few feet of old worn-out pyrotechnic actuators, replacing thirty-year-old components that were predicted to fail in tropical conditions. A few thousand bucks per seat. Instead, the budget weenies cut the upgrade program. Lo and behold, the first time a couple of our guys try to punch out near Diego Garcia—actuator failure, two seats. Two dead crewdogs.”

  “Like I said, Colonel, I can’t discuss particulars of any file or investigation,” Norman insisted. “In any case, every weapon system from the oldest to the newest has a cost-reward break-even point. We use purely objective criteria in making our decision …”

  “Tell that to the widows of the guys that died,” the colonel said. He shook his head disgustedly and turned away from Norman.

  What an idiot, Norman thought. Trying to blame me or my office for the deaths of two flyers because of a cost-analysis report. There were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of factors involved in every accident—it couldn’t all be attributed to budget cuts. He was considering telling the guy off, but he saw the staff wheeling carts of personnel folders down the hallway, and he kept silent as they took seats and got ready to work.

  In a nutshell, Norman observed, careers were made or destroyed by a simple numbers game. The Selection Board Secretariat’s staff members wheeled in a locked lateral file cabinet on wheels with almost four hundred Officer Selection Reports, or OSRs, in them. Although there was supposedly no time limit on how long each panel member considered each OSR, the board members were asked to finish up the first round of scoring in the first week. That meant they had no more than about five minutes to score each candidate.

  Five minutes to decide a career, Norman thought as he opened the first file. Five minutes to decide whether this person deserved to be promoted, or should stay where he was, or even if he or she should even be in the Air Force to begin with.

  Well, maybe it won’t be that hard, Norman thought as he scanned the OSR. The first thing he saw on the right side of the folder was the candidate’s photo, and this guy was a mess. Hair too long, touching the ears. A definite five o’clock shadow. Cockeyed uniform devices. Norman had a chart available that showed the proper order ribbons should be displayed on the uniform, but he didn’t need to refer to it to know that the Air Force Training Ribbon was not placed over the Air Force Achievement Medal.

  Each board member had a checklist of things to look for in a personnel jacket, along with a sheet for notes or questions and a scoring summary block. Each jacket was given a score between 6.0 and 10.0 in half-point increments. The average score was 7.5. Norman decided he would start at the maximum score and deduct half points for every glitch. So this guy was starting out with a 9.5, and he hadn’t even gotten to the job performance and effectiveness reports and ratings yet. Below
the photo was a list of the officer’s decorations and awards and an officer selection brief, outlining the candidate’s duty history. This guy was not wearing a ribbon he had been awarded, so Norman deducted another half point. How inept could one officer be?

  And yes, Norm noted that he was a flyer.

  On the left side of the OSR were the candidate’s OERs, or Officer Effectiveness Reports, starting with the most recent. Norman scanned through the files, paying close attention to the three rater’s blocks on the back page. Each OER was endorsed by the officer’s three sequential superior officers in his chain of command. He received either a “Below Average,” “Average,” “Above Average,” or “Outstanding” rating, plus a block below for personal comments. An OER with all “Outstanding” ratings was called a “firewalled” OER, and all officers seeking promotion aspired to it.

  After filling out hundreds of OERs in his career, Norman knew that anything short of an “Outstanding” rating was cause for concern, and he dinged a candidate for any “Above Average” or lower ratings. But since some commanders always “firewalled” OERs, Norman had to take a quick glance at the rater’s comments, even on “firewalled” OERs. He looked for examples of deficiencies or nuances in the wording to suggest what the rater really thought of the candidate. Most all raters used the word “Promote” in his comments, so if the word was missing, that was a big ding—the rater obviously did not think the candidate was worthy of promotion, so why should Norman? If the candidate was really good, the rater might put “Promote ASAP” or “Promote without fail;” if the candidate was exceptionally good, he might say “Promote immediately” or “Promote ahead of contemporaries.” Some were more creative: They sometimes wrote “Promote when possible,” which was not a strong endorsement and earned a ding, or “Promote below the zone immediately without fail” for a really outstanding candidate. Sometimes they just said “Promote,” which Norman considered a big ding too.

  By the first lunch break, Norman was slipping right into the groove, and he realized this was not going to be a really difficult exercise. Patterns began to emerge right away, and it soon becomes clear who the really great officers were and who were not. Out of thirty or so OSRs, Norman had only marked a few above 8.0. Most of his scores drifted below the 7.5 average. No one was ranked over 8.5—not one. Norman had to adjust his own scoring system several times because he started to read better and better OERs and realized that what he thought were good comments were actually average comments. Occasionally, he had to ask the flyers what this school or that course was. Norman disliked acronyms on OERs and dinged a candidate for them if he couldn’t understand what it meant—especially if he or she was a flyer.

  So far, Norman was not too impressed. Some of the candidates they were reviewing were above-the-primary-zone candidates, meaning they had not been promoted when they should have been, and they seemed worse than the others. It was as if they had already given up on the Air Force, and it showed—missing or outdated records, snotty or whining letters to the board attached to the record, old photos, and evidence of stagnated careers. Most were in-the-primary-zone candidates, meeting the board at the proper time commensurate with their date of rank, and most of them had a polished, professional, well-managed look.

  Most all of the flyers’ OERs were “firewalled,” and Norman scrutinized those even more closely for telltale signs of deficiency. The nonflying line officer OERs always seemed more honest, forthright evaluations. The flying community was indeed a closed fraternity, and Norman took this opportunity to take some chips out of their great steel wall every chance he could. If a flyer’s OER wasn’t firewalled, Norman mentally tossed it aside, taking big dings out of the score.

  The chips he was breaking off flyers’ OERs quickly became chunks, but Norman didn’t care. If a flyer was really great, he would get a good rating. But just being a flyer wasn’t a plus in Norman’s book. Everyone had to earn their score, but the flyers would have to really shine to pass Norman’s muster.

  The British Indian Ocean Territories, or BIOT, was a chain of fifty-six islands covering twenty-two thousand square miles of the Indian Ocean south of India. The total land area of the BIOT was only thirty-six square miles, about half the size of the District of Columbia. Located only four hundred miles south of the equator, the weather was hot and humid year-round. The islands were far enough south of the Indian subcontinent, and the waters were colder and deeper, so typhoons and hard tropical storms were rare, and the islands only received about one hundred inches of rain per year. If there had been any appreciable landmass or infrastructure in the BIOT, it might be considered an idyllic tropical paradise. The tiny bits of dry land and coconut groves on the islands had saved many hungry, storm-tossed sailors over the centuries since the islands were discovered by Western explorers in the late seventeenth century, although the reefs had also claimed their share of wayward sailors as well.

  The largest and southernmost island in the BIOT was Diego Garcia, a V-shaped stretch of sand, reefs, and atolls about thirty-four miles long, with a thirteen-mile-long, six-mile-wide lagoon inside the V. The British Navy claimed Diego Garcia and other islands of the Chagos Archipelago in the late eighteenth century and established copra, coconut, and lumber plantations there. The island was an isolated and seldom-used stopover and resupply point for the British Navy until after the independence of India, when it began to languish. Native fishermen from the African nation of Mauritius claimed Diego Garcia, citing historical and cultural precedents, and it appeared as if the British might hand over the island to them.

  The United States stepped into the fray in December of 1966. Eager for a listening post to monitor Soviet Navy activity in the Indian Ocean during the height of the Cold War, the United States signed a bilateral agreement to improve and jointly administer the BIOT for defensive purposes. The native Iliots on the islands were relocated back to Mauritius with a promise that if the islands were no longer needed for defense, they would be returned to them. The U.S. Navy immediately landed a Seabee battalion on Diego Garcia and began work.

  Seven years later, the U.S. Navy commissioned a “naval communications facility”—an electronic and undersea surveillance post—on Diego Garcia, along with limited naval-vessel support facilities and an airstrip. Five years later, the facility was expanded, making it a full-fledged—albeit still remote—Navy Support Facility. The few dozen sailors assigned there—donkeys, left over from copra and coconut-harvesting operations, far outnumbered humans—lived in primitive hootches and lived only for the next supply ship to take them off the beautiful but lonely desert island.

  But the facility took on a more important role when the Soviet Navy began a rapid buildup of forces in the region in the late 1970s, during the oil crisis, and during the Iranian Revolution of the early 1980s. With Western influence in the Middle East waning, Diego Garcia suddenly became the only safe, secure, and reliable port and air facility in southwest Asia. Diego Garcia became a major forward predeployment and prepositioning base for the U.S. Central Command’s operations in the Middle East. The facilities were greatly expanded in the early 1980s to make it “the tip of the spear” for American rapid-deployment forces in the region. The U.S. Navy began flying P-3 Orion antisubmarine patrols from Diego Garcia, and several cargo ships loaded with fuel, spare parts, weapons, and ammunition were permanently prepositioned in the little harbor to support future conflicts in the southwest Asia theater.

  There was only one highway on the island, the nine-mile-long main paved road leading from the Naval Supply Facility base on Garcia Point to the airfield. Until just a few years ago, both the road and the runway were little more than crushed coral and compacted sand. But as the importance of the little island grew, so did the airfield. What was once just a lonely pink runway and a few rickety shacks, euphemistically called Chagos International Airport, was now one of the finest airfields in the entire Indian Ocean region.

  With the advent of Operation Desert Shield, the rapid buildup of fo
rces in the Middle East to counter the threat of an Iraqi invasion of the Arabian Peninsula, Diego Garcia’s strategic importance increased a hundredfold. Although the tiny island was almost three thousand miles away from Iraq, it was the perfect place to deploy long-range B-52 Stratofortress bombers, which have an unrefueled range in excess of eight thousand miles. As many as twenty B-52G and -H model bombers and support aircraft deployed there. When the shooting started, the “BUFFs”—Big Ugly Fat Fuckers—began ’round-the-clock bombing missions against Iraqi forces, first using conventionally armed cruise missiles and then, once the Coalition forces had firm control of the skies over the region, pressing the attack with conventional gravity bombs. One-half of all the ordnance used in Operation Desert Storm was dropped by B-52 bombers, and many of them launched from Diego Garcia.

  The lone runway on Diego Garcia was eleven thousand feet long and one hundred and fifty feet wide, only four feet above sea level, on the western side of the island. At the height of the air war against Iraq, the aircraft parking ramps were choked with bombers, tankers, transports, and patrol planes; now, only days after the Coalition cease-fire, only a token force of six B-52G and -H bombers, one KC-10 Extender aerial-refueling tanker/cargo plane, and three KC-135 Stratotanker aerial-refueling tankers remained, along with the usual and variable number of cargo planes at the Military Airlift Command ramp and the four P-3 Orion patrol planes on the Navy ramp. Things had definitely quieted down on Diego Garcia, and the little atoll’s peaceful, gentle life was beginning to return to normal after months of frenetic activity.

  Before the war there was only one aircraft hangar on the island for maintenance on the Navy’s P-3 Orion subchasers—the weather was perfect, never lower than seventy-two degrees, never warmer than ninety degrees, with an average of only two inches of rain per week, so why work indoors?—but as the conflict kicked off the U.S. Air Force hastily built one large hangar at the southernmost part of the airfield complex, as far away from curious observers in the harbor as possible. Many folks speculated on what was in the hangar: Was it the stillunnamed B-1B supersonic intercontinental heavy bomber, getting ready to make its combat debut? Or was it the rumored supersecrect stealth bomber, a larger version of the F-117 Goblin stealth fighter? Some even speculated it was the mysterious Aurora spy/attack plane, the hypersonic aircraft capable of flying from the United States to Japan in just a couple of hours.