In his talk to family members, Rock assured them that, thanks to the Internet, communication with their Marines would be easy compared to the old days. He cautioned against putting specifics of the deployment into e-mails or on blogs or websites. Rock would send periodic reports to the families by e-mail as he could. If VMM-263 took casualties, though, the news would be brought to those affected at home in person.
At the talk of casualties, some of the young women in the audience exchanged worried glances. Tears welled in some eyes. Rock’s wife, Maria, seated in the front row, whispered a reminder to him. “Thanks, m’love,” he cooed. Other wives giggled. “Aw,” some sighed sweetly. Rock urged the spouses not to make their Marines’ departure too emotional. “We have got a great bunch of Marines here, and they are about to step off and do great things,” Rock said. “It is a noble mission. It is a worthy thing that they are doing.”
* * *
If the news from Iraq wasn’t enough to worry the families, there were predictions of doom when the Osprey went there. In January, the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank critical of the Pentagon, published a report titled “V-22 Osprey: Wonder Weapon or Widow Maker? They warned us. But no one is listening.” Produced by Lee Gaillard, a freelance military writer who had served in the Marine Corps Reserve, the report said the Osprey was “an aircraft waiting to increase its casualty list single-handedly if it is ever permitted to go to a combat theater.” Gaillard’s forty-seven-page study drew heavily on the writings of Harry Dunn. It also cited a memo Rex Rivolo had written four years earlier for the Pentagon’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation. Rivolo’s memo set out his concerns about the Osprey’s “lack of an autorotation capability,” its “drastically different response” to vortex ring state compared to helicopters, and his belief that its proprotors gave it too little agility for combat. Dunn had obtained a copy of Rivolo’s memo just after the IDA expert wrote it, and a draft had turned up on Osprey critic Carlton Meyer’s G2mil.com website about the same time.
The memo contained arguments Rivolo had lost shortly after he made them in 2003. That year, he and chief Osprey test pilot Tom Macdonald argued the autorotation issue raucously in front of the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican with a son in the Marine Corps. Macdonald was among a group of Navair and Bell-Boeing officials Hunter called to his office to debate Rivolo after the congressman read Rivolo’s “Lingering Safety Concerns” memo, which called it “unconscionable” to send the Osprey into combat when it couldn’t autorotate to a safe landing. At Hunter’s insistence, Rivolo later explained his views to the commandant at the time, General Michael Hagee, in a Pentagon meeting attended by Macdonald, others from the Osprey program, and a half-dozen Marine Corps generals. “I never felt more futile in my life,” Rivolo told me. “Clearly they had been told to have this meeting, they did not want it, and basically they asked no questions, they raised no objections. I went through my little pro forma and they said ‘thank you very much’ and showed me out.”
Rivolo, like Harry Dunn, had lost the Osprey debate.
Four years later, the pilots of VMM-263 and others in the Osprey camp shrugged off Gaillard’s report as a rehash of old issues. Some Osprey supporters were taken aback, though, when the current commandant, General Conway, told a Defense Writers Group breakfast in March 2007 that the Osprey might go to Iraq and would do well there, then added: “I’ll tell you, there is going to be a crash. That’s what airplanes do over time. We’re going to have to accept that when it happens.”
Conway was stating the obvious—virtually every aircraft crashes at some time—and apparently trying to prepare the public for the blow should an Osprey go down in Iraq. His comments, though, seemed to reflect another fact as well. The Osprey had produced so many unpleasant surprises over the years, Marine Corps leaders were more edgy about sending it to Iraq than the pilots who were going to fly it there.
“We were going to be very careful with the very first deployment of this aircraft, first operational deployment,” the assistant commandant at the time, General Robert Magnus, told me. No one in the Marine Corps had a longer history with the Osprey than Magnus, who in the early 1980s, as a young major, had been the action officer perhaps most responsible for getting the program started. Magnus still believed the tilt-rotor had been the right way for the Marine Corps to go, that its ability to fly fast and far were going to rewrite the service’s tactics. Magnus and others at the top of the Marine Corps, though, didn’t want the Osprey’s past to prove prologue when it went to Iraq. “Our idea was to crawl, walk, run,” he explained. Marine leaders didn’t want critics to accuse them of being afraid to use the Osprey in combat, Magnus said, but they also didn’t want Rock’s squadron to feel they had to perform miracles “because the media was looking at them, which gets you back into the situation like at Marana, where you feel like you had to do something you might not be able to do.” This was one reason the Marine Corps turned down dozens of media requests to spend time with VMM-263 before it left for Iraq, to accompany the squadron on its way, or to visit the unit at Al Asad. “We also didn’t want to have a bunch of stuff on this airplane that was on the Web that Al Qaeda was looking at, because you can bet they would have loved to shoot down one of these airplanes,” Magnus added.
That cautious attitude also was reflected in the decision to send VMM-263’s Ospreys by ship rather than have them fly to Iraq from New River. The Marines had touted the Osprey’s ability to “self-deploy” for years, but no emergency required rushing VMM-263 to Iraq. There were practical reasons to send their Ospreys by ship as well. Six to eight KC-130 tankers, an aircraft in short supply, would be needed to refuel them if they flew. The hours spent flying would require mechanics to spend extra hours working on the Ospreys once they arrived at Al Asad, delaying the date they could start flying missions. There was also the chance that one or more would break down on the way and have to make a precautionary landing. That had happened in each of two transcontinental deployments VMM-263 had flown in the United States during training. It had happened again to one of two Ospreys the Marines flew from New River to Farnborough, England, for the big international air show there in July 2006.
On September 17, 2007, Rock and most of VMM-263’s other pilots flew their ten Ospreys, carrying baggage, tools, spare parts, and about sixty mechanics, to the USS Wasp as it sailed near the North Carolina coast. Twenty-six years to the month after Navy Secretary John Lehman had told the Marine Corps to buy a tiltrotor rather than another helicopter to replace its CH-46 Sea Knights, the Osprey was finally on its way to war.
* * *
The Wasp was roughly halfway to the Gulf of Aqaba when someone on the ship showed Rock something that turned his stomach: the most recent issue of Time magazine, dated October 8 but published earlier. Its cover boasted a “Special Investigation” of the Osprey titled “Flying Shame.” The cover illustration depicted an Osprey in flight, nacelles in helicopter mode, casting a shadow in the shape of a graveyard cross. The art was accompanied by this text: “It’s unsafe. It can’t shoot straight. It’s already cost 30 lives and $20 billion. And now it’s headed for Iraq. The long, sad tale of the V-22 Osprey. By Mark Thompson.”
Thompson, a veteran Pentagon correspondent and deputy Washington bureau chief for Time, described the Osprey’s hybrid method of flight and its painful history, from Vice President Dick Cheney’s failed attempt to cancel it for cost when he was defense secretary through the terrible crashes. The article focused most heavily on Rex Rivolo’s argument that the Osprey’s inability to autorotate was “unconscionable.” Rivolo declined to give Thompson an interview but the article quoted Rivolo’s “Lingering Safety Concerns” memo, written four years earlier and later leaked to Harry Dunn. Thompson also quoted VMM-263 pilot Captain Justin “Moon” McKinney, who said he and others who flew the Osprey would “turn it into a plane and glide it down” if they were to lose both engines. “I h
ave absolutely no safety concerns with this aircraft, flying it here or in Iraq,” McKinney told Time.
The article also raised an issue largely ignored in the past, emphasizing the Osprey’s lack of a forward-firing gun for self-defense, an original requirement that had been waived for years to save money and weight. Retired General James Jones, the former commandant, was quoted saying he thought the Osprey needed such a weapon and was disappointed it lacked one. VMM-263’s Ospreys were going to Iraq armed only with a 7.62-millimeter machine gun that could be fired out the rear ramp. Toward the end of his article, Thompson noted that the current commandant had predicted an Osprey would crash. The Osprey was “a radical aircraft crammed with compromises that may change combat forever,” the article concluded, but “may also kill a lot of Marines while doing little of note on the battlefield.”
Rock wasn’t bothered by the text, which in his view contained no news. The cover art with its shadow of a cross, however, and the date of the publication enraged him and his pilots. The cover was sacrilegious, Rock felt, and the timing calculated to shock and sell magazines. Rock couldn’t see any other purpose in predicting after the Osprey already was on its way to Iraq that it was going to kill Marines. “It was obviously aimed to inflame, not to educate, not to illuminate, not to help,” Rock said. “The timing was downright malicious. The content of the article didn’t shake my faith or the faith of any of my Marines. What it did is, it pissed me off, because I knew, correctly, the effect it would have on our families. Our families are back there reading all this.” The article scared many of them.
Magnus sent Time a letter calling the article “a one-sided, sensation-alistic view of the V-22 program, full of inaccuracies, and misleading to Time’s readers.” The magazine published his letter in its November 5, 2007, issue. Months later, Magnus was still angry about the cover story. “I’ve still got it sitting in my bathroom,” he told me. “I just haven’t used it for the purpose that I’d like to because it’s slick paper.”
Rock sent the families an e-mail to reassure them. Trust your Marines, he told them, they know what they’re doing. Later, when he saw the photo on the ready room bulletin board of the handmade sign reading “Fuck-U Mark Thompson,” Rock left it there. It was a good morale booster.
* * *
“I think we should do this again. It’s still about selling the aircraft.” Major Timothy Miller, thirty-four, was talking to Rock, Major Wesley Spaid, thirty-six, and Captain Sara Faibisoff, twenty-six. The four VMM-263 pilots were seated on wheeled office chairs at one end of the squadron’s ready room at Al Asad on a Saturday afternoon in December 2007, two months into their deployment. They were discussing a mission they had attempted that morning but had to scrub after one of four generators on the Osprey that Rock and Faibisoff were flying failed. They had been carrying Marine infantry on a search for insurgents in the desert when Rock decided he shouldn’t continue flying with the bad generator on a mission that could last hours. He wanted to fly back to base and get a different Osprey, but the infantry commander called off the mission instead. Rock was deeply disappointed. The flight had been the first time a ground commander had agreed to include Ospreys in a mission called “aeroscout,” an armed reconnaissance patrol flown by a “package” of aircraft including Cobra helicopter gunships and a Huey transport helicopter to carry the officer in charge. Ground commanders were used to doing aeroscout with heavy-duty CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters to carry troops and extra fuel for the other helicopters. VMM-263 was awaiting a shipment of equipment that would let its Ospreys carry extra fuel as well. In the meantime, Rock and his pilots wanted to start familiarizing ground commanders with the Osprey so they would start including it in combat missions.
VMM-263 would fly other aeroscout missions successfully during its seven months in Iraq, but the breakdown on the first attempt was frustrating for the pilots. It also wasn’t the first time one of their Ospreys had let them down. Two captains flying the sixth Osprey to depart the Wasp for the flight into Iraq on October 4 had made a precautionary landing at King Hussein International Airport in Aqaba, Jordan, after their cockpit display indicated faults in their flight control and hydraulic systems. A half-dozen VMM-263 mechanics were flown from the ship to Aqaba by helicopter as the rest of the Osprey squadron completed the hour-and-a-half flight to Al Asad. A damaged wire turned out to be the cause of the faults, but that wasn’t obvious at first, and it took the mechanics nearly three days to figure it out and fix the problem.
Other mechanical problems, especially with electrical devices in the Osprey’s rotor hubs called “slip rings,” lowered the squadron’s readiness rate, the number of aircraft available to fly every day, during its first couple of months at Al Asad. Like slip rings in helicopters, those in the Osprey proved sensitive to Iraq’s sand, nicknamed “moon dust” by troops for its talcum powder consistency. The problem eased after VMM-263’s mechanics devised a quick way to troubleshoot slip ring failures, but with that rough start, the squadron’s average readiness rate for the entire seven months was 68 percent—well below its goal. Mechanical problems kept the squadron from flying only five of five hundred missions it was assigned over the seven months, though, and the five “dropped” missions were in the first two months.
Like much of the Osprey’s history, the tiltrotor’s first use in a war didn’t turn out as a lot of people expected. The predictions of the critics who forecast disaster went unfulfilled. The closest call came when a piece of an absorbent pad inadvertently left in a fuel tank by a mechanic who had been working on it choked off the flow of fuel to one of an Osprey’s engines in flight. The pilots made an emergency landing with one engine powering both rotors, as contemplated in the original design. None of VMM-263’s Ospreys crashed or got shot up trying to land in hot zones. Only two were ever fired on, as far as the pilots could tell. One night some tracer rounds passed between two of the squadron’s Ospreys as they flew at low level over a residential neighborhood in Ramadi. Another night, between Ramadi and Baghdad, someone launched a rocket that fell far short of some Ospreys as they sped past at several thousand feet.
By the time VMM-263 arrived at Al Asad, the fighting and terrorist attacks that had made Anbar so dangerous a few months earlier had fallen dormant for the most part. A “surge” of thirty thousand additional troops President George Bush sent to Iraq in the summer of 2007 was one reason. More important, Sunni leaders in Anbar had turned on Al Qaeda in Iraq and begun working with U.S. commanders against the terrorists, who fled to other parts of the country. By October, the Marines in Anbar were left without a lot of fighting to do. There were no hot zones for the Osprey to take them into, no need for a forward-firing gun, no casualties for VMM-263 to evacuate, other than a Marine whose appendix ruptured on Christmas Eve. Captain Faibisoff and another pilot picked him up at an outlying base and rushed him to the hospital at Al Asad.
By December, Faibisoff and others among the pilots who had been excited by the prospect of flying in combat were actually bored. “I thought it was going to be a war,” she grumbled when I ran into her outside VMM-263’s headquarters at Al Asad that month. A quiet young woman with short hair and a wry grin, Faibisoff had graduated from the Naval Academy in 2003 with two of the twenty-two male pilots in VMM-263. She had opted for the Marine Corps and become a pilot to do something exciting. The war wasn’t living up to her expectations.
* * *
I was one of fewer than half a dozen journalists the Marines permitted to visit VMM-263 in Iraq. Headquarters Marine Corps hesitantly granted my request because I was writing this book, and because a couple of senior active and retired generals felt I had written about the Osprey fairly in the past. As a Washington correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, I had covered the Osprey off and on for twenty-two years. I had written about the battle the Marines waged to defeat Dick Cheney’s efforts to cancel it in the early 1990s. I had written about the crashes and redesign and retesting of the Osprey. I had been among the first reporters to
ride in the Osprey at New River on July 13, 2005, and had written an enthusiastic first-person account. I had flown in a variety of U.S. military transport helicopters during my career. Flying in the Osprey was like nothing else. Its power and speed and novelty made the ride exhilarating.
By the time I got to Al Asad, I was a familiar face to most of the pilots and many of the maintainers in VMM-263. I had begun following the squadron in February 2007, when I went to New River twice to interview Rock and others. I visited when they trained at the Marine Corps air station in Yuma, Arizona, that spring, and spent a week with them at New River in August.
Rock was cordial when I first met him in February but initially seemed cautious toward me. By August, he clearly was more comfortable with what I was doing, but when I saw him at Al Asad in December, he was all business, zeroed in on his mission. Escorted by a public affairs officer, I was largely free to roam the squadron’s rugged headquarters, a sand-colored, sandbag-surrounded one-story building that had been constructed when Al Asad was an Iraqi air base and whose plumbing had long ago fallen into disrepair. I could walk to maintenance offices in other buildings nearby or to the squadron’s hangar on the flight line, interview anyone who wasn’t too busy to talk, ask them whatever I liked. The mechanics were working in twelve-hour shifts around the clock seven days a week to keep their Ospreys flying. “When the kids go home, they’re tired,” observed Chief Warrant Officer 2 Carlos Rios, the maintenance material control officer.
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