by Mark Bowden
Among the squadron’s recorded collection of audio-video “greatest hits” was the artful destruction of a purported Taliban building in Kandahar. Last summer I reviewed the event with a group of crew members at their base in Idaho. On the monitor we watched a negative black-and-white thermal image of a building at the center of the city. Vehicles and people were moving on the street out front. Abruptly four black darts flashed into the picture from the upper left-hand side, quick as an eye blink, and the screen was filled with a black splash.
On the recording the gleeful voice of a wizzo named Buzzer shouted, “Shack, baby! Die like the dogs that you are!”
We all sat in silence for a moment as the outburst hung awkwardly in the air. Buzzer is known for raw commentary like this, and months removed from the heat of battle, with a writer there and all, the six crew members in the room were clearly having second thoughts about having played this particular clip. On the screen, in the form of tiny black dots, people could be seen emerging from the flaming building, fleeing down the street.
Finally, Slokes spoke. His face creased with disapproval, he said sternly, “That’s just wrong.” He held his expression for a few seconds, and no one in the room was sure about whether to take him seriously. Then he grinned. Everyone laughed.
In the early weeks of the campaign the American effort to topple the Taliban and rout al Qaeda was not showing big results. By late October there were signs that the campaign was getting bogged down. With winter approaching, skeptics predicted that experienced Taliban and al Qaeda fighters might hang tough for years, as they had two decades earlier against the Soviet Union. According to The New York Times, Ahmed Rashid, one of the foremost authorities on the Taliban, was predicting that the Taliban leaders and their fighters could survive for “at least six months.” R. W. Apple, the veteran Times news analyst, invoked the historically loaded term “quagmire.”
On November 13 Kabul fell. Three weeks after that the Taliban fled Kandahar, their final stronghold, and jubilant citizens danced in the streets, tearing down Taliban flags and raising the traditional black, red, and green Afghan banner. The heart of the American military campaign had taken exactly two months.
The turning point, as experienced from the cockpit of an F-15, was the introduction on the ground of small numbers of U.S. soldiers—Rangers, Delta Force, and the Air Force’s own combat controllers—known as forward air controllers, or FACs, whose voices started crackling into the fliers’ headsets in late October. These extraordinarily brave stealth operators found themselves alone or in small groups deep in enemy territory, calling down air strikes and orchestrating what quickly became victory. They had parachuted or been helicoptered into Afghanistan at night, and had been left on the ground to fend for themselves. Some Special Forces teams, Green Berets, went to work helping to mobilize friendly Afghan forces against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Others usually hunkered down in dangerous places—the vicinity of airports, forts, and enemy troop concentrations, for example—to become the forwardmost eyes and ears of the air assault.
Tank was flying wing on October 25 on a four-plane mission from Kandahar up to Mazar-i-Sharif. He listened in on the communications as a team of F-16s dove into their bombing runs. To Tank’s delight, the jets were talking to a ground FAC. When the Lawn Darts had shot their load, the F-15s moved in and started working with the operative. The landscape below was all enemy-controlled territory, but somewhere in the stark hills was this American voice and a keen pair of eyes. The ground FAC was trying to coordinate an attack on a collection of enemy tanks and trucks. This flight was code-named Zesty (like many F-15 sorties).
“Can you ID a vehicle, Zesty?” the ground FAC asked.
“We’re at twenty-five thousand feet,” answered Stab, one of the pilots, meaning, “Not likely.”
“Do you see the main road?” the ground FAC asked.
“Roger.”
“Any vehicle north of that road is bad. The good guys are all on horses and camels.”
Slokes and Snitch were in awe of the guys on the ground, who were so far from anything friendly, huddled down between rocks on cold mountainsides, eating their packaged meals (or bugs and snakes), and sleeping in bags on hard terrain, while the Bold Tigers dined on steak and lobster, watched European MTV, and slept in air-conditioned comfort. It made the pilots doubly disappointed when they were unable to hit what the ground FACs wanted them to.
One night Slokes and Snitch were assigned to a Special Forces team perched temporarily on a hillside just south of Kandahar, not far from the city’s airport. Four miles above, at 20,000 feet, the fliers watched as the ground FAC waved an infrared laser pointer to draw them a map on the hillside. He traced a waving line, and gradually narrowed its swing down to a point. “We’re here,” one Special Forces operative told them.
He was part of a team of eight men, code-named Texas One Seven, with whom the Bold Tigers would work for weeks. Using the steep hillside to provide protective cover from the north, the eight had set up camp in a valley, complete with a big plastic bag of fuel, called a bladder, to serve as a filling station for their four-wheeled vehicles.
There was one ground controller working near Kabul whom the crews dubbed the Crack FAC, because his ground-to-air instructions were so vague and at times so misleading that he seemed to be on crack. Not that they didn’t respect the guy. He must have been, as they put it, “crazy brave” to be down where he was. But whenever Boss Man ordered a crew to work with the guy, there were groans in the cockpit. The Crack FAC didn’t sound any older than nineteen. (The squadron never found out who he was.)
“Okay, you see the first ridgeline?” he said on one run. “Go one ridge over.” From the cockpit at 20,000 feet, the world was made up of ridgelines.
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” the pilot told him.
On one occasion he pleaded with a crew to drop on a village. “Just go ahead and drop a bomb,” he said.
“We can’t do that, dude,” a pilot nicknamed Bait replied, meaning they couldn’t just wipe out an entire village.
“There haven’t been any good guys in that village for years,” the Crack FAC argued.
“I might hit you,” Bait said.
“You’re not going to hit me, man, I’m standing in snow.”
Still, the crews declined to drop their bombs.
But even the Crack FAC got better at communicating, and the crews grew fonder of him. After directing a strike on a Taliban tank that had begun firing on his position, a relieved Crack FAC called back, “Zesty, that was excellent!”
On the last day of October, just before the course of the air war started to turn dramatically, a Strike Eagle flown by Zuni with a wizzo named Gunner, veterans both, got a call from Spartan, directing it north to help some U.S. forces under fire. With a full load of GBU-12s and fuel, the jet was what the crews call a “pig in space,” and flew at what seemed to them a snail’s pace. Once in the vicinity, they started calling for Tiger Three, the ground FAC. When his voice came up into the headphones, it was clear they were dealing with a cool customer.
“Hey, Zesty, I’m ready to give a nine-line brief,” he said—jargon for a quick assessment of the situation. He wanted them to get right to work. What he needed wasn’t going to be easy. This was a daylight sortie, but cloud cover had been building. Now the crew could see nothing below but an ocean of cotton. Here and there mountain peaks poked through. Zuni wanted to know exactly how urgent the situation was.
“Tiger Three, this is Zesty. Are you under fire?”
“Roger, Zesty. We are under fire by tank.”
That was about as urgent as things could get. The two fliers were going to have to try something. Zuni asked if the ground FAC had the capability of changing his laser code to steer the F-15’s bombs. He did, so it was theoretically possible to drop the bombs into the clouds and let him take over.
At first the fliers struggled to relay the numbers of their laser code through the static. The
n Zuni asked the ground FAC to read him the latitude and longitude coordinates for the tanks. The ground FAC proceeded to read out a list of numbers, which Gunner quickly realized were calculated somewhat differently from what he was used to. For some inexplicable reason the Army uses a system different from the Air Force’s—one of those interservice snafus that have cropped up throughout the history of American warfare. The Air Force uses degrees, minutes, and thousandths of a minute, whereas the Army uses degrees, minutes, and seconds. All the numbers would have to be converted, and Gunner didn’t have a chart.
“I don’t have a nine-line card,” he complained. “I’ve got a fucking piece of paper.”
So at 20,000 feet, with friendly forces taking fire beneath an opaque canopy of clouds, flying a multimillion-dollar aircraft equipped with the U.S. military’s state-of-the-art targeting software, Gunner went to work with a pencil, a piece of paper, and the calculator on his Casio watch. He has a degree in aerospace engineering with a minor in physics, but this was going to call for long-dormant computational skills.
Gunner worked frantically. Under the pressure of the moment, hurtling forward at hundreds of miles per hour, he felt as if his brain were functioning at half speed as he pounded away on the tiny keys of his calculator. He was muttering to himself, “Ah, he gave me two-nine-point-six-nine. I made that four-five—shit! Four-five, three-seven, oh-six, five. And he gave me six-nine-two-two-point-four-one. I made that a point-seven…”
The jet moved into heavy clouds and kept descending, hoping for clearer skies.
“Zesty, when do I turn on the laser?” the ground FAC asked.
“Wilco, stand by,” Zuni told the ground FAC. Then he said to his wizzo, “As soon as you get it in, Gunner, I’m going.”
“You’re good,” Gunner said with a sigh. He had just punched in the last conversion.
They now asked Tiger Three for an elevation reading, and once more the numbers had to be converted. Gunner started pounding away again on his watch.
“That’ll make it—ah, goddammit! That’ll make it sixteen hundred and six-nine feet for elevation.”
The jet was still socked in by clouds. In a land of high peaks it wasn’t safe to fly low with zero visibility for long.
“I don’t think I want to go underneath this, Gunner,” Zuni said.
“Nope,” the wizzo agreed. They would have to release the bomb blind.
“Turn your laser on,” Zuni instructed the ground FAC.
“Roger. Laser on.”
“I want you to keep it on. Keep it on for at least about a minute and a half.”
“Our laser will only allow sixty seconds,” the ground FAC said.
“Okay, turn your laser off,” Zuni instructed immediately, realizing that the battery would be dead by the time the ground FAC could pick up the bombs.
“Okay,” Gunner said. “Five seconds.”
“Turn your laser on now,” Zuni told the ground FAC.
“Roger,” came the voice from the ground. “Laser on.”
“Weapon away,” Zuni said. “Weapon away.”
Zuni turned the jet and headed steeply up out of the clouds. Things got quiet. There was just the sound of the F-15 and the inhaling and exhaling of its anxious pilot and wizzo, waiting. Thirty seconds. Half the known age of the universe. At thirty seconds Zuni said hopefully, “You should have impact.”
Nothing. More quiet breathing. Then, crackling in their headphones, “Zesty one-one. Laser off. Shack on target.”
The pilot and the wizzo cheered in the cockpit.
“Prepare for immediate reattack,” Tiger Three said.
Making one run after another for the next twenty minutes, Zuni and Gunner repeated this procedure, doing the conversions, dropping the bombs blind, and waiting for the report back from the ground. Between runs the ground FAC changed the batteries in his laser.
Down under the clouds, unbeknownst to Zuni and Gunner, a miracle had taken place. When the squadron met with the ground FAC months later, he explained how things had looked from his end. He had been with a Northern Alliance unit equal in number to the Taliban forces but outgunned. With the Taliban fighters stretched in front of them in tanks, the Northern Alliance fighters were about to withdraw when the ground FAC persuaded them to wait for air support. This was early in the ground war, and the local fighters were still dubious of their new allies’ technological claims. The Northern Alliance fighters eyed the opaque cloud cover skeptically. Who could hit anything through that? What could these scruffy American soldiers who showed up at their camps in teams of two or three accomplish in a real battle on unfamiliar terrain? What did they know about fighting? Many of the Northern Alliance soldiers were veterans of numerous campaigns. They didn’t need Americans to tell them what they could or could not do on familiar battlefields. They knew when they were overmatched. Some of them were already falling back.
Then, like a thunderbolt, the first bomb blew up the lead Taliban tank. Minutes later another bomb shot through the clouds and destroyed a second tank. This happened again and again, until the imposing armored force arrayed before them was in smoking ruins. Mystified but jubilant, the Northern Alliance forces descended from the hills, routing the Taliban troops. It was a preview of what would happen in the coming weeks all over the country. How could one fight a foe that could rain pinpoint destruction through the clouds, day or night, 24/7?
When it was over, an exhausted Gunner complained to Zuni, “The recruiter said there would be no math in the cockpit.”
After the ground FACs arrived, in late October, things moved fast. Mazar-i-Sharif fell, and then Kabul, and then Kandahar, marking the formal collapse of the Taliban. In the end the entire armada of fighters, AWACS, jammers, tankers, and rescue planes was dancing in the skies over Kandahar, every crew eager for a chance to do its thing, trying to stay out of the other crews’ paths. The relentless pounding broke the spirits of the Taliban, whose forces began to defect in ever-larger numbers.
By mid-November most concentrations of enemy fighters would disperse at the sound of a jet overhead. Some of the more stubborn ones, however, continued to hang tough. The F-15 crews would spot them at camps in the hills, but neither the jet noise nor even bombing runs seemed to faze them. But when they started hearing the click! click! click! of the servo motors steering a GBU-12 in for the kill, they would begin fleeing in all directions. By then, of course, it was too late. In truth, the only safe place to be was underground, and with bunker busters, and Special Forces guys prowling the hills, even the caves became unsafe. Some thought they could escape in a speeding car or truck, and a few years ago they would have been right—but Baldie’s grille shot demonstrated the folly of that tactic. Afghanistan was the greatest pickle run in history.
The science of war will keep advancing. A half century from now the exploits of the Bold Tigers over Afghanistan will be as anachronistic as Saint-Exupéry’s battling biplanes. Snitch’s grandfather, a retired military pilot, clips and sends him articles about the coming of an age of UAVs and teases him about fliers’ being “the limiting factor in aviation.” Pilots and wizzos of the future will “fly” their machines from comfy chairs at a safe distance, with both feet on solid ground and bathroom facilities close at hand. Today’s fighter jocks will reminisce to their grandchildren about what it was actually like to ride bullets high over the clouds, and to reign supreme in the night sky.
It will sound more glamorous then. For the fliers of the 391st it was sometimes hard to keep their eyes open on the ride home. Fatigue and relief from the stress of bombing runs would overtake them. Up there in their bubble canopy among the stars, to help stay awake, Baldie would chat nonstop with Two Fish, about their families, their futures, their friends, her plans to attend pilot school. (“Baldie, you took another one of those go pills, didn’t you?” Two Fish would ask.) Slokes and Snitch ate their Thanksgiving meal high over the peaks of Pakistan. Before the sortie they had stocked Styrofoam carryout meal boxes with drumsticks, stuffin
g, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie—there had been quite a spread in the mess hall. Neither had wanted to eat a big meal before setting out on a nine-to-ten-hour flight. But with their bomb racks empty, Slokes put the F-15 on autopilot, muttering his thanks into the thin air of dawn, and the two feasted, finding the food by the finger lights on their gloves. By that time the meal had grown very cold, but Slokes says, “It was definitely the most memorable Thanksgiving dinner of my life. Sorry, Mom.”
On those long rides home, in the hours before the sun cracked the planet’s purple rim, they would survey the jagged peaks of the Siahan Range and peer out past the Gulf of Oman to the great fires that leap up from the oil fields of the United Arab Emirates. The seaport of Dubai glimmered like a jewel on the Persian Gulf coast, lit up so improbably at the edge of the desert that it looked as if someone had misplaced Las Vegas. Sometimes thunderstorms in the distance would flash waves of light across the clouds for hundreds of miles and throw sudden shadows across their cockpit. The constellation Orion was always over their heads on those fall and winter nights, as familiar and as distant as it was at home. Sometimes the radar stations along the Iranian coast would paint the jets ominously, and alarms would go off in the cockpits—a reminder of hazards still lurking in the dark.
And some nights the sky would explode with shooting stars. Showers of light. They moved in blue streaks across the heavens, one or two every couple of seconds. There were so many that the squadron’s intel officer would warn the crews not to mistake them for enemy fire. Using their NOGs, the crews saw them as lines of bright white against a glowing field of green.
