Part I ends on the last day of the Gulf War a day that was no celebration for Andrews. He spent part of it on his back in the Iraqi desert--his right leg broken, his hands raised in surrender. Several soldiers from what was likely a Republican Guard unit were running towards him, bullets from their AK-47s rearranging sand uncomfortably close to his head.

Code One is extremely pleased to share excerpts from this first-hand account of one of the most highly decorated pilots of the Gulf War. Part II will appear in our April issue.

31 December 1990

Wow! New Year's eve in the Middle East. Could anyone at Hahn have anticipated this a year ago? Definitely not me! But you know something? I definitely wouldn't want to spend New Year's with any other group (besides Stacey (Andrews' wife) and the kids) than a bunch of Americans about 8,000 miles from the United States. Being so far away from home really gives one a sense of purpose. I know we can't hold a candle to the boys from Shaw (who have been here for five months), but we're all glad to be here for the show.

2 January 1991

Got "The Plan" and my heart soared. I am so damn proud to be part of it. The guys that wrote this plan have put together an incredible air campaign. I was worried that when push came to shove, the right people weren't going be in the places where they'd be needed. I am not nearly as apprehensive as before.

4 January

First flight today. Severe rust. Couldn't handle the radio, but at least stayed in formation.

7 January

I felt real confident in the guys in the flight today. Everybody did a good job.

8 January

I flew a CAS [close air support--air missions to support ground troops] mission about fifty miles from Kuwait this eve. Wow! It was busy. We did well, but it was a real workout. We flew northwest through the Persian Gulf. That felt strange - you could clearly see Iran to the east and Saudi Arabia to the west. The radios were full of American voices. The ships below were part of American fleets. You could hear the US Navy challenging unidentified aircraft and ships on the Guard frequency [an open emergency radio frequency that can be heard over other frequencies in the cockpit]. An American F-18 intercepted and identified us. After getting to our CAS target, I was damn sure glad I'm not in the Army. Those guys are on the surface of the moon, about 1,000 miles from civilization.

I continue to pray for peace and hope for tomorrow, but expect the worse.

9 January

Hopeful for the Geneva Talks. Maybe we can avoid this.

10 January

Failed talks. This is an emotional roller coaster.

13 January

No peace hopes. Just a question of when does it start?

14 January

Phoned home. Stacey was surprised and sounded worried. Shannon told me quite excitedly about her first Barbie. Choked me up. I'm glad that I'm 3,000 miles from the kids to fight this war. When I saw them everyday back in December, I got misty and choked up five or six times a day, thinking of their lives without a dad. I still have a big agenda for those kids. They're going to love reading because of all the books we're going to read aloud on my lap. I sincerely hope that this is going to be a "Turkey Shoot" like the DO [director of operations] says.

15 January

Deadline's gone.

16 January

Tensions are running high - everybody is doing a lot of thinking and, kind of quiet -subdued. How about grim determination?

17 January

Went to bed last night knowing that B-52s were on their way and the Stealth fighters were briefing. It was hard to get much sleep. We heard the first takeoffs from the wing go at about four a.m. They came low over Tent City with afterburners cooking. A lot of guys went outside and cheered. When the news of the attack hit the radio, Bags [nickname of a fellow pilot] and I were cheering and giddy with excitement. It sounded like the Stealths, Beagles, Varks, and Tomahawks kicked ass. Our Sabres who went downtown had big eyes when they talked about all the SAM launches all around them, how the RWR [radar-warning receiver] scope was filled and how the SAMs seemed unguided.

18 January

Hit Tallil airfield at sunset. I led the last eight ships of a forty-ship strike force. The target area popped up suddenly. I found it on radar and took my best guess where our target - the wing headquarters - was. Joey and I let our 2,000-pounders fly. The RTB [return to base] was exciting, zooming out on top of the clouds at 40,000 feet in afterburner. Like a drag race, weaving and billowing white contrails behind.

23 January

The package plan was still good from yesterday and our support was eight Eagles, four Weasels, and two Ravens. The briefing was short and standard, so I had a lot of extra time in the cockpit before start. I thought, This sure looks like war (Mk-84s, chaff, flares, gun, ECM pod), but it doesn't feel like war. It seemed like a normal day at work. The flight went as if on rails. The Weasels and EF-111s joined us en route--perfectly. Inbound from the IP [initial point], we saw many HARMs streaking inbound. They were great. We got a bit of RWR from a SA1 and an antiaircraft gun. Tail-end Charlie got a steady SAM lock-on and four launches. He jettisoned everything and survived a ninety-second SA1 engagement. He's still pulling seat cushion out of his backside! I saw the target from about ten miles out (or more). The roll in was exciting, finally hitting something we could see.

28 January

Our orders were to press north from the neutral zone towards Tallil, looking for surface defenses. Then we were supposed to turn eastward and: to the Tigris-Euphrates basin and fly down the river to Kuwait. It was an eerie tour. We passed over several Iraqi fighter bases. We looked hard for MiGs, in the open or in the sky. However, we didn't see anything. Some of the fields had dozens of bomb craters. I also saw some Tab-Vs [highly reinforced aircraft shelters] cracked wide open and scorched black. They looked like split-open clamshells.

2 February

Flew our four ship into Kuwait. We went in over a cloud deck and then we were between cloud decks. I was sweating the clouds on the way into the target, but they cooperated and we flew out from the undercast about ten, miles from the target. Joey and I went in first. We hit an MRL [multiple rocket launcher] battery dug by the coast. I then directed Ivan and Pete onto the HQ area inside a deep berm. They plastered it. All four of Pete's CBUs hit inside the berm. Setter 41 [callsign of subsequent flight] hit some launchers at the site ten minutes later with Mk-82s. They said the headquarters was scorched and the MRL battery was still burning.

8 February

We flew three missions today, carrying four Mk-84s each on every sortie--quite a manly load. The jet just looks awesome with that bomb load (four 2,000 pounders and no drop tanks). It does, however, really make you sweat the gas. We went to southern Iraq and hit some lightly held positions. RTB was to an A-10 base in the middle of nowhere. It looked quite God-forsaken. The ramp, nothing more than a parallel taxiway, was littered with fuel blivets, bombs, Mavericks, and ammo loaders. What a target it would be!

On Sortie No. 2, we flew to the Kuwait City-Basra autobahn for road recce. Our goal was to stop trucks. The bombs going off in Kuwait are awesome. You can see two or three areas getting hit at all times. Sortie No. 3 was more of the same.

13 - 15 February

Worked as the night chief of mission planning. The night shift stinks, but was glad not to be shot at. I really don't relish being shot at whatsoever. But one thing stands out--when I'm down the chute, it doesn't matter what's out there. I'm 100 percent in the HUD, on the bomb fall line, and in the pipper! I'll worry about the AAA after I feel the clunk.

24 February

(This entry is from a Ivan Thomas's journal. Thomas flew as Andrews' wingman on this mission.)

It was 24 February, and the coordinates our Pointer scout had passed to us were well north of where we normally went to go pound the Republican Guard. In fact, I'd misplotted the coordinates on my map, only realizing my mistake as I saw the Euphrates River passing underneath me. The coordinates weren't even on my mission map of Kuwait and the area of Iraq along the border, but farther north. I pulled the big scale map out of my g-suit pocket and replotted the target.

I'd been unable to understand the target description we'd been given, but I had the coordinates and would ask my flight lead, Bill "Psycho" Andrews, if I had any questions once we got to the target area. As we pressed northwards, I heard a good deal of talk on the emergency frequency (Guard). It sounded like someone on the ground was directing fire pretty close to their own position. Must be way out west, I thought, where the airborne units are advancing into Iraq to begin the ground war. Too bad we can't help them out.

Soon after we passed over the Euphrates, I noticed that the calls were getting louder. The fighters the ground guys were talking to were our Pointer flight and a flight from Shaw in front of us. This was not going to be routine. I'd never done any Close Air Support with troops in contact. This definitely sounded dicey. As the flight ahead attacked, the Pointer flight described the situation to us. A team of Special Forces had been discovered by an Iraqi platoon well inside Iraq. They were fighting to survive until a rescue helicopter could come pick them up.

Until now in this war, we'd never had troops counting on us to save their lives. We'd just bombed enemy trucks and tanks in the desert. Whether these troops, American troops, lived or died might well be determined by the job we did. I felt the adrenaline rise in me, along with excitement, tension, and pressure. This was going to be a challenge like none before.

Pointer and the ground troops, using the same callsign as the radio frequency, Guard, were trying to talk our eyes onto their position. It was very hard because there were many small towns and river bends in the area. Nothing stood out as a prominent landmark. To make things worse, the sun was setting into a low haze, which made it impossible to see the ground when looking west. The Special Forces were trying everything they could to help us, even firing small flares that revealed their position to the Iraqis, but not to us. The frustration was incredible - trying to find the landmarks Pointer was using to narrow us in on their position. We knew that if we didn't spot them soon, our cluster bombs couldn't save them.

Finally, Psycho found the spot Pointer had been describing. It was time to go to work. In the hazy light, we couldn't see our guys, or the Iraqi troops moving towards them. I lost the small field they were in every time I glanced west and had to follow the landmarks again on the other side. It was like trying to spot a particular person in a crowded stadium. We dropped our first bombs carefully, and not too near our troops. We would walk successive drops in using corrections radioed to us from Guard. The cluster bombs made tight patterns on the ground, a line of small explosions that swept out an oval area almost the size of a football field. We used the patterns as references to move in closer with each pass. But there were a lot of football fields down there. We had to place these bombs in relation to the right one.

Slowly, the corrections radioed to us got smaller. Two ravines led to Guard's position. The enemy was moving up one of them. I picked the northern ravine. Wrong. But now we knew where to concentrate. Our flight of four planes had dropped about half of its sixteen cluster bombs when we began attacking the southern ravine. As we moved closer, Guard radioed the corrections back, always after an agonizing pause that made us fear that we screwed up and killed our own guys. "Those dropped behind them," Guard said in an incredibly steady voice. "Come farther up the ravine."

How could he be so calm with the enemy advancing on him, just a few hundred meters away? He was asking us to drop bombs very close to his position. One screw-up, one bad bomb, would make the whole situation academic. I went down the chute on my bomb run muttering to myself, "Don't f - - - up. Please don't let me f - - - this up." After that drop came the longest pause. Where was the correction? Talk, damn it, I silently cursed.

"Good hit. Good hit," came Guard's excited voice. He was fired up now that our bombs were hitting true. The next pilot down the chute put his bombs even closer to Guard's position. After another long and tortuous pause, Guard came over the radio yelling, "That's it! That's the one I've been waiting for!"

It was a moment I will never forget, a feeling of accomplishment and pride that I'd be lucky to ever feel again. I felt my face grinning hugely underneath my mask as I yelled and whooped to myself.

Guard asked if we could drop closer, but we were already pressing the safe minimums for this munition. One stray bomblet would be enough to leave us with regret the rest of our lives. So we dropped our last bombs on the closest spot we could, getting enthusiastic reviews from the ground with every drop. We were out of gas and out of bombs. Psycho was busy talking the new Pointer flight onto the good guys' position. It would be night soon, and the helicopter would come for them then. We'd broken the back of the Iraqi platoon's advance with those few, well-placed bombs. As we turned southward to leave, Guard told us he was sending someone to check the casualties in the ravine. The attack was over for now. We'd done it.

It took me an hour to come down off the adrenaline rush. I was still so excited and tense that I fell off the refueling boom of the tanker we had found to refuel us. I felt great. We'd helped out some fellow Americans through a jam about as tight as they come. The exhilaration was powerful, and I felt content as the tension and nerves slowly left my body.

We landed after dark. I taxied to my shutdown spot. I was just about to cut off the engine when I heard operations call me on the radio. What now? I wondered to myself as I called them up. As I did, I remembered that my very pregnant and overdue wife hadn't been home that morning. "It's a boy," said the voice over the radio. Our first baby had been born while I was somewhere over Iraq. It was the perfect end to the perfect sortie. I could hardly shut up as I climbed out of the jet, telling everyone within earshot about my new baby and the mission we had just had. In debrief, Psycho, Joey, Abner, and I all shook hands and clapped backs and grinned until our heads were about to split. We found out soon afterwards that the Special Forces had been pulled out, all safe. That night we drank the sweetest, coldest beers of the whole war.

27 February

Because of recent events, this entry was made on March 7th. I have many entries to catch up on.

Our mission for the day was Push CAS assigned to the 18th Airborne Corps. We came off the tanker almost 200 miles from the Iraqi border. We came in hanging on the edge of a stall at 28,000 feet with our heavy load of four CBU-87s each, our best anti-armor weapon. We contacted the 18th Corps, but they handed us off to a FAC already heading home. We went back to ABCCC [Airborne Battlefield Command Control and Communications] who gave us some coordinates to recce.

It was undercast with a few holes. Ivan and I dropped down through one of them, leaving Pete and Joey on top. I made about a 270-degree turn and then another 90-degree turn and saw almost nothing on the ground besides some dilapidated vehicles in a truck park and two movers on a north-south road. I had been under the clouds for less than a minute and was considering whether to get permission from ABCCC to hit the movers when I was hit.

The hit was sudden and unbelievably violent. My plane felt like it was wrenched out of my grasp. The nose pitched very hard down, yawed right, and rolled right all at once.

The view was incomprehensible. I couldn't interpret or understand what I was seeing. I recall seeing a lot of lights. The cockpit was out of focus. There was a bright pink and orange glow over the entire canopy.

I knew my machine was totally uncontrollable. It felt like it had been totally blown apart. I made no attempt at the radio: I didn't think it would work, and I didn't think I could delay my ejection for an instant. I looked down and grabbed for the handle with both hands. If the g forces were too severe for a safe ejection, it didn't matter. I was literally grabbing for my life. Every fraction of a second counted.

I found the handle, closed my eyes, and pulled with both hands. I felt a tremendous force. According to the flight manual, the canopy blows off and is followed a fraction of a second later by the seat. I don't remember any of these details. I just felt an extreme wind rush and a tremendous suction that pulled me out of the aircraft. I kept my eyes closed. When free of the aircraft, I felt a great clutter around me. My classified materials, authenticators, charts, list of contact points, and lineup cards were being blown off me. (I also lost my glasses and visor.)

A moment later, I felt the chute open. I was in a different world. I opened my eyes and heard the blowing wind and the sounds of battle--fire from numerous machine guns and AAA pieces. I felt motionless, as if permanently suspended above the Iraqi desert. I reached into my g-suit and pulled out my spare pair of glasses and my radio. I hit the emergency beeper and then called, "Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is Mutt 41 on Guard."

I described my surroundings to my mates - hardball east-west road, a burning factory, another burning item (which turned out to be my jet). I did a four-line jettison and tried to steer downwind to cover the most distance. But there wasn't much wind. I probably did about two 360s without covering much ground.

About this time, I realized that the Iraqi troops were shooting at me. Some big 23mm tracer rounds came zipping by from behind. I then heard all kinds of rounds shooting through the air around me. I started to scream on my radio: "They're firing at me in the straps. They're shooting at my canopy!" I kept describing my position. I saw some Iraqi ground troops close by and looked away from them.

The ground came up damn quick after being so far away for so long. It smacked me hard. From the hit, I knew my right leg was broken. I released my chute and tried to move, but no dice. I described my position on the radio from some big explosions to my northeast. A couple of Iraqi soldiers were coming at me and firing their AK-47s. I called over the radio, "They're close. They're attacking me!" Their shots became more accurate as they approached. When they were about 100 feet away from me, I decided I'd better try to see what I could do to get them to stop shooting. So I dropped the radio and raised my hands. They stopped shooting and motioned me to get up. I shook my head that I couldn't and they closed upon me.

Part 2