Making Noise
We flew a lot of missions that didn’t require dropping bombs. On one such mission, a ground controller in a town said the al-Qaeda was trying to incite a riot among the local people. He asked us to fly low over the town to make some noise, to let them know we were there. We dropped down, blasted over the town, and put out a couple of flares. Sure enough, the flyover broke up the gathering. The al-Qaeda jumped in their trucks and left town.
– Lt. Col. Mike, 169th FW

High Density
We had a lot of threats in Iraq during Desert Storm. So the heavies would not get near the country. The fighters and bombers would go in there, do their business, and fly out. In OEF, we had to dodge heavies in the target area. Once our forces corralled al-Qaeda in the mountains for Operation Anaconda, we ended up with a target area about six miles in diameter. That’s the size of a postage stamp for a 500-knot fighter. Tankers, AWACs, B-52s, Rivet Joint, JSTARs, B-52s, B-1s, and Predators all piled up in this small target area. We tried to deconflict by altitude, and we had airplanes stacked up at all altitudes. They were further compressed by the height of the floor created by the mountainous area. Given the long distances and untried techniques for dealing with the detailed coordination required to bring all those air and ground assets together, the air operation was hugely successful. Our unit contributed greatly to the apparent goal of having assets with ordnance airborne over the AOR around the clock.
– Lt. Col. Mike, 169th FW

Special Forces
The Special Forces guys took over Afghanistan. We didn’t march in there with a big army. A handful of Special Ops guys went from Mazar-e Sharif down to Kandahar. The bombers and fighters acted as their artillery.
– Lt. Col. Mike, 169th FW

Purpose
I was tired and just a little irritable after a long night mission. I got out of the airplane with my combat vest, helmet bag, full piddle packs, lunch box, and all of the other accoutrements we had to carry. I couldn’t carry one more thing and I couldn’t be any more tired. I walked into the maintenance debrief area and looked at photos of the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Above the shots, our maintenance personnel had posted, “In case you’re wondering why you are here.” I could not complain. I remember that night better than I remember the details of any specific OEF mission.
– Lt. Col. Jay, 169th FW

Frustrations
Almost every mission was extremely frustrating. A GFAC would ask us to do something for him, but someone sitting miles away in air-conditioned comfort would tell us we couldn’t do that. I remember a guy on the ground with a British accent, whispering into his radio because people were very close to him. We were told we couldn’t help him. We stayed anyway until some other aircraft could get there and give us a positive handoff so that the guy on the ground had someone overhead. We didn’t want to leave him without air cover. We got in trouble that night because we overstayed our vulnerability time by more than an hour.
– Lt. Col. Jay, 169th FW

Jupiter Light
We were flying one cloudless night with NVGs. The moon had set with the sun, so the night was as black as pitch. The day before, a snowstorm had covered Afghanistan from its center to its northern reaches. Jupiter provided the only light. But we could still make out details and see the huge mountains, which reach to about 16,000 feet in the central part of the country and to about 26,000 feet in the north.
– Lt. Col. Jay, 169th FW

Satisfaction
I dropped a JDAM through the clouds on a building in the mountains during Operation Anaconda. The GFAC said that I shacked the building, but I didn’t even see a flash in the clouds. In the Gulf War, my unit dropped visually from our steam-driven 1979-vintage F-16s. We got the satisfaction of pickling on a target, rolling up, and watching the targets blow up. The JDAM mission in OEF seemed sterile and detached compared to missions I flew in Desert Storm.
– Lt. Col. Jay, 169th FW

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• MRE – meals ready to eat; portable meal packets used by the military

Terminal Recliners
Imagine being strapped into your favorite chair for nine hours. You can do whatever you want—read, watch television, and eat. But you can’t get out of the chair. And you can’t fall asleep. See how sore your bottom gets. It will get sore no matter how comfortable the chair.
– Lt. Col. Jay, 169th FW

Not Your Mamma’s F-16
A lot of people say the F-16 was never designed for long missions. But we flew long missions. The F-16 can do a lot of things it wasn’t designed to do. It’s a day, VFR fighter. Yeah, right. Not anymore.
– Lt. Col. Jay, 169th FW

• VFR – visual flight rules

Perspective
I always remembered why I was there. The events of 11 September were always in the back of my mind. I was glad I had the opportunity to contribute to the operation. No one ever complained. We knew we had troops over there who had it a lot worse than we did.
– Maj. Scott, 169th FW

Tight Fit
First missions are more of a pain because we have to double-check everything. On my first OEF mission, a day mission, someone put the wrong helmet in my helmet bag. I realized the mistake when I was putting the gear into my airplane. Going back to get my helmet would have taken another twenty or thirty minutes. We were already running a little late for a takeoff time, so I decided to fly with the wrong helmet. The helmet was way too small. It was tight and uncomfortable. Tight helmets for extended periods can cause hotspots and bad headaches. I got a little sinus blockage. Then I got a splitting headache above my right eye. I was not feeling good. I got my g-suit knife out and cut the straps out of the helmet and loosened everything else to make it fit better. Two hours into the flight, my sinus blockage went away and I felt fine.
– Maj. Scott, 169th FW

Accuracy Improvements
My second time to fly with a JDAM was in a combat mission with a live bomb. We had zero practice with these inertially aided munitions, so our learning curve was almost straight up. After we dropped a couple of them, we began looking for alternatives to simply typing in coordinates from the GFAC, dropping the bomb, and saying have a nice day. We combined visual information from our radar with GPS coordinates to make our drops even more accurate.
– Maj. Greg, 169th FW

Desert Storm Comparisons
I flew Block 30 F-16s in the Gulf War. No F-16 had targeting pods in Desert Storm. A couple of units had navigation pods. But the technology made some huge advances since then. In many ways, OEF missions were more stressful than Desert Storm missions. They were much longer and every drop was in close proximity to Americans. So we were essentially dropping bombs in a friendly country. In Iraq, we usually crossed a line that divided friendly from unfriendly forces.
– Maj. Greg, 169th FW

Instantaneous Support
Some guys came back from missions frustrated that they couldn’t drop. I didn’t care if I dropped or not. If my government wanted me to go out there and fly circles for three hours, that was what I was going to do. We were there to provide near instantaneous support for our guys on the ground when they needed it. Providing that support made the missions worthwhile.
– Maj. Greg, 169th FW

Open For CAS Business
We’re a Block 50 F-16 unit dealing almost exclusively
with SEAD missions. We thought before going over to Afghanistan that we were out of the CAS business. We got over there and started flying classic CAS missions right away. It wasn’t up-close-and-personal CAS as we trained ten years ago when we had the Army guys on the ground during the day talking us onto a target based on terrain features and roads. We were often flying at night with NVGs. The terrain was almost featureless. And we were dropping on GPS coordinates.
– Capt. Allen, 169th FW

Threats
The biggest threat was doing something stupid. The second biggest threat, which was remote, was having an aircraft malfunction. The third biggest threat was al-Qaeda.
– Capt. Allen, 169th FW

Confirmations
My toughest mission was dropping WCMD at night. I was on station for three hours. My wingman and I were already six hours into the mission. The radios weren’t that good, so coordinating with the guys on the ground was tough. With our inertially guided munitions, we had to confirm everything multiple times over the radios. We couldn’t confirm target coordinates enough. We’d confirm information with guys on the ground and with our wingmen. We had to make sure everyone had the same information and knew exactly where the bombs were going to hit. The GFAC was very close to where the bombs were going to impact, about two kilometers. We were also concerned about the location of other units out there, friendly units we didn’t know about.
– Capt. Allen, 169th FW

Mission-Ready
We had an all-hands maintenance meeting every day. We’d present aircraft status and discuss maintenance issues at these meetings. When we got to our slides, everyone would say boring because we almost always had an eighty-six percent mission-capable rate, which is the highest rate we could have with one of our F-16s in a phase inspection. We normally had at least five of our six jets ready to go at any given time. The availability of other aircraft at our location was five out of ten or one out of three. Our jets performed great. Our crew chiefs were top notch.
– Capt. Chris, 169th FW

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Fire Ant Inspections
I was most impressed with our phase inspections. We were completing them in two and one-half days. Normally, a phase takes about three to four weeks to complete at our home base. We had all the people we needed in one place, and they were all working on the airplane at the same time in a twenty-four-hour operation. They were working like fire ants.
– Maj. Allen, 169th FW

Volunteers
We didn’t have to ask for volunteers to deploy to Qatar for Enduring Freedom. Everyone wanted to go. A lot of people were disappointed that they didn’t get to go.
– Maj. Allen, 169th FW

Combinations
The jets performed well. We fly the newest Block 52 F-16s. They work as advertised. When you combine good jets and good people, you get high FMC rates.
– Maj. Allen, 169th FW

• FMC – full mission capable; a statistic used to track the availability of aircraft over time

Sympathetic Cramps
In thirty-two years of aircraft maintenance, I’ve never felt sorry for a pilot. But I almost felt sorry for them over there. When they got out of the airplanes after flying one of those long missions, they looked like someone had beat them bad. They must have been wearing forty pounds of stuff in the cockpit. I don’t think they could move around that much to stretch. I couldn’t do that. Some of our pilots had trouble getting out of the airplane they were so cramped.
– Chief MSgt. Charles, 169th FW