the thing. As they all flashed past me, barely a mile away, I caught sight of a brown cylinder with incredibly stubby wings.
MiG-21! my brain screamed.
“It’s a fucking MiG-21,” I yelled into my mask, and my thumb came back down above the pickle. My first shocked thought was that the Eagles had made a colossal blunder. The Iraqi Air Force had MiG 21s, and this was exactly where you’d expect to find one. Close to its home base and hiding in the mountains.
Then I saw the red flag with the white crescent and star on the tail, and my thumb again came quickly away from the pickle button.
Unbelievable. Un. Fucking. Believable.
Türk Hava Kuvvetleri. Turkish Air Force. My brain clicked on again and I remembered why the jet was familiar. It was an American-made F-104 Starfighter, and I’d seen one in a museum once. Shaking my head as the thing zipped by, I very carefully moved the master arm to SAFE . What kind of idiot would be out trolling the border today in front of a hundred armed fighter pilots? I shrugged my shoulders against the seat straps and took a deep breath. A Turkish idiot, that’s who. As we continued north, the F-15s stayed with the F-104 and were voicing the same sentiments to the still bewildered AWACS.
Air-refueling was always satisfying. Every time was different and yet each instance required absolute precision to bring it off. In peacetime, in normal airspace, air-to-air refueling was tedious and very rigid. But combat refueling was more straightforward. Each track usually had a cell of three KC-10 or KC-135 tankers flying in trail of each other. They were about three miles apart and stacked at different altitudes, so we creatively named them the High, Medium, and Low tankers. The Low tanker was usually leading the cell. This was done for several reasons. The other tankers, which had no air-to-air radars, could fly off him visually during the day or night if the weather was clear. If it wasn’t, then they were de-conflicted by altitude and wouldn’t hit each other. Lastly, with the Low tanker in the lead, his jet wash, which could be considerable, didn’t affect the aircraft behind him. Flying through invisible turbulence while you’re impaled on a boom twenty feet from a jet filled with jet fuel isn’t much fun.
You had to find the tanker on your air-to-air radar and talk to him. You had to run a three-dimensional intercept to wherever he was, watching out for the remaining tankers and dozens of other fighters. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it; slowly sliding up behind the big plane and watching the boom come down was always a thrill. Unless it was nighttime, or the weather was bad, and you were running out of gas—then it was a sweaty nightmare, like a monkey fucking a skunk.
But not this morning. This was a bright, clear day over an exotic corner of the world that seemed even more beautiful because I’d survived my first combat mission. After getting our gas, we slid back and pulled away low to the southwest. Our home base was about 200 miles away on the Gulf of Iskenderun.
A half-hour later, we were overhead Incirlik Air Base. Normally, there were well-established procedures for getting into and out of an air base, like overhead patterns and instrument approaches for bad weather. There were also “minimum risk” procedures, designed to get as many jets as possible off the ground or down to land without exposing them to ground fire. In retrospect, it was fairly silly to worry about shoulder-launched SAMs and small-arms fire. This being the first day of the war, no one knew what to expect and, until sanity prevailed, we could do whatever we wanted. Besides, it was fun to fly up the runway at 500 knots or do the “Stack.”
The Stack was basically a long glide in idle power down from 20,000 feet to the overhead landing pattern. You could see everything below, and it kept your engine cool to thwart an infrared threat. Besides, as I said, it was fun. Orca and I were
MiG-21! my brain screamed.
“It’s a fucking MiG-21,” I yelled into my mask, and my thumb came back down above the pickle. My first shocked thought was that the Eagles had made a colossal blunder. The Iraqi Air Force had MiG 21s, and this was exactly where you’d expect to find one. Close to its home base and hiding in the mountains.
Then I saw the red flag with the white crescent and star on the tail, and my thumb again came quickly away from the pickle button.
Unbelievable. Un. Fucking. Believable.
Türk Hava Kuvvetleri. Turkish Air Force. My brain clicked on again and I remembered why the jet was familiar. It was an American-made F-104 Starfighter, and I’d seen one in a museum once. Shaking my head as the thing zipped by, I very carefully moved the master arm to SAFE . What kind of idiot would be out trolling the border today in front of a hundred armed fighter pilots? I shrugged my shoulders against the seat straps and took a deep breath. A Turkish idiot, that’s who. As we continued north, the F-15s stayed with the F-104 and were voicing the same sentiments to the still bewildered AWACS.
Air-refueling was always satisfying. Every time was different and yet each instance required absolute precision to bring it off. In peacetime, in normal airspace, air-to-air refueling was tedious and very rigid. But combat refueling was more straightforward. Each track usually had a cell of three KC-10 or KC-135 tankers flying in trail of each other. They were about three miles apart and stacked at different altitudes, so we creatively named them the High, Medium, and Low tankers. The Low tanker was usually leading the cell. This was done for several reasons. The other tankers, which had no air-to-air radars, could fly off him visually during the day or night if the weather was clear. If it wasn’t, then they were de-conflicted by altitude and wouldn’t hit each other. Lastly, with the Low tanker in the lead, his jet wash, which could be considerable, didn’t affect the aircraft behind him. Flying through invisible turbulence while you’re impaled on a boom twenty feet from a jet filled with jet fuel isn’t much fun.
You had to find the tanker on your air-to-air radar and talk to him. You had to run a three-dimensional intercept to wherever he was, watching out for the remaining tankers and dozens of other fighters. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it; slowly sliding up behind the big plane and watching the boom come down was always a thrill. Unless it was nighttime, or the weather was bad, and you were running out of gas—then it was a sweaty nightmare, like a monkey fucking a skunk.
But not this morning. This was a bright, clear day over an exotic corner of the world that seemed even more beautiful because I’d survived my first combat mission. After getting our gas, we slid back and pulled away low to the southwest. Our home base was about 200 miles away on the Gulf of Iskenderun.
A half-hour later, we were overhead Incirlik Air Base. Normally, there were well-established procedures for getting into and out of an air base, like overhead patterns and instrument approaches for bad weather. There were also “minimum risk” procedures, designed to get as many jets as possible off the ground or down to land without exposing them to ground fire. In retrospect, it was fairly silly to worry about shoulder-launched SAMs and small-arms fire. This being the first day of the war, no one knew what to expect and, until sanity prevailed, we could do whatever we wanted. Besides, it was fun to fly up the runway at 500 knots or do the “Stack.”
The Stack was basically a long glide in idle power down from 20,000 feet to the overhead landing pattern. You could see everything below, and it kept your engine cool to thwart an infrared threat. Besides, as I said, it was fun. Orca and I were
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