Harry's War

By Ed Benjamin

Is this what DEATH feels like?

Experience the raw emotions of air to air combat. Feel the tension as Harry flies against seven enemy aircraft. This book will place you inside the cockpit of an F-15 fighter as Harry must decide how to deal with incoming seven state-of-the-art Su-27 Iranian fighters. Even though he faces insurmountable odds, Harry chooses to stay and fight. The reader can feel his muscles tense as he put his fighter plane through its paces facing the enemy threat.

The US president has declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist threat. The Air Branch of the Revolutionary Guard is part of that force. Many wonder if the attack described in this novelette is the first salvo of War with Iran.

Many reviewers have described the air battle scenes as the best description of air-to-air combat they have ever read.

The question, "Will Harry survive?" remains with Harry as he enters the battle and afterwards, he must deal with the unexpected consequences.

This is the story of a broken warrior – a warrior victorious in battle but broken and defeated in peace!

It tells how a man wins a great victory in combat, and then loses life as he knows it as a result.

For Harry, being a fighter pilot and flying the F-15C fighter plane on Combat Air Patrol over the Iraq-Iran border was the epitome of success. After his wing man is shot down, he finds he must test his abilities and training when faced with overwhelming odds yet decides to engage his enemies in air-to-air combat against overwhelming odds.


Many readers have commented this book places them in the cockpit of a United States fighter jet in air combat; however, this is essentially the story of the ultimate air battle and the human consequences resulting from that battle.

In the aftermath, Harry discovers he must dig deep to learn how to fight and survive in the battlegrounds of life. . . Will he?

In this story, Harry faces the most difficult demons of his life. It is a multiple front personal war with demons from a deep past haunting him and some nice newly minted demons resulting from the glory of survival.

The questions are "Will Harry survive?" and/or, more importantly, "Will Harry prevail?"

You do not want to miss this story,

The author hopes, if you decide to purchase and read this story, you will appreciate the broken warrior. Not just Harry, but the thousands and thousands of veterans who have served our country faithfully and are dealing with their own issues. Though their travail, they all remain proud of the service they provided their country. They are the true warriors. We continue to pray they will not merely survive but will prevail. We owe them that much and more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781620950333

Ed Benjamin

Ed Benjamin and his bride, Mary Pettit, currently live in Bulverde, Texas, “The Front Porch of the Texas Hill Country.”  Every time he drives down the hill next to his property, he is treated to a panoramic view of the Hill Country of Texas.  They have lived here 19 years as of July 2018 and love it. Ed’s folks were moving from Oklahoma City to rural Alabama just before he was born.  His mother intended for him to be born in her hometown of York, Alabama, but nature intervened, and he became an ‘Okie’ instead.  He did get to Alabama seven days later and grew up in Birmingham and York, Alabama.  When he was 14, his family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina.  After college, he joined the United States Air Force and spent 27 years supervising people who fixed airplanes, establishing technical training programs, and helping procure major weapons systems for the Air Force. After he retired from the Air Force, he started and still operates a one-person business helping companies prepare proposals to get business with the government. He states, “I like to write and am in the mode of experimenting more with self-publishing and putting myself out there in various forms of fiction and nonfiction.” He is the author of “Harry’s War” – a long short story in eBook form available in most eBook venues.  Victory in battle and defeat in peace, and these other publications: Mar: A Harry Miles Redemption Story - a story about an Iranian fighter pilot who uses deception to achieve air-to-air combat victories; and “Cash in on the Obama $5 Trillion Spending Plan: How to make large amounts of money by conducting business with or receiving grants from federal, state, and local governments,” a simple, easy-to-understand guide for very small businesses to learn about the various ways to conduct business with federal, state, or local governments.  He invites you to visit his website at EdBenjaminBooks.com where he has a blog and you can learn about his pending projects.

Book preview

Disenfranchisement

Harry’s War

1. Prelude: Combat Air Patrol near the Iranian Border

Harry disengaged from the refueling boom and left the tanker after topping off his tanks. He waited for his wingman to join up so they could resume their patrol over Iraqi airspace. He leveled his F-15C Eagle fighter at 35,000 feet and tuned his radio to the preset channel for the AWACS, or the Airborne Warning and Control System, aircraft. AWACS would alert him and his wingman if there were any activity about which to be concerned.

Early Bird, Rebel Three in position.

That communication advised the AWACS that Harry and his wingman were off the tanker, refueled and on the way to the patrol area. The radio transmission appeared redundant to Harry. The AWACS, with its fancy radar dome atop the modified Boeing 707 and highly accurate search radar inside the dome, knew his position within 35 feet. The AWACS search radar combined its own data with information received from one of the 24 GPS, or Global Positioning Satellites, in orbits spanning the globe. The GPS provides real-time positioning data and a very accurate time signal to civil and military air, land, sea, and space-based users worldwide.

The AWACS airplane was a modified Boeing 707/320 commercial airframe with a rotating radar dome. This radar dome is 30 feet in diameter, 6 feet thick, and is held 11 feet above the fuselage by 2 struts. Its powerful radar had a range of 200 miles for low-flying targets and farther for airborne vehicles flying at medium to high altitudes. The radar, combined with the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) subsystem can detect, identify, and track both enemy and friendly aircraft by eliminating returns that confuse other radar systems.

In the air-to-air role, with which Harry was concerned, the AWACS served as an airborne controller and directed fighters and fighter-inceptor aircraft to enemy targets with ease. The AWACS served other missions for other military users, like tracking enemy movements on the ground and directing air-to-ground fighter-bombers to optimum delivery points.

The AWACS had another wrinkle that Harry used. Through the use of special adapters, the electronic equipment on his plane was able to tap into to the signals received by the AWACS.

The AWACS radar and the GPS fed data into the plane’s displays so that Harry did not emit any electronic radar emissions. Harry knew his Eagle fighter wasn’t a stealth aircraft and that any radar signal beamed toward him would give a clear signal back to the sender. Anybody with minimal training would be able to identify the radar return signal as an F-15 radar signature when it returned to the point of origin. But Harry figured that every little bit helped. If the lack of radar transmissions prevented the enemy from acquiring him on their targeting radar for a few seconds, then he figured it was worth it. Harry and his wingman had set their own avionics systems to the standby mode. They stayed on but did not transmit. At the first sign of trouble, Harry and his wingman would go active. With a simple flip of a switch, they could turn their transmitters on full blast to take advantage of the information the aircraft’s advanced avionics sensors provided them.

At the intelligence briefing that morning, the intelligence analyst had talked about the possibility of elements within the Iranian Air Force launching fighters from a base in Western Iran. Intelligence sources believed these fighters were older MIG-31 aircraft acquired by Iran in 2003 when Iraqi pilots decided that discretion was the better part of valor and flew to Iran at the start of the Shock and Awe of the American venture into Iraq in 2003.

The MIG-31, named the Foxhound by NATO intelligence officers, possessed long range intercept capabilities. The twin-engine fighter had the powerful Zalson phased array radar with a range of 200 kilometers or just a little over 120 miles. The main threat perceived by the intelligence nerds was the knowledge that a unit of MIG-31 aircraft could phase their individual radar systems together and establish a search pattern covering a width of 450 miles. They didn’t need an AWACS to search out enemy aircraft; they could do the job by themselves.

If four Foxhound aircraft launched from Western Iran and linked up as advertised, they could provide radar coverage for most of Southern Iraq. Another quartet of Foxhounds could cover Northern Iraq as well. If the Iranians had developed the capability to link up electronically with the radar guided ground-to-air missile sites, the ground based missile sites might be able to launch radar guided missiles at American aircraft without turning on the ground-based radar systems. The ground based missile sites