Hogs in the Sand: A Gulf War A-10 Pilot's Combat Journal

By Buck Wyndham

"I am awed by my destructive power. With a small squeeze of the gun trigger under my right index finger, I can rip the turret off a thirty-ton battle tank and throw it 200 feet across the desert, while the rest of the tank burns in an explosion of white-hot, burning phosphorescence. But the cold, morbid reality of it

• Language: English
• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Release date: Aug 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646631599

Book preview

INGRESS

THE JET FEELS STABLE and rock-solid at 330 knots. The A-10’s control stick is very responsive at this speed, and I can command the slightest bank, climb, or dive with just a vague hint of pressure in my right hand. Stark, rocky ridges to our left and right act like a funnel, guiding our flight down into a wide valley. It’s deep enough that the morning light has barely begun to penetrate it. Dark shadows hide the details of the peaks on our right.

We’re low. Very low. The ground is rushing past, just a couple hundred feet underneath the belly of the plane. It takes most of my attention to fly this way. An uncorrected descent, caused by just a moment’s distraction, would result in a spectacular rolling fireball across the rocks and scrub vegetation that dot the valley floor. By regulation, I’m actually a bit too low, but at least down here, we’re less likely to be seen on the enemy’s radar.

I manage to rationalize the low altitude on an entirely different level, too. I’m having so much visceral fun, I’m able to justify the guilty pleasure of continuing to do it for a while longer.

My wingman, disciplined professional that he is, has moved into perfect position, three thousand feet to my left. He’s also low, and he’s probably cussing under his breath because I’m putting him in the weeds. In some ways, he’s got a tougher job than I do because he has to watch both my airplane and the ground ahead of him. I know that right now, his head is swiveling back and forth, checking his twelve o’clock position, then looking at me. Then back out the front again. And back at me. He’s working hard to stay alive, but he’s not complaining.

There’s some turbulence rolling off the nearby mountain ridges, and it pounds my airplane with a quick, sledgehammer blow. I’m briefly lifted out of my seat, tight against the straps.

Enough of this. Time to climb a bit.

I pull up ever so slightly and gain a hundred feet of altitude almost instantly. My wingman follows. The extra altitude will allow us to spend more time looking around for enemy airplanes and missiles instead of fixating on the ground ahead. I glance at the Waypoint Distance indicator displayed in front of me on the angled glass of the head-up display (HUD) mounted on top of my instrument panel. It shows seven miles to the initial point (IP), the start of our attack run.

Kato is my wingman today. He and I have switched roles for this mission. Normally, I’m a wingman, but I’ve been preparing to upgrade to Flight Lead, and Kato has graciously allowed me to lead today’s flight. He’s trusting me to run the whole show. If we don’t find and destroy the target, it’ll be entirely my fault. I’m loving the challenge.

I glance at the elapsed-time clock, then at the map in my left hand. We should be crossing an unpaved road in exactly fifteen seconds. I look ahead and see a dirt road winding its way down into the valley from the ridgeline on the left. We cross the road five seconds late. Normally, I would try to correct a five-second error, but the road cuts our flight path diagonally, which means we might have a left/right course error, not a timing error. I ignore the late waypoint and remind myself to check the timing at the IP.

Our target, an enemy command vehicle, is supposed to be located 7.5 miles from the IP, on a heading of 080 degrees. I do some quick math. Our groundspeed is 5.5 miles per minute, almost 11 seconds per mile. So our IP-to-target run will be about 1 minute and 22 seconds long. Our action point, the place where we’ll abruptly turn and climb in order to position ourselves to drop the bombs, will be two miles, or about 22 seconds, before the target. Therefore, exactly one minute after the IP, I will action to my right.

I slide the microphone button under my left thumb to the up position and say, Bullet, wedge, fence-in.

Kato immediately responds. His airplane aggressively flicks away from me, then settles into a wedge position about a mile behind and to the left of me. This will allow him to cover me as I attack the target. It will also keep him out of the blast pattern from my bombs as he makes his attack run behind me. He’ll drop his bombs on a nearby troop bunker.

We’re in enemy territory now—across the fence—and our Fence Check will prepare our airplanes for what’s to come. I reach down and move the master arm switch to Arm. I’ve already selected the under-wing pylon stations from which I want the bombs to drop and specified which of the bombs’ fuzes will activate when they fall. The green Ready lights on the armament panel now tell me the bombs will drop as soon as I push and hold the red button under my right thumb.

The IP today is the intersection of a road and a railroad track. I see it two miles early and correct my heading a few degrees in order to fly directly over it. We’re right on time. Over the IP, I punch the hack button on my clock, starting a timer, and press the mic button again.

Bullet One’s departing the IP. Hack.

Kato acknowledges me just like a good wingman, or Number Two, should.

Two.

I turn the plane to a heading of 080 degrees and review what I expect to see as I roll in on the target: a squat, tan-and-green truck on the west side of a clearing, next to a north-south dirt road.

The clock’s second hand sweeps around toward the one-minute mark. I make a final check of my engine instruments, fuel gauges, and, most importantly, weapons-arming panel. It would be a shame to screw up the attack run by missing a critical switch setting.

Everything is as it should be. The jet hums. The sun is within minutes of peeking over the mountains.

One minute. Bam. I slam the stick to the side, pull the airplane forty-five degrees to the right, roll level again, pause a moment, then zoom-climb the airplane at a thirty-degree angle. There’s an instant sunrise as I cause the sun to abruptly bloom over the ridgeline.

This climbing maneuver, called a pop-up, is our best method of performing a sneak attack, and it also positions the plane for a shallow dive-bomb pass. As the plane climbs, I stare intently out the left side of the canopy, looking for the road, the clearing, and, ultimately, the truck.

There it is. A quick glance at the altimeter and airspeed indicator verifies I’m on track. At 3,500 feet, I roll to the left, nearly upside down, then pull the nose down toward the clearing. I’ve got to hand it to the enemy. The truck is well camouflaged—merely a subtle dot on the brown landscape over my head—but it’s about to die.

I roll back upright, check my dive angle, and fly the aiming mark, or pipper, on my HUD to a specific point short of the truck. Now in a thirty-degree dive, I wait for 2,300 feet, my release altitude. The pipper meets the truck at the same instant I pass 2,300 feet. I push the red button under my right thumb and feel a definitive clunk from underneath the plane as a pair of 500-pound bombs falls away.

I level out momentarily, then roll and dive for the deck. The bad guys are going to be very pissed off in just a few seconds, and they’ll probably start shooting at me. As I head toward the cover of a nearby hill, I jink aggressively, throwing the airplane around in an unpredictable way to foil their aim. For good measure, I fire off a couple of red-hot flares to fool any infrared missiles they might shoot at me.

Kato is just beginning his pop-up maneuver when my bombs detonate, scattering molten pieces of the truck across the clearing. He has the wherewithal to actually score my bomb pass as he’s setting up for his own. I hear him yell an A-10 pilot’s favorite words: Shack, Lead! A direct hit.

His bombs are equally accurate, and he safely evades the streams of tracers now arcing into the sky from a nearby anti-aircraft gun.

We’ll return later in the day to take care of that menace, but for now, we’ve successfully achieved our goal. The enemy’s command vehicle is in flaming pieces, which means their command structure is weakened, and we’re that much closer to winning the war.

We head for home. It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

* * * * *

The bombs are real, and so are the dangers of maneuvering low and fast up a valley in an Air Force attack jet. If the enemy anti-aircraft fire had been real, this would have been a hell of a day. However, Kato and I are in Alaska, participating in aerial war games. We’re far from our homes in England, but we’re at home here in this rugged landscape. This kind of flying is what A-10 pilots live for. This day’s events, and thousands like them, have been repeated at countless locations around the world for decades, by generations of military pilots.

Kato and I have never dropped a bomb in anger on a real enemy, but training exercises like this have prepared us for the task if we’re ever called upon to do so.

In our innocence, we have no idea how soon that will be.

CHAPTER 1

The Hog

You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

—Al Capone

THEY HAD TO BE some kind of battle-worn X-Wing fighter planes from Star Wars. That was the first explanation my 11-year-old mind came up with as I stood on the beach with my family in South Carolina. My sister and I had been building a sandcastle while my parents snoozed in their beach chairs. I’d glanced up though sun-glistened eyes to see a pair of sinister aerial shapes, skimming low along the surf line from south to north in loose formation. To my young mind, they looked brutal, primitive, otherworldly, and exotic—like a dinosaur come to life.

The apparitions whistled out of sight in the summer haze, and I knew I must figure out what they were. It took me another couple of months to learn their identity from a copy of Aviation Week magazine in my school’s library. From that day on, I was hooked on the A-10 and pledged to myself I would one day be an A-10 pilot. I didn’t have any idea how to accomplish that lofty goal, but I had plenty of youthful energy to dream and doodle and dream some more. My path was charted, then and there.

As I grew up, I educated myself about the A-10. I learned it was the Air Force’s best ground-attack fighter, and that although its official name was the Fairchild-Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, everyone who flew it or maintained it called it, affectionately, the Warthog or just the Hog.

I learned its primary mission, Close Air Support, involved a lot more than just blasting armored vehicles with its enormous seven-barreled, 30-millimeter Gatling gun—a gun that fired armor-piercing bullets the size of a large flashlight. I learned that the Hog also carried a multitude of other weapons and performed other roles I hadn’t even heard of. I learned that flying low over a battlefield means constantly getting shot at, a fact that did not dampen my youthful enthusiasm for flying it. The Hog, I learned, was designed to survive—and that cemented my interest even more.

Everything I did in high school and college had a filtered image of a pair of silver Air Force wings superimposed over it. I relentlessly studied aviation and participated in every flying opportunity I could find, from launching radio-controlled gliders to towing advertising banners in a vintage Piper Cub.

One by one, I jumped through the thousands of required hoops, and in the fall after college graduation, I found myself entering US Air Force pilot training in west Texas.

Some of my classmates in pilot training thought I was nutty for listing A-10 as my first selection on my assignment request form. Most of the guys who wanted to be a fighter pilots coveted the sleeker, more glamorous F-15s and F-16s. But for me, the mental image of flying low, dodging hills and trees, and unleashing holy hell with that giant aerial cannon still seemed like the best job ever.

A year of intense flight training followed and, by a stroke of luck, grace, and perhaps some preordination, I was awarded an A-10 assignment along with the silver wings of an Air Force pilot. That began another year of equally rigorous training that led to me to become fully mission-qualified in the A-10.

I don’t have to tell you how good that day was.

* * * * *

A description of the A-10 Warthog’s appearance always includes one prominent word: mean.

In addition to the world’s most powerful forward-firing aircraft-mounted gun protruding from its snout, the Warthog’s thick, Hershey-bar-shaped wings could carry a vast assortment of bombs, rockets, and missiles. The plane was designed to kill just about anything on a battlefield, especially tanks and armored vehicles.

A plane designed to be pitted against such a monstrous, hulking target as a battle tank is, appropriately enough, not sleek. Nor is it fast compared to traditional fighters and attack airplanes. Aerodynamic smoothness and graceful lines were distant-last-place criteria in the engineer’s minds when they designed the A-10. But despite its looks and relatively slow speed, it was an astonishingly maneuverable airplane to fly and attractive in its own way.

The Hog’s mission was close air support (CAS)—supporting ground troops by shooting at nearby enemy forces. It was an extremely demanding mission because it meant most of our time was spent hiding at low altitude, maneuvering violently to avoid enemy fire, dodging hills and trees, reading road maps, plotting enemy and friendly troop positions, and most importantly, employing our weapons against the enemy, who may be only yards away from the good guys.

As you might guess, friendly-fire incidents, where a pilot mis-identifies and accidentally shoots at friendly troops, were a constant dread in the A-10 community. We feared this as much as enemy fire and we took extensive precautions to prevent it.

Flying an A-10 down low, in a high-workload flying environment, we had to concentrate on what we were doing every millisecond because, although A-10s operated in pairs, we were single-seat pilots, alone in our own airplanes. Other than one early test article on display in a museum, there were no two-seat A-10s.

Single-seat is much more than just an aircraft description or broad designation. For A-10 pilots, it’s an attitude and a philosophy. It means you are completely in charge of your destiny. Everything the airplane does and whatever is sent into oblivion by your bombs, missiles, and bullets went there because you alone made it happen.

Let me put you in the cockpit for a moment.

When you’re in initial Air Force pilot training, you fly only two-seat training airplanes. You get to fly solo, without an instructor, only a couple dozen times. And even when you’re solo, you feel your instructor’s presence in the unoccupied seat, guiding and correcting you.

A year or so later, when you’re flying an A-10 for the first time, you are constantly reminded that you’re very much on your own. Your instructor is nearby in another airplane, but your first flight in the Hog is also your first solo flight in it. It’s a sobering event, but immensely and unforgettably fun, too.

Some modern fighters and attack airplanes have a second crewmember—a weapons-system operator, a radar intercept officer, or a bombardier. Those crews develop their own flying styles, pacing, and tactics, optimized for two people. As an A-10 Hog Driver, however, you’re obligated to develop your own habit patterns. You quickly perfect a system of personal cross-checks and behaviors that will keep you alive, despite the many internal and external factors that affect you (and distract you) each time you fly.

In time, you begin to feel a profound sense of freedom in being alone in a multi-million-dollar attack jet, highly trained and armed to the hilt. Your wingman or Flight Lead is usually flying nearby, of course, and there are numerous operational rules you must follow, but when you look around the cockpit of an A-10, you’re always reminded that you’re completely alone. The cockpit is a small space, designed not for comfort, but for utility. It’s your life-pod, your cocoon, and your office. When you reach for the master arm switch so you can fire an anti-tank missile right down the throat of some Commie bastard, it’s as natural an action as a corporate executive reaching across his desk for a paperclip.

An A-10 cockpit fits your body. Every switch and control is placed so you can reach it without stretching. The stick grip in your right hand is molded to the human palm, and the trigger and four buttons on it are placed in natural positions under your fingers. The twin throttles under your left hand are also contoured to fit your palm, and on them are more buttons, each under a different finger. Your legs disappear deep into dark wells on either side of the center instrument pedestal, and your feet rest comfortably on the rudder pedals. Your life-support system, communication system, and restraint harness connect your body to the airplane in seven places. The result of all this contact is a strong sense that you’re not just sitting in the airplane; you’re a part of it. You don’t sit in the cockpit, you strap the airplane on, like a backpack. The airplane is an extension of your body.

When you roll in on a target to drop a bomb from a thirty-degree dive angle, you do not do what the book says you should do. The book instructs you to perform the dive-bomb roll-in maneuver by moving the control stick to the side until the aircraft’s angle of bank is approximately 120 degrees. Then you’re supposed to pull the airplane’s nose downward until it’s approximately thirty degrees below the horizon, move the stick back to the other side to roll the airplane upright, and begin your alignment with the target.

In practice, that’s not the way it’s done. You simply roll your body in the direction of the target and fly your body down a thirty-degree path to the target. Instead of placing the aiming pipper over the predetermined aim-off distance and maintaining the dive angle until the pipper covers the target, you simply maneuver yourself in the proper direction, look at the target, and command it to die. When you start thinking this way, you know you’ve finally become comfortable with the airplane and the mission. You and the airplane are one. The military’s huge training expenditure is now validated, and woe be to the enemy.

* * * * *

One of the first things they taught us in A-10 school was that the Hog was designed to survive and bring us home safely, despite suffering severe battle damage. The ground-school instructors explained how the high-bypass turbofan engines ran cool and didn’t emit much hot exhaust. The limited amount of hot air they did produce was masked from view by the horizontal stabilizers. This design feature meant that any heat-seeking, infrared-guided missiles coming our way would have difficulty locking onto the engines and their warm exhaust plumes. The engines were placed outside the fuselage and far apart, so if one of them was hit, the resulting fire or shrapnel wouldn’t damage the other one or any other critical aircraft system.

Next, the flight control cables that moved the ailerons, rudders and elevators were routed along widely spaced paths from the cockpit to their respective hydraulic control actuators, so if a bullet severed one cable, it wouldn’t take out any other one.

But let’s imagine the unthinkable. Let’s say an enemy missile struck my airplane, destroying the tip of my left wing and jamming my left aileron so it couldn’t move. Let’s also suppose that hydraulic fluid was spraying out of the damaged flight control actuator. In most modern airplanes, I’d be in big trouble, not only because of the jammed aileron and the resulting lack of control of the airplane, but because my precious supply of hydraulic fluid was being rapidly depleted.

In the Hog, however, I had some Magic Switches. I could just reach down to the Emergency Flight Control panel near my left thigh and throw a switch that disconnected the left aileron from the control system and also isolated hydraulic pressure from the damaged aileron. Then I’d head for home—no drama, no sweat.

Similarly, I could disconnect and isolate any of the other individual flight control surfaces if necessary. In fact, I could suffer a complete loss of normal hydraulic flight controls and still bring the airplane home using a manual reversion mode that connected the control stick to the flight controls using good old-fashioned steel cables, just like one of the old Piper Cubs I used to fly.

The Hog was also fitted with a bathtub of titanium armor that surrounded the cockpit, designed to withstand penetration by everything from small bullets all the way up to 105-millimeter anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) rounds. It was very comforting to know the armor was there, helping to shield my body from whatever nastiness awaited below. Even the front windshield panel was made of thick, bullet-resistant glass that could take a direct hit from a 23-millimeter bullet.

All the fancy design features were nice, but we all knew that sometimes bad stuff just happened. Hog Drivers referred to a lucky bullet that made its way past the armor and through the one, tiny weak spot in the defenses as the Golden BB. Though I suppose we secretly feared it, we were pretty fatalistic about it. It was just not worth worrying about the improbable stuff, since there were so many other serious threats to think about.

In addition to the Hog’s clever design features and armor, we had a few other tricks up our sleeves as well.

The A-10 was equipped with flare and chaff dispensers under each wing. We could eject either of them with buttons located on the throttles.

Flares would fall away behind the airplane and burn for a few seconds with a white-hot phosphorescence that might divert enemy heat-seeking missiles from locking onto the airplane.

The chaff cartridges were designed to confuse enemy radar-guided missiles. They contained thin strips of aluminum that dispersed and formed a radar-reflective cloud behind the airplane.

Another onboard defensive tool was the radar warning receiver (RWR). It featured a small, round screen in the cockpit that displayed any radar signals looking at us. Symbols on the screen told us the direction, signal strength, and type of radar. They also told us whether a missile system was seeking us, tracking us, or had actually launched a missile.

As a backup to the visual display, the RWR provided accompanying sounds in our earphones. There wasn’t a pilot alive who could miss the distinctive screeching-beep sound of a missile launch. The first time you heard it, there was no mistaking the fact that something bad was happening. Whoever designed that particular launch tone certainly knew what kind of sound would raise the hair on the back of a pilot’s neck.

Our most wonderful and wondrous line of defense against enemy missiles hung under one of the airplane’s wings, about ten feet inboard from the wingtip. It was a twelve-foot-long, green cylinder with flattened sides that weighed just over 500 pounds. Called the electronic countermeasures (ECM) pod, it was crammed full of computers that received and processed enemy radar signals. The pod automatically identified the incoming signals, designed a spoofing or jamming signal optimized for all sorts of variables, then re-transmitted a new signal back to the enemy radar site. The enemy radar, therefore, got a false image of where we were.

The ECM pod might be the difference between getting hit by an enemy missile and merely yelling a few choice expletives. It was about the most miraculous device I could imagine. Most A-10 pilots said that if we ever met one of the geniuses at Loral and Westinghouse who designed this magnificent box, we’d buy them all the beer they could drink.

There were two negative aspects to the pod, however. First, it was heavy, which somewhat diminished the Hog’s climb performance, turn rate, and top speed. Second, and more critically, the circuitry and algorithms used to produce the altered signals were all closely guarded secrets. As a result, the ECM pod was the only wing-mounted attachment on our airplanes that could not be jettisoned in an emergency. The Air Force naturally didn’t want us dropping a pod, either intentionally or inadvertently, right into the hands of the enemy. That was all fine until the day came when you fervently wished you could drop it, such as when you lost an engine right after takeoff on a very hot day. The asymmetric drag and dead weight of an ECM pod could cause big problems with the Hog’s single-engine climbing capability. More than one sweating Hog Driver in history had cursed the pod as he hedge-hopped his way off the departure end of a runway after an engine failure shortly after takeoff.

We heard an amusing story about a Myrtle Beach A-10 pilot who, while beginning a long over-water flight, suffered an engine failure. He immediately reached out and pressed the prominent Emergency Jettison button above his instrument panel to get rid of as much weight as he could. The ECM pod, of course, remained firmly attached, but he did manage to get rid of several hundred pounds of empty bomb racks, two unarmed air-to-air missiles, and, unfortunately, a travel pod containing his clothing, a portable stereo, books, a family photo album, and numerous personal effects. The travel pod sailed over the heads of some very startled sunbathers on the beach and plunged into the surf several yards from shore. The pilot saved the airplane and was a hero, but his belongings had to be dug out of four feet of water and a foot of wet sand. Not an auspicious way to begin a long deployment.

The A-10 was designed to drop and launch all kinds of conventional ordinance from under its wings, but our most common loads were Maverick missiles and several types of unguided, free-fall bombs.

Mavericks were air-to-ground missiles that we could use against tanks, armored vehicles, structures, and higher-value targets. The missile had a range of around ten miles, and came in two varieties: electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR)-guided.

The EO Maverick had a television camera in its nose, and it displayed its image on a TV screen in our cockpit. It detected the contrast between light and dark colors. We could lock its crosshairs onto almost any dark-colored object against a light background, or, with the flick of a switch, light-colored against a darker background. As long as the contrast between the object and its background was good, we could probably lock on. Once a couple of other parameters were satisfied (range and gimbal limits), we could launch the Maverick and it would keep its lock on the target without our help. In fact, as soon as we launched the missile, the cable providing the TV image was disconnected, causing our cockpit screen to go dark.

The IR version of the Maverick was the same, except it displayed the contrast between a hot target on a cooler background, or a cold target on a warmer background. This capability was especially useful at night, or when attempting to hit a vehicle with a hot engine hiding under natural foliage or artificial cover of some kind. A warm vehicle stood out like a beacon in the night.

Tying together all of our weapons was the HUD, or head-up display. The HUD was our optical aiming system. It consisted of a thick, angled piece of glass mounted on top of the instrument panel, and a small projector connected to a computer. The glass, called the combining glass, was directly in the pilot’s view as they looked out the front of the plane. Projected on the glass was a digital display of the airplane’s altitude, airspeed, compass heading, gunsight and bombsight, navigation, and other critical information.

In the high-stress world of combat aviation, a pilot sometimes couldn’t afford precious seconds looking inside the cockpit for the information he needed, and the HUD allowed him to keep his focus outside, where it belonged. The projected information floated in front of him, focused at the same distance as the surrounding landscape.

Another good thing about the HUD was that it could record the view through the front windshield onto a videotape, along with the accompanying radio communications. This let the pilot review their mission in the comfort of the debriefing room once they’d landed.

Before a mission, we studied charts that told us what flight parameters we had to meet in order to drop a bomb precisely on a target. Each type of munition we carried had different release conditions that must be met, either so the bomb armed properly as it fell away, or so that the blast pattern on the ground was optimized. We also had to make sure the blast from the bomb didn’t strike the airplane.

The charts allowed us several options. For instance, we could drop bombs from a level attitude, a ten-degree dive angle, a twenty-degree dive, a thirty-degree dive, a forty-five-degree dive, and so on.

When we reviewed our HUD videotapes after a mission, we were particularly interested in analyzing the flight parameters that determined whether a bombing or strafing pass was a good one or a not-so-good one. For strafing, we would look at where the gunsight, or pipper, was aimed as the trigger was squeezed, and what our range to the target was. For shooting Maverick anti-tank missiles, we would look at the relative size and contrast of the selected target. For dive-bombing, the most important parameters were our pipper placement, dive angle, airspeed, and the altitude at which we released, or pickled, the bomb.

For each pickle altitude there were several combinations of the other parameters that result in the bomb hitting the target or near it. If the airplane was too fast, too steep, or too low when the bomb was released, the bomb would sail past the target, and if the airplane was too slow, too shallow, or too high, the bomb would impact short of the target. A bomb would also miss the target if the aircraft was in a bank, pulling Gs, or skidding through the air due to the pilot using too much rudder.

Bombing in an A-10 was a true physical art, and it took many, many attempts at dropping practice-bombs in peacetime before a pilot was proficient enough to do it with real bombs, in combat.

We always strove for the mythical Perfect Pass, but since that was so rarely achieved, we learned how to correct for our errors in order to put the bombs right on target, despite being slightly fast, or slightly steep, or anything else.

The rules of thumb were deeply ingrained in the minds of all A-10 pilots: Steep, fast, or low: pickle early. Shallow, slow, or high: pickle late. More specifically: One degree steep: pickle 100 feet early. Five knots slow: pickle 100 feet late. And so on. These kinds of corrections had to be made instantly, instinctively, and literally on the fly—there was no time to ponder what you had to do. The HUD videotape system allowed us to analyze whether we’d made these corrections properly.

And then there was the gun. The magnificent GAU-8 Gatling gun defined the A-10 and made it a legend. I don’t quite have the words to describe the feeling of unleashing sixty-five massive bullets per second from the front end of my airplane.

The first time I fired the gun, during initial training in Arizona, it was almost overwhelming. I lined up my target using the fixed gun pipper, squeezed the trigger to its first detent, then tentatively increased my finger pressure like I was trying to massage a rattlesnake. As I squeezed, there was a short dead-zone in the trigger, and then all hell broke loose. There was a sudden deep roar coming not from my headset but from outside my helmet, despite its tight ear-cups and my foam earplugs. I felt like I could hear it through my own skin and muscle. The airplane rumbled and vibrated like something important had come loose, and my aiming pipper was a blur in front of me from the intense, buzzsaw vibration. The G-meter’s needles, which had been resting at 1G, pegged upward and downward to ten positive and six negative.

I released the trigger and yelled something like, Sweet Holy Mother! The strafing rag at which I’d been aiming, 3,700 feet in front of my airplane, was smoking—at least that’s the way it looked, until I realized there was a plume of sand and dirt spraying into the air behind the fabric target.

As I pulled out of my shallow dive and began a hard climbing left turn away from the target, my instructor’s laconic voice came over the radio and into my ear: Pretty darned cool, huh?

As I tried to formulate a pithy answer, I began to smell it. Cordite. Gun gas. Gunpowder. However you refer to it, it was the most glorious smell ever, and it had made it all the way into my oxygen mask from the beastly gun located two feet under my cockpit floorboards. It was the smell of power.

On the downwind leg of the strafing pattern, while setting up for my second pass, I heard and felt the gun barrels rotate briefly, backwards and forwards, as the gun automatically readied itself for another demonstration of what made it the most unearthly, badass cannon on the planet. It seemed to be encouraging me to roll in and press that trigger again and again and again.

I gleefully accepted its challenge.

* * * * *

In my mind, the Hog was an iconic surrogate for the US military itself: rough, tough, and ugly, with some sharp edges. It was utterly and fantastically lacking in tact, grace, or overt friendliness. And it was fully, happily able to quickly destroy any unfortunate motherfucker who displayed ill will as they stepped in front of it.

It was the perfect airplane for its job.

CHAPTER 2

Cold War Hog-Driving

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

—G.K. Chesterton

BY THE SUMMER OF 1990, I was on top of the world, flying my beloved Hog as a twenty-five-year-old First Lieutenant based at RAF Alconbury, a US-operated, Royal Air Force-owned air base near the city of Cambridge, England.

My squadron, the 511th TFS (Tactical Fighter Squadron), was nicknamed the Vultures. It consisted of thirty-six pilots, over a hundred maintenance personnel, two dozen weapons loaders, and around thirty administrative staff members. The Vultures were one of two A-10 squadrons at Alconbury—the other being the 509th TFS Pirates.

Our purpose in life, along with four other UK-based A-10 squadrons, was to help protect Britain and the friendly side of the European continent from the possibility of Soviet invasion. The Cold War had been going on for decades, and we and the Soviets stared across the Warsaw Pact fence as seriously as any foes ever stared at each other.

A universal truth about warfare is that one should always know thine enemy, and A-10 pilots did just that. A lot. We studied Russian tactics, armament, and vehicles. We could identify a Soviet ZSU-23-4 radar-guided gun just from its fuzzy profile in a photograph flashed momentarily on a wall. We took tests, oral and written, about our own tactics, weapons, and procedures. We read stacks of technical books.

But mostly, we flew. Two or three times per week, we took off and practiced a cross-section of the skills we would have to use in a European war. Our flights had evolved into a fairly predictable routine. We’d navigate a complicated low-level route, make simulated attacks with our Maverick missiles at various things on the ground, and spend some time at the bombing range, dropping practice bombs and shooting the gun. It was a simulation of all the things we’d do if Communist troops swarmed over the West German border.

While most air-to-air fighter pilots—the guys flying F-16s, F-15s and other similar airplanes—rarely got to practice actually firing their missiles and shooting their guns at aerial targets because of the expense, peacetime air-to-ground attack pilots had the thrill of dropping hundreds or thousands of practice bombs and shooting tens of thousands of bullets during their careers. The instant gratification and performance feedback we got from this was extremely rewarding. Granted, the small blue bombs we used for practice produced only a puff of white smoke and a tiny crater when they hit the ground, but it was immensely fun to look over my shoulder as I pulled up from a bombing pass and see the results of my handiwork there in the dirt. Air-to-Mud was, and is, definitely the most exciting flying mission in the Air Force.

Hog Divers had a particular, favorite pastime at the bombing range. We loved shooting our formidable gun at the fifteen-by-fifteen-foot fabric square suspended between two telephone poles that served as our strafing target. In an A-10 pilot’s imagination, that fabric target became everything from a Soviet T-72 tank to a busload of terrorists, and we always concentrated on hitting it with the same precision we would use on a real target. The strafing target was electronically scored, providing us with an instant measure of how well we were doing after each strafing pass.

If the weather wasn’t good enough to fly low or to use the bombing ranges (a fairly common occurrence in England), we had the option of climbing up into a block of reserved airspace over the eastern shore of England to practice our air-to-air maneuvering, or dogfighting. Though the A-10 wasn’t designed specifically as a dogfighter, it was very maneuverable, and it was equipped with a pair of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and, of course, the 30 mm gun. Even though the gun was designed to shoot tanks and armored vehicles, it would certainly be effective against enemy airplanes if the need arose. Pilots of other types of airplanes hated facing that gun.

Once we’d expended all of our onboard munitions or reached our minimum fuel level, we would head back home. Our flights usually lasted around two hours.

Sometimes, we’d up the ante. The Vultures and the Pirates, being friendly rivals, often competed against each other in weapons-delivery contests called turkey shoots. These aerial shootouts were day-long contests of skill that involved flying at low altitude in four-ship formations to one of the numerous bombing and gunnery ranges along the east coast of England. During the target ingress and egress, we’d employ all sorts of tactics to defeat any simulated enemy threats that might pop up. These threats ranged from surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and anti-aircraft artillery (Triple-A) to enemy fighter aircraft. We’d drop our bombs and shoot at various electronically scored targets, then return home, where our scores would be tallied and our friendly monetary bets would be settled.

Sometimes, to further simulate the conditions of a real war, we would fly entire missions without using radio communication. Comm-out flights tested our ability to operate in an environment where the enemy was jamming our radios. They proved that, using simple hand signals and various pre-briefed aircraft flight control movements, we could accomplish an entire attack mission without a word being spoken.

To further optimize or experience and tactics for the European World War Three environment, the Vultures and the Pirates were each assigned forward operating bases in West Germany—bases from which we would operate if the Warsaw Pact ever attacked NATO nations.

The Vultures’ main forward operating location was a small, north-German airbase called Ahlhorn. Around six times each year, we deployed some of our pilots, maintenance crews and airplanes to Ahlhorn to train for a couple of weeks. There, we flew realistic attack sorties throughout northern Germany and along the border, trying to learn the local terrain so that when and if the need arose, we would know the area and perhaps have a slight upper hand against the enemy. We occasionally took our airplanes to bases in Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere for additional training opportunities. Every opportunity to fly in a new place was worthwhile and challenging.

Back in England, social events between the Vultures and the Pirates were a major part of our off-duty lives. Americans living abroad always tend to seek each other out for companionship and mutual support. Alconbury was a relatively small British base, and since we were the only two A-10 squadrons there, we felt a sense of kinship with our fellow Hog Drivers across the runway from us, even though each squadron felt clearly superior to the other. Good-natured ribbing and name-calling between the squadrons was the norm in the Officer’s Club on Friday nights.

We built our camaraderie playing drinking games and singing fighter pilot songs, and we heightened our sense of competition by participating in weekly, violent games of Crud, an aggressive game played using a pool table and two pool balls. It was a game that served as a non-flying way to further test our mettle as pilots and men. The rules of Crud, developed by our brethren fighter pilots in the Vietnam War, were very complex, and the game required absolute attention and a good bit of physical dexterity and psychology to win. The losing team had to buy the winners a round of beer, and the winners would often be immediately challenged to a rematch. Many Friday nights turned into Saturday mornings as teams fought