Fall 2014; Embarked USS George H.W. Bush, North Arabian Gulf
As the dog days of summer droned on, the air wing settled into our new role employing ordnance on ISIS. The rest of our time in the North Arabian Gulf seemed to fly by. The Blacklions were doing well. In our mid-August change of command, the diaper-advocating Coma was replaced by Chick. We all knew Chick from the last eighteen months with him as our executive officer, and I don’t think I was alone in my excitement for what I felt would be a positive leadership change.
I was thriving as well. Since the start of deployment, I’d flown more than forty flights in combat and had progressed from being a nugget, to a combat section lead. I’d been vested with the responsibility to lead two jets and three of my peers into Iraq and Syria to confront the enemy without any adult supervision. It was a big deal. No other squadrons had such junior JOs leading other JOs in-country, and it showed that my performance was well-respected.
When our squadron did its biannual junior officer job switch, I moved on from writing the flight schedule to supervising the maintainers and was loving my new role. As much as I enjoyed being in the air and flying around at Mach 1, taking care of the people that kept our jets in working condition was surprisingly the most gratifying part of being in the squadron. It was the little things—ensuring they had clean bathrooms and showers, air-conditioning in the 120-plus degrees, or even just getting them watercoolers to cool off. I also worked hard to get them promotions or accepted into programs they applied for. It wasn’t something I expected, and maybe I had Bullet’s example to thank for it, but mentoring the enlisted who worked so hard on our jets made me feel like I was giving back.
Combat-seasoned and satisfied with my contributions on the ship, I was finally feeling like a member of the team. Of course I wasn’t best buddies with all the guys in my squadron, but I had a solid group of guys I could trust, and a smaller, but even more loyal, group that I considered friends. Many of the guys I’d had conflicts with had moved on to their next jobs, and the remaining junior officers were all pretty copacetic. For the past seven months of the cruise, we’d all been so focused on the mission and working together as a team that there was no time for the petty, cliquey drama I’d experienced back home as the FNG. At sea, it was just about the work. No wives to stink-eye me from across the room; well, except for the group who stared at me from the three-foot poster that hung in our briefing space. There wasn’t any division about who got invited out on the weekends because there was nowhere to go. We were all united in our efforts to survive the scary nights behind the boat and constant threats that were popping up in our missions. Sure, I spent lots of time holed up in the Sharktank, working on my master’s instead of playing video games after hours with the bros, but for the most part, I’d found my place with them.
Before leaving the Gulf, we had one last Middle Eastern port call in Bahrain. And while it wasn’t as intense as Dubai, it was our last time to cut loose and stock up on rugs and gold jewelry. By now, Taylor and I were the expert cruise directors and booked our squadron at an incredible resort that looked like it belonged in a coffee-table book you’d find in an Ace Hotel. Just like we’d done prior to deployment, we spent four days living like there was no tomorrow. We brewed a mean man stew at the swim-up bar, practiced our synchronized pool aerobatics, and cleared the local souk of their exquisite, handmade wares. Throughout the port call I was having fun, but I could tell something in my system wasn’t right. I experienced bouts of severe nausea that were more serious than your typical repercussions of a wild night. I’d only gotten this kind of reflux once before, while at the Academy, and then it was because of extreme stress. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but this was one of the first obvious symptoms that the strain of deployment affected me physically.
Pulling out of port, we only had a few more days of combat operations left before we turned over with the USS Carl Vinson and headed home. Each time one carrier finishes their work in the Gulf and turns the reins over to the next carrier strike group, the two mother ships pull alongside one another. All of the extra stores—bombs, missiles, and extra equipment for the jets—needed to be transferred. Also, the cross-deck allowed crews to turnover face to face, giving us a chance to pass our last words of wisdom and a few last-minute classified materials. From topside, I watched the operation—two one-hundred-thousand-ton ships steaming side by side, with helicopters flying back and forth transferring goods and passengers as fast as physics would allow.
Once we’d transferred the last load to the Carl Vinson, the Bush broke away and made a 180-degree turn to head south toward the Strait of Hormuz, our first obstacle on our long journey home. Once the passing of the torch was complete, the USS Carl Vinson would pick up the fight where we left off and the next day, they would be flying into Iraq and Syria.
Key Stats
Name: Caroline Johnson
Call sign: Dutch
Rank: Lieutenant (O3)
Aircraft: F/A-18F Super Hornet
Squadron: VFA-213 Fighting Blacklions
Total Flight Hours: 1,123.1
Brief & Debrief Hours: 3,607.5
Combat Flight Hours: 247.7
Enemy KIA (Killed in Action): 16 ISIS
Departing the Gulf and then the Middle East area of operations was called chopping out, and was marked by a change from tan flight suits, which matched the desert sand, to our standard US green ones. Naturally, we were all coming off a high, and already reflecting on the things we’d accomplished. Over the past eight months of deployment, our carrier air group had flown more than 32,000 flight hours, and of those, 18,333 were in combat. We launched 3,245 combat sorties into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and employed 120,000 pounds of ordnance. Our weapons accounted for 20 percent of the weapons employed thus far in the campaign against ISIS, and the weapons alone cost $62 million. We’d been the first aircraft to respond to the crisis in Iraq, had dropped the first bombs on ISIS, and led the first US air strikes ever into Syria.
The Blacklions, one of nine other squadrons aboard the Bush, had also done well. We’d led in the number of weapons we employed, we were the first to drop bombs in Iraq and Syria, and we set the standard for tactics and operations around the boat. As a squadron, each pilot and WSO employed in combat; more importantly we didn’t “sling any bombs”—meaning, we hit all of our intended targets—and as a team, we didn’t have any inadvertent border crossings or cause any international incidents. These were all feats that other squadrons couldn’t claim. Later, we would win many awards for our work, and even though there were three other F/A-18 squadrons on the Bush that year, all of the accolades for the Navy’s premier fighter squadron on the East Coast went to the Blacklions.
When the Bush was relieved in the Gulf, our successors onboard the USS Carl Vinson would amp up the fight even more after we left. The release authority was finally pushed down from POTUS and senior leadership to a more appropriate level. During the Vinson’s eleven-month deployment, they flew 2,383 combat missions and dropped more than five hundred thousand pounds of ordnance. When they were relieved by the USS Eisenhower in 2015, things ramped up even more. Even though the Eisenhower’s air wing only flew nineteen hundred combat sorties, they dropped 1.3 million pounds of ordnance on ISIS.
These stats are more than just numbers, they tell a story. As the first show in town, the Bush kicked everything off and laid the groundwork for a long and grueling fight against ISIS. As time has progressed, the Navy got better intelligence and obtained more hostile targets on which they could employ. Even with fewer flights in combat, crews started dropping ordnance on almost every flight flown in-country. This showed that the US and our coalition were taking ground from ISIS and eroding their infrastructure. Even as an aviator who’s been there and done that, it’s still hard to believe we’re still prosecuting that many targets, still dropping bombs. It’s difficult to fathom that ISIS is still growing, like a weed popping up here and there, refusing to be destroyed, even after millions of dollars and pounds of ordnance and several years of work by the US and our coalition forces. No matter how many times the weed comes back, we can’t stop taking action. We must continue to save the lives of those threatened by ISIS.