5
IN TURNER'S GUNSHIP, MARR WAS THINKING, AS IF THE pucker factor isn't high enough already.
They were being ordered to go home—now.
Marr thought, No. His gunship would not leave MAKO 30 unprotected, and his gunship was all that Slab and the team had as cover. The gunships had failed MAKO 30 twice now, and Marr wasn't looking for a hat trick. He thought, It's our decision while we're in the aircraft, unless the commanders want to come repo it.
It was not the response that his commanders wanted to hear.
Marr thought, Our boss may not like it, but we are not leaving.
His commanders assumed that the gunship had not heard their order. The gunship was not heading for home. Part of the reason: Masirah was ordering them to stay on station; they were instructing Turner to disobey a direct order (from his own command) in wartime and to follow another direct order, placing him in an impossible position of not knowing which order to obey.
Commanders continued to pimp Turner to leave. Earlier, they had asked for his bingo—the time at which gunships were required to pull off to refuel. Marr figured their fuel loads. The minutes went by. The light brightened in the east. Reasons for disobeying were wearing thin with command. They'd hit the thirty-minutes-to-daylight warning window, and Turner's command demanded to know his intentions. His answer depended on whether other close air support, called “daylight CAS”—F-15s, F-18s, and A-10s—could be found to replace him. An AWACS (airborne warning and control system, a large airplane with a saucer on top that served as an air control and communications platform) reported to Turner that F-18s would soon be available off the carrier USS Kitty Hawk in the Arabian Sea, but not soon enough. F-16s and F-15Es were logged to arrive on station from their base in Kuwait, and Turner radioed them with Slab's grid coordinates. But having a specific destination and reaching the destination in time for a seamless transfer were different factors. Turner could do the math in his head: the jets would not arrive in time—not even close.
Turner decided to stretch the thirty-minute rule, regardless, until the F-15s were closer in to give Slab and his team protection, or until his fuel supply forced him to pull away. In those moments, like Slab before him, he was caught between the forces of necessity and prudence. He thought of reasons why he should leave, but in the end, there was only one—Spirit 03, a lesson that was drummed into the thinking of every gunship pilot. It meant the difference between life and death.
The memory of the incident never left Turner. It had occurred during the first Gulf War, on the morning of January 31, 1991, when Spirit 03, a Spectre gunship, was about to end its mission and head back to its base. Daybreak was dawning. An embattled unit of Marines asked Spirit 03 to delay its return long enough to destroy a last enemy missile battery. Knowing the risks, the crew prepared to do what they'd been asked. As a consequence, an Iraqi on the ground was able to see Spirit 03. He shot an SA-7 “Grail” surface-to-air missile that struck Spirit 03, which then crashed in the waters of the Persian Gulf, killing all fourteen crew members. Those dead men, hardly abstractions, were friends and neighbors of Turner's crew. They had broken the rule.
Turner reminded himself that this was not his decision. A soldier gets told to charge the machine-gun nest and he does, and he gets told to retreat and he does that too. Yet as an Air Force pilot in charge of his aircraft, he had the right to decide.
Still, flying in circles at low altitudes and low speeds in almost full daylight made the lumbering gunship a target as obvious and vulnerable as the Goodyear blimp over a football stadium. Turner had been shot at during his deployment to Afghanistan—AAA and, he believed, MANPADs (man-portable air defense systems)—but he had never made his gunship a target during daylight. As if to underscore his fear, Turner's electronic warfare officer (EWO) reported that a MANPAD—a Russian SA-7 antiaircraft missile—was in the air and streaking toward them from the southeast. Turner requested a threat assessment. The EWO reported that the missile was out of range and that an avoidance maneuver was unnecessary.
Masirah came up on his radio again. Six or eight voices were issuing conflicting orders at once. Turner was told to disregard the command from his other commander, the one back at his home base, the one who had told him to obey the thirty-minute rule, and get the hell out. The word that Turner was hearing now, Masirah wanted him to remain on station over the mountain until he “ran out of gas or bullets, period!” In short, disregard “the whole daylight thing.”
Turner had no problem with that per se. But the conflicting guidance frayed his nerves. He told both commands, “You guys need to get on the phone together and figure out what you want us to do.” They did that, throwing rank around on the radio and creating further confusion while raising the level of tension. Turner sat back listening to the sounds of high-level shit hitting the fan.
His commander told him, “You are on RTB [return to base] now.”
He was past the thirty-minute window and in receipt of a direct order.
Marr radioed Slab, “You got daylight CAS coming in.”
Slab called and said, “Don't leave us.”
The gunship had a two-hour flight home with no refueling tanker to hook up to. Their bingo was now.
Turner thought, Hey, pay attention. An AWACS called to ask if he had seen a second MANPAD, this one no closer than the first and out of range, but a threat all the same. His crew had missed sighting it, and Turner knew why. The blinding flames behind antiaircraft missiles were harder to see in broad daylight.
AWACs reported that two Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles inbound from Kuwait were delayed on a tanker. Turner did some quick mental math. The fighters were thirty minutes out.
Marr listened over the net. The traffic on the radio was enough to give him a headache, and it wasn't helping. Knowing what he was doing, he reached up and turned the radio receiver switch to the off position. Marr was saying, “We stay until we determine what the right time is to leave.”
Turner thought, We are not doing this because we think they are not right in ordering us; we are doing it because we know from talking to Slab that we are the only friends he's got. He's in a hurt locker.
Minutes went by. The sky brightened. Turner put his game face on. Gas, not daylight or the conflicting orders, decided for him. But that didn't quell his anxiety and guilt. No matter how correct and even necessary his decision to leave may have been, he was putting MAKO 30 at greater risk.
On his turn out, Turner called Slab to tell him goodbye. Slab wanted to know about the QRF. Turner knew that the Rangers had loaded aboard the Chinooks, and he called to ask about their status.
“An hour,” he was told. Other voices on his net quickly reported the QRF's arrival “within” an hour, “a couple of hours.”
Vectoring for home, Turner relayed to the AWACs grid coordinates for an offset LZ off the peak. His crew thought they had made the point. They asked the AWACS to relay the offset grid coordinates to the QRF, so that they too would not land on the peak.
Turner said, “Don't let them go into that first one. Two helicopters have gone in there and two have gotten shot up. Don't let them go back to the original LZ.”
Finally, when the gunship was quiet, Marr thought, We disobeyed orders for thirty minutes . . . we did not abandon them.
The flight home was long and somber. Every man in the crew dreaded the news that might greet them when they landed.