It was December 29, 2004, and I was twenty-four years old. It was my first combat deployment to the northern Persian Gulf, flying Tomcats with the Swordsmen of VF-32, onboard USS Harry S. Truman. By the end of December, I had flown a handful of missions over Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. They had all been uneventful; any increase in heart rate was usually self-imposed. On this particular evening, I was scheduled to fly a standard mission “in-country.” I was paired with an experienced radar intercept officer, call sign “Demo,” and we had a Marine Hornet, flown by “Spaz,” as our lead.
During our pre-mission planning and brief, our intelligence officers didn’t provide any information out of the ordinary. We were on the hook to fly some pipeline routes in central Iraq, near Baghdad. One of many insurgent tactics was to plant explosives on the oil pipelines that crisscross the country. Our job was to either catch them in the act or deter them from acting at all. We expected to be staring at our sensors while trolling the pipelines for these bad guys. After about three and a half hours in Iraq, we’d cruise back to the boat for a greasy slider (cheeseburger) before bedtime. No big deal. As the old saying goes, “Ignorance is bliss.”
As far back as I can remember, I had always wanted to be a Navy fighter pilot. Maybe it was the movies I watched, maybe it was the books I read or the stories I heard. Maybe it became a part of me on my third day of life when my father took a detour to the airport on the way home from the hospital and took me airborne for the first time. However it started, I have known from a young age that being a fighter pilot was my destiny. Dad died of a heart attack when I was two years old, but he remained a driving force in my life, motivating me to dream looking skyward.
My journey toward naval aviation was fairly typical. I studied hard and took flying lessons in high school. Thanks to the enthusiastic support and encouragement of my mother, I soloed an airplane when I was sixteen. That same year I was accidentally shot in the face, and I thought that my fighter pilot dreams were over. My seventeenth birthday, July 4, 1997, was spent in the hospital. As I watched the fireworks over Boston Harbor through my window, wiping drool from my chin and craving the next hit of painkiller, I wondered if I would ever fly again, never mind become a Navy fighter pilot.
I recovered and through my mother’s unwavering support got my pilot’s license when I was seventeen. I was inducted into the Naval Academy Class of 2002 two weeks later. I didn’t stop flying while at the Naval Academy, nor did I stop facing adversity. Near the end of my junior year, the Navy Bureau of Medicine rejected my request for flight status. I was crushed. I appealed and appealed, fought and kept fighting. Finally, a year later, I was granted a waiver and flight status with no limitations on what I could fly. I service selected naval aviation and started flight school seven days after graduation. After a year and a half of flight training, I moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, to begin the F-14 Tomcat training curriculum. My dream had come true. At that moment, I could never have imagined that a lifetime of dreaming and striving and working to become a naval aviator would eventually be summed up in one very poignant evening flying over northern Iraq.
It was a lovely afternoon over downtown Baghdad. I was a brand-new Fleet aviator on my first cruise. Everything was new to me, and in part because of that, I hadn’t really explored the consequences of failure, or success for that matter. I was just happy to be there. Happy to serve, happy to fly.
We spent the first forty-five minutes of our mission searching for suspicious activity; eventually it just felt as though we were on a leisurely cruise through the countryside. I even commented to Demo, with a big yawn, that I was quite enjoying our sightseeing trip over the Tigris. Right about that time, our radios crackled to life.
“Viscous 45, 46, this is Warhawk. Be advised, there is a TIC in progress in Mosul. Your signal is buster. Meet your tanker fifty miles north of your position!”
Viscous 45 and Viscous 46 were our mission call signs, so I perked up quickly. Obedient to the anonymous voice on the radio, we turned our aircraft and “bustered” north as quickly as possible to get gas and help out the TIC (troops in contact). As briefed, “Exxon in the sky” was on our nose at fifty miles, heading toward Mosul. I was lucky to plug in first to fuel up, but it turned out the tanker’s pumps weren’t working. “Just stay in the basket,” said the tanker pilot, “there is another tanker near Mosul. Take whatever gas we can give you in the twenty-minute transit. We’ll drag you right to him.” As we rendezvoused with our second tanker, Spaz elected to take gas first. While he was in the basket, we attempted to get an update on the situation on the ground. Just then, our primary radio gave up the ghost.
In general, operating on one radio is no big deal, but on this particular evening, it certainly would have been nice to have both radios working. Wartime operations require lots of coordination and lots of communication. The amount of communication over one radio was almost too much to handle, and it caused more than a little discomfort and misunderstanding throughout the remainder of our flight. We elected to stay up on the tanker frequency for safety, and therefore we were not able to get any more information about our troops and their fight in the city below us.
After fifteen minutes in the basket, Spaz had a full bag of gas and pitched off the tanker to provide support in Mosul. “Get your gas, report overhead,” said Spaz over the static of our crackling radio. “See you in twenty minutes.” With that, we were all alone. We got into the basket, again, and this time started to take on fuel. Five minutes later, a single Hornet from our Marine squadron showed up on the wing of the tanker. He had just come from the fight we were about to dive into. He was out of bullets and out of gas. When he checked in with the tanker I realized that it was a good friend of mine.
“What’s going on Cleetus!” I yelled, hoping he could hear my broken transmissions over the din of static and radio noise.
“Is that you MJ!”
“You know it buddy! What’s the story down there?”
Communications are normally kept succinct and professional in the air. Quiet time on the radio is golden, and filling that time with a running dialogue is not the norm. This evening, however, chatting casually with Cleetus provided us with some invaluable situational awareness that we had lost working with just one radio. Without him, we would have never learned what we were getting ourselves into. Despite the fact that our radio was scratchy and broken, I could still clearly hear the stress in his voice. As he described the battle that had unfolded in Mosul, I started shaking in my seat.
Cleetus spent some time describing the layout of the streets, the location of the friendlies, the buildings housing the enemy, and lots of other important details that helped us get our heads around the environment where we were about to immerse ourselves. He had done a good job of utilizing his Hornet’s ordnance in support of the troops on the ground, but the battle was still raging. An Army Stryker unit had gone on patrol through the streets of Mosul, a common occurrence in the region. Ops were normal. What was not normal was that insurgent forces had planned an ingenious and deadly ambush. The convoy of vehicles, mostly heavily armed utility vehicles, had been rolling down the main drag on the west side of town. They were at the end of their mission when all hell broke loose. Multiple roadside bombs exploded simultaneously at intervals throughout the convoy, and the men and vehicles were stopped in their own bloody tracks. As soon as the men dismounted, gunfire rained down on them from all sides. They were trapped.
Full of fuel, we said goodbye to Cleetus, pointed the aircraft to the center of Mosul, and attempted to contact Spaz. I was scared, but I was ready to put my aircraft, and training, into service to help out my buddies in the street. Demo switched our only, shitty radio up to the frequency that we had been given, and the noise on that channel was startling. With the sun setting behind us, I peered down into the maze of streets, bridges, intersections, and smoking buildings. All I could think of was how our target resembled the Super Bowl—a grandstand full of flashing cameras above the heads of Army soldiers on the ground—but instead of thousands of flash bulbs, I was seeing the bright flashes of bullets, tracers, and grenades, all pointed at U.S. soldiers. I was now even more scared, but those were my brothers down there and I had to help them.
Gazing down at the maelstrom, I picked up the blur of a Hornet diving at the ground. Seconds later, a truck exploded, and more smoke poured over the battlefield. Though I knew I was safe in my cockpit, I was physically shaking. I had no idea what was next, and I had no idea how our boys were faring. The diving Hornet had been Spaz, on his last strafing run. Like Cleetus, he was out of bullets. The congestion of the city made collateral damage concerns too great for him to drop bombs, and he had to pitch out of the fight. We had bullets; it was our turn.
Demo began to get a talk-on to friendly and enemy positions, and an updated situation report from our joint terminal air controller (JTAC). The JTAC is like an offensive coordinator in football. He is with the guys on the ground, can see where the threat is coming from, and utilizes the aviation assets at his disposal to attack the threat. It’s a tough job, but one that is absolutely crucial in a fight of this magnitude. This JTAC sounded young, and stressed, and he frequently took pauses to engage the enemy himself. The noises in the background were like something out of a movie. I was wet behind the ears, but I knew enough to realize that our team was in extremis.
The JTAC was begging for strafing attacks on the enemy, just eighty meters from their position. It took Demo and me a few minutes to get our bearings, but faster than I expected we were diving toward the ground, cleared hot—with permission to employ our 20 mm Vulcan cannon. I managed to get the gun sight squarely over the balcony from which the enemy was firing, but as I got lower and lower, the symbols in my gun sight weren’t what I was expecting to see. I had to be sure that the bullets from my gun were not going to end up hitting the good guys or any nearby civilians. I pulled off without a shot.
“What happened?” came the voices from all sides as we recovered off target. “Why didn’t you fire?!”
“I didn’t ire because it didn’t look right,” I yelled into the radio.
Demo shouted back from the rear cockpit, “MJ, we gotta get bullets down there. These guys need us”
“Fuck. Okay, okay, I’ll do it.”
I knew that I needed to put bullets down on the second run, but I also knew that I still couldn’t risk the lives of friendlies, so I pressed our Tomcat absolutely as low as I could before I pulled the trigger. It’s amazing to me that I can still remember those few seconds so vividly. The gun spooled up, bullets came out, the earth started getting REALLY big in my windshield, and I pulled up, hard, and continued climbing back to our holding altitude. Through it all . . . silence. No static on the radios. No calls from the JTAC, or from Spaz. Oh my God, I thought, I just killed the friendlies. Seconds felt like hours as my stomach twisted itself into a pretzel.
“Good hits, those were good hits!” came Demo from the backseat. Then the radio crackled to life again, “Those were good hits, good hits! You are authorized for an immediate reattack!” I thought, “Holy shit! Thank you God! Here we go again!”
We rolled in again with the same results. Cleared for a third attack, we made our way around the circle and dove toward the target. Flashes whizzed past the canopy and our wings. It didn’t even occur to me that those little guys were firing up at me. I only knew that I had to fire down at them. Ignorance was, indeed, bliss.
Coming off target, Demo yelled from the back seat, “Holy shit, break left!” I rolled and pulled about as hard as I possibly could, dumping flares out of the bottom of the aircraft. As I strained to see behind us, the spiraling smoke trail of a heat-seeking surface-to-air missile passed really close behind our tail and through the flares I had expended. Thank God for Demo. I probably wouldn’t be recounting this story if he hadn’t been watching our tail. Thanks, buddy.
The fight continued into the night, and the surface-to-air threat became more distinct. There were no more missile shots, but every time we rolled into our dive, tracer fire, and in some instances strings of antiaircraft artillery, followed our aircraft down the chute. It was terrifying, but our JTAC kept asking for support. We had gas and bullets, so we kept rolling in until we had spent all of our nearly seven hundred bullets.
After about an hour, we began to run out of gas. We had time for one last attack before we had to go back to the tanker. We coordinated the two aircraft, with Spaz pointing his Hornet at the target and shooting an air-to-surface missile. Demo used our targeting pod and laser to guide the missile into the very same building we had been attacking all night. The missile let itself in the front door and greeted the occupants of the building with a fiery blast. No more gun-fire came from the building.
When we finally plugged into the tanker, very low on gas, we heard our JTAC report that the convoy was mounting up and heading for home. They made it out. Spaz, Demo, and I began the hour-and-a-half transit from Mosul back to the “boat,” as pilots like to call home, in this case a floating city in the northern Persian Gulf. We spent the entire trip in almost complete silence. It was emotional detox time, coming down off an indescribable adrenaline rush. It was spiritual. I went over the fight in my head, said my prayers for those we tried to help and the souls we hurt. I then prepared myself for the nighttime carrier landing I was about to execute.
Every night when I come down the chute to land on the boat, I say a couple of Hail Marys. This short prayer always seems to calm me down. That night, to make matters even more worthy of divine intervention, my aggressive defensive maneuvering had severely damaged our Tomcat’s wing-flap system. We had to land on the carrier without wing flaps or slats, which help the aircraft fly slower for a more manageable landing approach. It was a less than optimal configuration, controllable but certainly not comfortable. Our approach was much faster than normal, resulting in perhaps the scariest moments of the evening, including nearly being hit by a missile. That night I may have said a complete rosary on my way down the chute.
Once we were safe on deck, Spaz, Demo, and I debriefed with our intelligence officers, my skipper, and our air wing commander. As soon as we finished, we sat down and emailed the guys we had been supporting on the ground. Our message was simple: “Hope we helped you guys out. Let us know what we can do better next time.” Less than two hours later, we received a reply: “Sir, helped out is a f-ing understatement. . . . You saved a lot of good guys’ lives out there tonight. If you hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t be here. Thank you.”
I sat back in my chair. Cold chills ran up the back of my neck, and then I breathed a long sigh of relief. Satisfaction, pain, pride, validation, and countless other emotions washed over me. Twelve years as a boy dreaming, four years at the Naval Academy preparing, and two years of flight school training to become a U.S. Navy fighter pilot had culminated in this one moment. My brothers made it home. It was all worth it.