0900 Saturday 15 December 1990
King Faisal Naval Base
Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Spend a lot of time talking to customers face-to-face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.
—ROSS PEROT, AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN
Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.
—PETER DRUCKER, CONSULTANT, EDUCATOR, AND AUTHOR
It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
—IMMANUEL KANT, GERMAN PHILOSOPHER
Jeddah’s leadership needed volunteers to work the air campaign plan. Lieutenant Colonel Bruce from Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Georgia, led the mission planning cell (MPC). Lieutenant Colonel Wright, call sign D-Right, worked for Lieutenant Colonel Bruce and needed help on A-Model tanker plans. I jumped at the chance. Working in the MPC and also getting to fly is the best of both worlds, and a great opportunity to learn. Lieutenant Colonel Bruce put my name on the list to check out “the Bag,” a wide black leather briefcase containing all of Jeddah’s first air tasking order (ATO) missions for the first three days of the war. Only thirteen names were on the Bag’s list. Lieutenant Colonel Bruce took me into a room and read me Operations Plan 1002, the war in Iraq. He explained in great detail events planned for the air campaign’s first three days. I read each day’s ATO package summaries, containing over 130 missions on the first day.
One of the 1709th’s biggest customers was Carrier Strike Group 2 in the Red Sea, then commanded by Admiral Riley Mixson. The USS John F. Kennedy’s battle group contained several other ships, such as Aegis cruisers and destroyers to defend the battle group, and tankers too. Carrier Air Wing 3 was on “Big John.” The USS Saratoga and Carrier Air Wing 17 rounded out Admiral Mixson’s air wing strike force. Each week tanker MPC folks flew out to the John F. Kennedy to work with Air Wing 3 strike planners on the first three days’ strike packages. D-Right came down the hall after one of our flights and asked if I wanted to go out to the carrier. Of course I wanted to. SAC’s tanker community knew very little about how the carrier air wings operated.
On the morning of Saturday 15 December, D-Right and I donned Mickey Mouse ears and float coats for the ride out. A loadmaster briefed us on safety issues before walking us to a waiting Grumman C-2 carrier on-board delivery (COD) aircraft, wings folded and engines running, at King Faisal Naval Base on the Red Sea coast. Stepping onto the open rear ramp, D-Right and I walked to our seats for the long flight to the Kennedy, haze gray and under way in the northern Red Sea. I sat in a window seat on the left side, right behind all the cargo on the COD’s rear deck. D-Right sat on the aisle across from me. The C-2, call sign RAWHIDE 45, taxied out to the runway, its ramp down until just before takeoff. After a short takeoff roll, the Hijaz Mountains passed by out the window, and the Red Sea was a bright turquoise blue from eighteen thousand feet. An hour into the flight, our loadmaster came over the intercom and told us what to do during the arrested landing: sit tight, feet and knees together, cross your arms, and hold your shoulder straps with your head down, your chin on your chest. And then the loadmaster gave this ominous warning: “If we go down in the water, remember that bubbles always float up. Follow the bubbles to a hatch, and let the float coat take you to the surface. Take steady breaths from the life vest oxygen bottle. Remember to release air from your lungs as you rise.” How long does it take to rise to the surface from the Red Sea’s six-thousand-foot trench?
“D-Right, what’s an arrested landing and cat shot like?”
“Like nothing you’ve ever experienced in your life—not even at Disneyland!”
As we leveled off and accelerated eight hundred feet above the water, the loadmaster told us to get into position. The C-2’s wings rolled left into a 3-g carrier traffic pattern break, and we could see the deck filled with planes passing beneath us out D-Right’s window. We slowed down and I heard the gear come down, and then the flap extension tubes activate. After we completed another wide left turn, the loadmaster screamed from his seat, “GET READY! GET READY! GET READY!”
Big John’s wake appeared under my window, followed by the gray deck and fantail. I can describe the arrested landing only as SCREECH—BANG—HALT. The tires screeched on hitting the deck as the wheel struts bottomed out and the airplane came to a halt in the time it took you to read this sentence.
The COD’s wings folded, covering my window as we taxied out of the arresting cable wires. The cargo ramp opened, and I saw that the ship’s bow was covered with A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair attack planes. A Navy KA-6D tanker followed behind us. As the COD turned butt end toward the conning tower island, a big white 67 appeared behind us. As we pushed back into the parking spot, several people wearing different-colored shirts waited to transfer cargo, passengers, and baggage. D-Right leaned over and asked, “Well, how’d you like that?”
“That was outstanding!”
With a big smile, he said, “Wait till the cat shot!”
Carrier launch operations are among the most destructive sounds a human ear can experience, coming in at 160 decibels, and in some cases higher; the human eardrum ruptures at 170 decibels without protection. King Faisal’s Air Transportation Office told us to use foamy earplugs under the Mickey Mouse cranial protectors, and now I knew why. Smells of burning jet fuel and greasy oil filled my nose. It was like being in a car repair shop with AC/DC turned all the way up. D-Right and I stood next to the COD’s folded wings as a kneeling F-14 Tomcat’s launch bar dropped over catapult number four’s shuttle on the waist. A young kid waved at several people and ran out from under the nose as the launch bar contacted the big catapult shuttle. An A-7E Corsair taxied by, momentarily blocking our view. The VF-14 Tophatter Tomcat, call sign CAMELOT 110, went into afterburner and strained against the holdback bar. A Green Shirt gave the thumbs-up signal, and a Yellow Shirt tapped the deck and pointed forward. CAMELOT 110 blasted off the end of the deck and out of view.
The jet blast deflector—JBD to all on the carrier—came down, and a KA-6D unfolded its wings while taxiing over the catapult track. Another A-7E, call sign CLANSMEN 307, taxied by, its wings folded, a single AGM-88 HARM missile hanging from a pylon. Men in yellow, green, red, brown, and white long-sleeved shirts ran all over the deck. Two young sailors in purple shirts walked around the E-2 Hawkeye next to us and went downstairs. The air boss shouted over the loudspeaker at a sailor who wasn’t paying attention. Everyone stood behind a red-and-yellow-striped line as the VA-75 Sunday Puncher KA-6D went under tension and spooled up its engines to max power. A few seconds later, it disappeared out of view behind the COD. The flight deck was chaos under controlled conditions.
Escorts tapped us on the shoulder and led us toward the island. We stepped off the flight deck onto a small stairway, the Red Sea passing eight stories below us under catwalks made from heavy wire mesh welded to a framework. Walking into the carrier’s ATO office, D-Right shook hands with Dagwood, Carrier Air Wing 3’s lead strike planner and our host. Dagwood led us through several passageways to the carrier intelligence center, or CVIC. About the size of your living and dining rooms combined, the CVIC would be our workspace for the next two days. The CVIC held most of the strike planning data and intelligence support systems, making it the natural place for large, multisquadron planning meetings. All Carrier Air Wing 3 squadron commanders gathered in the CVIC with us to review air plan changes.
An intel analyst briefed us on Iraq’s air defenses from a report published by the Office of Naval Intelligence Strike Projection Evaluation and Anti-Air Research (SPEAR) Division in Suitland, Maryland. I had never heard the sort of detailed analysis of Saddam’s air defense network that this report contained. The Black Hole air campaign planning cell in Riyadh had just published new strike package priorities for the first three days’ air tasking order, and all the Navy refueling requirements had changed. After going over the new air wing taskings, it was our turn to ask some questions. One question D-Right had for the commanders was what the 1709th needed to do to improve our support. No one liked our Iron Maiden, the nickname for the KC-135’s refueling drogue. It’s a hard basket looking like a badminton shuttlecock, attached to the boom that Navy aircraft refuel from weighing more than 250 pounds. Several new air wing lieutenants had never refueled behind a KC-135 or KC-10 until operating in the Red Sea. All the comments were small things Jeddah’s tanker aircrews needed to fine-tune, small and easily made adjustments to our procedures with Navy receivers. We spent the next two hours going over all the strike missions in detail, changing tanker requirements where needed and answering any questions asked; it was an incredible learning experience with our customers.
After our meetings, D-Right and I had some time off. Dagwood introduced me to my escort, a Tomcat radar intercept officer (RIO) named Dave Parsons, call sign Hey Joe. Both of us had a passion for photography. Hey Joe took his camera on every flight, and he had a great view from his Tomcat’s backseat office. He showed me several of his recent pictures, which the carrier photo shop had blown up for him. He asked if I was hungry, and I told him, “You bet I am.”
Hey Joe said I hadn’t experienced carrier life until I had consumed a slider, a roller, and auto dawg. I thought, What kind of Air Force initiation is this? Is it specific to KC-135 pilots, as payback for the Iron Maiden? We headed down to the Dirty Shirt Mess, an area where all could eat while working in their dirty duds. I stuck to Hey Joe like white on rice, knowing I would never find the way back to my stateroom through this maze of passageways.
Following Hey Joe’s lead, I grabbed a tray off the stack. He pointed to a cook flipping thirty burger patties on a grill.
“Those are sliders—hamburgers.”
Pointing down the line, he said, “Those are rollers,” and pointed at sixty hot dogs turning on a hot dog roller.
Pointing to the ice cream machine, he said, “That’s auto dawg—ice cream.”
“Why do you call it auto dawg?” I asked.
He laughed and said, “Because it looks like a dog with diarrhea as it comes out!”
The Dirty Shirt Mess salad bar had more items on it than my onshore cafeteria at Jeddah. I asked Hey Joe how they got all the lettuce. He told me it came aboard while they were underway-replenishing, or UNREPing, from a stores ship that would come alongside. The ship replenished its bombs the same way. Both of us sat down at the VF-32 Swordsmen table, Hey Joe introducing me to his squadron mates as a KC-135 pilot from Jeddah. One bowed to me, saying, “We love tanker guys!”
I asked all of them what we were doing wrong at Jeddah, how we could improve our service to them. Each one mentioned their preference for the soft, Nerf-like drogues the KC-10 had over the KC-135 Iron Maiden. Unfortunately, SAC was not going to fix that before the war. They asked us to lock the boom when we refueled off the drogue, but there is no “lock” on the boom. A pilot with the call sign Sundance said, “Let us plug into it, don’t help us.” They also asked KC-135 mission planning questions: “How much gas do you hold?” “What is a KC-135’s fuel burn rate?” “Do you burn the same gas you’re off-loading?” The discussion lasted over an hour.
After I finished dinner, I asked Hey Joe to take me to some of the best places for pictures. I had twenty rolls of film in my helmet bag that I wanted to shoot before leaving. We walked toward the center of the ship and climbed several sets of stairs. As I stepped through a large hatch onto an island balcony, the deck spread out below me three stories down. We were standing on Vulture’s Row. Hey Joe told me that this was the best and safest place to take pictures if I had never been aboard before.
A lot of people come to Vulture’s Row to watch and photograph flight ops. The entire flight deck fore and aft spread out in front of me. I shot five rolls of film over the next ten minutes. Hey Joe told me there was one other place to shoot from. We stopped by the Swordsmen ready room, where Hey Joe handed me a cranial protector and a float coat. We followed VF-32’s landing signal officer out onto the deck, just a short walk from the ready room. Two Tomcats came over the carrier at five hundred knots into the pattern break as we stepped onto the deck’s landing area. Each Tomcat landed thirty feet in front of me. An A-6E Intruder and two A-7s came down the right side and into the overhead break pattern. I stood mesmerized by the spectacle in front of me. After all the aircraft landed, everyone cleared off the platform and went back to their ready rooms. Twelve planes had landed in seven minutes.
D-Right and I met in the CVIC the next morning to tie off a few more planning items. Dagwood then walked us to the Air Traffic Office, the passenger terminal for the carrier, for our departure back to Jeddah. Again donning Mickey Mouse cranials and float coats, we listened as the loadmaster gave us another safety brief. A Grumman C-2 Greyhound COD, call sign RAWHIDE 46, had been backed into the same spot, waiting for us to board. The first thing I noticed was that all the seats were facing aft. D-Right and I shook Dagwood’s hand and stepped into the COD and sat down.
“Wait till you experience this,” D-Right said, laughing.
Whatever is about to happen to me, I thought, I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.
RAWHIDE 46’s rear cargo ramp closed as it taxied toward the bow catapults. I watched as several people standing on the deck moved by my window. The loadmaster announced that we were taxiing into the cat, so we needed to get ready; this would happen fast. Within minutes, the engines throttled up as the loadmaster screamed, “GET READY! GET READY! GET READY!” and put his head down on his chest.
I looked out the window to watch. Cat shots are a loud BANG, followed by a big backward jerk and another loud BANG. After the first bang, I came out of my seat about half an inch—remember, the seats were facing the tail! The striping on the deck was a blur. Three seconds later there was another bang, and RAWHIDE 46 was airborne. Zero to 160 knots in 307 feet.
I looked over at D-Right and screamed as loud as I could, “I GOTTA DO THAT AGAIN!”
He just laughed at me, a big smile on his face. During the long ride home, we discussed what I had learned, and I asked him a lot of questions.
The SAC tanker community knew very little about how the Navy air wings operate. Jeddah’s big wing of tankers were about to refuel some of the largest carrier strike packages in combat history, but very few in the SAC’s tanker plans community understood how the Navy does business. We didn’t even speak their language. The carrier had a confidential communications card with their preset radio frequencies printed on it. The carrier, called “Mother,” had a navigation antenna atop the mainmast that the tankers could navigate from. Mother’s tactical air navigation system (TACAN) channels changed periodically, so having the carrier comm card was important. VF-32 had their own squadron radio frequency to talk to each other. I had learned about deck cycle time, going from launching aircraft to recovering aircraft and how it affected refueling operations. Most important, Hey Joe had explained how the Tomcats and Aegis cruisers defend the tankers during refueling.
One new idea the Jeddah tankers tried with the Navy was the hose multiplier concept, which was a huge success for refueling. Hose multiplier works like this: KA-6Ds, the carrier’s organic tankers, fill up from Air Force KC-135s before the strike aircraft arrive at PRUNE or RAISIN refueling tracks in western Saudi Arabia. Once full, the KA-6Ds move to our wings, trailing their internal drogues as other contact points aircraft can plug into for fuel. Hose multiplier KA-6Ds gave KC-135s the ability to refuel two airplanes simultaneously. It would have been impossible for all twenty-six to thirty-four strike fighters to get their required fuel before reaching the Iraqi border if we hadn’t used hose multipliers. When a KA-6D said they were on their way to my tanker’s Iron Maiden, I always gave them as much gas as they wanted. The gas then spread to all the airborne Navy fighters and jammers.
On Saturday 22 December, my crew refueled the Red Sea air wings. I wrote Hey Joe’s squadron’s frequency on my lineup card, classified mission notes on an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper strapped to my right leg, hoping he might be airborne during the sortie. Kevin’s mom and dad sent our crew a Christmas package containing four Santa hats and lots of chocolate. Feeling the Christmas spirit, we all took our new Santa hats on the flight. We were in a giving mood. Kevin, Rick, and I put the Santa hats on and then our headsets, while Kenny put on his hat over his headset. The wind was blowing hard out of the north at about thirty knots while we taxied out to the center runway. As we taxied out to the end of the runway, Kenny and I opened our windows at the same time. A thirty-mile-per-hour blast of wind went through the cockpit. Kenny’s Santa hat went out the window in a red flash.
What could I tell the supervisor of flying? “Hey, SOF, can you pick our Santa hat out of the airfield fence just off the taxiway to the center runway?” We discussed what to tell the SOF as a crew. Kevin said I shouldn’t tell him anything—the hat was in the fence and wouldn’t hurt anybody. Good plan. We closed the windows and took off.
A controller called Red Crown in the Aegis cruiser cleared us into the carrier airspace and passed us off to Strike Control, a radar controller inside the Kennedy’s Carrier Information Center, their version of Jeddah’s COYOTE Ops, the command post call sign at Jeddah. Kenny dialed in the Swordsmen frequency in comm two of our brand-new Rockwell Collins ARC-210 radio. I keyed the mic and said, “Hey Joe, check!”
“Hey Joe here.”
“Sluggo’s flying the tanker!”
“Be there in ten minutes!”
He called back minutes later to say he’d locked us up on radar.
“Where are you, Hey Joe?”
“On your nose for three miles.”
I started looking for him out in front of us. I didn’t see him.
“Hey Joe, where are you again?”
“Look up!”
I peered up through the eyebrow windows to see two Tomcats roll inverted on their backs and pull as hard as they could toward the boom.
“Boom, Pilot—here they come!”
“Looking for them . . .”
“OH JESUS!”
Hey Joe, in GYPSY 200, the air wing commander’s brightly painted billboard jet, and his wingman, in GYPSY 201, the squadron commander’s billboard jet, leveled off behind the drogue.
“How much can you give us, Sluggo?”
“How much do you want?”
“Can you give us each ten K?”
“If I can get some good pictures of you off the wing afterward, I’ll top you both off.”
“Deal!”
GYPSY 200 and 201 owned the bar. After getting his gas, GYPSY 201 moved down to the drogue. Hey Joe parked out my window, a camera up to his face. He was pointing at us and laughing. Hey Joe’s pilot, Dawg, moved high and close to my window. Both pointed down at me.
They saw the Santa hats.
GYPSY 201 joined on Hey Joe’s left side after getting his ten thousand pounds. Both Tomcats just sat there motionless in perfect fingertip formation. Hey Joe snapped several pictures and then stuffed his camera down beside him. Then I heard Dawg’s voice on the radio: “Gypsies—burners . . . NOW!”
Engine exhaust nozzles opened wide. Long tongues of orange flame grew longer and longer as each stage of afterburner ignited. GYPSY 200 and 201 lurched forward and upward, gaining speed. Hey Joe called Strike passing thirty-two thousand feet. He had left us at twenty-one thousand.
My crew in EXXON 55 stayed airborne for two more hours, refueling whoever came up. Strike Control took us up to one of the MiG combat air patrol (CAP) stations near the Gulf of Aqaba. At one point we could see the Mount Sinai area, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. On our way home, we passed over the USS John F. Kennedy, its wake visible from twenty-three thousand feet. After landing and stopping by COYOTE Ops to drop off all our gear, we hopped a bus for the compound.
Two weeks later, D-Right found me in the hall. “Come with me, Captain.”
Walking into our secret vault, he spun the safe’s dial. He handed me a piece of paper from a folder marked TOP SECRET on its orange cover sheet and said one word to me: “Read.” Only the top quarter of the page had writing. It said,
TO: All Units
SUBJECT: Operation Desert Storm
MSG: Implement Wolfpack. D-Day is 17 January 1991, H-Hour is 0000Z or 0300 local Baghdad time. Good luck and good hunting! Horner
Wolfpack, the code name for the first three ATO days of the air campaign, would commence at 3:00 a.m. Baghdad time on Thursday 17 January 1991.
One of the biggest lessons from my involvement in Desert Storm was that tanker planners knew nothing about how the Navy operated, but a quarter of Jeddah’s wartime receivers were Navy drogue-equipped aircraft. SAC tankers practiced very few drogue refuelings in daily training—maybe once a year tops. I learned a new phrase from Hey Joe while he escorted me around the carrier: the Navy uses the term “the gouge” to mean someone has the latest and greatest insider knowledge on an event or situation. D-Right and I needed the most recent gouge from strike planners aboard the John F. Kennedy if Jeddah was to be successful during the war.
My first time aboard an aircraft carrier at sea was quite a shock. I knew very little about how the Navy operated, even after reading all the documents I could find. Meeting Hey Joe was like having a personal tutor running me all over the ship and introducing me to the strike leads in CVIC. Face-to-face meetings with clients are invaluable opportunities for learning the gouge. Being aboard the Kennedy and meeting all those pilots and RIOs made me a captive audience and increased my learning curve. Never miss the chance to gain knowledge and the latest, greatest gouge through face-to-face contact with your clients. When it came time to execute refueling missions for real, Jeddah tanker planners understood what our Navy customers needed. I used this gouge-learning tool during face-to-face meetings with business customers while working in the defense industry. Our company won a huge international contract because I picked up the phone and called an air attaché for his gouge on what his country’s Air Force needed in an airlift/air refueling aircraft. I had the gouge, and the company benefited from it.