This story is an excerpt from Radioman: Twenty-Five Years in the Marine Corps. It is better in the context of the book and the situation at the time in Fallujah. Please keep that in mind as you read it. To keep the story concise, much of the escalation of force and ROE discussions were trimmed.
Fallujah, Nov 2004:
I called Division and asked for a fixed wing with a GPS guided bomb. A squad from 1st Bn, 8th Mar. was pinned down by a sniper in a minaret and asking for help. Division replied that he had a single harrier with a GBU 38 and 20 minutes of fuel. Perfect.
I worked up the grid to place the bomb right at the base of the minaret and then made our hasty field adjustment to correct for the elevation deviation. Swifty 71 checked in with the standard brief. I gave him a quick explanation of the situation and a 9 line brief for his attack. He plugged in the 10 digit grid and had his sensors on the target minaret in moments. I explained that I needed him to follow the attack azimuth within 5 degrees. Usually you give the aircraft as much latitude as possible for their attack run. In this case, I wanted to parallel the side of the mosque that the minaret was attached to. If the bomb was long or short, it still wouldn’t hit the mosque. Of course I also needed my correction to work and to properly test it, we needed the bomb on the correct azmuith. Hitting long of the target wasn’t a problem, that was most decidedly bad guy territory. I was worried about hitting short and endangering friendlies. In the chatroom, I got a TOT of 30 approved. TOT=Time On Target. 30 meant 30 minutes after the hour which was about 8 minutes away.
“Swifty 71, Ripper 32, earliest TOT I can get approved is 30. Can you work with that?”
“Affirm Hesty”
“TOT set at 30. Just to confirm, this is Danger Close and we accept it”
“Swifty”
Cracked me up when guys switched up my callsigns but I didn’t really care. All it meant was I knew the guy and when you are laying large ordnance very close to good guys, that is usually a good thing.
I knew 1/8 was on the radio listening but I double checked with him on the back radio. This was actually working backwards from normal SOP. Usually the battalion Air O worked the air and the regimental Air O listened in. Here, I was running the Air and 1/8 was listening in just to make sure it all went the way he wanted.
I had a lot of resources at my fingertips that 1/8 didn’t have, I wasn’t getting shot at, I wasn’t outside in the freezing rain. Hell, I had a cup of Raybucks coffee. If I could help, I was going to.
I looked up across the COC and gave everyone a heads up I was running a mission for 1/8 and TOT was 30. I saw my buddy the S-4 standing over at the door of the COC. He had been working his ass off and probably hadn’t slept in 36 hours. I waved him in and pointed at the open chair behind me. Then I pointed at my eyes then to the screen. He could use a little ‘smash TV’ to lighten his mood. Let him watch for a minute.
“Swifty 71 inbound”
“Swifty, Ripper 32, cleared hot”
“Swifty is wings level”
“Cleared Hot” I didn’t need to clear him hot again but wanted to make sure there was no confusion and I was amped up on adrenaline.
“Beep” the Harrier transmitted a little beep when the bomb released. Then “Bomb away”
I echoed to the COC and to 1/8 on the radio “put your heads down, bomb away”
I could hear the roar of the jet overhead as he accelerated up and away and back into his holding area.
About 12 seconds later, right as my watch ticked over to “30”, the screen bloomed out white. A second later, we could hear and feel the ‘whomp’ of the impact. The radio crackled from 1/8 at the same time the image recovered on the screen. I could hear whooping and hollering in the background on the radio. There was hushed “Yeah!, OOOhh! Hell yeahs” trickling around the COC as the image of the stump of a minaret came into view.
“Shack! Beautiful, direct hit, impacted the minaret about 10 feet off the ground, it disintegrated!”
Swifty was now out of fuel and ordnance, he needed to return to base (RTB)
“Swifty, direct hit, that was a perfect shack! Don’t know how many snipers were in there but that is at least one Enemy KIA. You are cleared to switch and RTB, thanks for the work!”
“Anytime Hesty, I’ll be back, find me some more bad guys to schwack”
I remember that….it was awesome! One of the few times during that war when my timing was perfect. The other time was the “Iraqi synchronized swim team” when I walked into the COC just after they called in the artillery strike of “VT in effect” at the insurgents swimming across the Euphrates that 1/8 had been chasing…and then the second group of insurgents jumped in the river at the very same time. I actually heard the fire command “Repeat…over” and the second group got pink misted as well!
Ripper 4 out.
“Repeat” is something you rarely get to hear! That swim team mission was…different LOL