The Fighters Read online

  All this amplified the already substantial difficulties in forming cohesion between forces that did not speak the same languages and were culturally apart, and helped foster the mutual resentment evident between the forces. Nonetheless, well-intentioned Afghans and Iraqis gambled on American promises, only to suffer and die in quantities far exceeding the American loss of life. Blame for their shortfalls cannot fairly be assigned only to them. They were victims of Pentagon folly, too.

  How to examine personal combat service in wars replete with miscalculations of such scale? By remembering that national failures and individual experiences, while inextricably linked, are distinct. One chronicler of prominent veterans of Vietnam called his subjects “a flesh and blood repository of that generation’s anguish and sense of betrayal.”II For veterans of recent American wars, the postwar experience has been different. Beyond their physical wounds and the psychological toll, the bulk of them were not betrayed in the same sense—at least, not by most of their fellow citizens, who have mostly been supportive of this generation’s all-volunteer force. These American veterans confront something pernicious but usually invisible: the difficulties of trying to square their feelings of commitment after the terrorist attacks in 2001 with the knowledge that their lives were harnessed to wars that ran far past the pursuit of justice and ultimately did not succeed. They were betrayed not by their neighbors, but by their leaders. Although each of the combatants in this book was different, they shared a pair of behaviors that shaped their lives and became part of who they were—a determination to serve the American public, and an intensity with which they came to their fellow fighters’ aid. Selflessness in extreme circumstance was a binding, animating trait. Stripped of all other context, apart from the errors and misjudgments above them, this is what the pages that follow are about, so that their labors—what they gave in good faith—might be more fully understood, even where squandered by those who sent them into circumstances of grave danger, moral confusion, and agonizing deed.

  New York, N.Y.

  April 2018

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  I. Acronym for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, a product of Lockheed Martin.

  II. From The Nightingale’s Song, by Robert Timberg.

  PART I

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  * * *

  Storm

  ONE

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  INTO AFGHANISTAN

  G-MONSTER—Lieutenant Layne McDowell’s Quick Air War

  “I have been praying for God to take vengeance, since vengeance is His. I ask that if He decides to use us to take it, then make it swift and just and let us not be ashamed, let not our enemies triumph over us.”

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  Aboard the USS Enterprise

  All through the ship the eyes of the crew were locked on television screens. The Pentagon was burning. The World Trade Center was ablaze. The USS Enterprise, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was steaming through the Arabian Sea.

  The ship had passed through the Strait of Hormuz the day before, leaving the Persian Gulf and swinging its bow south toward South Africa. Temperatures fell as the huge gray hull entered cooler waters. The aviators and crew enjoyed a welcome sense of relief. They had been away from home for four and a half months and for the past few weeks were sleep-deprived and uncomfortable in the hot conditions and tempo aboard a warship in the Persian Gulf. All that was behind them. They were scheduled for one last stop—a port call in Cape Town—before setting course for Norfolk, Virginia, where their families would be waiting.

  A few hours before, at lunch in the wardroom, the aviators were lighthearted. “For all intents and purposes, this cruise is over,” one of the senior officers had said. Their most pressing duty was to spend all their training funds before the Enterprise reached home. In the peculiar way the United States military burns money, they would be flying to protect their service’s share of the Pentagon budget.

  Now sailors were watching live coverage of American citizens under attack.

  The news swept away all plans. The American military was readying for retaliation and war. Emotion and anxiety rippled from unit to unit, person to person, right to the bridge and operations spaces of this ship, where senior officers were in a state of uncertainty. The Navy Command Center had been destroyed in the attack on the Pentagon. The Enterprise’s officers had been cut off. They had no fresh orders. The ship’s nuclear power plants were pushing the vessel south according to the old plan, away from where news commentators were suggesting the terrorist attacks had come.

  Lieutenant Layne McDowell, an F-14 pilot, had been asleep in a three-bunk stateroom when one of his roommates, Lieutenant Patrick Greene, rushed in and switched on the television. He woke sensing Greene’s heightened state of alertness.

  “Something weird happened in New York,” Greene said.

  McDowell sat up. He saw a burning tower on the screen. Greene mentioned a plane and the possibility of a terrible accident.

  A second aircraft appeared, a jetliner flying low, level, and fast. It hit the other tower and exploded in an enormous fireball. McDowell instantly knew what it meant.

  This is a coordinated attack, he thought. What’s next?

  He winced as if he himself had failed. He had never felt so out of position in his life. We’re an F-14 squadron. We’re supposed to be between Americans and this. This is what we’re supposed to prevent.

  He and Greene hurried to the ready room, stood before another screen, and watched the towers collapse.

  McDowell was a member of VF-14, a fighter squadron built around F-14 Tomcats and part of the Navy’s elite. Its aviators had combined experience spanning multiple wars. They were conditioned to attack, unfamiliar with the sensation of seeing American cities struck.

  The Enterprise had been shuddering as it steamed south, vibrating as it moved near its maximum speed. The ship slowed. The shuddering ceased. The carrier leaned into a hard turn as its bow came around. Throughout the ready room the aviators understood. The USS Enterprise had changed course. It was headed in the opposite direction, toward their foes. McDowell turned to another pilot. “Somebody knows where we’re supposed to be going,” he said.

  That night the squadron’s commanding officer called a meeting. Al Qaeda, he said, was behind the terrorist attacks. Around the world, Navy ships were reacting. Schedules were being scotched. The Enterprise was moving north to meet another carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, south of the coasts of Iran and Pakistan. There the two carriers would prepare for strikes into Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The American military was at DEFCON 3, a heightened state of national readiness and a step closer to armed conflict. The ship and all aboard, he said, were to act as if at war. Once operations began, aircrews should prepare for the worst. There was no nearby friendly country to which a pilot might divert. Aircraft that were damaged or short of fuel would have to try heading back to the carrier, he said, and their crews would eject as near to the ship as they could.

  After the briefing, McDowell reviewed maps and charts. The ships’ rendezvous point, he saw, was 700 miles from the center of Afghanistan. He was one gear in a sprawling military machine and knew the opening salvos would not be immediate. While the Enterprise and Carl Vinson were almost in positions from which their aircraft could strike, the two carriers would not act alone. The retaliatory killing would be coordinated across the globe. Surface ships and submarines would launch Tomahawk cruise missiles. B-2s would strike from the United States. B-52s would carry payloads from Diego Garcia, and these planes would have to be brought there.

  McDowell did the F-14 math. It was a long flight to the Afghan border, and their targets would be beyond that. The Tomcats would require KC-10 or KC-135 aerial tankers from which the pilots could refuel in flight. None of these aircraft were in place. And there would be diplomatic steps before the aircraft would fly. Afghanistan was landlocked. Approaches to its borders from the Arabian Sea passed through Pakistani or Irani
an airspace. F-14s would either need permission or have to fight their way in.

  As he weighed the factors, McDowell wondered whether Tomcats would fly at all. This might be a quick war, the work of heavy bombers and remotely launched strikes. Would he miss it altogether?

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  Layne McDowell had been seasoned early enough that his analytical demeanor and calm brown eyes could make him seem older and wiser than his junior rank might suggest. At twenty-eight years old and on his second overseas deployment, he was a veteran F-14 pilot, experienced in the particulars of air-to-ground killing in the American style. In the spring of 1999, on his first carrier tour, he had flown repeated sorties against Serbian forces in Kosovo and hit an airfield in Montenegro. He had also struck into Iraq in 1999 and in 2001. A month before the attacks in New York and Washington, he had flown in a formation of six F-14s that destroyed a fiber-optics facility at An Numaniyah, southeast of Baghdad.

  Since childhood he had seemed destined for such missions. Raised on a cotton farm in the Texas South Plains, he was four or five when he first saw a crop duster buzz past his house. Years later he could still draw that aircraft: a bright yellow prop-powered single-seater with low wings and a sprayer bar underneath. It looked like a stylized P-51 Mustang. His father contracted the aircraft and its pilot, William Tidwell, known as Wild Bill, to spray fields for weevils. McDowell developed a habit. When Wild Bill approached the high plains flatland, so low that the little yellow plane scooted beneath power lines and seemed to skim grass, McDowell would run from the house into the crops for a personal air show.

  The allure of the crop duster marked a beginning. Reese Air Force Base, a training base for pilots, was over the horizon to the west. Its students would scream above the cotton in white T-38 Talons, twin-engine supersonic trainers with a needlelike shape. The McDowell farm stood alone. Its big white roof acted as a beacon in a sea of green and brown. The flight school used it as a low-level turning point to teach new pilots how to think at high speed. Formations of T-38s would blast by the house and bank, often as low as 500 feet. McDowell became sharp-eyed, picking them up on the horizon, watching them grow as they neared, basking in jet-engine roar as they blew past.

  By the time he was in junior high, he had decided: He wanted to fly. One night over dinner he mentioned his ambition to his father.

  “Then you need to get yourself into one of those service academies,” his father said. “We definitely can’t afford to both send you to college and teach you to fly.”

  Gaining an appointment to a service academy was difficult. McDowell built his file. He lettered in three sports and racked up achievements. He stood five feet seven inches tall but quarterbacked the high school football team, taking the snap behind linemen he could not see past.

  A knee injury led to the Air Force disqualifying him. But the Navy gambled on the driven kid from the cotton farm, granting him a medical waiver for enrollment in the Annapolis Class of 1995. At the Naval Academy, McDowell completed the aerospace engineering program and graduated with a 3.84 GPA, earning a slot in the fighter-pilot training pipeline.

  He soon discovered he was physiologically matched to vertiginous life in the cockpit. An early phase of the training aims to familiarize students with the effects of g-force and teaches them to prevent the onset of g-induced loss of consciousness, or G-LOC, which can lead to fatal crashes. The training is accomplished in part by seating each student in a boxlike compartment attached to a long frame that spins at accelerating speeds. Properly known as a human centrifuge, the device has another name in the aviation world: the spin and puke.

  As human beings experience intense g-force, blood tends to pool in their legs, robbing the brain of oxygen for vision and alertness. The Navy’s training was designed to bring each student to gray-out, then tunnel vision, so a new aviator will recognize the onset of symptoms and compensate in future flights. Many students pass out, then slowly wake, sometimes while convulsing. Depending on a person’s innate tolerance and physical condition, this can happen within seconds at 4 g. It commonly begins by 6 or 7 g.

  When McDowell’s time on the centrifuge came, he barely reacted. At 7 g he remained sharp. His small stature helped. Blood flows more easily between heart and brain if the distance is short.

  The centrifuge sped up. As the g-force intensified, McDowell quickened his breathing and rhythmically flexed his legs, buttocks, and abdomen, pumping blood up to his torso and brain.

  The machine spun faster.

  He was still seeing clearly. When he combined his flexing and rapid breathing with the repeated grunt-like articulation of the word “hook,” he withstood 9 g over time. He was a g-monster, a pilot who via physiology and compensation stayed alert and functional in a circumstance that would imperil most peers. He was a natural for the fighter-pilot track.

  Although he did not yet grasp it, he was entering a military profession that had utterly changed. Until the later years of the Cold War, aviators on bombing runs saw little of what they struck, particularly when what their bombs hit was camouflaged or small. Targets tended to pass beneath them in a most general way: an airfield, a building, a highway bridge, a hilltop upon which enemy forces were said to be entrenched. Threats from below—first gunfire and later antiaircraft missiles—could further trim an aircrew’s opportunities to see what they might strike. Whether releasing from high altitude or during fast flights tight to the earth, the result was the same. It was almost impossible for aviators to observe the effects of their weapons on human beings. Often it was difficult to tell if they struck a target at all.

  With the advent of forward-looking infrared sensors, GPS, and small monitors in cockpits, aviators attacking a ground target had a much richer experience. They could stare below with clear and sustained views. The sensors were coupled to new weapon guidance packages that allowed aircrews to adjust a bomb’s path as it fell. The combination turned modern strike aircraft into something once unimaginable: a supersonic delivery system for high-explosive ordnance that weighed a thousand or more pounds, and could, when everything was working, hit small targets again and again, day or night.

  McDowell had studied to be a fighter pilot. By the time he joined his squadron, F-14s were no longer just fighter planes. Retrofitted with targeting pods and carrying laser-guided munitions, they had become something more deadly: fighter planes that could perform as tactical ground-attack jets, and kill with an intimacy new to aviation. Aviators now saw their target—be it building, vehicle, or man—at the moment the bombs hit. Technology opened for them an experience once known primarily to snipers. They watched targets while deciding whether to kill. Then they watched people die.

  With the possibility of precision came the opportunity for greater care, which in turn brought a clearer sense of responsibility. Air strikes were not visible to aircrews only in real time. They were recorded. The footage could be archived and reviewed on large-screen monitors in the safety of a ready room. This did more than give militaries another means of grading pilots. It presented moral burdens. With a larger fraction of uncertainty removed from the job, pilots could not readily disassociate themselves from their strikes, at least not in their own minds. When things went wrong, and in war they routinely do, aviators were less likely to be ignorant of the effects of their bombs.

  In McDowell’s view it was not problematic to enter a dogfight and kill an opposing pilot in a supersonic killing machine. The air-to-air arena pitted people who chose to fight against each other. Everyone involved accepted the kill-or-be-killed rules. McDowell yearned for this, the chance to defeat one of America’s enemies in what could seem, at least notionally, like the ultimate fight. Dropping bombs was different. This was an awesome power, and it invited the gray. Combatants and civilians intermingled below. Intelligence driving targeting decisions was often insufficient and sometimes flawed. New weapons were vulnerable to failure. When fins were snatched by crosswinds or seeker heads were blinded by smoke, bombs made smart sometimes broke thei
r high-tech leash and reverted to dumb—“went stupid,” aircrews would say. These bombs would veer offscreen to strike and explode God knew where, each an outcome the Pentagon was loath to share with a public fed selectively released video snippets of successful strikes. Air-to-ground war was surgical now, to use one of the adjectives of choice. There was little official interest in a public accounting for ordnance that failed. And technical shortfalls formed only part of the problem. Even when ordnance worked as designed, precision munitions could not eliminate error or sloppy tactics, leaving smart bombs to channel human folly as lethally as their dumb forebears. It was possible to mistakenly target the wrong place with exacting precision, killing people you intended to protect with a bomb that functioned according to its sales brochure.

  * * *

  All these factors changed what it meant to be a fighter pilot. On his first deployment, in 1999, McDowell had confronted his profession’s new lot. The carrier from which he flew then, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, was in the Adriatic Sea and his squadron was tasked with attacking the Serbian military in Serbia and Kosovo. McDowell was eager but conflicted. One moment he ached to participate. The next the idea of bombing a Christian force and a Christian nation unsettled him, and he worried about the potential for error. As a nugget, American naval slang for a pilot on a first carrier tour, McDowell was not assigned to the opening flights and had to wait for more senior pilots to fly. He alternately groused about being excluded and worried over what inclusion might mean: