First Night over Iraq

EF-111's were based at Upper Heyford, UK and Mountain Home AFB, Idaho
and were deployed to Ta-if, Saudi Arabia

Operation Desert Storm - First Wave to Iraq
by Ike Sweesy, EF-111 Flight Lead, 390 Electronic Combat Squadron, USAF, Ta-if, Saudi Arabia

The EF-111 is a Supersonic Radar Jammer plane modified by Grumman from the General Dynamics F-111 Fighter Bomber. It was designed to jam the enemy early warning and missile threat radars. EF's from both Mountain Home AFB, ID and Upper Heyford, UK flew in Desert Storm. The receivers are located on the tail of the aircraft in "the football", and the transmitters on the belly in "the canoe". The EF has since been retired from service.

The following letter to family and friends was written a few days after the first mission to Baghdad.

I had my first mission early, early 17 January morning and it was spectacular. I know everyone was watching things on the news. I was in the first wave leading three EF-111s for the strike against Baghdad and there were over 70 aircraft in the mission. Our package was striking airfields, missile sites and military targets in and around Baghdad itself. It was AWESOME!!!

For the two days prior to the attack, we were working on the mission planning and getting our body clocks adjusted for the 1:30 AM launch. The night prior to the mission I stayed up until about 5 AM putting the final touches on my mission then went to bed. I could only sleep until 11 AM then I got up and puttered around at Intell and the Squadron. I cleaned my Chemical Warfare mask and put in new filters then went and found the security policeman that I had bartered with. I traded one of my flight suits for a bayonet and sheath. It is VERY sharp! I took off my rings and patches and set up my combat wallet (plastic ziplok) taking only my ID card, some money and my New Testament, no pictures allowed. I put together my web belt and canteen with my gun holster and hooked on the bayonet. The extra water and my survival equipment would be easier to carry if I got shot down. We normally have our .38 pistol on our survival vest but it is in a bad place right above the left kidney and it gets in the way. I have an extra helmet bag to hold my web belt, two flashlights, a set of desert fatigues and floppy sun hat (no desert flight suits yet), my Chem gear and mask, and my big ziplok bag with sunscreen, skin lotion, aspirin, gum, pepto bismal tablets, malaria tablets, go pills, blistex, ear plugs, eye drops, throat lozenges razor blade knife, camouflage paint, fire starter, matches, nylon cord (two thicknesses), and camouflage scarf. I also carry my little Swiss Army knife that Sandy gave me two Christmases ago plus my big Swiss Army knife that Bob gave me. All my knives I have sharpened to a razor edge. The bag fits below my legs and between the seat and joystick. My helmet bag with the Escape and Evasion maps and my flight jacket goes under the seat. What about ejection you ask me - in the F-111 the entire cockpit goes with you and you land on a balloon!! I'm not kidding!

About 1930 our flight piled into the PimpMobile and went to the Mess Tent for dinner. It's called the PimpMobile because it has felt curtains with little danglies hanging down and felt covers on the dashboard and other plastic parts. Inside the Mess Tent door, there is a sign-in sheet and everyone always makes a joke of it. Sometimes we will all sign one person's name or else "Mickey Mouse" or even "Dan Quayle". We had a variety of "sign ins" tonight also but I was feeling particularly pugilistic so I just signed "Fighter Pilot". My good Christian friend "BRENT" behind me signed just his first name in a mock shaking script. We all laughed at each other but we all understood what danger we were flying into. After dinner we all went back to the MPC (Mission Planning Cell) for our final Intell update and got our Blood Chits issued.

The Blood Chit is a paper with the US Flag on one side and a message in several languages that promises that the US government will pay a person several thousand dollars if they will aid a downed airman to escape back to Allied territory. I had not seen one since Southeast Asia and we all hoped that we would keep them in our pockets and turn then in the next morning after the mission.

At 2115 we attended the mass briefing with the weather, Escape and Evasion briefing, taxi plan, and the enemy situation. This lasted about 45 minutes. At the end, the Wing Commander stood up and all he said was "Alright guys, let's go to war." There was no cheering, no bravado. There were probably some of us that would not come back.

After this briefing I took my flight to the squadron and we briefed for the mission. I had heard some talk in the squadron about turning around if enemy Mig fighters were spotted so I spent some time talking about the difference between aggressiveness and recklessness. We need to be aggressive in protecting the striking fighters. We go right in with them and jam the radars that direct the missiles and the interceptors, and if we turn around just because a Mig is in the area then we aren't doing our job and a lot more fighter crews will get shot down. A Mig in the area is not a threat until he targets you, THEN you do your threat reaction and call for the F-15s. On a later mission my flight had 4 Mig-29s in our orbit but they didn't get a shot since we were all maneuvering. Dang, where's that gun I had on my F-4 Phantom?!

For this first mission, my mission briefing took an hour and a half versus the normal 30 to 45 minutes for a training mission, then we went upstairs to Life Support. We loaded our guns, stashed the extra ammo and put on our survival vests and G-Suits and picked up our Escape and Evasion maps. You should see me with my pistol on my right hip, my bayonet on my left and my G-Suit and Survival Vest on. Now I weigh about 220 pounds with all my gear instead of my lean and mean 170!

About two days prior I thought about the plane that I would fly and prayed "Lord, it would be nice if I got to fly my own jet with my name on it." I didn't think much else about it until we got our aircraft assignments just prior to the mission - There it was, Aircraft 7048, Major Ike Sweesy. It was just a touch of assurance that the Lord was in charge here. It reminded me of the assurance that God gave Gideon before he went into battle.

There must have been twenty ground crew to help us because everyone knew what was happening and knew that it was serious. There was very little joking around but lots of 'good luck' and 'God bless' comments from everyone. I was glad that I didn't see any of my friends from the church in Mountain Home. It would have really been hard on me and I knew that I would cry if I tried to talk to them. I had no fear of death (and after 15 combat missions I still don't) but the sadness of the temporary separation should I be killed gets to you. Two days prior I had written a 'last' letter to each of the kids and one to Sandy and that was really hard on me. Even though I'm assured of God's personal hand in my life, that doesn't mean there wouldn't be emotional pain for my loved ones should I be killed in combat. This tough fighter pilot cried a lot writing those letters.

It was pitch dark, but once I climbed into the cockpit, I got down to business and just like I said in an earlier letter before the war started, a brave man is not someone who doesn't get scared or nervous. Instead the brave man is the person that just goes ahead and does what he has to do - his duty. "Duty then, is the sublimest word in the English language. You should do your duty in all things. One could never do more and never wish to do less." General Robert E. Lee. As I checked in my flight on the radio and we taxied out, everyone saluted us and gave us the thumbs up and the "Give 'em Hell" fist! You can bet that we saluted back very smartly. All was dark but you could see the aircraft lights from thirty or more EF-111s and F-111s for the first wave to Baghdad. Every five minutes four aircraft took off with the brilliant light of the afterburners blinding us as we waited for our turn.

At 0142 I led my formation onto the runway, all three line-abreast pointing toward Baghdad. I can't describe the feeling that I had but as I pushed the throttles up to full afterburner and released the brakes I turned to my right seater and said "Well Marty, we're on our way." That was almost as profound as what one Lieutenant right-seater said to his pilot after we took off on that moonless August night when we deployed to Saudi Arabia, "Gosh Sir, looks like it'll be dark all night." "Yup," the pilot replied.

Everyone in the three ship was nervous and we all made little errors like bad radio calls or missed frequencies, but we made a smooth level off at 20,000 feet and only had a tanker rendezvous and air refueling between us and the Iraqi border. What I did next I had planned for over a week. While Marty busied himself with checking the flight's fuel on the HF radio, I pulled out some matches from an MRE and a pack of cigarettes that had come in one of those 'to any servicemember' boxes. The flare of the match lit up the dark cockpit as I puffed on that cigarette to get it lit. Marty had a cow. Actually it had just the effect I wanted. He just couldn't believe that ‘straight arrow’ Ike Sweesy was smoking a cigarette. Yes, I put out that cigarette right away but the terrible taste stayed in my mouth for hours. The other two crews saw our cockpit light up with flames and Marty told them over the HF radio what I did. This out-of-character action really broke the tension for us and we relaxed and we started performing like fighter crews.

In about forty five minutes Marty had the tanker cell on radar and we made an outstanding tanker rendezvous. And it had been all 'comm out' since we departed from homeplate of Ta-if (30 miles from Mecca!). We turned at just the right time, never exceeded 30 degrees of bank, and rolled out exactly one mile behind the tanker. With our 50 knots of overtake we pulled up to the refueling boom and I stabilized under the KC-135 tanker as our wingmen moved to the side of the tanker. We each took on over 2500 gallons of jet fuel in one long gulp. It only took about 6 minutes or so, but it was overcast and pitch black with no moon. Only the blinking position lights of the other fighters were there to remind me of the mission ahead.

By the time the 3 EF-111's were finished refueling, the F-4G Wild Weasels were anxious to get their gas (F4's are always anxious for gas). The Weasels shoot missiles at radars and also have Air-to-Air missiles against enemy fighters, so we waited for them to refuel before we all headed to the drop off point together. The 12 Weasels and my 3 Ravens had drained three tankers dry. As each flight lead took his flight from the tankers we all jockeyed for position and took up our assigned altitude heading for the 'push' point. The 4 F-15 'Eagles' pushed five minutes earlier to do a Mig Sweep ahead of us, then came 8 Weasels with our 3 EFs at 30 seconds trail each and finally the last 4 Weasels. We were stacked from 12,000 feet all the way up to 23,000 feet with the Eagles up above 30,000. All were at 510 knots for the ingress. Other strikers with bombs were down in the weeds on TFR (Terrain Following Radar). And this was only the SEAD package (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense). Once the air defenses were thinned out, hundreds of other fighters hit targets such as the nuclear/ chem/ biological warfare facilities; command, control, and communication capabilities; and SCUD missile facilities.

When we passed the Iraqi border the airborne radar aircraft AWACS started giving us "Bogey Dope" on the enemy fighters' locations and I felt this strange exhilaration just like at RED FLAG exercises at Las Vegas when Bob Patridge, my EWO and I, led a 40 aircraft 'Gorilla'. We were on a Penetration Escort mission to a target northwest of Area 51 ("the box") and the Aggressor F-5s and F-16s were looking for us. On that mission we led the whole package in to the target area, then egressed at MACH 1.2 and 300 feet above the ground TFR to avoid the interceptors trying to 'kill' us. It feels real even in Nevada (of course, that's the point of wargames). Now, however, it was for keeps, but it felt almost the same. Actually those feelings only come rarely. I remember thinking that this felt just like the first time I soloed a Cessna 150 down in Puerto Rico when I was 16 years old. There was a certain thrill. You knew that you had been well-trained but there was still a chance that you wouldn't live through it. The adrenaline was really pumping now and Marty and I were leaning forward in our seats in anticipation. Actually it was to help us look around the aircraft for missiles or AAA.

We were jamming the early warning radars from over a hundred miles before the border and then on in to the target area, and the EMI (ElectroMagnetic Interference) got so bad that Marty and I had trouble talking to each other. Soon we couldn't hear the Bogey Dope either. I didn't want to get out in front of our shooter cover so I would point to the ground speed indicator and Marty would signal with his left hand to pull back or push up the throttles then hold up 5 or 10 fingers for knots. We had annotated on our map where we would be when the strikers were to hit targets so that we could watch for them. 10 F-111Fs and 2 Mud-Eagles (F-15Es) were coming in on the deck against two different targets. F-117 Stealth fighters were hitting targets in Baghdad and we were jammin' for everyone! The audio tape of one F-111 attack on an airfield was on CNN as well as some video of F-117 hits.

Just prior to the F-15E strike, our Jamming computer malfunctioned dumping all of our automatic jammer steering. This was bad news since we were blinding the radars that control the Iraqi SAMs and interceptors. Marty was very busy for too many tense seconds getting everything set up again on manual to protect the strikers and ourselves. I grabbed the map and took over navigation to get us to the orbit. I was so busy with ground speed calculations, navigation and watching outside for missile threats that I didn't even look for the first bomb strike by the Mud-Eagles that closed an enemy fighter base and destroyed an important radar center. We were very busy however when we got to our orbit and didn't have time to lament this.

We were only 25 miles from an active Iraqi interceptor base with lots of Soviet-built Mig 29s and French F-1s; and besides flying my orbit parameters, we were looking for those threats. Just after we got into the orbit, the 10 F-111s hit that airfield and shut it down and an F-15 shot down an Iraqi F-1 from there that had gotten off before the strike. We knew the TOT (Time Over Target) and were watching the airfield and saw it all. It was spectacular!! By this time, our F-117 Stealth Fighters were striking targets in Baghdad and the whole sky lit up with sparkles. I'm sure you saw it on the news. It was doubly impressive from where we were I can assure you. Our jamming orbit was just outside of two SA-2 (Surface-to-Air Missile) threat rings but what we didn't know was that the Iraqis had put up another one that was only 4 nautical miles from our orbit centroid. They had never turned it on before, so our Intelligence didn't know it was there! Just as "Monk" and "Rude Dog" were turning at the end of the orbit, the SA-2 launched and I saw it shooting up. We were jamming of course, and it exploded behind them and lit up the cockpit and the whole sky around them. Rude Dog said it was like daylight in the cockpit! Even if I had tried, I couldn't have transmitted a warning because of our EMI noise.

A couple minutes later, I was looking out and saw a SCUD surface to surface missile fired and it looked like an inverted bowl of light. What an impressive sight! It landed in a Saudi oil field. Finally all the strikers were clear and we departed our orbit for the Saudi border going the speed of smell. Marty kept telling me to push it up but we were just short of supersonic already and I didn't want to use my afterburners anymore because of my fuel state. On the way out, AAA was firing at us but we were so high that they couldn't reach us. Well, I climbed even higher. We finally reached the border and slowed down - both our speed and our breathing. We had survived our first combat in Iraq after over 45 minutes in enemy territory!

Since our homeplate of Taif was closed for fog, I directed the flight to find the Post-Strike tanker and refuel again. (No communications blackout now since they know we are here). We would return to Taif and hold for better weather and then divert only if required. My wingmen whined but I made them do it. They were glad later when they had enough fuel to get to yet another tanker and hold over the field until the fog cleared out. [other flights ended up diverting to Jeddah and other bases] We eventually ended up refueling from four different tankers that mission until the field opened up. Most of the F-111s wimped out and flew a straight in approach but I went to overhead initial and pitched out like a man for a 360 overhead pattern and landed as the last whisps of fog dispersed. As we rolled out down the runway, Marty and I shook hands and smiled broadly. After almost six hours in the air, we had completed our first combat mission over Iraq and were back home to prepare for another.

It took us 25 minutes holding at the end of the runway waiting for all the planes to land before we could get across to our parking spot in Q10, but I finally put my plane back where I found it. That's the way it's supposed to be. We eventually found that not a single EF-111 or F-111 had been lost even though most of us had been fired at by surface missiles, enemy interceptor aircraft, or ground fire (AAA)!

The euphoria of the successful mission was tremendous and Marty and I were yelling and slapping hands with a high 5 and everyone on the maintenance crew was shaking our hands. What a feeling! As I said, those special feelings only come rarely and it hasn't returned in my subsequent combat missions. Now it is just a dangerous job that must be done to make things in this region right. I know the dangers and do my job professionally but I know the Lord is watching over me. The war isn't over yet and will be some time still, but no matter what happens, I know the Lord is with me and with my Christian friends here. We have seen his deliverance over and over again in our first combat mission and in missions since! Keep praying for us.

This picture was taken of Marty and me after one of our combat missions and is in a history of Desert Storm - "Desert Victory".

I eventually flew 34 missions over Iraq and Kuwait during those 6 short weeks of war.

Since we were based on the opposite side of Saudi Arabia from Iraq, most missions lasted around 4 hours or more and all involved refueling, sometime both inbound and outbound depending upon the target area in Iraq and how much maneuvering was required. On one mission I had 3 missiles fired at me. But with Full Afterburners, defensive jamming, Chaff, and maneuvers, all missed!! On another mission, some Iraqi fighters attacked our formation. Without guns or missiles on the EF-111, we did our defensive maneuvering and called for the Eagles! Reforming my flight of 4 EF's, I continued with the mission. By the end of March 1991 we returned home to bands, speeches, and parades, which was quite a difference from my 'welcome home' after Southeast Asia. Then, less than a year later, I was back over in Saudi Arabia as the EF-111 commander with the 'provisional wing'.

I retired in 1992 after twenty years of flying fighters, but the U.S. is still there (or should I say 'again'), just like in many, many other locations around the world now. Pray for those great warriors.