I looked at the INS. “Another five minutes away,” I told him.
“Copy all. I want you guys in at 200 and below. We’ll hold over you, 210 and above, and we can provide your cover. When you get into the target area, I’ll give you a talk-on.”
“Taco Zero-One,” I replied. Switching frequencies, I compared fuels with Rip. We’d have enough for about 15 minutes in the target area. I plotted the position of the target on one of my 1:50 maps. It was within a kilometer of the corner of the map, halfway up the side of a hill on the eastern side of a fairly nondescript small valley. It wasn’t going to be easy finding it—especially without being able to reference the map features to the immediate south and west of the target. To see all of that, I would have to juggle two other 1:50 maps in the cockpit along with the one I already had out and the 1:250 that I was using for navigation. It wasn’t an easy thing to do.
We were almost there—only three miles away. I looked out and saw Stew 21 circling over the valley to the south, slightly higher than us and about four miles away. “Stew, Taco’s visual, ready for the talk-on,” I announced.
“Right beneath you, there’s a fairly long town in the middle of the valley, oriented north-south. Call contact.”
I looked down into the valley. There were a lot of towns. I came back inside, checked my map, checked the compass, back outside. Yep, there was the town that he was talking about, and it was pretty much north-south. “Contact,” I replied and then added, “Confirm that there is a hardball road leading through the length of the town.”
“Affirmative,” came the answer. “Let’s call the length of that town one unit. Now look on the eastern side of that town. There’s a dirtball road leading southeast up into the hills. Call contact.”
I looked down. There were a lot of dirtball roads, some more prominent than others. “I see a lot of dirtball roads,” I said.
“Right, this one is the most prominent one. It leads out in a straight line to the southeast and hits a tree line in the hills about two to three units away from the town.”
I looked down. None of the roads that led out the town to the southeast ran into a tree line. I checked my orientation. OK, I was looking to the southeast of the town. No trees. My frustration started to build.
“Stew, Taco’s not contact with that tree line,” I admitted.
“It’s right underneath me now. I’ll put down a mark to show you.”
I looked up to watch him. He wasn’t over the town. Where was he? I looked off to the south. Searching, searching… I had lost him while I was looking for the target. One potato, two… wait a minute—there he was—only he was a lot further south than he should be. How was he going to mark this target area from so far away? Then it dawned on me—I was looking at the wrong hillside. I swore to myself. How could I be so stupid? I had been looking at the wrong area. My INS pointed to the area that I was looking in, but it must have drifted. I looked about three miles south, underneath the area where Bumpy was circling. There was another elongated town in the valley, with a hardball road leading through it. “Stupid idiot!” I cursed at myself for a novice mistake!
I called Rip on FM to say that we had been orbiting too far to the north and were shifting south. Rip acknowledged, and we started south just in time to watch Bumpy roll in and put down two Willy Pete rockets on the side of the hills. One landed near but on the north side of a dirtball road; the other Willy Pete landed about 200 meters north of that.
“Stew, Taco’s contact with your smokes. We were looking in the wrong area,” I admitted, somewhat sheepishly. I still felt stupid.
“Roger that,” he replied. “There are four revetments in the field just on the south side of the road, south of my southern mark. I’d like you to lay down your CBUs right on the tree line—I think that they may have some of their stuff hidden in the trees. The two closest revetments to the tree line have something in them.”
“Copy all,” I replied. Then to Rip, “Shooter-cover, bombs, gun. Winds are out of the west at 60 knots.” That meant that I would be coming in with a tailwind to make this work. Even though each one of these bombs weighed about 1,000 lbs 60 knots of wind would definitely affect it as it fell for about 12,000 feet. Rip acknowledged my plan and shifted his orbit to the west, so he could look through me to the target area.
I checked all of my switches. All the lights were green, and I was at the right altitude—everything was ready. “Taco One can be ‘in’ in 10 seconds,” I said.
“Continue.”
“One’s in hot!” I rolled to the left, slicing down out of the sky. Down, steeper and steeper, my nose pointed at the earth—green and brown earth replaced the blue sky in my windscreen. In the background, I heard Bumpy’s clearance. I rolled out, straightened my wings, and waited a few moments for the low altitude safety and target enhancement (LASTE) bombing solution to stabilize and indicate that I had lined up just right of the target. I had misjudged the winds slightly and had to compensate by adding about five degrees of bank. I clicked forward on the trim to reduce stick forces and attempted to relax—I tried not to jerk the stick or make any sudden inputs that might throw the LASTE solution and the CBU-87 canisters off target. Slowly, in seconds that were like minutes, the pipper approached the target. As it got closer, it seemed to accelerate. I resisted the urge to push forward on the stick to slow the pipper’s movement and make the weapons-release point easier to judge. If I had done that, I would have “bunted” the aircraft, fooled the computer, and caused the canisters to impact long of the target. Temporal distortion is normal during a diving delivery—it just seemed much more intense now that I was doing the job for real. I waited until the pipper was superimposed on the target, pressed the pickle button, and felt the two clunks as the two canisters left the jet and started their ballistic fall.
I pulled back on the stick, felt the Gs build up as I brought the nose up to 35 degrees of pitch, and then rolled into a slight bank to the right. I looked down and could see some of the flares I had expended trailing behind my jet; my left index finger persisted in hammering away at the flare button. I continued my right-hand climbing turn towards the sun while looking back at the target area. It seemed to take an eternity, and then I saw two small puffs when the canisters opened. Half a second later, the whole area along the tree line erupted in a beautiful shower of silver and white sparkles as the bomblets detonated. It reminded me of one of my chemistry labs when we had set fire to magnesium shavings. Only this was on a much larger scale. I looked away and scanned the ground for threats.
“Good hits, Taco,” came Bumpy. “Have your wingman drop his Mk-82s north of your hits. We’re going to clear you off on this target and look for some more targets.”
“Copy all,” I said. “Two, I want you in out of the west in one minute. One’s climbing for energy,” I directed on FM. I continued my climb, slowly ascending out of danger, and reached the relative safety of altitude. About a minute later, I was happy with my position. “One’s cover,” I announced.
“Roger, Two will be ‘in’ in 10,” Rip replied.
“Continue.” I replied and offset myself to the southwest, where I would be in a good position to monitor his attack.