The Apache commander, Lieutenant Colonel Dick Cody, quickly came on board and adapted his unit's tactics and aircraft for the mission. He welded 1,500-gallon tanks to the bottom of his helos and conducted live-fire practice sessions with Hellfire antitank missiles to make sure they would explode when striking the comparatively soft targets.
They did. The plan — called EAGER ANVIL — proceeded.
It would be the first strike of the war.
General Schwarzkopf, suspicious as ever of special operations, somewhat reluctantly blessed it, but kept close tabs on the training. The story goes that he allowed the operation to proceed with one overriding order: "Do not screw this up."
The Saudi desert stretched out in endless darkness as White Team skittered toward Iraq during the early-morning hours of January 17, 1991. In the lead Pave Low, Pilot Captain Mike Kingsley and his copilot took turns scanning the green screen of the FLIR. They had been flying now for just over an hour at a relatively leisurely pace — no strain for the powerful helicopter; the same could not be said for the crew. The six men — two pilots, two flight engineers, two para-rescue men, or PJs — had been practicing this gig for weeks, but even the most realistic exercise was still simply an exercise. The standard "test guns" order shortly after takeoff had blown away only a portion of the jitters. They were going to start a war and they knew it.
A few hundred yards back, the pilot in the second Pave Low, Major Bob Leonik, rechecked his navigation set, which had gone flaky shortly after takeoff when the Enhanced Navigation System (ENS) had inexplicably "dumped." The crew had had to work feverishly to reset the system. At the same time, a glitch in their SATCOM coding had deprived them of a secure way to talk to Command. Both problems had been solved, the helicopter was precisely on course, and relatively unimportant transmissions were now coming over the radio. Mission Commander Comer, listening to the SATCOM from the left-hand seat of the Pave Low cockpit, resisted the impulse to tell them all to shut up.
Farther back, the Apaches flew in a four-ship, staggered-line formation. Each attack helicopter carried two crew members and was loaded with Hellfires, rockets, and 30mm machine-gun shells.
White Team pushed over the border, dropping to fifty feet over the shifting dunes. The pilot pulled right, ducking toward the dry bed of a large wadi that would hide the flight's approach toward its target. The crew doused the last lights in the cabin.
"We're in Iraq," said the copilot laconically. It was just past 0213. Their attack was to begin at 0238. H-hour for the war was 0300.
The west and east radar sites — called "California" and "Nevada" — were very similar. Each contained a number of Soviet-made radars and support vans. Each radar sat on its own van or truck, either buried in the sand or placed in a revetment. Antennas were either the familiar rotating dishes or else something more like fixed radio masts. Together, they scanned a wide area and covered both high and low altitudes. An assortment of support trailers or vans were arrayed around for communications and other functions, and there were also troop quarters.
Neutralizing the sites meant hitting not just radars but their control and communications facilities.
One big problem with launching a surprise attack on an early-warning site is that it is itself designed to keep such attacks from being a surprise. But no radar will give one hundred percent coverage. EAGER ANVIL'S tactics had been drawn up to take advantage of known holes in California's and Nevada's capabilities. Different radars have different capabilities, but in general they have trouble picking out objects very close to the ground. Even radars designed to detect low-flying airplanes — such as the P-15M Squat Eyes at each of the target sites — have limited detection envelopes because of ground clutter and physical limitations in the equipment. In this case, the helicopters would be essentially invisible at fifty feet off the ground even at close range. If they got higher than that, however, they could be easily spotted.
They could also be heard, no matter what altitude they flew, and so the routes of both attack groups carefully avoided known Iraqi installations. When the Pave Lows in Red Team detected an unexpected Iraqi formation in their path, they doglegged around them, hoping to prevent the troops from hearing the very loud rotors of the MH-53s and AH-64s.
The Pave Lows in White Team drove up the wadi to a point about ten miles southeast of the radar sites, then swung left, the pilot pushing the throttle for more speed as White Team whipped over a road. He listened intently, hoping that the PJs in the back wouldn't see anything on the highway.
Nothing. They were ghosts, wandering across the desert undetected.
2:36. They reached the IP 7.5 miles southeast of their target — the "no-shit point," they called it. One of the crew members ignited chemical glow sticks in the back of the helicopter, waving his arm through the open doorway and dropping the bundle on the desert floor, a literal "X" marking the navigation spot. All the high-tech equipment aboard the Pave Lows notwithstanding, the success of the mission came down to a PJ's steady hand.
The Apaches sped forward at sixty knots, using the glowing sticks to orient themselves for the attack. They updated their guidance systems, then kicked on their target-acquisition computers and continued in toward the targets. A dozen buildings, clusters of command vans, radar dishes, a troposcatter radar antenna — the site began to reveal itself in their night goggles. One by one, the interphones in the helos buzzed: "I've got the target." Lasers beamed.
Lights popped on in the buildings as they closed to 5,000 meters.
"Party in ten," commanded the Apache fire team leader, Lieutenant Tom Drew.
Figures began running toward the three antiaircraft pits guarding the base.
"Five… four… three…," said Drew calmly.
Before he reached "one," Thomas "Tip" O'Neal pickled a Hellfire. "This one's for you, Saddam," said Dave Jones, O'Neal's copilot, as the Hellfire whisked off the left rail of the Apache. It was the first shot of the war.
Twenty seconds later, the missile hit home, incinerating a set of generators providing power for the radars. By then, a host of missiles were under way. Hellfires, then Hydra-70 rockets, then 30mm chain guns gouged a gaping hole in the Iraqi air defense systems. Less than five minutes after the attacks began, both Iraqi sites had been damaged beyond repair—"Condition Alpha," as the coded message back to base put it.
The Special Forces crews in the Pave Lows watched the destruction with fascination and some trepidation; they'd be called on if the sporadic answering fire managed to bring down any helicopters.
As the Red Team Pave Lows waited for their Apaches, Iraqi ground forces fired two SA-7 heat-seekers at one of the MH-53s. The pilot managed to duck the shoulder-launched SAMs with the help of decoy flares and some quick jinking across the sand. "We were too busy trying to dodge the missiles to see where they went," said Captain Corby Martin, one of the pilots.
Before the early-morning strike had knocked out the radars, an operator at one of the sites had apparently managed to get off part of a message indicating that they were under attack. Relayed to Baghdad, the warning seems to have caused antiaircraft units in the enemy capital to begin firing into the air willy-nilly. That turned out to be a good thing. By the time the first F-117 attack on the city actually began about fifteen minutes later, they had expended their ammunition and overheated much of their gear.
Crossing the border behind the EAGER ANVIL helos, SOF troops in Chinook CH-47s touched down to plant beacons to help guide American raiders.
American bombers were soon streaming through the hole poked by the SOF and Apache units….