MH — 5 3 J Pave Lows played an important role throughout the war, inserting SOF units and flying combat and search-and-rescue (CSAR) missions.
The CSAR missions were controversial, since combat rescue was not a traditional SOF task, and the Air Force and Navy were never convinced either that it was a high enough priority or that SOF was devoting enough resources to it.
Schwarzkopf tasked Special Operations with combat rescue partly because of the hazardous conditions inside Iraq, partly because Special Forces had the deep infiltration and exfiltration capability required, and partly because the Air Force's own rescue capability had been allowed to atrophy after the Vietnam War, and there was no other alternative but to task SOCOM for assets.
Seven bases, five in Saudi Arabia and two in Turkey, were used to stage the missions. At the very beginning of the air war, the helos loitered over Iraq at night in case they were needed. But this was obviously hazardous, and Johnson soon ordered the units to scramble over the line only if they had a "reasonable confirmation" of a pilot's location. During the early stages of the war, rescues were also restricted to nighttime.
While there was no denying the capability of the SOF crews or the helicopters, some Air Force and Navy officers bristled that their service was not directly responsible for its own search and rescue. (Though they were Air Force aircraft, the Pave Lows were SOCOM assets.) Johnson's restrictions, while protecting the helicopter crews, lessened the odds of recovering pilots, especially since U.S. air crews were equipped with obsolete emergency radios, whose limited range and frequencies exposed them to the enemy. The other services also felt that not enough resources were devoted to the CSAR mission.
Nonetheless, Pave Low crews accounted for one of the most daring operations of the war, a full daylight rescue of a downed Navy pilot under fire. And they did it with help from a number of Air Force units, including a pair of A-10A attack planes (called Warthogs, because that's what they look and act like), flying far behind the lines.
On January 21, several days after the start of the air war, Lieutenant Devon Jones and Lieutenant Lawrence R. Slade were flying "Slate 46," an F-14A escorting a Navy EA-6B Prowler on a strike against a radar installation protecting the Al Asad airfield in northern Iraq, roughly fifty miles west of Baghdad. After the Prowler had completed its mission, Jones banked his plane and began heading back toward the USS Saratoga, his squadron's floating home in the Red Sea. As he turned, he saw a missile coming up for him. He started evasive maneuvers, but the SAM managed to detonate close enough to his Tomcat to rip its tail apart and render the plane uncontrollable.
Both Jones and Slade, his radar intercept officer, bailed out. Separated as they left the plane, the men quickly lost track of each other in the dim light of early dawn. After they reached the ground, they unwittingly headed in different directions.
Meanwhile, Captain Tom Trask was sitting with his crew in an Air Force Pave Low at Ar-Ar, a tiny base near the Iraqi border. Tired from a succession of missions, Trask's squadron had been slotted "last in line" behind some Air Force and Navy Blackhawks; their priority today was supposed to be some well-deserved rest.
But neither Saddam nor the weather cooperated. Heavy fog soched in the airfield. When the call came at about 7:15 A.M. that American fliers were down, the Blackhawk pilots couldn't see to take off. Two Pave Lows, including Trask's, took over the job.
The initial information about the shootdown came in muddled, and at first the Special Operations airmen thought they were trying to rescue crews from the A-6 as well as the F-14. Breaking with their usual tactics, the helicopters "chopped" their flight in half, each focusing on a separate crew. Though they were flying a preplanned route that snaked across Iraq and avoided the most potent defenses, Trask's helicopter was sighted by an Iraqi border unit. They escaped easily, and their luck continued when the fog lifted, allowing them to nick down to fifteen feet above the ground.
Then two Iraqi fighters took off from an Iraqi air base dead ahead.
"Snap south, snap south!" yelled an AWACS controller monitoring the area. Meaning: "Turn south and run like hell."
This would have worked fine for a fighter. But no helicopter was going to outrun a MiG. Trask hunkered his helo into a dry wadi as one of the enemy planes whipped toward him.
"We actually saw him fly over," he said later. Fortunately, the helicopter was too low to be picked up by radar and was hidden from the Iraqi by a broken cloud deck. The AWACS had meanwhile vectored in F-15C Eagles. As soon as the MiC realized he was being hunted, he turned tail and landed back at his air base.
Trask pushed northward toward the area where the F-14A had gone down. Deep in Iraq without escort or even another Pave Low to back him up, he was starting to feel pretty lonely.
There was another problem: No one had heard from the F-14 crew. Downed pilots follow very specific schedules, or "spins," which dictate when they try to contact SAR assets and what frequencies to use. The rescuers know this and follow procedures designed to minimize the chance that the enemy will find the downed pilot first. Though no one then knew this, slight but significant differences in Air Force and Navy spins made it difficult for the Air Force searchers and the Navy searchee to connect. The effort was also hampered by the survival radio Jones carried. Not only was its range limited, but the enemy could easily home in on it.
In short, the planes looking for the Navy pilot came up empty. After several hours of standing by deep in enemy territory, Trask turned his helo back toward the border to refuel.
As all this was going on above him, Lieutenant Jones had been hiking for over two hours, which brought him to a clump of low bushes and vegetation near a muddy wadi. He dug a hole with his survival knife. An hour and a half later, his bloodied and blistered hands had managed to clear a hole three feet deep and four feet long. The hole soon came in handy; a farm vehicle with some business at a water tank a thousand yards away inspired him to cover up in it.
Since air crews had been briefed that rescues would take place at night, he didn't expect to be picked up anytime soon. He passed the time by making calls for help on his survival radio — and keeping his hole clear of scorpions.
By coincidence, a flight of Air Force A-10s flying search and rescue deep in Iraq had been given a backup frequency that coincided with the Navy pilot's rescue frequency. Jones, meanwhile, had decided to transmit and then listen at times that were slightly off his normal schedule, hoping he might find his lost backseater on the air.
What he found instead were unexpected but enthusiastic American voices.
"Slate 46, this is Sandy 57. Do you copy?" said one of the A-10A Sandy (for search and rescue) pilots.
"Sandy 57, Slate 46. How do you read?" Jones answered.
His voice was so calm, the A-10A pilot thought for a moment he was dealing with an Iraqi impersonator.
As the A-10s worked to get a fix on the downed airman, Trask saddled up again for the flight north. Joined by the other MH-53J, he alerted the AWACS and sped over the desert.
"The SAMs are kind of coming up and going down, coming up and going down," recalled Trask, who did his best to follow the AWACS' directions and steer clear of the defenses.
Meanwhile, the A-10A pilot kicked out a flare so Jones could spot him and vector him toward the spot where he was hiding. The Warthog passed over the pilot's hole about a hundred feet off the deck.
Communicating this location to the approaching Pave Low proved more difficult. Unlike the helicopter, the A-10A was equipped with an ancient navigational system that tended to drift; his coordinates were as likely to send the Pave Low in the wrong direction as lead him to the pilot. Worse, there was no secure way for the two aircraft to communicate. Running out of fuel, the A-10A pilot resorted to a primitive voice code to pass the location to Trask and then took off to refuel.