A-10s over Kosovo (illustrations removed)

Moonbeam then said, “That looks like it’ll do the trick. Now we want you to proceed northeast by about 10 miles to these coordinates [UTM coordinates provided], and there should be at least 20 pieces of armor in a field.”

By this time we were sure there was someone on the ground directing our attacks, but for some reason we weren’t talking directly to him. Incompatible radios? Fear of compromise? We didn’t know.

We flew directly to the coordinates and spent 10 minutes looking for armor. All we could see were open fields with some barns located in and around them. We asked Moonbeam to repeat the coordinates, and when it did so, they confirmed that we were in the right place. Then Moonbeam said that there should be a large, U-shaped pole barn at the end of an eastwest dirt road. We already had that in sight—since it was the largest reference in the area.

Moonbeam then said, “The tanks and APCs are inside that barn; you are cleared to strike it.”

Well, thanks for telling us. We now had to rush the attack because gas was getting low and becoming a factor. We each shot our remaining Maverick into separate corners of the “U,” made three high-angle strafe passes using two to three trigger pulls per pass. I shot about 700 rounds into the barn, and Slobee shot about 400. We did not see any large explosions as the barn began to burn, but I did see what appeared to be smaller secondary explosions from inside and yellow-green smoke rising from the burning barn. Moonbeam told us that we had direct hits and had destroyed many of the armored vehicles; we still couldn’t figure out how he knew that. We then egressed the target area for the tanker air-refueling track about 100 NM to the south. All in all, it had been a very successful day—much more satisfying than others, since we had found and destroyed or damaged tasked targets. We cautiously discussed our information “source,” vaguely speculating about who or what it could be and hoping that it wouldn’t be compromised. We did not learn the real story until later that evening.

That day Col Alan Thompson, 40th EOG commander, and two of our fellow Panthers had been in CAOC’s battle-staff room when our strikes occurred. The battle-staff room resembles a Dr. Strangelove movie set—a “room with the big boards.” They said that a USAF Predator drone had been orbiting in our area and had picked out, fixed, and identified potential targets. The CAOC then passed coordinates, instructions, and attack clearance to us through Moonbeam.

Through Predator, and possibly other intelligence sources, the CAOC had identified the L-shaped building as a makeshift Serb army command post. Our first attack had seriously damaged the building, but the Predator operators had still seen activity in and around the building, so we were directed to strike it again. During the second strike, the Predator had been in position to allow its operator to witness the impacts and assess the damage. The operator passed the BDA to the CAOC, who in turn immediately passed it to us. The Predator operators had also determined that armored vehicles were stored in the U-shaped barn. So as soon as the CAOC was convinced the command post had been destroyed, we were directed to find and strike that barn. Our pilots at the CAOC watched real-time transmissions from the Predator as Slobee and I attacked the barn. They said the Maverick impacts were devastating but were really surprised to see CBU bomblets exploding on and very near the buildings. We were also confused by what they had seen—we not only had not dropped any CBUs, but we weren’t even carrying CBUs. We finally figured out from the sequence of attacks that they had actually seen our high-explosive incendiary 30 mm cannon rounds exploding on impact. While we were strafing the building, they watched as one whole side of the barn was blown away, exposing many burning hulks.