A-10s over Kosovo (illustrations removed)

I didn’t have to wait long for the second SAM after I directed my wingman to roll in on the revetments where the smoke had come from. He came off dry with a hung Maverick only to see another SAM come streaking up for him. I called for flares and then held safely to the south until the strikers showed up. The F-15Es called in but were low on fuel. I talked them onto the target, but they bingoed out (reached the amount of fuel required to fly to a tanker and then on to their divert base if refueling proved unsuccessful) for gas before they could splash any of the revetments with their LGBs. Now I was running low on fuel, and before I could get the Belgian F-16s on target, I hit bingo myself. While flying formation on the tanker and waiting my turn to refuel, I plotted my revenge. Unfortunately, while I refueled, low-level clouds moved into the target area, and we had to leave all 20 revetments unmolested. It still burned me that they had been able to take two shots at us without retribution.

I was now eager to wipe the slate clean and start over. Dirt and I took off from Gioia, under the call sign of Cub 31, and headed east towards Macedonia. Coming off a tanker I turned north to see the weather over southeastern Kosovo looking good. I armed a Maverick as we returned to the revetments south of G-Town. Dirt covered me as I rolled in, but the APCs were no longer there and I came off dry—thwarted. The Serbian army had been extremely adaptive to our tactics. We never got a second chance in the same place with these guys.

I was forced to search around G-Town, looking at the hilltops for signs of other revetments. After 10 minutes I found what I was looking for: two groups of revetments three miles east of G-Town in a group of foothills. I put my binos on them and found the northern group filled with eight artillery pieces. In the southern group were two APCs. I called Moonbeam, the call sign for ABCCC, and requested a set of strikers. First up was Merc 11, a two-ship of Canadian CF-18s carrying 500 lb LGBs. I passed them coordinates and gave them an update as they came into the target area. My plan was to drop a single 500 lb Mk-82 bomb on one of the revetments to get the CF-18s’ eyes onto the target area and then let them drop their LGBs onto the artillery. Everything went as planned until I rolled in on the target. I dropped my bomb and then came off target, rolling up on my side to see where it landed. As luck would have it, the bomb was a dud. “The best laid plans and all,” I said to myself. I asked Dirt if he was in position to drop, but he wasn’t. It would take a while to build up the energy (airspeed and altitude) to roll in again, so I began a talk-on.

A talk-on simply describes the target area to the strikers and, with no more than a radio, gets their eyes on the target. It sounds like a much easier task than it is, as both the AFAC talking and the striker listening were flying war birds three to four miles above enemy terrain. At those altitudes, the revetments looked smaller than the head of a pin. Also, since the jets were flying at speeds of five to eight miles per minute and since English is not always the mother tongue of the strikers, (not so in this case but true of many others) a talk-on can easily be more difficult than just “laying down a mark.” Over the course of the war, I controlled USAF, United States Navy (USN), Canadian, British, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Dutch, and Belgium strikers.

I responded to Merc 11’s check-in: “Copy. We are just east of the target and setting up for another mark. Call visual on the factory that is just east of the huge town that is on the east-west hardball” (hardball was our term for a hard-surface road, which we differentiated from a dirtball or dirt road). G-Town is the only large town in eastern Kosovo, and since Merc 11 had eyes on my flight, it was the only town they could see. On the east side of G-Town was an enormous factory complex next to the highway leading east out of the town.

Merc 11 replied: “Copy. I see one factory. Large structure has a blue-roof building to the west.” Merc 11 not only responded that he saw the factory but confirmed it by giving a positive description of a distinct feature. I had confidence that he had the right factory in sight.

“That’s affirmative. Let’s use that factory east-west one unit. From the eastern edge of factory go two—let’s make that three—units east on hardball. Then use factory from hardball. You’ll see a pull-off on the north side of the hardball. Go one unit to the south off the hardball. In between two small towns you’ll see some light revetments.” I continued the talk-on by setting the length of the factory complex east to west as a unit. I treated that unit as a yardstick to measure the distance along the road to another feature (a pull-off from the highway). I talked Merc 11 down between two towns where the artillery was lying.