A-10s over Kosovo (illustrations removed)

After the longest two weeks of my life spent watching the air strikes on CNN and hearing about the heroics of my squadron mates during the rescue of the downed F-117 pilot, I was afforded an opportunity to go to Aviano for just three days. Not being one to quibble, I jumped at the chance and packed my bags. On 5 April I would fly my first combat mission over Kosovo with Maj Joseph A. “Lester” Less. Due to continuing poor weather over Kosovo, no A-10 pilot had yet been able to employ munitions. As I performed my walk-around, inspecting the live weapons on my Hog, I was more excited than I had ever been about a sortie. I had flown lots of missions over Bosnia with live weapons, but this time it was real. We could actually shoot something today. We launched as a two-ship AFAC mission over southwest Kosovo.

As we flew into Kosovo, the first thing I noticed was how beautiful the country was. The landscape was magnificent—a wide, green, fertile valley surrounded by majestic, snowcapped mountains on all sides. I could see why generations have fought and died over the right to live in this country. The weather that day was exceptional. You couldn’t buy a cloud. The sky was clear—except for the smoke from all the beautiful villages 20,000 feet below us that had been set ablaze by Serbian forces. The roads leading to the southern border of Kosovo were jammed with refugees fleeing the country. As they approached the border, they were forced to leave their cars and walk with little more than the clothes on their backs. Their abandoned vehicles stretched from the Albanian border to more than 20 miles into Kosovo. Seeing the villages being burned and the mass exodus of refugees firsthand made me want to aim my 30 mm gun at the ground and kill those responsible for this devastating crime against humanity. But on this mission I didn’t get to fire the gun or drop any weapons. Although we saw several vehicles moving in and around burning villages that we suspected were Serbian military and police (VJ/MUP) forces, we did not find any hard-and-fast “military” targets. After two hours of scouring the countryside and witnessing the carnage, we returned to Aviano with all our ordnance. Frustration was mounting in the Panther clan and at the CAOC. After the first day of really great weather in the KEZ, not one bomb had been dropped. Less than 24 hours later, all of that would change. 

Kimos “We Are Going to Kill Something Today” Haave

I had never seen that look in Kimos’s eyes before. Normally a very mild-mannered family man and exceptional leader, Kimos revealed a different side of himself that day. As the mission commander for the 6 April CAIFF package, Kimos briefed the pilots assembled in the 510th FS briefing room in Aviano like a football coach giving a locker-room pep talk to a team that has narrowly lost every game that season. He was the coach, and this was his final game—he would not retire a loser! After his brief, I was ready to go out and do some damage to some Serbs! After that mission I called him Kimos “we are going to kill something today” Haave to the guys assembled around to hear about the first Panther kill. I was proud to be on his wing that day because I knew from the brief we were going to take the fight to them.

We were Bull 11 flight, AFACs for an 18-ship package that included British GR-7s and French Super Entendards as strikers. After the tedious two-hour flight down the Adriatic Sea to Kosovo, we refueled over Macedonia and began searching for targets. The weather was like yesterday’s, ceiling and visibility OK (CAVOK). We set up a search pattern around the town of Rogovo. The first target we acquired was a military scout vehicle parked on a hillside. Kimos rolled in and marked the target area with two rockets to allow Cougar Flight, two British GR-7s, to acquire the target and employ BLU-755s. Unfortunately the Brits’ bombs hit well short of the target. With the vehicle now on the move, Kimos rolled in and employed a Maverick missile while I covered his attack. He scored a direct hit.