Black Aces High: The Story of a Modern Fighter Squadron at War

Introduction

When the U.S. War on Terrorism heightened to actual air strikes against the Taliban government in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, one of the navy squadrons selected to lead the early bombing raids was VF-41, a fighter squadron flying F-14A Tomcats and nicknamed the Black Aces. VF-41 crews were assigned some of the most heavily defended Taliban targets and dropped over two hundred bombs in three weeks of night operations, a prodigious amount, scoring an unprecedented hit rate of nearly 90 percent.

The squadron, part of Airwing 8, the carrier’s approximately eighty-plane, multisquadron air arm, should have been home at NAS (Naval Air Station) Oceana, Virginia Beach, Virginia, when the Taliban bombing began. The Enterprise had finished a nearly six-month cruise in the Persian Gulf, had been relieved by another carrier, and was on a leisurely route back to the United States via some exotic ports of call where its five-thousand-plus officers and enlisted personnel planned to unwind and have a good time. But when Islamic fanatics hijacked four U.S. airliners on September 11 and flew two of them into the International Trade Center in New York and another into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing thousands of American civilians, those plans changed abruptly. The Enterprise was ordered to turn around and quickly return to the Gulf.

Airwing 8 and particularly the Black Aces were uniquely suited for what was suddenly anticipated after September 11—a fact strong in the minds of military leaders who ordered it back. Although changed somewhat by normal attrition and replacement, a strong core of the squadron had fought in early 1999 in America’s last air war, the Kosovo War, and possessed expertise that was suddenly needed. In 1999, Airwing 8 had been on the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Because the Roosevelt and the air wing were beginning a cruise and were heading for the nearby Mediterranean, it was not much of a diversion to extend the carrier’s destination to a position off Kosovo and substitute training exercises for the real thing.

Kosovo presented a new kind of conflict for modern fighter squadrons, a precursor to what would happen later in Afghanistan and other terrorist countries the United States, in its subsequent War on Terrorism, might bomb. It wasn’t a conventional conflict in which fighters battled other airplanes for control of the skies and air operations supported ground invasion and conquest. In Kosovo, fighter squadrons, usually pristine in their role as air fencers, got down and dirty and dropped bombs. Kosovo marked the first time in the history of warfare that victory was won without the introduction of troops on the ground.

Airplanes reigned supreme—but not as easily as has been portrayed in the press or by the pundits.

The Black Aces probably played a greater part in that 1999 victory than did any air squadron in theater, whether air force or navy. Because of its superior performance, sophisticated equipment, and two-man crews, who took it upon themselves to do something extra, the Tomcat and its flyers distinguished themselves. Basically, they proved in Kosovo to be the one U.S. asset that could both find hiding enemies and destroy them with smart bomb accuracy.

And doing that eventually became the main mission of the navy there—despite daunting problems.

Flying aging Tomcats and faced with having to locate Serb fighters operating covertly in a mountainous land, much like Afghanistan, and with almost no help from ground spotters, VF-41 aviators spearheaded for the navy the creation of new ways to pinpoint, identify, and destroy enemy troops and weapons. These were tasks that fighter crews had seldom had to do before. The Aces had to break rules and frequently go in harm’s way in order to be successful. In the beginning, there had been resistance to their taking license. But they eventually had done so well that for the first time in aviation history, a fighter squadron—theirs—had been awarded the Wade McClusky Trophy, the navy’s premier bombing honor. The award, named for a World War II dive-bomber pilot and post–World War II admiral, had been won previously only by bombing squadrons.

The award was quite a coup, but like the purely symbolic Super Bowl or World Series trophies, it was hardly indicative of the hard work, missteps, pain, sacrifice, and dedication needed to win it.

The experience of the Aces in fighting over Kosovo—what they did and how they did it—is what this book is about.

I had always wanted to write a book about a fighter squadron at war. A fighter squadron has its own inherent drama and human interest. Fighter pilots and fighter crews are in themselves intriguing. They must be smart and talented to safely operate their intricate, awesome, and deadly dangerous machines. In the sky, they are often at the very edge of their abilities and of human endurance. Many of them like that. Competition is what most of them are about. And there is no crucible like danger and battle. Both reveal character. It is almost impossible to fake courage or knowledge in the middle of an emergency. There is only honesty—often brutal, sometimes inspiring. Every decision, every action can have a monumental effect, especially in the air.

War just heightens those aspects.

Someone is trying to kill you.

I realized that, from the squadron’s commanding officer, who must lead, to the newly winged junior lieutenant who must learn but also perform from day one, the dynamics of a squadron fighting at war make an interesting story. September 11 would make that story timely and pertinent as well.

When the Kosovo War started, I saw a chance. It didn’t seem like a very big or even interesting war. But war alone wasn’t what I sought. I sought to portray a fighter squadron at war. And that was there.

Because of several books I’d written on fighter pilots, the navy agreed to let me go on a carrier. There were no strings attached. After a lot of waiting, I finally made it out to the Roosevelt as the war was ending. It was a good time to arrive. Tensions were lessening. We were somewhere in the middle of the Ionian Sea between Italy and Greece. The air-wing commander, or CAG, was generous. He said I could interview any squadron. I wanted his guidance. I asked him which squadron would be the best. He said I might want to talk to the Black Aces. They’re doing some interesting things.

I’m glad I followed his advice. Eventually, after many interviews conducted then and later, a story of fear and courage, mishap and success, fighting spirit and military innovation, unfolded. Black Aces High. It’s a human story that goes behind the smiling, sunglass-wearing facade of aviators flashing a V, the sterile, seemingly slow-motion target video that has become a staple of Pentagon briefings, and the rock ’n’ roll cowboy image of fighter crews seen in the movies.

It is a story, I hope, that shows something of who these aviators really are and what they do beyond what the public is told, a story that probably will be repeated again and again as our carriers continue to deploy in this new kind of war our nation is fighting.

In a phrase, Black Aces High is the story of a modern American fighter squadron in a twenty-first-century war.

Book I

Fear and Trepidation

One

Skies Above Decimomannu, Sardinia, Late Summer 1999, After the Kosovo War

Lt. Marcus Lupe Lopez wrenched his Tomcat hard and low into the path of the MiG-29 as it roared past their merge. The fight was on. He shot a look back to see the point-nosed Fulcrum’s afterburners blowing fire in the start of a high climbing turn—a first move in gaining an advantage. The 29, its retreating silhouette gleaming lethally in the Mediterranean sun, could actually increase its speed going up—a phenomenal feat normally reserved only for rockets.

Scarily, the guy driving the Fulcrum was one of the best MiG-29 pilots in the world—a burly senior German officer call-signed Hooter, who had missing teeth and a beard, and liked to wear an eye patch and pirate bandanna when off duty drinking or riding his motorcycle. Besides being a biker, he was a professional dogfighter who spent nearly all his considerable airborne hours practicing air-combat maneuvering, or ACM in the jargon, in perhaps the best dogfighting jet in the world.

In contrast, Lupe—a slight, clean-cut, youthful twenty-seven, with dark-haired good looks and a genial personality, had only been in the VF-41 Black Aces squadron for a little over five months and hadn’t been in a turning fight since he’d left the F-14 training squadron the previous spring. Lupe was a rookie, or nugget, as they call a new pilot in the navy, shiny barred and untested, with at most a half-dozen one-versus-one (1v1) dogfights on his résumé.

He was also in one of the navy’s oldest jets, the F-14A, which had made its debut back in 1972, nearly three decades before. While it was fitted with new avionics and other upgrades that made it, among other things, a better turner than many newer Tomcat models, it was still an aging fighter that, on paper, did not match up well in a turning fight against the newer Fulcrum.

The MiG even had a Star Wars–type missile-firing system that allowed its pilot to launch merely by pointing his helmet at the intended target. If Hooter could get the Tomcat in a position only forty-five degrees off his MiG’s nose—which was a heck of a lot easier to establish than the Tomcat’s narrower, ten-to-twenty-degree nose-on requirements—and at the proper distance, Lupe was dead meat.

No question the young lieutenant had his hands full this August day in the beautiful sun-splashed fight skies off Italy. And he knew it.

But he had a plan.

He and his backseater, Lt. Comdr. Louis Loose Cannon, a quiet, thoughtful Desert Storm veteran flying RIO, or radar intercept officer, with Lupe specifically because of his experience, had decided they would, at first, just try to keep the fight even, doing their best to stay out of the maneuverable, smaller MiG’s kill envelopes while threatening it enough to keep it at bay. The tactic would buy them time, and if Hooter made a mistake, they’d pounce.

Maximum performance was the key. As long as they could continue turning well enough to keep their nose threatening the 29, Hooter would have to respect them. He wouldn’t go for the kill until he thought they were in trouble. Since they didn’t have the MiG’s power, they’d use gravity to help them turn. Turning bled speed, or energy, as it was also called in the dogfighting world. Without speed, any fighter is vulnerable. Maneuvering becomes harder. But roaring down, with gravity aiding them, they’d be regaining energy lost in the hard turning.

It was a chess game, the cobra and the mongoose. If Lupe and Loose kept sight of the MiG so that they knew where it was and therefore what to anticipate, and kept elusive so that the MiG had harder shooting angles, and if Lupe flew the jet at its optimum turning speed—around 310-to-320 knots—where it would curl fastest and in the shortest radius, they would have a chance.

It only took one mistake to give them an opening.

The Tomcat was now seconds into its descending turn. Lupe was tugging the stick as hard as he could, his feet coordinating the rudders, keeping the jet steady at the six and one half Gs at which it curved the best.

A G stands for a unit of force roughly equivalent to a man’s weight. One G can feel like 180 pounds on the body; six Gs, like a crushing half ton. Gs on an airplane are exerted by gravity. They are similar to, but much greater than, the centrifugal force experienced in a car careening around a corner. Too many Gs and blood drains from the brain. Unconsciousness, or blackout, ensues. Aviators wear inflating G-suits, or speed jeans, to keep blood from draining. But the more Gs they experience, the harder that task becomes—as their grunting and groaning often indicate.

First color fades. Then vision tunnels. Unconsciousness comes next. And it isn’t a sweet drift into sleep. It’s a sometimes-nauseous, painful, scary feeling that no pilot or RIO wants or likes.

But at this point unconsciousness wasn’t a factor. Perhaps there was only a little graying at the edges. Both Lupe and Loose were locked on the MiG, their perceptions supercharged as they roared to optimum knot speed.

In a second or two, Loose would start snatching glimpses at instruments in the cockpit in order to keep Lupe advised of airspeed, Gs, and other data he needed in order to fly without having to take his eyes off the Fulcrum. Years prior, when backseaters were first introduced to modern navy jet fighters, the RIO was resented by pilots who didn’t feel they needed somebody else’s help.

But Vietnam changed that. Backseaters more than proved their worth as a second pair of eyes for finding MiGs that looked like gnats in the huge sky, and for reducing the complicated workload, including running the radar and locating bombing targets. Such tasks were increasingly demanded in the cockpits of the sophisticated new jets. By the time the Tomcat became the main carrier fighter, RIOs, because of their worth, expertise, and proven leadership, were increasingly being given command of fighter squadrons, even though they rode in the backseat without a stick.

In fact, at this very moment, the Black Aces were commanded by a RIO, Comdr. Joseph Joey Aucoin, a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School, which was better known as Top Gun. Joey, like Loose, was a Desert Storm combat veteran with thousands of hours in the backseat.

But none of this was on their minds right now—if it ever was. Lupe and Loose were only thinking of the fight.

Suddenly, Hooter did the unexpected—well, not totally unexpected, because Lupe and Loose knew the Fulcrum tactics and had discussed just such a move. But the fight had begun as they wanted, and, in the heat of battle, they had hoped it would continue that way.

Both jets at this instant were at the beginnings of what is called a two-circle fight. At the merge, they had turned into each other, the MiG going high, the Tomcat low. In order to bring their noses around to threaten each other, each fighter would have to travel a full circle, or 360 degrees; hence the two circles. Two-circle was what Lupe and Loose wanted because if they could hold the optimum six-and-a-half-G turn as they were, they felt they could traverse the circle about as fast as the Fulcrum.

They’d remain even.

But now they saw Hooter do a sudden reversal, a quick change of direction from the circle he was previously flying to the beginnings of one in the opposite direction. He’d suddenly gone counterclockwise, which would change the fight into what is called a one circle. While a two-circle could be envisioned as a figure eight in the sky, with both jets roaring clockwise on the opposite spheres of the eight—eventually, after 360 degrees of turn, to meet in the middle—a one-circle fight flipped one jet out in the opposite direction so that it only needed to turn 180 degrees to meet the other.

One-circle meant that in an instant Hooter had cut in half the curling distance he had to travel.

Hooter probably figured that Lupe, being as green as he was, wouldn’t know what was happening and would continue along his 360-degree trek. With Lupe and Loose rounding the bottom of the eight, the 29 would quickly be aiming at the Tomcat like a submarine fixed on an unsuspecting freighter.

But Lupe and Loose had kept sight of Hooter and seen his maneuver. Lupe instantly knew he had to counter. In a millisecond, he also reversed, in effect forcing the fight back to a two-circle. It was a violent reversal, smashing both men against the cockpit as Lupe rammed the stick forward to unload, or divest Gs, so he could reverse more quickly, and then snapped it back sharply in the other direction while simultaneously pumping the rudders. Lupe’s reaction not only nullified Hooter’s reversal, but because of a design flaw in the Fulcrum, gave him a chance to pounce.

The MiG had a blind spot behind its cockpit. Unlike the Tomcat crew, which sat fairly elevated in a cockpit that gave them clear 360-degree vision, Hooter sat low, a large seat back obstructing his view. When he made his reversal, it flipped the rear of the Fulcrum at the F-14, causing him to momentarily lose sight. In that millisecond, Lupe made his reversal. When Hooter came out of the maneuver, he was expecting to see the Tomcat in a chunk of sky near where he’d left it.

But it wasn’t there!

In addition, because he was going up, the reversal cost Hooter airspeed. He pulled for everything he was worth, recalls Lupe. He doesn’t care about energy…. He just wants to bring his nose around faster. That’s what the MiG-29 does best. Maneuverability. But as soon as he does, he’s bleeding airspeed. He’s trading energy for nose position. He’ll do that to get the one-circle because with the one-circle he can get the quick kill.

But because of the blind spot, he didn’t see the Tomcat reverse. He burst from his reversal, fangs out. But instead of finding the Tomcat a mile below, bottoming around a two-circle turn, he saw nothing but an empty piece of sky.

Lose sight, lose fight, is the dictum.

Now Hooter had to be scared.

And with good reason. Since the Tomcat was headed down when it reversed, it had hardly lost any speed. Lupe and Loose, their jet primed, were quick-turning up on the other side of the MiG, barely three thousand feet away, and preparing to shoot. The MiG teetered helplessly, nose up, trying to regain some maneuvering speed, its pilot desperately trying to find his target.

But it was too late.

As the Tomcat closed the gap and Lupe called Fox One, meaning a radar missile had been locked and was on its way, Hooter finally located them. It’s not clear whether he heard the Fox One call, got warning indications of the radar lock on his cockpit alert gear, or simply spotted them against the azure Mediterranean sky. But he realized instantly that he was in trouble. Hooter did the only thing he could do. In an effort to bring his nose back around and at least try to threaten the Tomcat, he again pulled hard with everything he had and overstressed the Fulcrum.

His nose is still stuck up high, and I’m down low, recalled Lupe. So he’s trying to bring his nose down there as fast as he can, and he probably pulls the stick in his lap.

The MiG-29 is a nine-G jet, meaning that’s the limit the manufacturer says the pilot can put on it. Anything more is dangerous and can break the plane. I’m sure he pulled so hard he hurt himself, said Lupe. You can feel it. It’s a seat-of-the-pants thing…very painful…He knew he’d overstressed the jet.

This was a training fight and had to be called off. The jet might have been damaged in the overstress, rendering it unsafe to fly hard any longer. Lupe and Loose had already won anyway because the Fox One they had called was a kill shot, verified by their onboard equipment. Had they been in a real dogfight, Hooter, not the rookie, would have bought the farm.

That was nice, said Lupe. We had to fly back slow and easy, check his jet, and make sure nothing was broken. We were happy as can be and ready for the German O club.

And it had all happened in less than a minute.

Make no mistake—had he not damaged his jet, Hooter most likely would have returned and in the next fight waxed the rookie. Experience counts. It counts the most. But for this day, Lupe was the victor, and Loose was probably less impressed because he’d seen it so much more.

But for a fighter pilot, ACM was traditionally what distinguished the good from the not so good. Things had changed in the nineties. Bombing, which most fighter pilots regarded as grunt work, was definitely making a comeback. But ACM was still how a fighter pilot made his reputation and secured his place in the pecking order, his right to stand at the bar with his mate, hands flying, telling great stories.

So Lupe was feeling his oats. But he was no fool. He knew the fight could just as easily have gone the other way.

What he was really happy about was that he had upheld his squadron’s honor. By a chance draw, he had been matched against the MiG squadron’s best—and on the very first day of the squadron’s one-versus-one fights. The squadron was like a family, a fraternity. It was an elite brotherhood of men he liked and respected. Some he might have even idolized. The demands of the squadron meant that a pilot or RIO spent more time with its members than with his wife or girlfriend. It was an intimate, revealing camaraderie. You can’t fake who you are at six hundred knots, with your life liable to be snuffed out in a millisecond. Pilots and RIOs flew and sometimes tragically died together. They trusted each other, depended on each other. They were handpicked, recruited like professional athletes or elite social-club pledges. A squadron wanted the best, demanded the best.

Because of all this, Lupe was proud that he’d held his own. He’d just been through a war with the Black Aces and contributed more than he had expected, and this was further proof that he was fitting in.

But he hadn’t always felt this way. Five months earlier, in April 1999, he’d been as apprehensive as any nugget pilot. Not just because he was joining his first squadron and going on his first cruise. But because the Black Aces, one of two F-14 squadrons on the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, were going to war.

Two

Four Months Earlier, April 5, 1999, Aboard the USS Roosevelt, En Route to the Kosovo War

Comdr. Joseph Joey Aucoin, skipper of the VF-41 Black Aces, had last experienced abject fear during Desert Storm in 1991. On his very first combat mission, he was launched as a young lieutenant backseater in an F-14 on a MiG sweep. The Tomcat was running interference for a carrier night strike on Basra. They’d entered Iraq through a violent lightning storm over Iran and then, approaching the target, had been engulfed by a savage Basra night sky filled with antiaircraft fire.

It was just the general things inherent in combat, he said about that baptism. The confusion, the plan falling to pieces, not being able to communicate, the screaming on the radios. Boy, they were really trying to kill us. You could die. Just that realization. It’s not like we can say, ‘Okay, stop that.’ It really takes some courage.

That’s why this early evening he’d called the All Officers Meeting, or AOM, as he and his officers referred to it. Ironically, the North Carolina native (he’d actually been born in Germany but called North Carolina home) had been a junior officer in the same Black Aces when he’d seen that first combat in Desert Storm. Junior officers didn’t always come back to skipper their old squadrons. But Aucoin, call-signed Joey, had come back. Now he wanted to talk to his aircrews and support officers about what they were soon to experience and what he would expect of them.

The Aces, some three hundred officers and enlisted support men and women, including thirty aviators, aboard the large nuclear carrier, were racing through the Mediterranean to a secret point south of Italy in the Ionian Sea. There, the following day, their aircrews would begin strikes on Serbian targets in Kosovo. They were readying themselves to take part in the newly declared war of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on the former Yugoslavian republic. Aucoin, forty-two, and one of his senior officers, Louis Loose Cannon, the squadron’s only black aviator, were the sole combat veterans in the squadron. None of the others had ever experienced the chaos of war.

Aucoin looked on as the low-slung, dull gray ready room began to fill with green flight-suited pilots and RIOs and khaki-and-jerseyed support officers either taking the name-tagged leather seats reserved for flight-crew members or standing, arms folded, around the sides and in the back. Few, if any, could detect Aucoin’s concern. Fit and lanky, quick to smile, he was always low-key but purposeful at such meetings. He had a down-to-earth, easy-talking leadership style, seldom got angry, and was known as a skipper who cared about his men, especially the enlisted troops. His father had been an enlisted man. That’s how he’d been born in Germany. Several junior officers, or JOs, as they were called in the squadron, had even gotten mad at him for what they perceived as his favoritism toward enlisted sailors. It wasn’t true, but their irritation didn’t bother Aucoin. He didn’t worry how he was perceived. He had little egotism for a man in his profession, and was mainly interested in what worked and worked well. He believed in the power of the team. Stars alone weren’t going to produce success. It took every player.

But the pressure was building.

Behind them was the struggle they’d all endured to get ready for this deployment these past months during workup, the year-plus period between cruises, also called turnaround, when a fleet fighter squadron returned to its land base, regrouped, and began training again for its next extended cruise.

It took that long, after a deployment, to get back to a fighting peak.

The turnaround, which included Aucoin’s assuming command of the Aces, hadn’t been easy.

Far from it.

Maintenance had been a mess when Aucoin had become skipper in 1998 after serving as the squadron executive officer, or XO, as skippers-to-be normally did. Bad management had caused a deterioration in the quality of jet technicians and their noncommissioned managers, which had resulted in the squadron’s airplanes being mostly grounded and in need of repair. The situation had gotten so bad that the squadron’s previous cruise had been scornfully dubbed the Love Boat Cruise by its aviators because of the lack of flying time the broken airplanes had caused them. The nickname referred to the extra time in ports they had because they couldn’t fly. Most of them had hated the situation.

Making matters worse, they had had to borrow airplanes during the cruise from their sister squadron, VF-14, the Tophatters. They were sisters only because they were both in Airwing 8, one of the few air wings that had two Tomcat squadrons. Most air wings only had one. The borrowing had been humiliating. If a fighter squadron is anything, it is a fiercely competitive organization that prides itself on being ready, reliable, and the best. But how good could the Aces really be if they had to depend on another squadron’s maintenance