I quote my friend Randy Haskin from a post on the mustangsmustangs board December 2003:
Here’s a sad tale that you all might find interesting…..
I am (or was up until very recently) a USAF F-15E pilot. I was deployed during IRAQI FREEDOM earlier this year, and one of our types of missions was something called SCAR, or Strike Coordination and Reconnaissance. Without getting too detailed, it’s basically a poor man’s “Fast FAC” Forward Air Controller, where we go into a target area, find our own targets for our own ordnance, then find targets for other strikers in the area.
One day after a mission I was sitting in the Intel shop filling out some paperwork and I heard some aircrew in the next room over reviewing their HUD film after their mission for the Intel debrief. They had apparently been flying SCAR near the Balad SE airfield just north of Baghdad and had run across a number of airplanes dispersed out into a field. They had destroyed 4 or 5 of them, but neither they nor the intelligence folks cound figure out what type of aircraft they were.
So, the Intel officer knew that I was a bit of an old airplane freak, and poked his head around the corner, asking me to come look at the tape.
As they played back the tape, the first thing I saw was a Hawker Hunter getting speared with a laser guided bomb. I told the Intel officer that’s what I thought it was, then filled him in that I was pretty sure the Hunter had been one of thge main Iraqi fighters before they got their fleet of MiGs. “Hey, you guys know that this isn’t a MiG, right? It’s British…” They just sort of looked at me blankly and said, “yeah, but it’s an Iraqi fighter, so we hit it.” The tape kept rolling…another Hunter bites the dust.
The pilot who’d flown the mission piped up, “It’s this next one that’s really weird, though…it looks like a big prop plane of some sort.”
So, the next thing that flashes up on the screen, sure enough, is a Sea Fury. The tape continues to roll as my eyes light up…”Hey, cool, that’s a Sea Fury!” It appears to be a 2-seater and is sitting there intact. For a moment I take mental note that it’s at the Balad SE airfield and wonder if, in a postwar Iraq, there would be any way of me getting up there to claim that thing! I start explaining to the pilots and intel guys what kind of airplane it is when I see on screen that another 500-pound laser guided bomb sails right into the Fury, destroying it in a large explosion.
“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO THAT FOR?!?” I was stunned, seeing such a thing obliterated. My reaction was a little funny, especially considering on my own tape I had just watched my own bombs destroying a MiG-23 and a Su-17, and hadn’t thought twice about it. But this….a Sea Fury….that was sacrilegious!
The pilot, obviously not grasping the value of a warbird in the same way that I was, just shrugged, and said, “hey, it was an airplane….it might be able to carry WMD, right?”
Martin
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