My Share of the Task(138)
Mike Flynn, Kurt Fuller, and I came out from our office into the TF 16 JOC. We took our spots on the bench at the back of the JOC room. As I had on hundreds of nights in the past two and a half years, I sat quietly and watched.
The JOC in front of us was in pained, tense anticipation. In order to secure the site and arrest anyone who escaped the blast, we wanted Tom D.’s operators to land just after the explosion. So Steve was waiting on them to be airborne and nearby before having the F-16 engage. Unbeknownst to many of us in Balad, as the troop down in Baghdad was first kitted up and loaded into the two helos taking off from in front of their villa, one of the engines wouldn’t start. Tom D. and his team were stunned. This was unheard of for 160th helicopters. They sent for another helicopter, but it would be thirty tense minutes before it arrived from Balad.
As they watched the house on the screens, many in the JOC played over in their minds the worst-case scenario: They imagined seeing Abd al-Rahman and the Man in Black, spooked by the sounds in the busy sky overhead, dart from the house, disappearing into the foliage. They scoured the edges of the house, looking for movement under the carport or around the house’s stucco walls. For now, it was quiet. The only movements on the screen were made by the tall palm trees, their top fronds rustling slightly, casting dark shadows across the house.
As we imagined what was happening inside the boxy, two-story house, we knew that if Zarqawi was there, he was not alone. His family—including perhaps both of his wives and their children—often stayed with him and would be killed in the strike.
Steve decided they couldn’t wait for the Baghdad troop to be nearby. He called down to Tom D. at Baghdad. Through the receiver pressed to Tom D.’s ear, J.C. could hear Steve’s go-ahead.
“Blow that motherfucker up.”
Tom D. set it in motion. “Get the first helo airborne; the other one will catch up,” he ordered. He turned to his joint tactical air controller (JTAC). “Go ahead and execute. Drop the bomb.” The JTAC relayed the order to two already airborne F-16s on a normal combat patrol flown to provide near-immediate response to emerging requirements, like bombing a target. But the answer came back that only one of the two F-16s was available. The second was on the tanker, refueling midflight, and would be delayed fifteen minutes.
It was now after 6:00 P.M., and Tom D. shook his head. Weeks of patient, persistent focus had gotten them here, and the final operation now seemed to be running off the rails. “We don’t have fifteen minutes.” He told them to send the one that was free. The lone F-16 canted and roared through the clouds toward Baqubah.
“You are cleared to engage,” the JTAC relayed, and the JOC waited. The jets were in a three-minute hold.
A minute passed. Two minutes out.
One minute.
The jet was within miles, and the residents of Hibhib would soon hear its engines crackle through the sky overhead.
At 6:11 P.M., it came in on a dive, rushed over the house, and peeled up. Tom D. and the JOC watched the screen. There was no explosion. The house was still there. The F-16 had screamed low over the house’s roof but left it unscathed. They called the F-16. The JTAC’s earlier bomb command had been improperly worded, they were told, so the F-16 hadn’t released its munitions. Tom D. couldn’t believe it. They looked to the screen, waiting to see Abd al-Rahman and the Man in Black flee into the palms.
They prepped the F-16 with the right command, and it circled back around.
At 6:12 P.M., a laser-guided, five-hundred-pound GBU-12 bomb traveling nine hundred feet per second hit the house. The explosion flashed, turning our screens in the JOC white for a split second, as smoke and dust burst up and out laterally in three columns, like the prongs of a toy jack. The F-16 circled again, and a minute and thirty-six seconds later, using GPS coordinates, a GBU-38 hit the same spot.