A-10s over Kosovo (illustrations removed)

“Taco, Stew Two-One, good voice; say ordnance and playtime.” I recognized the voice of Maj Bumpy Feldhausen, one of the boys from Pope. I replied, “Stew, Taco, One’s got two by CBU-87, Maverick, and the gun. Number Two has four by Mk-82s. We’ve got another 20 minutes of playtime.” “Roger,” Bumpy said, “we’ve got some arty positions in the tree line in our target area. We’re halfway between G-Town and Vranje. Confirm you have the coordinates.”

\Map: Artillery positions between G-Town and Vranje

I looked at the INS. “Another five minutes away,” I told him.

“Copy all. I want you guys in at 200 and below. We’ll hold over you, 210 and above, and we can provide your cover. When you get into the target area, I’ll give you a talk-on.”

“Taco Zero-One,” I replied. Switching frequencies, I compared fuels with Rip. We’d have enough for about 15 minutes in the target area. I plotted the position of the target on one of my 1:50 maps. It was within a kilometer of the corner of the map, halfway up the side of a hill on the eastern side of a fairly nondescript small valley. It wasn’t going to be easy finding it—especially without being able to reference the map features to the immediate south and west of the target. To see all of that, I would have to juggle two other 1:50 maps in the cockpit along with the one I already had out and the 1:250 that I was using for navigation. It wasn’t an easy thing to do.

We were almost there—only three miles away. I looked out and saw Stew 21 circling over the valley to the south, slightly higher than us and about four miles away. “Stew, Taco’s visual, ready for the talk-on,” I announced.

“Right beneath you, there’s a fairly long town in the middle of the valley, oriented north-south. Call contact.”

I looked down into the valley. There were a lot of towns. I came back inside, checked my map, checked the compass, back outside. Yep, there was the town that he was talking about, and it was pretty much north-south. “Contact,” I replied and then added, “Confirm that there is a hardball road leading through the length of the town.”

“Affirmative,” came the answer. “Let’s call the length of that town one unit. Now look on the eastern side of that town. There’s a dirtball road leading southeast up into the hills. Call contact.”

I looked down. There were a lot of dirtball roads, some more prominent than others. “I see a lot of dirtball roads,” I said.

“Right, this one is the most prominent one. It leads out in a straight line to the southeast and hits a tree line in the hills about two to three units away from the town.”

I looked down. None of the roads that led out the town to the southeast ran into a tree line. I checked my orientation. OK, I was looking to the southeast of the town. No trees. My frustration started to build.

“Stew, Taco’s not contact with that tree line,” I admitted.

“It’s right underneath me now. I’ll put down a mark to show you.”

I looked up to watch him. He wasn’t over the town. Where was he? I looked off to the south. Searching, searching… I had lost him while I was looking for the target. One potato, two… wait a minute—there he was—only he was a lot further south than he should be. How was he going to mark this target area from so far away? Then it dawned on me—I was looking at the wrong hillside. I swore to myself. How could I be so stupid? I had been looking at the wrong area. My INS pointed to the area that I was looking in, but it must have drifted. I looked about three miles south, underneath the area where Bumpy was circling. There was another elongated town in the valley, with a hardball road leading through it. “Stupid idiot!” I cursed at myself for a novice mistake!

I called Rip on FM to say that we had been orbiting too far to the north and were shifting south. Rip acknowledged, and we started south just in time to watch Bumpy roll in and put down two Willy Pete rockets on the side of the hills. One landed near but on the north side of a dirtball road; the other Willy Pete landed about 200 meters north of that.

“Stew, Taco’s contact with your smokes. We were looking in the wrong area,” I admitted, somewhat sheepishly. I still felt stupid.

“Roger that,” he replied. “There are four revetments in the field just on the south side of the road, south of my southern mark. I’d like you to lay down your CBUs right on the tree line—I think that they may have some of their stuff hidden in the trees. The two closest revetments to the tree line have something in them.”

“Copy all,” I replied. Then to Rip, “Shooter-cover, bombs, gun. Winds are out of the west at 60 knots.” That meant that I would be coming in with a tailwind to make this work. Even though each one of these bombs weighed about 1,000 lbs 60 knots of wind would definitely affect it as it fell for about 12,000 feet. Rip acknowledged my plan and shifted his orbit to the west, so he could look through me to the target area.