Maj Dave “Devo” Gross
After flying numerous pseudocombat sorties over Bosnia during several earlier deployments in support of the no-fly zone, the 81st FS received orders to return to Aviano AB, Italy, to fight what was certain to be a shooting war over Kosovo. I sat in the back of the 81st FS briefing room on that
cold and rainy February afternoon. I listened to the deploy-ment brief, ready to go to war and fight for what is right in the world—but my name was not on the Aviano deployment list.
“What do you mean I have to ask my boss if I can deploy with the squadron?” I asked incredulously.
Lt Col Kimos Haave replied, “Devo, you work for Colonel Jouas (ops group commander) now, and he will decide if you can deploy with the squadron. Of course we would love to have you, along with all your experience.”
I had several regrets leaving my job as the squadron’s assis-tant operations officer in November of 1998 and taking over as the chief of the 52d OG’s Standardization and Evaluation (Stan/
Eval) Division at Spangdahlem AB, Germany. I felt as though I had been set up by being assigned to take over the Stan/Eval shop just one month before a major inspection. I also missed the Panthers’ camaraderie and their day-to-day operations. Stan/
Eval made it through the inspection with an “excellent” overall, and I still flew training missions with my family—the Panthers.
But because of my new job, I was no longer a sure bet to deploy with the Panthers on what was sure to be a great chapter in the history of the A-10. With all the maturity and poise I could muster, I watched my squadron mates deploy to Aviano AB while I stayed behind. My plan, if the war lasted that long, was to swap out in two weeks with Capt David S. “Ajax” Ure, my assistant in the Stan/Eval shop. I had my doubts.
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 af-forded 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.
MISSION LEADERSHIP AT THE TACTICAL LEVEL
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, snow-capped 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 Ser-bian 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 re-sponsible 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 burn-ing 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 wit-nessing the carnage, we returned to Aviano with all our ord-nance. 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 mis-sion 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
dam-age to some Serbs! After that mission I called him Kimos “we are going to kill something today” Haave to the guys assem-bled 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 search-ing for targets. The weather was like yesterday’s, ceilsearch-ing 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 em-ployed a Maverick missile while I covered his attack. He scored a direct hit.
We went on to employ against a petroleum, oil, and lubri-cants (POL) storage facility and a military-vehicle compound near Pirane (a small town located near a rail line about halfway between Orahovac and Prizren). Kimos coordinated an attack by Griz 81 flight, a second two-ship of GR-7s, on the ve-hicle compound while I coordinated with ABCCC for clearance to attack the POL site. Griz flight dropped CBUs on the east side of the vehicle compound, which contained about 15 per-sonnel carriers. We dropped our remaining bombs on the west end, destroying all the vehicles in the compound. Both Kimos and I employed everything on the jet that day: Mk-82s, Mav-ericks, and even the lethal GAU-8 gun. Not a single shot was fired back at us. I started to get a false sense of security. It felt like another routine training mission except for the fact we were dropping live weapons. Unfortunately, the rest of my sor-ties over Kosovo would not be as easy.
The true significance of this mission was not the targets we destroyed. Those attacks by no means turned the tide of the campaign. The significance was the effect that our two A-10s had on our maintenance personnel when they saw their aircraft
MISSION LEADERSHIP AT THE TACTICAL LEVEL
pull into the de-arm area with empty missile rails, empty bomb racks, and bullets missing from the gun. The significance was also in an attitude change among the Panther pilots after hear-ing that we actually employed this time. Thhear-ings would never be the same. Milosevic’s days were now numbered because the Panthers got their first taste of blood and were hungry for more.
Me, I had to go back to Spang to an empty base and CNN. But I was there—there, for the first Panther kill!
You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide
After two more long weeks back in Germany, my boss al-lowed me to join the Panthers in their new home at Gioia del Colle. Once again, my first mission back in country was action packed. It was 22 April and I was leading a strike mission with Capt Kevin “Boo” Bullard, one of the 75th FS pilots. Boo and several other Hog pilots from Pope had recently joined us and brought along six additional A-10s to add to our firepower.
This was his first sortie in OAF.
You could hear the excitement in Lester’s voice: “We have mili-tary vehicles down there!” Lester had to be one of the most laid-back pilots in the squadron. Nothing excited him. That’s why I knew from the tone of his voice that we had hit the mother lode when he called us in as strikers to work the target area. Lester had found a group of 20–30 military transport vehicles parked in an area around several small buildings near Urosevac. It ap-peared to be some sort of VJ/MUP headquarters. After allowing his wingman to employ Mk-82s on the south side of the target, he handed the target area over to my flight. Boo and I proceeded to wipe out every vehicle in that compound with our Mk-82s and guns. The Mk-82s’ FMU-113 airburst nose fuses caused them to detonate approximately 15 feet above the ground. This made them lethal weapons against the soft-skinned vehicles we were attacking, as well as any troops within 100 yards of the im-pact area. Deep inside I hoped that this was one of the rape camps I had heard about in the news and that we were making a difference in this campaign.
After Boo made his last pass, we began searching the area for other targets. There was a dry riverbed that ran from the target area down a narrow ravine towards a town. I noticed
several peculiarly shaped rocks in the riverbed, too square to be just rocks. From 15,000 feet they appeared to be the same color and texture as the rocks in the riverbed, but their squared edges led me to believe they were man-made. My first thought was that they were cement blocks used to contain the river, but they were not positioned at the edges of the bank. I set my formation up for a reconnaissance pass, utilizing the A-10’s top-secret, hi-tech targeting system—a pair of Canon space-stabilized binoculars. My suspicions were confirmed;
those shifty Serbs were attempting to hide six tanks in this riverbed by putting them next to rock formations and covering some of them with tree branches. When I keyed my mike to talk to my wingman, I am certain I sounded even more excited than Lester. I talked Boo’s eyes onto the tanks and quickly briefed him on my attack plan. I maneuvered into position, rolled in, and fired an AGM-65D Maverick missile on the tank at the north end of the riverbed. As I came off target with flares, I observed a direct hit on the lead tank. I instructed Boo to hit the tank at the south end of the formation to pin them in the riverbed. As Boo maneuvered for his shot, his target began to move in an attempt to escape. Boo scored a direct hit on the “mover,” pinning down the other tanks in the riverbed.
The rest of the tanks were now urgently trying to escape as we continued our assault.
For some strange reason, the Serbs were getting a little tired of our act and began firing some pretty intense AAA at us.
Most of it exploded below our altitude. We changed our axis of attack and continued our assault on the tanks with our re-maining two Mavericks and then made one pass with the GAU-8 gun. Out of gas, we reluctantly handed the target area over to another flight of A-10s, who found more vehicles close by and continued the attack. That was my first experience finding concealed armor in an environment other than a desert, be it Iraq or the Nevada/California desert. It was a completely different ball game, but the learning curve was high for most of us. The Serbs quickly learned that they were going to have to do a better job of concealing their fielded forces with A-10s on the prowl. We were patient and persistent in our pursuit of targets. It was a great day for the Panthers!
MISSION LEADERSHIP AT THE TACTICAL LEVEL
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
After two all-night squadron top-three tours and a weather cancel on my next sortie, I was starting to feel the fatigue I had seen in everyone’s eyes the day I arrived at Gioia. That was the only time I was grateful for my time at home in Germany with my wife and three-month-old son while my squadron was fighting in the skies over Kosovo. We knew we were in this for the long haul. Milosevic would not fold easily.
Since I was not an AFAC, I coveted the sorties when I was scheduled as a striker because I could lead the mission and have more control over the outcome. On 30 April I briefed my wingman, Lt Scott “Glib” Gibson, like I briefed all the other missions. We were going to take the fight to the Serbs as Chili 11 flight. I had demonstrated my ability to find lucrative tar-gets with some degree of success, so the AFAC assigned to my sector allowed me to perform my own reconnaissance, but I had to confirm the validity of targets with him before attack-ing. This day’s weather was forecasted to be “severe clear” over Kosovo. I was climbing up the A-10 ladder to enter my “office”
and go kill stuff, when Maj Thomas J. “Bumpy” Feldhausen, the top-three supervisor, drove up and handed me a target photo, complete with coordinates. A “top three” designation is reserved for the squadron commander, operations officer, or another senior squadron member responsible for the execu-tion of the day’s operaexecu-tions. The Brits had flown over a small compound southeast of Urosevac that morning and had taken a recce photo of some tanks parked next to a house. Once again, I couldn’t believe my luck. I could hardly wait to get across the Adriatic, hit the tanker, and get into theater to see if the tanks were indeed still there.
As I pressed into the area of responsibility (AOR), I called my AFAC and told him about the target area. Since he was busy with his own flight’s carnage and destruction, he cleared me to engage that target area. Glib and I circled the area at 15,000 feet and found the house and the tank. The tank was nestled close to the house, so the Maverick was the weapon of choice to prevent any collateral damage. I rolled and acquired the tank in the cockpit’s Maverick video display. It was white hot from sitting in the spring sun all day. I locked the target,
waited for a valid weapons lock, and fired the missile. The Maverick roared off the rail like a locomotive, finding and de-stroying its target in a blaze of smoke and fire.
Knowing that tanks are usually not solitary creatures by na-ture, Glib and I searched the immediate area for more targets.
Using the binos we could see tank trails running throughout the area. Once again, I noted something peculiar: a mound of hay isolated in a field, surrounded by tank tracks. Having lived in Germany for the past three years, I knew that German farmers piled their hay in stacks close to their barns. I never saw a sin-gle pile of hay just sitting in a field alone with no cattle. On my drives to work in Germany, I had watched the hay combines dur-ing the harvest season. The machines would pick up hay,
“process” it, and drop the bundles out the back without stop-ping. This resulted in piles of hay in uniform, regularly spaced patterns, quite unlike what I was now seeing from the air.
I dropped down and took a closer look with the binos as Glib gave cover. My suspicions were again confirmed. The Serbs were trying to hide a tank under a pile of hay in the middle of
MISSION LEADERSHIP AT THE TACTICAL LEVEL
Lt Glib Gibson inspecting Willy Pete rockets and IIR Mavericks prior to a day-time combat mission
USAF Photo by SrA Stan Parker
the field. I clearly saw the turret sticking out from the hay.
There was only one thing left to do. I rolled in with the mighty GAU-8 gun and put two 150-round bursts of 30 mm armor-piercing and high-incendiary explosive rounds into that tank.
In classic Hog fashion, the gun vibrated the cockpit and rud-der pedals and filled the cockpit with the sweet smell of gun-powder as the bullets found their mark. The tank went up in bright-red flames that shot 40 feet into the air, and it was still burning and cooking off unexpended rounds when we left the area 30 minutes later.
Glib and I continued our search of the target area; behind a building we found two square, green patches that just did not quite match the surrounding foliage and grass. I rolled in with my Maverick missile to get an IR image of what we were see-ing. What started as a reconnaissance pass quickly became an attack as the Maverick’s imagery clearly showed two tanks concealed under a camouflage net. After I killed the first tank with a Maverick, I directed Glib to take out the second. He rolled in and took it out with a Maverick missile.
Out of gas, we reluctantly retracted our fangs and headed for home. The next day a fellow pilot on an AFAC mission saw the tank I had shot with the gun: the tank—with its turret blown off—was sitting in the field. For two days following the Brits’ discovery of this tank by the house, coalition forces found and killed numerous pieces of artillery and armor hid-den in and around this target area. A picture is indeed worth a thousand kills. Once again, I learned that if something on the ground doesn’t look quite right, it’s probably a Serb hiding from the wrath of the Warthog. Thanks to my British war brethren for the great target.
Break Left! No, Your Other Left!
The first of May began like any other day in Gioia. I was scheduled to fly as Maj Kirk M. “Corn” Mays’s wingman on an
The first of May began like any other day in Gioia. I was scheduled to fly as Maj Kirk M. “Corn” Mays’s wingman on an