The first shot

Airman, July, 2003 by Mark Kinkade

As Ram 01 and Ram 02 banked toward Baghdad, the morning sun rose outside the left side of Maj. Mark Hoehn's F-117 Nighthawk fighter jet. To his right, the evening moon still hovered full and bright over the Tigris River below.

Normally, such a sight would have been cause for pause, Hoehn said. But on this particular morning, he had other things on his mind. He was about to start a war.

"If it hadn't been for the fact that we were over enemy territory and facing a severe anti-aircraft threat, it would have been a magical moment," he said. "I was a little preoccupied."

That magical moment came just minutes before Hoehn and Lt. Col. Dave Toomey, in a second F-117, dropped satellite guided bombs on a bunker in Dora Farms, a compound near the Tigris. They fired the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Freedom, an their target was Saddam Hussein.

March 19, 2003, 12:30 a.m.

They call them "Nighthawks" for a reason. The F117 is a slow-moving to the sleeker F-15s and F-16s that routinely patrolled Iraqi skies during Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch. Sheathed in black radar-deflecting materiel, the aircraft looks like a large fly buzzing across the desert sky when the sun is out.

But at night, the Nighthawk is an invisible knife slicing toward the enemy's jugular. It moves almost invisibly and low to the ground, darts and cuts on a dime and delivers with a lethally accurate punch.

The Nighthawks of the Black Sheep Squadron, deployed with the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing to a base in Southwest Asia, sat quietly on the flight line. The war hadn't started yet, and, with morning fast approaching, the squadron was shutting down operations for the day to configure aircraft for normal combat operations.

Maj. Clint Hinote, a Nighthawk pilot deployed as a mission planner on Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley's Combined Air Forces Component staff, sat in the dining facility chatting with friends and fellow pilots. A few minutes before, he had briefed Moseley on plans for the first few days of the pending air war.

"I was pretty tired and taking a break when one of the guys from the time sensitive targeting cell came in and told me I was needed back on the [planning] floor," Hinote said. "When I got there, I was told we needed to get two jets ready for a strike on a leadership position. The word had come from the Pentagon."

The Pentagon had an opportunity. and President George W. Bush was facing a decision. An intelligence report said Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusai were in a bunker in a little-used residential palace in Dora Farms, a section of suburban Baghdad. A successful strike would decapitate the Iraqi military leadership and probably shorten or even pre-empt the coming war.

Ordinarily, short-notice missions are difficult for the F-117 planners. The Nighthawk is designed for special missions, and those usually take time to develop. Normal mission planning cycles can range from 18 to 20 hours from planning to putting bombs on target. Anything outside that range is unusual and difficult to accomplish.

Hinote and the Black Sheep had four hours to put bombs on target -- from the minute he arrived on the planning floor. Hinote and the other planners grabbed a draft plan for short-notice taskings, called "Silver Bullet" missions, he said.

The clock was ticking.

12:45 a.m.

Moseley hung up the phone when Hinote entered his office.

"Here's the answer I owe the president," Moseley said to Hinote. "Can we make this strike happen, and what are the risks?"

The risks were formidable. The Nighthawks would enter Baghdad airspace without protection. The aircraft don't have defensive capabilities, and fighter escorts would peel off before arriving over the target to avoid alerting air defense batteries.

And the air defense batteries were some of the heaviest in the world, Hinote said.

"The Iraqis basically brought their entire air defenses to cover Baghdad," he said. "The place was bristling with missiles and anti-aircraft [batteries]."

Time was not on the Air Force's side, either. The mission would take about four hours from launch to bombing, and sunrise was expected at just after 5 a.m. That meant the fighters would be on the outskirts of the city as the sun lightened the sky, exposing them to anti-aircraft spotters like bats in a bright room.

Cloudy skies over Baghdad would help, but that would also pose a problem for the pilots when looking for the target.

And, the aircraft were configured for combat operations, not strike missions, and the plan called for using modified bunker-buster bombs the pilots hadn't used before.

Hinote told Moseley the plan would work. He offered a series of options, including a plan calling for two stealth fighters to penetrate Iraqi airspace and hit the target.

"I felt confident we could do it," he said. "If we could make sure the logistics worked out, it would be tight, but we'd pull it off."

Moseley approved the plan, and Hinote went to work. He contacted the Black Sheep and told them they had a job to do.

1:00 a.m.

Hoehn was reviewing plans for the next day's missions when the call for pilots came in at the squadron. Someone handed him a set of coordinates and asked him to find the target.