There’s an old joke that a Japanese Airline pilot for JAL was on final approach to Honolulu International Airport situated next to Pearl Harbor and the approach controller asked the pilot if he was familiar with the airport and the pilot said “I’ve been here once before but the last time….we didn’t land.”
In a previous post, I wrote about my concept of creating a large training area in Libya here, today comes the news that Secretary of State Rice is visiting Libya. I myself almost visited Libya a few years ago; except I don’t think the reception would have been as warm as Secretary Rice’s. In 1985, I was a B-52 navigator-bombardier and remember watching the CNN report saying that the US had just bombed Libya with the operation named “Eldorado Canyon” which President Reagan ordered after the Labelle Disco was bombed in West Berlin.
Military operations in the 80’s and 90’s were often either a single raid (think cruise missile attacks) or relatively brief operations like Grenada, Panama, Haiti, or even Desert Storm. If you weren’t involved in the initial operation, you were unlikely to be involved and you could miss being involved by literally a phone call. One friend of mine at Barksdale Louisiana was washing his car when he was called on a Saturday to deploy for what eventually became the raid on Libya. He missed the call and his crew didn't deploy.
My friend’s Brian Shul and Walt Watson happened to be in England on a regular SR-71 Blackbird deployment and got the call to come in to work, quietly, in to their deployed squadron headquarters in Mildenhall England. Back in those days, Mildenhall was a fairly open base with no walls or fences except around the flight line. When Brian and Walt left their “Q” rooms, they saw a large security presence and after arriving at the headquarters, were told the next day they were going to get the pictures of the post strike on the raid on Libya. They told their story in the well written and photographed book “The Untouchables”
I visited Brian and Walt on their first deployment to the UK a couple years earlier but this mission would be the one in their career that they had missiles fired at them. The really funny story of this mission is that when they got back after their third day of flying in a row, an unprecedented event, Brian was watching the news and Colonel Khadafy was giving a speech when Walt and Brian’s jet overflew the reviewing stand (at 65,000 feet!) and Khadafy and the rest scrambled from the stage when their double sonic booms hit the stands and everyone though they were being hit again!
A few weeks after the Libyan raid, our commander called all of our bomber crews into a room and arranged us by flights, we had two flights that specialized in conventional operations and the other two focused on, well, the big bomb mission area. He pointed to my section and said that if Prime Minister Thatcher had not allowed the F-111’s to fly from England, the mission would have been ours. We looked back with some shock and disbelief but also pride that we were being considered for this mission. Our F-111 brothers had many more advantages than us, not the least of it was speed and maneuverability, as I would find out in my next assignment. But we were fairly sure had we been picked we would have suffered more losses than the single F-111 shot down.
And that’s my Libya story. Hope everyone has a great weekend and best wishes to all the folks out there on the pointy end, stay safe!