In August 1991, we (VF-32) were at Nellis AFB acting as adversaries for the Air Force Fighter Weapons School and enjoying every minute of it. Our "spy" came in and starting talking about an invasion of Kuwait. Those of us who were not busy listened to his assessment, figured we were low on the totem pole to be called into action and went back to the task at hand. By the end of the day, CAG called and said get back to Oceana and get ready to deploy. C-9s literally fell out of the sky and we were off by the next morning heading east. We had to get all our F-14s ready for war while doing FCLP and swapping out all engines with less than a couple hundreds hours left on them. So we working 24 hrs a day all weekend and flew FCLPs after midnight every night in preparation for going aboard USS John F Kennedy. AVCM Keith Hulbert, already a legend in the maintenance world, oversaw 13 engine swaps and met the flight schedule. On Monday we transitioned to getting everything loaded aboard the ship and were at sea on Tuesday. After that, the toughest part was uncertainty...would we be engaged...would Saddam back down...this was before email and cell phones so telegrams and short wave radio (MARS) were only contact options to stay in touch with home. We transited the Suez Canal and joined USS Saratoga in the Red Sea and began practicing the first three days of the war flying the routes right up to the border with Iraq and doubling back. We got to do amazing low levels in the formerly forbidden realm of Saudi Arabia. The west coast was forbidding and desolate and offered the most fun low levels I've ever done (except for Star Wars Canyon in Oman). Even though we decided to operate at 20K and above over Iraq due to the threat of AAA, we still practiced low levels at the end of every hop unfettered by the speed and altitude restrictions back in CONUS. The Tomcat goes like a scalded cat down low thanks to efficient inlet design and not everyone had ever fought the aircraft to its limits down low die to CONUS restrictions. There was always something new to see or explore so flying in the Red Sea was a rare treat. Even standing alert 7 in the cockpit in 2 hour stints wasn't bad. There was always a gentle breeze and with a walkman for entertainment, an alert stint was not bad...even let me catch up on mail to worried family and friends...normally, I never had time, but I was a faithful correspondant thanks to the Alerts. Then the faithful date approached. We had a press pool aboard who didn't now we were counting down. I was escorting Ms Amanpour from CNN and making sure she didn't see the charts with routes laid out for the strikes that night. We were told that if Saddam didn't back down by 1500, events would be in motion for Desert Storm to begin. At 1500, the admiral came over the 1MC and stated the situation and said we would be launching strikes ending with "God Bless us all". The normally cool Ms Amanpour's eyes got really big and said "Are we safe?" That made me smile...we were probably safer than anyone. We eventually sequestered the press folks in the PAO shack until the strikes went off. Talk about caged beasts. They didn't want to miss anything and were cut off from their bureaus. Kennedy was blessed, we didn't lose a single jet to enemy action and our tight air wing got even tighter as we all relied on each other to do our respective jobs. "Dog" and I were on the night team initially so we got to see tracers galore. They must have had guns everywhere and once one guy started shooting, everyone else followed suit. Even though we didn't stray below 20K for the most part, which was supposed to be above their effective range, it was spooky, if not mesmerizing to be basically above a display of tracers as far as you could see...like being right above the 4th of July fireworks. Even spookier was when they were coming at you and looked like stationary red dots. After flying over a hundred miles inside Iraq and beginning to turn back and seeing a literal river of tracers arcing up in our path (they were firing on the sound of our engines), I remember saying to Dog "Boy, they are REALLY pissed at us...I certainly wouldn't want to have to eject". Our missions were a minimum of 5 hours and topping 8 wasn't unusual. Coming out of western or central Iraq and hitting the USAF tankers over the deep Saudi Desert was a nice respite and they were typically generous with fuel so we always had plenty to rage home at low level in the rugged mountainous vallies and burn off the adrenaline. Landing back aboard and heading to the dirty shirt mess for a slider topped off the day. Our jets were always in fine form. I never saw such great warfighting machines. Keith Hulbert was on top of everyone to keep our Tomcats combat ready. The most humorous moment was one of my first day hops...so strange to fly in the sun and wonder where all the tracers were...that was spooky knowing they were likely there but unseen. I almost preferred being on the night team. TARPS was my forte so I drew the first long range TARPS mission to hunt for SCUD activity. It was to be an hour and an half inside Iraq hitting ten different locations with our cameras. We openly hoped for their MiGs to challenge us as we would be a section of two Tomcats all by ourselves going by their airbases in Western Iraq. I had my pick of pilots and chose Dog who started kidding me about being a "war lover" and asking "who in his right mind would spend so much time in Iraq?" I arranged to use the little known or used Tanker station in northwest Saudi that was frequented by a Navy EA-3 det. Gas is always a concern and you always want every drop you can get. I briefed Dog that if the tanker was alone (no customers) that I'd ask him to "drag" northwards to the border tanking us until we entered "Injun" country. I reasoned that they would eagerly respond to my request out of boredom and the fact that if they even touched the border (penetration, no matter how slight!), they doubled their points for a strike/flight air medal. He was doubtful, but I said trust me! So we launched uneventfully and headed to the tanker. Once established, I asked the tanker to go secure comms with me and asked if he could drag north. He instantly replied with notable enthusiasm, "how far north to you want to go?" obviously wanting to go past the border. I told him that wanted gas right up to the border and then had to accelerate to a tactical airspeed. he then said "Oh, we'll be happy to go with you!" I told him that wasn't possible, but we'd like to meet them at the border on egress and if they were there, we'd take them on a tour" The response was a heart, "You got a deal!" I was feeling pleased that we'd have lots of gas to begin the mission and afterwards, but Dog wasn't happy at all and started ranting about "First you talk me into flying all over Iraq and now you're promising to take these guys on a tour....I'm not spending one minute more inside Iraq than I have to!" I started laughing and told him that was all in jest. He was sure they were serious and were expecting an escorted tour inside Iraq. While he was ranting, I looking up at the tanker to take a picture and noticed something I'd never seen before. Under the boom operator's window was fluorescent taped letters saying "Kick Ass!" I interupted Dog and told him to check out the letters. I knew he spotted them because the jet started a mild oscillation from his laughing. That broke the ice, back to business. So there we were, Two Tomcats each carrying a TARPS pod, 4 Sidewinders, Expanded Chaff Adapter (ECA) and a specialized jammer on the forward Phoenix stations and 4 Sidewinders on the wing pylons and FAMMO for the M61A1 Vulcan cannon. One jet carried the original KA-99 9’’ focal length panoramic camera in the center camera bay and the other had a KA-93 LOROP 36” focal length camera installed instead of the trusty 99. Both add KS-87 frame cameras in the nose bay and AAD-5 IR line scanners in the aft bay. After tanking from our new USAF friend, Dog continued to argue that he was NOT taking any tanker on a tour of Iraq after the mission with me replying that it hadn’t been a serious offer or reply. Dog was convinced the Tanker pilot would be waiting and expecting his escorted tour of Iraq. We concluded the dialogue and got down to navigating to our first set of targets to be photographed. Western Iraq is pretty desolate and slightly mountainous up against the border area with Jordan. We were flying Northeast just to the east of the border photographing potential SCUD basket areas as given to us by our Intel folks. I had looked at the three major rectangles they were interested in and added 6 more targets that had been struck or were going to be struck so we could update our target folders. One thing not appreciated by our strike comrades was that their cool high definition photos that they had always planned with, were suddenly out of date. They never talked to us about using our services until now. I was working in the Strike Cell on the Flag Staff as the Battle Force Red Sea Reconnaissance Coordinator because the staff Tomcat “expert” was not a TARPS trained type and he kept searching me out when the Admiral asked any TARPS questions. He finally started taking me to the flag spaces and then the Admiral put me in the Strike Cell to coordinate all the RECCE activity for the 3 TARPS squadrons flying from the 3 carriers in the Red Sea (eventually 2 when USS America left us to go to Persian Gul ). I got to crossdeck to Saratoga to work with their TARPS SME who was a close friend to set up the Counter SCUD missions I had been tasked to set up. The schedules officer tried to share the wealth of good deal missions by rotating the incountry sorties with the relatively peaceful CAP in the Red Sea that required virtually no mission planning and was pretty uneventful. The importance of the SCUD hunt sorties meant only TARPS trained crews were in that rotation so we didn’t get our normal sequence of CAP (and that meant a lot less sleep because of the intensive mission planning demands for incountry sorties). Dog was a bit grouchy over losing his expected “recovery” CAP rotation and because I had expanded the mission to do more than was asked for by the higher authorities, but I was well within my scope of responsibilities as the Flag Staff RECCE guy to wring the most out of the opportunity and I was the Mission Commander for the flight so my word dictated what we would do. Our discussions were good natured and fun, but he was constantly accusing me of trying to go too far in Harm’s Way. After doing our “fence checks” and configuring the aircraft for combat, we flew in combat spread talking to an E-2 from Kennedy that would flight-follow us and hopefully warn us if Iraqi MiGs or Mirages decided to make a run at us (we figured if they did, it would be a strip launch at our six o’clock -----I had been chased by 2 MiG-29s on day one (while escorting 2 EA-6B Prowlers) that would only approach when we turned away from them-----F-15s helped out in the end. We figured they had a healthy respect for the Tomcat from 10 years of getting the worst end of it from the Iranian Tomcats (see Tom Cooper and Farzad Bishop’s excellent book on subject…over 100 kills by Tomcats against Iraqis). So we proceeded on our timeline running cameras as we went and looking for anything unusual. We saw some train marshalling yards in the western part of the country with dozens of parked box cars and wondered why they hadn’t been hit. We gave Al Qa’im with its 6 Sa-2 and 3 SAM sites a wide berth and headed South East for the next SCUD “box” rectangle. As we passing the pipeline road between H-1 and H-2 airfields, the AWACS controller in the Western Iraq sector made a call on the strike freq saying “Any aircraft with unexpended ordnance, check in now”. That got my attention as I suspected it meant something unusual was going down in our area. Not hearing any immediate replies, I started flipping through my kneeboard cards for our air wing squadron common freqs. I knew our 18 A-7 Corsairs were in Iraq somewhere and remembered they had a target just inside the central sector close to the Western sector. I also remembered the Strike lead was the skipper of VA-72 beause we had both been in CVIC in the early AM getting our ATO info. I switched to his freq and called him and he relied right away. I asked if he had dropped yet and gave him the freq and told him to check in when he said no (I also knew his target was a barracks that was likely uninhabited by now). He checked in on the AWCS freq by the controller to head west immediately. We had plenty of fuel thanks to our new friend so I told Dog that we’d anchor in the area and see what was up figuring post strike photos would be helpful for the Intel folks. Of course, now Dog was convinced I never wanted to leave Iraq and kept saying “What? You really like this place, don’t you?” But it wasn’t long before our A-7 friends showed up and were given targets to prosecute followed by F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolts. It was shaping up to be a turkey shoot against lots of mechanized vehicles in western Iraq. We stayed offset and ran our cameras until we hit our fuel ladder and the action seemed to die off. RTB to JFK was uneventful and Dog got to play around flying low level near the coast. When we went to CVIC to debrief and asked what they knew, they were all aflutter to get to the film. There was an SAS unit codenamed Bravo Two Zero that was apparently on the run. They had lost radio contact but by watching Iraqi ground activity and listening to comms, it was apparent that the team was on the run and trying to evade. We had flown over all the action and the AWACS was trying to take out the pursuing Iraqis to give the team a chance to escape. Their story is chronicled in “Bravo Two Zero” and “The One that Got Away”. Only one member made it safely across the border to Syria; several were killed or died of exposure and the remainder were captured. Interesting story. Out film was rushed off the ship so we never got to see for ourselves what was transpiring on the ground. We eventually got to fly CAP again and recharge our batteries. Copyright statement: Copyright LCDR Dave Parsons, all rights pertaining to text and images reserved. Content (Text & Photographs) may not be copied or distributed in any manner (electronic, web or printed) without the prior written consent of the writer/photographer LCDR Dave Parsons.