Lieutenant drops first bombs

He fired his bombs, filmed the explosion, and banked back south, toward the aircraft carrier he calls home. He faced a long, three-hour ride over Afghanistan and Pakistan, back to the Vinson in the Arabian Sea.

For Lt. Don, 29, flying this combat mission was the culmination of a dream that took root when he was a sixth-grader at St. Philomena School in Portsmouth, R.I. He grew up in Fall River -- he once dated Miss Fall River -- but his schooling was in Rhode Island, first at St. Philomena, then at Portsmouth Abbey, class of 1990.

Three hours after dropping his bombs, Don, who withheld his last name for fear of terrorist retaliation, spotted the aircraft carrier from his fighter jet. From five miles out, the ship looked like a little pinpoint of light against the dark sea, like a star in the sky.

He was flying at about three miles a minute, so within two minutes of the time he spotted the pinprick of light, he'd hit the carrier deck.

With a minute to go, he descended to 1,200 feet and set the stick for a three-degree glide, a gentle descent.

The carrier still looked like a tiny speck of lights until he was about a half-mile away; at one-half-mile, he was 15 seconds from landing. The carrier got big in a hurry.

Landing on aircraft carrier ``is not like a normal landing,'' said Don. ``You're just planting it right through the deck. You're just driving as if you were going to drive right through the deck.''

His F/A-18 fighter plane -- a sleek, single-seat plane with two tails -- slammed onto the deck; a hook dangling from the plane's belly snagged a cable on the deck. Within two seconds Lt. Don went from 150 mph to 0.

He returned to his squadron's briefing room to watch the video of his bombing run; it was only in viewing the video that Don realized that he had been nervous. He could hear it from the sound of his voice on the tape.

Don, whose radio call sign is ``Jobu,'' has since flown nine more bombing runs into Afghanistan. Each run is about 1,600 miles round trip, flights of nearly six hours strapped into an airplane.

``It's basically a long cross-country trip and in the middle of it you get 20 minutes of excitement, and then you come back home,'' said Don. ``And at the end of it, you have your fun night carrier landing.

``When you go up there, it's all business. It's a mission. You're trained to destroy a building, artillery pieces -- you're trained to do that so you do that, and then you get out.

``When we go up there we're not thinking: I'm going to kill somebody today. It's: Okay, I'm tasked with this mission, I'm going to complete it and come back safely.''

Don's mission on Sunday was to be on alert in the ready room, in case he needed to fly quickly. While on alert, he had to wear his flight suit for an eight-hour shift.

The flight suit is drab-olive in color. It includes a G-suit that looks like tight, olive drab underwear worn around his thighs and torso. The G-suit plugs into the jet through an air hose; when a pilot is subjected to severe gravitational force -- if he's ``pulling G's'' -- then the air hose inflates the suit, squeezing blood from the legs and the abdomen toward the brain. This prevents the pilot from blacking out.

Lt. Don also wore a torsion harness around his shoulders and neck. The harness attaches to the a parachute embedded in the ejection seat. When he plugs his G-suit and harness into the jet, Don really is wearing a plane on his back; sometimes 70,000 pounds of jet, fuel, and bombs.

In case he gets shot down, Don also wears a 9mm pistol, and a survival vest holding a radio, water, a compass and a manual on the local edible vegetation. In Afghanistan, the manual is slim.

Every combat pilot goes to survival school, where he learns how to avoid capture, and what to do if he's captured. First, a prisoner of war must keep a positive attitude. He's also taught, Don said, ``to keep faith with your country;'' accept no favors from his captors; and set up a chain of command among fellow prisoners of war.

Don is a member of a fighter squadron called VFA-94: the Shrikes. The Shrikes, one of three fighter squadrons assigned to the Vinson, include 16 fighter pilots who fly 12 F-18s. The pilots live together, fight together, and play together. ``We provide each other's entertainment, basically,'' Don said. A poster in the squadron's ready room shows a bloody snake impaled by a thorn. The poster's text notes dryly: ``A shrike is a small but ferocious bird that impales its prey on thorns.''