‘I Wouldn’t Pick on America’: The War on ISIS Gets Personal for the US Navy

USS GEORGE H.W. BUSH, Mediterranean Sea—The sound of aircraft launching off the flight deck rumble deep within the bowels of the aircraft carrier.

Conversations in the officers’ mess room, where I’m having chicken cacciatore for lunch, dutifully pause while the jet engines above decks run up to full afterburner. Then, the walls and floor shudder when the steam-powered catapults launch the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet strike fighters and the EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets off the flight deck at an acceleration of zero to 184 miles per hour in just two seconds.

Just by the sound of it, there’s no way of knowing if each successive launch is for combat or for training. But there’s a good chance the jet you hear is headed to war.

Each day about 16 to 24 sorties launch from the USS George H.W. Bush en route to Iraq and Syria to support a nearly 3-year-old coalition air war against the Islamic State, the terrorist group also known as ISIS, called Operation Inherent Resolve.

On this day, as I intermix eating and interviewing, I’m sitting across the table from an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter pilot from Strike Fighter Squadron 87 (VFA-87), a Navy lieutenant who goes by the call sign “Bacon.”

I ask the pilot how he defines success.

“Validation of all my years of training is my measure of success,” Bacon replies.

Bacon, who asks that his full name not be used due to security concerns, is trim, articulate, and effusively polite. He sports a mustache, which matches his reddish hair. The mustache is a tradition among male pilots on combat deployments. The Air Force does it, too.

If Bacon wasn’t in his flight suit, however, he would look like any young American man. There would be nothing to outwardly imply that he is among the most well-trained and lethal warriors in history.

I’m about to ask Bacon another question, the one I really want to ask. But, before I can get the words out, there’s the roar of afterburners, and the whole room shakes as another jet launches. Bacon smiles, points his eyes to the ceiling, and patiently waits for the noise to subside and for me to continue.

The thud of the catapult, the roar of take off. Then quiet. It’s my cue.

“OK, let’s keep going,” I say. Bacon leans forward, whether feigning interest or being genuinely polite, I can’t tell. I imagine talking to a journalist is not on his list of most desirable activities in between combat missions. It wouldn’t have been for me. But he deals with it in an exceedingly polished way.

You’ve seen the ISIS snuff videos,” I go on. “How they burned alive the Jordanian F-16 pilot [1st Lt. Muath al-Kasasbeh], and how they’ve beheaded foreign journalists like James Foley, who was my friend.”

Bacon nods.

“Does the brutality of ISIS affect you?” I ask. “Does it make it easier to kill?”

I ask the question cautiously, almost embarrassed at the words. I’m worried that my budding civilian perspective is overdramatizing the war in the way civilians are so prone to do. War becomes much less romantic, or epic, when you’re in the arena every day, away from your family and friends for months on end—not for a few days or weeks at a time as us journalists typically are when we embed.

I assume that for these operators, who have endured years of intense training to be where they are, the war is a daily task to be executed cleanly and professionally, without much thought devoted to its overall moral justice. Surely, I think, pilots like Bacon have achieved a requisite degree of mental detachment from the killing they do.

I was wrong.

At the end of my question, without a moment’s pause to craft a response, as if he had thought of his reply long before I had even asked the question, Bacon answers, “After Sinjar, their actions justified our response.”

He’s referring to Islamic State’s genocide of Yazidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims in the Iraqi town of Sinjar. There, in August 2014, ISIS killed about 5,000 people—including men, women, and children. The militants mostly spared the young women for use as sex slaves. When I visited Sinjar in June 2016, none of its 88,000 civilian residents from before the war were left living there. They had all become refugees, or had been killed or enslaved by ISIS.

Sinjar was one of the key events that spurred the U.S to begin airstrikes against the Islamic State. The murder of Foley was another.

Bacon’s words are measured and low-key as he talks about the Islamic State’s barbarism. No machismo or posturing. And certainly no canned responses dictated by the brass. Only a blunt declaration that hints at what lies inside the warrior’s mind.

“I’ll happily take the fight to the enemy, rather than them taking the fight to us,” Bacon says. “That’s mission accomplished.”

Momentum

Bacon is on his second combat deployment to support Operation Inherent Resolve. He and his fellow combat aviators aboard the USS George H.W. Bush are responsible for killing the enemy and protecting innocent lives each time they fly into Syria and Iraq.

Of course, the pilots’ lives hang in the balance of each mission, too. A single mistake during the risky routine of carrier flight operations can be fatal. And there’s danger over the Syrian war zone, where Russian and Syrian warplanes operate in narrowing proximity to U.S. forces.

There’s also a surface-to-air threat from the Syrian regime, the likes of which U.S. pilots have rarely faced, if at all, in the past 16 years of supporting post-9/11 counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The air war over Syria, consequently, is one of the most complex in which active-duty U.S. Navy aviators have ever flown. Yet, despite the war’s complications, the effects of air power have been a bane to the Islamic State and a boon to U.S. partner ground forces like the Kurdish peshmerga, the Iraqi military, and the Syrian Democratic Forces.

Coalition air power has given America’s ground partners the battlefield momentum they need to put the Islamic State on its heels. The terrorists’ stronghold of Mosul in northern Iraq has fallen. And the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa is under siege.

As coalition partner ground forces circle in for the kill, the Islamic State’s leaders are decamping south along the Euphrates River valley into some of the last towns they still occupy, like Tal Afar in Iraq and Deir al-Zour in Syria.

The Islamic State now holds only one-third the territory it did in 2014 at the height of its strength. About 60,000 of the terrorist army’s fighters have died in combat since Operation Inherent Resolve began in 2014, according to U.S. officials. In 2015, the Islamic State was able to offset its battlefield losses with new recruits. Now, recruitment has slowed to a trickle as the militants’ losses continue to mount.

“We definitely have the momentum,” Bacon tells me. “Now ISIS has to find one spot and hold on to it. Everything has been building up to this.”

Compartmentalization

Emotional compartmentalization is an essential skill for the military aviator. The high-stress environment of combat aviation leaves little time to reflect on its life or death consequences.

It can be the same with landing—especially on a carrier. The pilot’s job requires so much focus, and is so reliant on habit patterns ingrained through years of training, that the brain goes into triage, discarding sensory inputs not immediately necessary to the task at hand. That’s why the landing gear handle is shaped like a wheel, blinks red, and blares an audible warning when it’s time to lower the wheels. Smells, sounds, even your peripheral vision can incrementally shut down as you tap into every available neuron in a high-stress situation.

Emotions switch off, too.

Short story: When s— hits the fan, you’re too busy to be scared.

Before my lunch with Bacon, I visit the squadron briefing room for Strike Fighter Squadron 87 (VFA-87), an F/A-18 Super Hornet squadron deployed on the George H.W. Bush.

Inside the VFA-87 squadron room, in which rows of leather, La-Z-Boy-style chairs are arranged like in a movie theater, the pilots laugh, joke, watch movies, and munch on snacks during downtime.

In the briefing area, a metal bolt hangs from a string above the assigned seat of a pilot who botched a recent landing. Humor and good-natured ribbing are essential components of fighter pilot culture. The hidden meaning behind call signs, for example, is usually related to some act of buffoonery committed by the named pilot.

If the pilots’ behavior seems incongruous with the high stakes of their profession, it’s because they purposefully act that way to endure a level of stress most humans could never endure.

The joking, the cool demeanor, the compartmentalization, the sterile vocabulary—to an outside observer those things might seem like the collective symptoms of emotional indifference.

But it’s all part of a well-honed culture among combat aviators, which ingrains in them the necessary mental resilience to deal with the crushing stresses of combat aviation.

“We call it compartmentalization,” Lt. Cmdr. Scott Welles, call sign “Butters,” an F/A-18 Hornet pilot with Strike Fighter Squadron 37 (VFA-37), tells me.

Sometimes, news reports and Hollywood movies depict combat aviation as an emotionally vapid experience. But U.S. military aviators—both the pilots and weapons systems operators—are not emotionless automatons blindly executing orders.

By its very nature, combat aviation is removed from the tragedy and carnage of the battlefield. Today, as it was for the American fighter pilots who first saw combat over the World War I trenches in France a century ago, U.S. combat aviators—both the pilots and weapons systems operators—live in relative safety distant from the front lines.

Yes, the pilots are physically removed from the battlefield, but they are not insulated from the moral imperative of their actions. The Islamic State’s snuff videos, which may be a slick recruitment tool for aspiring extremists, also harden U.S. combat aviators to killing their enemies.

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source: Daily Signal