Grandpa’s War – Part 15 – Eagle Down

There’s some debate if this actually happened or not.

Some soldiers swear these words were broadcast by Baghdad Betty. And if you disagree, they’ll defend it to the death that she said them.

Others claim that she never did.

Perhaps it’s simply one of those things that was said so often that we remember it as fact.

In case you’re wondering, the debate centers around Betty telling us to go home. Why. Because our wives and sweethearts were fooling around with Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, and Bart Simpson.

I think someone told me about it and I recall saying, “I suspected my soon to be ex dabbled in watercolors.”

And as I was thinking it, there was a loud “BOOM!”

I’d have sworn I felt a rumble come through the ground.

“What was that?” It felt like a bomb had gone off.

We all looked at each other. Automatically, we knew what it was. Not many minutes before, we’d heard jets overhead. The Air Force had been out practicing and someplace, not far away, a fighter had gone down.

We rushed outside.

In the darkness and several miles away, a ball of fire was mushrooming up into the sky.

“What the hell!” I heard someone say.

We all clustered around the command tent to see if we heard anything. One of our units from Checkpoint Bravo was headed that way. It took them several minutes to arrive.

“The plane is scattered all over,” the team leader said over the radio.

I don’t recall who was running the tent that night, but he asked, “Do you see the pilots? Any chutes?”

A few minutes break. “Negative on both.” A pause. “If they were still aboard when this thing hit, they probably didn’t make it.”

“Establish security on the wreck,” our command center advised. “There’s probably a lot of munitions around we don’t want falling into the wrong hands.”

“Roger that,” the patrol radioed back. “In fact, my gunner just picked up what looks like a piece of a missile.”

The NCO running the radio turned a funny shade of pale. “Tell your gunner to very carefully put the missile down and back away slowly. Get away from the wreck and stop anyone except authorized people from going in.”

“Hydrazine,” an officer said.

“Hydrazine?”

“Yes, some aircraft use it. It’s toxic. Tell them to stay upwind of the wreck and if they have to go downwind, to mask.”

From there, the crash got boring for us on this end of the radio. The Air Force got up there with their people and secured the wreck and began their investigation. They sent our people home.

Of course the big question of the hour was to the gunner. “What possessed you to pick up that missile?”

In Basic Training, they screamed at us about picking up ordnance lying about. That was a nice way to end up in orbit without using a rocket. He should have known!

He shrugged. “It seemed the logical thing to do.”

Strike Eagle Down: the Story of the F-15E that Crashed during Operation Desert Shield