★ As we were waiting in the TACC, Mary Jo was eating dinner with her mother, who was visiting from Cresco, Iowa. Sean Cullivan, our aide, came in and announced, “Mrs. Horner, the war has started.” Like many others, she and her mother left the dinner table and went into the family room to watch television. Like many others, they stayed glued to the TV for the next six weeks, morning, noon, and night. The “CNN Effect” bloomed into full flower during this war. (Interestingly, CNN became a major source of intelligence for us in the TACC.)

★ The radar display showed our strikers creep, at 500 to 600 knots, toward their targets. As we watched, someone announced that CNN’s Bernard Shaw was reporting live from Baghdad that the guided missiles were beginning to land on their targets. In my office on the third floor was a television with a CNN hookup. Meanwhile, the critical F-117 strike against the telecommunications building in Baghdad that was the core of Iraqi command and control was about to occur. We called it the AT&T building. Bernie Shaw’s reports were relayed to the United States over Iraqi telephone commercial circuits that passed through this building.

I asked Major Buck Rogers, one of the key Black Hole planners, to go upstairs and turn on my TV and let me know what happened.

The critical bomb impact time over target was to occur at 0302. As the second hand of the big clock on the wall swept toward the designated TOT, I talked to Buck on the hot line that connected my position in the TACC to my office on the third floor. The success or failure of this one F-117 mission, this one bomb, would tell a lot about how our air campaign would fare. If Iraqi telecommunications were destroyed, the air superiority battle became manageable: blind the enemy air defense system, and isolate the elements from the brain, and it is no longer a “system” but individual weapons operating in the dark.

Now we were hearing of the gunfire over Baghdad, intense and seemingly endless streams of bullets and missiles rising from atop every building and open area of the capital. I prayed for the F-117 pilots.

And then, just as the second hand swept past the twelve on the clock, Buck reported, “CNN just went off the air.” That was it. The AT&T building had taken a mortal blow. The report of our success flew across the somber-quiet TACC, and as it did, all of us came out of our shells of silence. Everywhere there was backslapping and boisterous talk. We had gone from the pits of anxiety to the heights of self-confident self-congratulations. (To me it had been close to despair. Fighter pilots are control freaks. When we are not in control, we feel hopeless.) It was a wonderful moment.

Yes, we had a long way to go before the ordeal would be over. But we were off to a good start.