Report after report of mission success began to roll in. It was like putting a puzzle together; as the pieces came together, a picture began to take shape. Each target destroyed added to the picture we had been imagining.

More important, all the aircraft, save a Navy F-18, on a suppression of enemy air defense mission, returned to their bases.

It wasn’t all smooth that night: Some of our 160 tankers ran out of fuel for off-load, and thirsty fighters had to find someone else to give them jet fuel. And the base at Taif, just south of Mecca (home to the F-111 fleet, all airborne striking vital targets across Iraq), was closed due to dense fog.

I was on the point of giving out commands, and then stopped. I needed to have faith in the commanders, in the AWACS crews, and most of all in the aircrews in each fighter. They knew how to figure out what needed to be done and then do it. If I got involved that would only add to the confusion and create dependency. Sure, I’d stay on top of the situation, but I had to let others make the decisions I dearly wanted to make. I had to delegate to others, watch them wrestle with problems that my experience made easy for me, and then watch in amazement when they found solutions I never even considered.

The air-to-air engagements were especially hard to stay out of.

Think about it. You’re a pilot who loves the complex ballet of an aerial engagement. You’ve trained for thousands of hours. Every cell in your body knows how to detect the enemy, bring your aircraft and your flight’s aircraft into the fight, engage the enemy aircraft with your weapons, and herd your team safely out of the fight toward home or into another engagement.

Now you are sitting in a room where a large display shows every aircraft in the battle (except F-117s). You see the friendly fighters going about their appointed rounds, delivering bombs or searching for Iraqi interceptors. All at once new blips appear, as a pair of Iraqi fighters scramble from their airfields. A microphone on the table in front of you connects you to AWACS and then to the fighters. You know almost as much as the AWACS knows. It would be so easy to pick up that microphone and direct, “Have Eagle flight kill the two fighters that just took off from Baland”—a fighter base in Iraq near Baghdad. All I had to do was say it, and it would be done. Even though it’s a no-brainer for the AWACS controller and the F-15 flight leader to handle it, yet I feel good. I even feel important. And we win.

But no. I’m not going to do it the Soviet way, which is the Iraqi way, with the general sitting in a bunker somewhere and telling the pilot where to fly and when to shoot.