Not all our potential aces flew air-to-air fighters. In February, the A-10s at King Fahd bagged a couple of Iraqi helicopters while looking to bomb Iraqi tanks and artillery. Captain Swain, on the sixth of February, and Captain Sheehy, nine days later, observed Iraqi helicopters flying very close to the earth. Bad tactic, helicopters close to the ground stand out clearly to a fighter pilot. Both A-10s used their 30mm guns to dispatch their targets. Up until then, it was normal for the Warthog community to take cheap shots from their interceptor brethren in F-15s. No more. To flag the change, sometime around the middle of February, the A-10 wing commander, Colonel Sandy Sharpe, called the F-15 wing commander at Dhahran, Colonel John McBroom, to offer his A-10s to fly top cover for the F-15s, in case they wanted to do some bombing. After all, it only made sense, now that the A-10s had two kills to the F-15 wing’s single victory. Boomer McBroom was not amused, but hundreds of A-10 pilots howled with glee.

The last kills of the war took out Iraqis flying combat sorties against their own people. In late March, an Iraqi Sukhoi jet fighter and a Swiss Platus propeller-driven PC-9 trainer, pressed into dropping bombs, were flying in eastern Iraq, in violation of the Iraqi no-fly agreement reached at the end of the war. AWACS vectored two F-15s against the aircraft. The flight leader, Captain Dietz, rolled out behind the Sukhoi, fired his AIM-9, and blew the target out of the sky. It was Dietz’s third kill (he’d bagged a pair of MiG-21s in early February). His wingman, Lieutenant Hohemann, also with two aerial victories (he got them the same day Dietz got his), rolled out behind the PC-9. Though our rules discouraged shoot-down of trainers or cargo/ passenger aircraft, and the PC-9 was a trainer-type aircraft, it had just completed a bombing mission against Iraqi civilians and wasn’t supposed to be in the air anyway. Should I shoot or not? Hohemann asked himself. While the lieutenant’s conscience wrestled with this question, the Iraqi pilot ejected! After seeing his leader blow up, the Iraqi wingman wasn’t going to wait around and take his chances. After jinking to avoid the Iraqi’s deploying parachute, Hohemann reached a decision: “It’s a fighter, not a trainer.” But just as he was about to shoot it down, the PC-9 rolled over and smashed into the ground.

Coalition Aerial Victories by Unit

Afterward, Jim Crigger awarded Hohemann credit for the kill, which brought his total to three victories, the closest anyone in the Gulf came to the five needed to become an Ace.