★ Knowing that I’d get very little sleep in the next days, I’d gone home to the USMTM compound next door at about 2100 that evening to try to sleep . . . until midnight, anyway. But sleep did not come. I was too keyed up, too tense. I lay there in the empty apartment (Yeosock and Fong were working at ARCENT and my aide Hoot Gibson had gone to Al Dahfra to fly in combat), trying to get some rest, wondering what I had forgotten, wondering what I had missed that would cost the life of a pilot. Sure, I knew some would die, but I wanted to be certain I had not made the mistake that cost them their lives.

There had been no last-minute phone calls to General Schwarzkopf, or to anyone else. These would not have been appropriate. We didn’t want an increase in communications traffic to tip off the enemy that something big was in the works, though I am sure they expected something after the fifteenth.

Shortly after the deadline passed, wheels had been set in motion. And on January 16, B-52s from the 2d Bombardment Wing of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, armed with conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs), had departed Barksdale AFB, Louisiana (an event duly reported on CNN). The Mighty Eighth would go to war once more, this time under command of the Ninth Air Force. Quite a turnaround from the days of SAC rule. Seven B-52s were to fly a round trip of 14,000 miles in thirty-five hours (the longest combat mission in history) and fire thirty-five CALCMs at eight targets—military communications sites and power-generation and transmission facilities.

Why send B-52s all the way from Louisiana?

In any war, there were many time-sensitive targets, that is, targets we wanted to hit early—command-and-control nodes, Scud storage areas, airfields, and so on—all of which we wanted to close down quickly so we could hit our other targets more efficiently as assets (fighter-bombers) became available after turnaround. Therefore, it made sense to plan the opening moments of the war to include as many strikes as possible, as quickly as possible; and cruise missiles, though expensive, gave us the ability to hit many targets simultaneously.

In this war, cruise missiles were fired not only from B-52s but from battleships and submarines (thus showcasing the Navy). The Air Force’s B-52s and their cruise missiles were the first to take off and the first to fire a shot in anger (thus showcasing the Air Force’s emerging Global Reach Global Power doctrine). Ordnance from Army Apaches was the first to explode. And Air Force F-117s were the first to penetrate the airspace of Iraq. Lots of firsts for everybody.