No, that doesn’t justify killing the enemy, nor does it soften your concern about their attempts to kill you, but there is balance, there is some sort of justification for the horrible things you do. Sitting in the TACC, setting the killing in motion, you carry a lot more responsibility, a lot more feeling of dread. It was a burden I’d been carrying around since I’d signed the orders that would start all of this carnage in motion. It was the understanding that someday I would probably have to explain my actions to God, and there was no suitable explanation. When men are imperfect—and God knows we are—then there better be a forgiving God.

Well, it was time to suck it up and go to work. And that’s just what we all did.

★ 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.