That is, a pilot only had to get off the runway without breaking anything, lift the gear handle, avoid hitting the KC-135 during refueling rendezvous, hang on to the boom while gas was pumped, then follow the WSO’s orders and put the jet into a small piece of sky at a speed and heading that would enable the bombs to hit their mark. Once that was done, he could fly back to a tanker, and then home.

During most of the mission, the WSO had it easy. That meant he could do busywork checking out systems or helping with the tanker join-up (if the pilot gave him control of the radar). Later he’d feed the route coordinates into the navigation system, which gave the pilot steering orders in the form of a small circle on his HUD. The hard part came when he took control of the radar and searched ever-smaller pieces of landscape below. When he’d found the target area, he’d work out where the bombs must impact by making a radar picture of the area (this looked like a fuzzy black-and-white photograph), and comparing that with the materials he had studied before takeoff or with drawings or pictures he’d clipped to his kneeboard. Then he would delicately manipulate the tracking handle to place the crosshairs of his radar display directly over the spot representing the target’s location.

No debate. There wasn’t time. The success of the mission, the payoff for this flight into harm’s way, came down to how well the WSO operated his radar, made sense out of the information displayed on his cathode ray tubes, and placed hair-thin bars that showed the pilot how to place the aircraft into that point in the sky that was the right place for releasing the bombs.

In the F-15E, the glory or failure went to the WSO, and it was pass/fail. Either you hit the target, or you didn’t. That night, Tom Griffith never got to try.

Things started to go bad as Eberly and Griffith’s F-15, Buick 04, was finishing with the air-to-air refueling and the flight was sitting in formation with the KC-135s, waiting for their EF-111 electronic jamming and F-4G Wild Weasel SAM attack support aircraft to arrive. But these aircraft called in miles out from the rendezvous: “We’re going to be late” (again, the cost of last-minute changes to the ATO). This put the F-15 flight leader in a bind. He had to leave the tanker now if he expected to make the time over target listed in the ATO. If he was early or late, he would risk interfering with other aircraft. If he went in without the protection of the EF-111s and F-4Gs, he’d risk sending the F-15Es naked into the target. It was a tough call, but he made the best choice he could. The flight left the tanker at the appointed time, and he radioed his EF-111 and F-4G helpers to refuel and join them in the target area as soon as they could catch up.