Still, there had to be a few Iraqi pilots who’d observed and listened to their mentors from France and Pakistan and the useless guidance of their inept leaders. It was those few I was concerned about—the ones with great situational awareness and good eyesight, who had figured out how to effectively use their aircraft and its weapons to defend their nation.

If those gifted Iraqi pilots existed, and I’m certain they did, they probably died on 17, 19, and 24 January. We went after them so hard and so thoroughly that they never had a chance to show that they were respectable.

Our fundamental strategy was simple. Blind them and beat the tar out of them as they groped about. We were going to stomp the Iraqi Air Force into submission. Not fair, not pretty, not poetic. Our goal was to be as vicious and unrelenting as possible. To do otherwise would just prolong the suffering and death.

To blind the Iraqi Air Force, our first bombers fell on its eyes and brains—radars, command bunkers, and communications sites. Of equal importance was the forward movement of our interceptor fighters into Iraq. We put twenty-four-hour CAPs over each of the Iraqi fighter bases.60 Forward fighters were positioned to intercept the Iraqi jets almost as soon as they broke ground. Our hopes for the Iraqi fighter pilot were very simple: take off and blow up.

For the most part, our hopes became reality. After the first three days of the war, we had seized control of the air over Iraq and Kuwait.

Three days may seem short, and the Iraqi Air Force may look like a push-over. But do not get the idea that gaining control of the air was easy. It was not a “macho,” “no sweat” operation. What turned into a turkey shoot in late January and February started out as a bitter struggle; those first few days were the hardest-fought, most critical aspect of the entire war.

Meanwhile, when the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, Iraqi pilots ran to their planes and took off. I’m sure they sent their best and brightest, and I know they tried their hardest; but in air-to-air combat, it’s win, lose, or get out of town. There is no second place. The Iraqis lost at least eight times on the seventeenth of January. They tried again two days later and lost six more times. Their last try (and their only effort to attack our forces on the ground with aircraft) was on the twenty-fourth, when two Mirage F-1s attempted to penetrate Saudi Arabia for an air-to-ground strike. An RSAF F-15C shot them both down just out to sea in the Arabian Gulf.

After that, they tried to hide in their heavily defended aircraft shelters, also to no avail, when we picked off the shelters, one at a time, with 2,000-pound hard-case, laser-guided bombs.