★ 1400 I sag back into my chair in the Current Operations section of the TACC, watching the AWACS picture—yellow icons streaming into and out of Iraq. One of our aircraft has been lost, and Jim Crigger has just filled me in on what they appeared to be doing and what caused the shoot-down. As always, I hate these moments.

As I sit there, weary, I let the noise and chaos of the TACC voices, announcements, reports wash over me—the sights and sounds of my war, not the war I experienced in Vietnam. There the action was intense—sweat running into your eyes from under your helmet, your head twisting and turning, trying to see everything, from the MiG closing on your rear to the SAM trying to hit you in the face. But there you were better-rested than here, and when you got down from your mission, you were through for the day. You could go to the bar and get mindlessly drunk and fall asleep, until the next morning’s briefing started you on another day of boredom punctuated by an hour or so of sheer-ass terror. In this war, there is little boredom and almost no terror, except maybe the fear of screwing up and getting someone killed.

Meanwhile, it is important for me to sit and listen when the troops talk at me about what they are doing and what is important to them. Moreover, their energy is contagious, their intelligence brilliant. It’s exciting to listen to them when they come up to Crigger or Volmer with suggestions about making this or that mission more effective or making up for the bad weather over target XYZ by going to target ABC. (Colonel Al Volmer was one of the four colonels who ran the war from the TACC.) Crigger or Volmer listen to what they have to say, then tell them how to implement their brainchild without screwing up the bigger picture.

People visiting the TACC stop by, and we chat. Later, the BCE team chief and some of his people gather around the table behind my chair and they talk about the ground war, which is bound to unfold soon. Joe Bob Phillips has come in early, and I give him a task to solve, usually about finding Scuds or avoiding friendly casualties.