Captain Gentner Drummond was an F-15C pilot assigned to Boomer McBroom’s 1st Tactical Fighter Wing at Dhahran, and he looked every inch like the central casting dream of a fighter pilot—tall, slim, handsome, steely-eyed, with a soft Oklahoma drawl. Of course, his name, “Gentner,” was a negative. It should have been Spike or Rip or Killer.

At any rate, this misnamed, but highly talented, fighter pilot was leading an element on MiG CAP south of Baghdad the first night of the war, when AWACS called out a bandit—high-speed, low-level, headed south out of the Baghdad area.

Gentner came hard left and rolled out on the vector he got from AWACS. He then pointed his antenna down and got an immediate lock on a target heading south 1,000 feet above ground level at very high speed. He began pushing the buttons on his stick and throttles that would identify the target and tell him whether or not it was friendly, and if friendly, what type of aircraft.

In the meantime, AWACS was calling for him to shoot.

Gentner knew that the AWACS controller had access to intelligence information from the Rivet Joint Aircraft that would confirm that the aircraft was Iraqi. Still, there was room for doubt.

As the F-15 pilot streaked through the night at 30,000 feet, he worked his system on the target. Time was running out. In a few moments, he’d be inside R minimum, which is the closest in range he could get to the target and still use his AIM-7 missile. There was still no ID.

Meanwhile, the AWACS controller was ordering Gentner to shoot.

He decided not to. He wanted to be sure in his own mind, and he figured that his altitude advantage would allow him to perform a stern conversion. That way he could get a better ID of the target, and then down it if it was an Iraqi.

Pulling his Eagle around hard left and down, he screamed into the night and pulled up alongside a Saudi Tornado on his way home from a successful strike deep into Iraq.

For this act of restraint, Gentner received a Distinguished Flying Cross—that is, he received it for not shooting down an aircraft. His composure under the most extreme stress, his use of logic and judgment, and his concern for human life prevented what could easily have been a tragic mistake.

In fact, his was not the only such story, yet it is typical of the stress our aircrews had to endure, as well as the high standards of conduct expected of them.

★ Unfortunately, our record in air-to-ground combat was not perfect.

More than twenty friendly ground forces, U.S., Saudi, and British, were killed by weapons delivered from the air.