Filled with relief, the pilot pulled his aircraft around to a southerly heading and climbed away from the place of terror and death toward home.

As they crossed the border into the safety of the Kingdom, Sultan and Mohammed were filled with pride—and with gratitude that they hadn’t screwed up. A month earlier, Sultan had gotten into trouble for doing an aileron roll during a night flight. But now as they crossed the border, he made a series of celebratory rolls to the right and then to the left. They were both alive!

At home in the shelter, the crew debriefed to a wildly enthusiastic ground crew. They had successfully brought off a lot of firsts for their young air force.

The next day, I reported the success of their mission success on worldwide news. Their attack had been so precise, I said, that you couldn’t have placed their munitions more accurately if you had driven them out to the runway in a pickup truck.

Meanwhile, after the laughter and crying, General Turki sent Sultan and Mohammed home and told them to take the next day off, which they did; but these combat veterans quickly discovered that in war you don’t relax, except through exhaustion. After they returned to the flying schedule, they flew thirty missions.

Let me add that after his first experience of low-level ground fire, Sultan demanded that they stop flying low-altitude bomb runs, and Turki backed him up. This paid off, for the only Saudi Tornado lost in the war ran out of fuel trying to land in fog at the King Khalid Military City forward operating base (where there was no approach control capable of handling such emergencies).

Some jobs require heroes. Someone has to set the records for others to follow. The hero is afraid, sure: afraid of enemy fire, afraid of being killed, but most of all afraid of screwing up and letting his mates down, afraid of failure. In spite of their fear, Captain Sultan and Lieutenant Mohammed fought the people like me at headquarters who failed to give them adequate warning, fought the weather that dark and stormy night, fought the disruptions that left them the sole aircraft to attack the target, and fought the Iraqis, who had not yet learned to fear and respect our Coalition airpower. They fought and won.

Thank God for heroes.

BUILDING COALITIONS

The key ingredients to forming and maintaining a military coalition are common purpose, political leadership, and military forces that can work together.

The common purpose removes the tendency to define national interests, as in, “What’s in this for me?”