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Sea Fury in Iraq...bites the dust :(

Posted by Randy Haskin on Sun Dec 21, 2003 09:37:07 PM

Hi all...I'm not a regular reader of this board (although I will be starting now!). I posted the following story on another warbirds message board and someone who read it asked me to re-tell it here....so here goes my sad tale!

I am (or was up until very recently) a USAF F-15E pilot (now a T-38C instructor pilot). I was deployed during IRAQI FREEDOM earlier this year and flew combat missions during the duration of the "major combat" portion. The F-15E is primarily a bomb-dropper....sort of like the old F-4 Phantom II "all-weather day/night fighter-bomber -- mostly bomber".

One day after I'd flown a mission I was sitting in the Intel shop filling out some paperwork. I heard some aircrew in the next room over reviewing their HUD film for the Intel debrief of a mission they'd just flown. They had apparently been flying SCAR near the Balad SE airfield just north of Baghdad. SCAR (or Strike Coordination and Reconnaissance) without getting too detailed, is basically a poor man's "Fast FAC" Forward Air Controller, where we go into a target area, find our own targets for our own ordnance, then find targets for other strikers in the area.

Well, this formation had been flying SCAR near Balad SE and had run across a number of airplanes dispersed out into a field. They had destroyed 4 or 5 of them with GBU-12 500-pound laser guided bombs, but neither they nor the "intelligence" folks cound figure out what type of aircraft they were.

So, the Intel officer knew that I was a bit of an old airplane freak, and poked his head around the corner, asking me to come look at the tape.

As they played back the tape, the first thing I saw was a Hawker Hunter getting speared with a laser guided bomb. I told the Intel officer that's what I thought it was, then filled him in that I was pretty sure the Hunter had been one of thge main Iraqi fighters before they got their fleet of MiGs. "Hey, you guys know that this isn't a MiG, right? It's British..." They just sort of looked at me blankly and said, "yeah, but it's an Iraqi fighter, so we hit it." The tape kept rolling and I watched yet another Hunter bite the dust.

The pilot who'd flown the mission piped up, "It's this next one that's really weird, though...it looks like a big prop plane of some sort."

So, the next thing that flashes up on the screen, sure enough, is a Sea Fury. The tape continues to roll as my eyes light up..."Hey, cool, that's a Sea Fury!" It appears to be a 2-seater and is sitting there intact. For a moment I take mental note that it's at the Balad SE airfield and wonder if, in a postwar Iraq, there would be any way of me getting up there to claim that thing! I start explaining to the pilots and intel guys what kind of airplane it is when I see on screen that another 500-pound laser guided bomb sails right into the Fury, destroying it in a large explosion.

"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO THAT FOR?!?" I was stunned, seeing such a thing obliterated. My reaction was a little funny, especially considering on my own tape I had just watched my own bombs destroying a MiG-23 and a Su-17, and hadn't thought twice about it. But this....a Sea Fury....that was sacrilegious!

The pilot, obviously not grasping the value of a warbird in the same way that I was, just shrugged, and said, "hey, it was an airplane....it might be able to carry WMD, right?"

I marched over to the closest computer and pulled up some photos of Dreadnought...I called the guys over and said "This is what you guys just destroyed." Only then did they sort of grasp things, but I still think that they really didn't care in the grand scheme of things.

C'est La Guerre....

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