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|OPERATION DESERT STORM


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|OPERATION DESERT STORM
|(The Electronic Version)


|Edited by Edward R. Taro


|The story of the Gulf War as told by the U.S. fighting men who were
|ACTUALLY THERE!


|PUBLISHED BY MILLENNIUM PRESS
|P.O. BOX 7885 SANTA CRUZ, CA  95060
|THE FIRST ELECTRONIC BEST-SELLER
|PLEASE COPY FREELY AND GIVE TO FRIENDS
|THIS WILL ENCOURAGE THE USE OF ELECTRONIC BOOKS
|AND HELP TO SAVE THE PLANET!


|Please Note:  The names of the participants have been changed
|to protect themselves and their families from any possible
|terrorist reprisals.



|PART ONE - THE BATTLE FOR AIR SUPREMACY



|TABLE OF CONTENTS

|HIT UP ARROW TO SELECT CHAPTER THEN HIT ENTER

|REMEMBER - THROUGH ENTIRE BOOK YOU CAN HIT BACKSPACE KEY TO
|BACK UP .. A SCREEN OR A TOPIC !!!

|"HISTORY OF THE WAR"*
|"CHAPTER ONE"*
|"CHAPTER TWO"*
|"CHAPTER THREE"*
|"CHAPTER FOUR"*
|"CHAPTER FIVE"*

|CATALOG*
|SOUVENIRS*



:"HISTORY OF THE WAR"

|BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WAR IN THE GULF

  From 1980 to 1987, Iraq and Iran fought a devastating and costly
  war.  Iraq was the aggressor and invaded the area around Basra* in
  order to take oil wells from Iran and a seaport terminal for itself.
  Saddam Hussein lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in this war
  because Iran outnumbered him five to one, and the Iranians would
  attack in Human waves.  After several of these attacks, however, the
  Iraqi command countered with tactics that leveled the playing field
  considerably.  They used poison gas and nerve agents delivered by
  artillery shells and jet bombers.  With these terror weapons, Saddam
  was able to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians, both civilian
  and military.

  In this way, victory see-sawed back and forth, until the advantage
  lay with Iran.  At one point, it looked as though the Iranians would
  take Baghdad and have the head of Saddam Hussein on a stake.  But the
  leadership of Iran was now in the hands of a one Ayatollah Homeini,
  as you may recall, and so this holy Imam fella, in his great wisdom,
  decided, at this most fateful juncture, that the Iraqis had had
  enough.  He then ordered his troops to withdraw just at the very
  moment of victory and then, he executed or imprisoned all his top
  military commanders.  Of course, this was the sign that Saddam had
  been praying for.  He sprung back to attack Iran, and a kind of
  uneasy peace was finally established between the two countries.
  Neither side could really claim victory since nothing had been
  settled except that both sides had suffered massive destruction to
  their economies and massive losses to their citizenry.

  The most significant thing to happen during this conflict, from the
  United States' point of view, was not the war itself, but the fact
  that a certain United States Army Colonel, one Oliver North, was
  very busy in the basement of the White House, using his connections
  to see to it that plenty of arms and ammunitions went to Saddam
  Hussein.  We even looked the other way while the Germans sold Saddam
  the ability to manufacture the horrible chemical weapons he would
  use on the Iranians and almost used on us.  Why?  Well, the United
  States, it appears, was more afraid of a possible Islamic Revolution
  in the region backed by the Ayatollah, than we were of the threat
  posed by Saddam Hussein.  So, we sold him some very sophisticated
  weapons and with them, he was able to stalemate the Iranian military
  machine.

  It may go down in history as one of the most ironic of wars.
  American soldiers would be subject to very grave dangers originating
  from what is has now become known as 'The Iran-Contra Affair'.  Even
  President Reagan has admitted publicly that 'We pulled a boner!'.
  Luckily, it was not a fatal one.  In fact the United States
  recovered from it all very nicely by winning the war with Saddam in
  record time, and with minimal loss of American lives.  For the
  Iraqis, however, the cost was considerable, over 100,000 soldiers
  killed or wounded, and the loss of 3,000 tanks, 2,000 artillery
  pieces and 2,500 armored vehicles.  There is no way to measure the
  loss of prestige, spirit etc. the Iraqis have suffered. It is
  estimated that it will cost them 500 to 800 billion dollars to
  reconstruct their country.  And they will very probably have to make
  some kind of reparations to Kuwait for the destruction done to them
  by Iraqi soldiers.

  For the Americans, it would become a war to finally shake the
  'spectre of Viet Nam,' as President Bush would put it.  It would be
  the cornerstone in a 'New World Order'.  It would set a very
  powerful precedent that the United Nations would no longer tolerate
  this kind of 'naked aggression', and the fact that they would have
  the teeth to back up this New World Order.  It might even lead to a
  new kind of global village in which the leadership will remain
  steadfast in the hands of the American version of democracy.  If
  this is so, may God grant us the strength and the wisdom to preserve
  the peace and to promote the brotherhood and understanding so
  necessary for this planet to survive!

  The following is an account of the historic Gulf War, (which may
  someday become known as the operation to rescue the Iraqi soldiers
  from their own leaders') as told by American combatants who were
  there and who lived through these terrible days.  The book is
  divided into two parts, (as indeed the war was) - Part One - The
  Battle for Air Supremacy and Part Two - American Blitzkrieg.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  This VIRTUAL BOOK is being presented to you in an
  electronic format and we hope that this method of reading books will
  catch on and someday be as popular as reading from books
  manufactured from trees.  We need to save all the trees since they
  absorb much of the pollution caused by the burning of oil and gives
  back pure oxygen for our consumption.  If we all get behind this new
  method of relaxing with a book, we may never have to have a Gulf War
  again!



:"CHAPTER ONE"
|CHAPTER ONE





  I never had any idea that war could be such a kick in the ass!
  Everything that I had been told, everything that I had studied,
  everything that I felt deep down told me that war is hell and that
  in volunteering my services to the United States Air Force, I might
  be placing myself in an eerie, gory and macabre kind of reality.
  Instead, what I found in the air war with Iraq was a kind of
  computer game in which the results would be much deadlier but the
  outcome would always be the same.  I would win.  With a superior
  airplane to anything the enemy could put in the sky, with superior
  firepower and with superior skills and support from my Command and
  Control units telling me exactly where my enemy is at any given
  moment, I could not fail but to win each and every air battle that I
  was placed in.

  I'm Air Force Colonel John K. Hunter.  I've been an officer in the
  Air Force for nearly twenty years.  I graduated from the Air Force
  Academy in 1971.  I flew 139 missions over Viet Nam.  I am based in
  a city on the West Coast of my country.  I'm connected to the United
  States Air Force 415th Tactical Fighter Squadron, also known as 'The
  Ghost Riders'. I love my country very much and I jumped at the
  chance to defend our freedom in the war now known as Operation
  Desert Storm.  And I'm very glad to say that the only hardship for
  me so far in this war has been the boredom and the longing for my
  family.  I don't think that anyone in the history of war has ever
  been prepared for the ease and the overwhelming superiority that we
  have enjoyed in this theater of war.

  Yes, a few of my compatriots were shot down by enemy 'AAA' or
  Anti-Aircraft & Artillery, but for the most part, and after my first
  mission, I never worried about it.  I personally saw only one SAM*
  missile flying out of control several hundred yards away from my
  plane on one of my early sorties. After my buddies successfully
  knocked out 95 percent of all anti-aircraft batteries in the first
  few hours of the war, I never received any more flack from the enemy
  and I flew in total confidence in all my missions.

  What was my most memorable mission?  By far and away, my most
  memorable mission was one of my first.  I was flying a Stealth
  fighter, the "F-117"*.  I was one of the first guys to go into Iraq.
  My mission was to destroy the enemy's radar sites in Baghdad* so the
  rest of my strike force could come in with as little 'AAA'* as
  possible.  I was going in at night so we would be using our FLIR*,
  detection unit. This would be the first real engagement that would
  test the stealth capability integrated into this new line of
  invisible fighter.  The plane would be required to get in under
  complete cover from the enemy radar and in so doing be able to see
  the enemy radar facilities and then destroy them.  I was a bit on
  the edgy side, on my first mission, which means that I was alert to
  everything.  All my training was intended to get me in and out
  safely, but I have to say that I was worried.  We had no idea
  whether or not the Iraqis would be ready for us.  We had no hard
  experience in actual battle conditions as to whether all this super
  sci-fi technology would work. Thankfully, it worked beyond our
  wildest dreams.

  The day began like any other.  We had been given a briefing on the
  morning of the fifteenth of January in which we were basically told
  what our missions would be, when, and if the order to attack was
  given by the President.  I knew for twenty-four hours that I would
  be in the vanguard or the spearhead of the attack.  I didn't care
  very much for my chances, to tell the truth, and I spent that night
  not getting very much sleep.  Several times I woke up and wrote out
  a will and several other letters to friends and family that I fully
  believed would be my last.  At the very best, I expected to be shot
  down and taken prisoner only to spend several very boring and
  unhealthy months in detention listening to Iraqi propaganda* until I
  was released.  I wasn't a happy camper, however, I love my country,
  I was very much aware of my oath and I knew that I would do my very
  best to fulfill my mission.

  I woke up, in the wee hours of the sixteenth, to my operations
  sergeant shaking me out of the rack.  He had a cup of coffee in his
  hand and a big smile on his face.  He told me the order had been
  given and we were ordered to scramble all our planes.  This was
  apparently the day we had worked so arduously for the last five
  months.  My first thought was that I was going to be killed or
  captured today. Then, I realized that this was the most important
  day of my life in regards to positive thinking.  All of a sudden, I
  realized that I had to start thinking very positively and that I
  would not come back unless I mastered this skill quite quickly.
  After my first cup of coffee and after I'd pulled on my flight suit,
  I sat down and visualized myself finding my targets, killing them
  and then flying home safely.  I saw some anti-aircraft fire, but the
  traces zoomed past my cockpit and sang out to me in praise and
  admiration.  I saw Saddam Hussein sitting inside his protective
  bunker and he was so angry at me he wanted to kill me, but he
  couldn't because I was now hundreds of miles away.

  We ran to our planes.  There were four Stealth fighters in my
  squadron.  I knew that this scene was probably being duplicated all
  over Saudi Arabia.  We had spread our planes out over several dozen
  fields in case the Iraqis had a fix on us with their skud missiles.
  Stealth pilots would be jumping into their cockpits, their ground
  crews struggling to make sure that the weaponry was all loaded and
  armed properly.

  As I made my final check of the instruments*, I saw my ground chief
  signaling to me that everything was ready and I had clearance for
  take off.  I pushed the throttle stick in my lap and I felt the
  engines growl as I revved up enough thrust to get the fighter
  rolling.  Then I pulled back and the engines purred beneath and
  behind me.  I took my slot on the runway and looked behind me to see
  a couple dozen other planes, mostly "F-15's"* being readied.  I
  guessed that these guys would be just minutes behind me, but they
  wouldn't survive in great numbers unless our stealth missions were a
  total success.  My primary target was the central radar control
  tower in the heart of Baghdad.  It would be the most protected
  target in Iraq, but if I could put it out of action, it would
  seriously degrade the enemy's ability to respond to the rest of our
  attack following right behind me.

  I was third to take off in our squadron.  It always amazed me how
  these composite* machines could fly at all.  The stealth fighter is
  not very aerodynamic.  It would not be used in air-to-air combat.
  It's mission is to bomb high priority targets in the vanguard of a
  full scale attack. We have no radar, and we have no air-to-air
  missiles.  We have only 2,000 pound laser-guided bombs*.  If we are
  detected we would be sitting ducks especially if they sent up the
  Soviet "Mig-29's"* against us.  We would have several F-15's flying
  cover to protect us, but we did not expect to be detected.

  All my training told me we would not be detected until it was too
  late. The F-117A, Stealth fighter plane is designed with weird,
  oblique angles all over it so that it will reflect radar waves up
  into the sky and down into the ground, away from the transmitting
  source.  This is why it is so hard to pick up.  Add to that the top
  secret materials that they laminated in between the layers of the
  skin of the ship to absorb the energy from the enemy radar and you
  have an almost invisible plane.

  Because of all this super reflective technology, the Stealth fighter
  cannot be flown without the aid of a highly advanced computer system
  to translate the commands of the pilot into instructions that would
  make the planes flight surfaces understand and follow those
  instructions perfectly.  At least that was the way it was supposed
  to work in theory. Fortunately for me, it would work that way in
  practice in this first real test of the stealth fighter.


  When I pulled back on the stick*, with just an almost noticeable
  delay, the aircraft would begin to climb, several dozen flight
  surfaces* of the ship working in unison to guide the plane as I
  instructed.  It was still very dark at three in the morning.  We
  would be over our targets in about an hour, and with a little luck
  we'd be back before dawn. We formed up and off in the distance I
  could see a half dozen more stealth's flying off in the direction of
  Iraq but slightly further South.  Because we were a stealth
  squadron, none of us had radar because this would tip off the enemy
  of our arrival and so we could not know if the enemy had spotted us
  until it was too late.  We were relying totally on the radar of the
  AWACS* planes flying overhead somewhere and helping to coordinate
  the attack and give warning of any incoming enemy planes. We do have
  infra red night vision and so I kept scanning my FLIR (Forward
  looking infra-red) screen for any indication of enemy planes coming
  toward us as well as for landmarks that would help guide us to the
  target.

  I was commander of the squadron and it was therefore my job to tell
  my wing pilots when to veer away toward their own individual
  targets.  We all would hit targets in Baghdad, but we would be
  several miles away from each other during the battle and so I
  radioed to them to keep in contact at all times.  If any of us were
  hit and had to eject in the heart of enemy territory, I wanted to
  know exactly where my guys landed so that I could direct a rescue
  mission to pick them up even before he hit the ground.  It wasn't
  much, but it was better than acting too late.  I knew that no matter
  how fast we reacted, the Iraqis had the advantage and would probably
  capture any one of us who had to bail out.  This is what I
  personally feared the most.  I didn't worry about being killed,
  because I probably wouldn't even know what hit me.  The thought of
  being captured by these monkeys and having to spend several months
  being 'entertained' by them and worrying about my family worrying
  about me was the most loathsome and creepy feeling I'd ever had in
  my life.

  Everything was quiet so far, however, and I relaxed and tried to
  enjoy the flight.  We bantered back and forth over the radio channel
  trying to keep ourselves from thinking about anything nasty that
  might be waiting for us.  There was nothing but good news from the
  AWACS planes.  They had not spotted a single plane in the Iraqi
  skies.  I felt Euphoric for a moment and then I worried that there
  should be something up there if only commercial traffic.  Why was
  there no sign of anything.  Surely they would have a couple planes
  on patrol.  It was the day after the deadline that the President had
  given them quite publicly.  Were they merely waiting for us in
  secret shelters*?  Did they have their fingers on the triggers?
  Wouldn't they find out about us taking off from spies sitting in the
  desert near our base?  The simultaneous scramble of hundreds of jet
  planes was hardly the kind of event you could keep secret for very
  long.  They must be hiding from our radar somehow.  Maybe they have
  acquired stealth fighters too from the Soviets and they have not
  told us about them.

  I thought about all this when we weren't prodding each other on the
  radio.  I guess we all had these thoughts and this is why we were so
  talkative.  I was really glad we did not have to maintain radio
  silence with our new stealth frequencies just being assigned.

        "Jimbo, this is going to be a turkey shoot, don't
        you think?"  I said.

        "Absolutely, Colonel!  They have no idea what's
        coming at them.  Saddam is probably snoring away and
        grabbing on to his teddy bear right about now.  What
        a surprise he's going to have,"  Jim replied.

        "I can't believe he would put his people to the
        torch like this.  He must be a really great leader,"
        I said, sarcastically.

        "Yeah, I bet he's eating his Kurds and way,"  Jim
        joked.  We all laughed.


  Then, I could see that we were just a few minutes from Baghdad from
  my navigation screen* which constantly displayed a map of Iraq in
  front of me.  I looked at the bright green television picture of the
  ground underneath us and the landmarks were confirming our location.
  We had just crossed the Tigris* river and on the other side I
  spotted the railroad lines leading into the Iraqi capital.  At our
  flight speed, "Mach 2.5"*, we would be over our individual targets
  in just a few minutes.  It was time for us to split up.  I gave the
  command to break and four black shapes knifed through the sky
  slashing their way toward the city lights just now glowing over the
  horizon.

        "Good luck, God bless, and stay alert,"  I said.

  Secretly, I wondered how many of us would get back.  The city lights
  were much brighter now and my NAVCOM* was zeroing in on the target
  for me.  I had very little to do.  I would allow the ships'
  computers to take me the rest of the way to the target.  I sat back
  in my seat and let the ship fly itself.  I knew that I could not
  respond fast enough to reach the target in the least amount of time.
  This would be left to my co-pilot, a silent mass of silicon chips,
  relay switches, and programming up in the nose of my plane.  He
  would be analyzing millions of pieces of instructions, sorting them
  into logical bits of information and making all the necessary course
  corrections.  He would also inform me of any problems with the
  integrity of the plane.

  So far, so good.  We were not under attack.  The sky was empty
  except for the red-orange exhaust of my buddies flying just a few
  miles away, heading for their own targets. Together, our squadron
  would knock out most of the SAM missile sites and the related radar
  installations that guide them.  But if this stealth technology
  didn't work exactly right, we'd be their first kills.  The generals
  told us over and over that they would not see us, they would not
  pick us up and they would not therefore be able to shoot at us until
  we had blinded them pretty badly.

  I picked up my first target visually, a radar and SAM missile site
  on a small hill and just a few blocks from a very tall building.  It
  looked like a Western hotel, probably a Hyatt or a Holiday Inn.  I
  thought to myself that a few of my countrymen were going to be woken
  up rather rudely.  I hoped they didn't mind too much.  I took hold
  of the stick signalling the computer to let me have control of the
  plane which it did immediately.  I had to maneuver a bit to avoid
  hitting the hotels and other buildings.  I looked all around me for
  signs of a SAM missile being launched and I studied my instruments.
  There was nothing, absolutely nothing.  We'd caught them completely
  unprepared.  They had their radar on, but they had not the slightest
  idea we were flying over their city.  The technology was working to
  its ultimate specifications.  I was elated.

  But I was also very busy.  I had the SAM missile battery in my
  sights.  I kept the crosshairs of my missile sights right in the
  very middle of the launchers even while I rolled and pitched at Mach
  2 to avoid all the buildings.  I felt like I was driving down main
  street in my home town.  It was a very warm and friendly feeling.  I
  made a mental note to thank the people at Lockheed for building this
  thing without any defects.  At least none I could detect so far.
  Then, before I had time to think about it, my weapons system buzzed
  a loud claxon signifying that it was releasing the two, two thousand
  pounders.  I used my laser sights in my eyepiece to keep the
  crosshairs on the target.  I moved the stick sharply up and to my
  right.  In this way I could keep the target in my sights, keep the
  laser light firmly affixed to it, guiding the bomb to the target and
  I could avoid all the buildings on main street as I did so.

  Then, there was a blinding flash of light as the bombs hit their
  target exactly where I wanted them.  I turned the television camera
  off to save the tape for the next run just a few miles South.  I
  continued to climb and I looked all around for any AAA of any kind.
  Then, I finally saw what I had expected all along.  The sky lit up
  with anti-aircraft fire.  There were streamers of light going up
  into the sky in almost all directions except directly toward me.  I
  was very happy about that.  The Stealth technology was working
  perfectly!  The enemy gunners couldn't see me.  I felt like I had
  been blessed with super-human powers.  The sky was filled with
  missiles and flack but none of it was going to hit anything!  I
  climbed into the star-filled sky and headed the ship toward my next
  target, another SAM site just a few miles south of the one I had
  just destroyed.

  Off in the distance, I could see the explosions of light indicating
  that the rest of my squadron was having the same success I had.  I
  yelled into the radio-mic for my buddies to report in.  They were
  all excited about the same discovery I had made.  The city was alive
  with 'AAA' and none of it was finding a target.  They were going to
  find several buildings damaged by the falling debris they were
  shooting up into the sky.  We were hitting only military
  installations and hitting them with absolute accuracy.

  I approached my next target with a great deal of relief and much
  less anxiety.  I now felt invincible.  American know-how had won the
  day.  I wondered if the taxpayers would ever realize what a
  wonderful bargain they'd gotten.  In peacetime it was easy to point
  out how expensive these planes were and everyone wondered if they
  would ever be used.  Here was the evidence that all our military
  planning was paying off in huge dividends.  We might just as easily
  be flying over Moscow and taking out their radar systems instead of
  Iraqi defenses.  With this technology and the Star Wars defenses, we
  could whip any nation on Earth!

  I was feeling pretty cocky at the time.  It was the adrenalin of the
  moment making me feel this giddy. Normally, I think of war as
  something to be avoided at all costs.  You want to avoid it because
  I would probably be the first to die.  I was always ready to give my
  life for my country, but I didn't want to give it away cheaply.  All
  during Viet Nam, I was convinced that my number was up with each
  mission.  I saw many of my buddies get shot down and I've never seen
  most of them again.  I fully expected to join them someday, but as
  luck would have it, I never did. I learned during that war that it
  wasn't funny.  It wasn't a game and you didn't want to go into a war
  without exhausting all other avenues of discussion.

  The Viet Nam War was avoidable and when I think of all my brave
  compatriots who were sacrificed there, it makes me angry, not with
  my country, but with Human Nature itself, because it's the kind of
  trap that many nations have fallen into in the past.  But I think
  that a great country such as ours is entitled to make a mistake once
  in a great while. This time, this war was no mistake. We had the
  backing of the United Nations.  I felt that if we had treated Hitler
  the same way, there would never have been a second World War.

  As I approached the second SAM site and released my bombs, I was
  thinking about all these things and I was trying to the best job I
  could do.  If I messed up a great many civies would be killed and no
  one wants that.  A few degrees to the left or to the right and I was
  going to pulverized several apartment buildings along the way.  I
  hoped that the most damage I would do was to their nerves as they
  were rolled out of bed by the shock of the bombs hitting just a few
  yards away.  I was amazed, even after all the practice runs, as to
  just how accurate my ordinance could be.  Then I realized the most
  accurate and most terrifying of all weapons would be coming in just
  behind me.

  As I climbed towards my third SAM site and watched all the gunfire,
  tracers and rocketry blaze into the sky harmlessly all around me, I
  felt like there could be a terrific traffic accident if I didn't
  move my butt out of there.  Another technological wonder, the
  Tomahawk cruise missiles*, would be coming into town flying low and
  slow and carrying their bombs to within a few yards of their
  targets. I marveled at how a guided missile could be so accurate
  with no pilot on board.  It occurred to me that someday, there would
  be no pilots to do this dirty work.  It would all be done by
  computer guided weapons.  Soon, there would be no need for fly-boys
  like myself.  Mine might be the last mission of its kind.

  I hit my fourth target on the way home, another radar and
  communications tower on the outskirts of the city.  Again, there was
  no warning of my attack and no indication that they could find me in
  the night sky.  They were shooting in all directions at once.  I
  couldn't help but marvel at well armed they were.  They just weren't
  going to hit anything, at least not tonight.  All I had to do was be
  careful not to fly into anything by accident.  I kept a watchful eye
  at my course away from the city and back towards Saudi Arabia. When
  a barrage of tracers* lit up the sky in front of me, I made a minor
  course correction by tilting the stick a little either right or left
  and was never in any real danger.  I felt sorry for the housewife or
  the farmer sleeping in his bed when a spent shell landed nearby.
  There would be a great deal of damage and many people killed from
  their own 'friendly fire'.  Then, I realized that some of our own
  people would be killed in the same manner.  War is not a nice thing
  for Human Beings to be involved in.  I tried to think of another way
  to rid the planet of this insane maniac, but I could think of none.

  My squadron formed up with me a few minutes outside of Baghdad and
  everyone was full of elation and we jabbered all the way home with
  the sights and sounds of what had happened.  One of my wing men had
  never been in combat before.  He was highly recommended for the job
  due to his very high scores in training missions.  I often wondered
  how well he would hold up during the real thing when they shoot back
  at you.  He held up fine.  He couldn't wait to get back, get
  refueled and re-armed so that he could fly another mission.  I told
  him to hang loose and not be in such a hurry to die.  If I wasn't
  the squad leader, I believe he would have cursed me for telling him
  that.  I cursed myself. I didn't want to jinx him or to think I was
  trying to jinx him in any way.  I apologized to him and he accepted
  it readily.

  This first mission had been a piece of cake.  I told them that they
  should all go even easier from now on, since our squadron had
  probably taken out their best and most effective radar sites.  I
  found out later that I was right and that we had also gotten about
  80 percent of their SAM missile sites.  The only way they could
  shoot us down now would be by our accidentally flying into some of
  their wild shooting.  The cruise missiles and the F-15's flying in
  waves just behind us would have taken out even more of their most
  dangerous weapons.  As we flew our missions over the next several
  days, I kept trying to spot some evidence of Saddam Hussein.

  If I found his limousine driving along, I was going to attack it and
  try to end this damn war before he decided in his fogged-up brain to
  send more of his people to a terrible death.  I knew that the Iraqi
  soldier was more afraid of their own leader than they were of us and
  that was the worst kind of a soldier.  This kind of soldier would
  surrender or desert at the first opportunity. Unfortunately, Saddam
  had thought of that and he had a battalion of soldiers trained to
  shoot the deserters.  It seemed like this guy was determined to as
  many people as necessary to kill one of us. I didn't care for his
  tactics very much.

  I'm glad to be home now.  My wife seems very beautiful to me.  My
  kids are the best kids in the world.  Even the family dog is a
  wonderful sight to me.  There isn't a day goes by that I don't thank
  God for getting me home without any scratches.  As I said before,
  I'm always prepared to give my life for my country, but I'm not real
  anxious to give it up cheaply, and I want to live to see that crazy
  Saddam get what's coming.  I pray that the army grunts who have to
  fight the worst part of this war on the ground will help me see this
  dream come true!



?"CHAPTER TWO"?"ORDER FORM"?SOUVENIRS?BEGINNING?CATALOG

*

:"CHAPTER TWO"
|CHAPTER TWO




  My name is Captain John Thackery.  I'm part of the 35th Tactical
  Fighter Wing.  I fly the F-4g Phantom, also known as the 'Wild
  Weasel'.  We were supposed to fly into Iraq and Kuwait in waves
  right after the Stealth fighters flew their missions.  I knew that
  the my brother Stealth fighter pilots would do a great deal to knock
  out enemy radar, but it would mainly be their central radar systems
  and communications batteries that they would get.  The enemy also
  had hundreds of sites of search radar situated all over the desert
  and they were going to be in a higher state of readiness because the
  Stealth fighter's laser guided bombs and the cruise missiles would
  have already taken their toll and probably woken up the whole
  country.

  We would definitely not have the easiest of missions.  Some of us
  were going to be shot down, even if by accident.  I was a little
  concerned when I learned of the impending attack in the early hours
  of the sixteenth of January, but I knew that we were going in with
  all our forces at once which would greatly reduce the casualties.
  All the planes were going to be supporting each other in many
  different ways. It was a very interesting strategy that Air Command
  was using.  I believe it would be the first time in History that one
  Commander would have so many different types of military weapon
  under his control.

  General Norman Schwartzkopf, or 'Stormin Norman' as he is
  affectionately called, would be in charge of the Naval forces, Air
  forces, Army and Marines belonging to the United States and on top
  of that he had the resources of all 24 of the allied nations' forces
  as well.  I don't think Eisenhower had that much control of Allied
  Forces in World War Two. So, it would be one hell of a fight and
  when my C.O. spelled it all out for our Phantom Squadron in the
  ready room, I think we all began to feel more and more comfortable.
  The F-15's initially would fly air cover and take on any enemy
  interceptors that came up to greet us. The Stealth fighters would
  eliminate much of their radar and communications capability, as well
  as the SKUD* sites.  We would take out the rest of the radar sites
  and SAM missile batteries that might threaten later missions, and
  then, after the top priority targets were taken out, we would go
  back in again to destroy the enemy airfields, take out their hard
  shelters in which they housed their best airplanes and so on.

  This was the part I was waiting for.  I wanted to take out as many
  of the enemy's "MIG-29's"* as possible on the ground because once they
  got in the air, they were the only aircraft that any of us were even
  remotely afraid of.  They could match us on speed and they had the
  air-to-air missiles that could catch us.  We had better pilots and
  better air support, but they could do some damage if they got after
  us in any great numbers.  Lucky for us, they never did.  We all
  wanted to avoid any dogfights with their best MIGs.  The other stuff
  they could fly against us, like the MIG-21's and their Mirage jets,
  we had total confidence we would blow them out of the sky before
  they even saw us coming.  But the Soviets had supplied Saddam with a
  couple hundred of their top of the line fighter and that meant that
  they had the eyes and ears to see us coming at about the same time
  that we could spot them, approximately ninety miles away.  That
  meant that whoever spotted the other guy first would probably set
  off a missile and these could catch a few of us by surprise.
  There's not much you can do when a missile is about to fly up your
  tail.  Many times, you wouldn't even have time to eject.  You had to
  keep your wits about you.

  So, when we finally took off for our mission over Iraq, I think we
  were all a bit apprehensive, but when we saw the damage the Stealth
  guys had done and not a single Iraqi jet had come up to challenge
  them, we knew that were going to have a good day.  The first thing
  to do was to go get their SAM sites.  These things can be as
  dangerous as a well-piloted MIG-29.  If their radar was all working
  properly, they could get a few of us with them.  We had all turned
  on our jamming equipment and so most of the SAM missiles were
  drifting up into the sky and running out of 'oomph' at about 60,000
  feet.  It was fun to watch them zoom up past you, start to slow down
  as they ran out of fuel way up above you, then turn around and
  slowly fall back to earth silently.  I had to laugh every time I saw
  one.  I used to say to myself, 'Here's to shooting yourselves in the
  foot, you stupid 'b......s'!'  I think most of the damage done to
  their civilian sites was due to their own SAM missiles falling back
  on them.  I think that when God* created Man, He said, 'Come forth
  and receive they brains!'.  I think the Iraqi's came fifth and they
  got the leftover stuff.

  Well, anyway, I remember feeling quite good when I saw my first
  target, a SAM missile site just South of Baghdad.  I had to watch
  out a little bit because there was a ton of flack all around.  They
  really lit up the night sky with their tracers.  It was very
  beautiful in a terrible sort of way.  I believe that they were told
  to just fire up in the air in all directions and eventually all the
  American planes would fly into the stuff.  Well, of course, this is
  very foolhardy.  All our F-4 Phantom jets have radar jamming
  equipment and we also have night vision FLIR (Forward looking
  Infra-Red).  So, we can see many of their anti-aircraft batteries,
  even at night, miles away.

  It's just a matter of a flick of the wrist on the stick and the
  plane will avoid all of that kind of fire.  Plus, we're flying no
  more than two hundred feet off the deck.  They'd have to practically
  shoot right at each other to get at us. I guess a couple of our guys
  got shot down this way, but it had to be pure luck on the part of
  the Iraqi gunners.  I'll bet they spent twenty million dollars worth
  of ammunition to shoot down each one of our planes.  War is hell and
  it's also very expensive.  This much I can tell you.

  I was one of the lucky ones, however, and I managed to weave my way
  between all of their 'AAA' batteries.  I was saving my bombs for the
  largest of their sites.  When I finally went in, I got the SAM site
  on the first pass.  My mapping and navigation information was
  perfect and so I knew exactly what the thing would look like on my
  screen as soon as it came in range.  All kinds of alarms went off in
  the cockpit anyway, just to remind me that my main target was dead
  ahead.  I put my head down so I could see the sights better in the
  middle of my canopy and dead ahead of me.  My cross hairs wandered a
  little, so I maneuvered the plane with my right hand and armed the
  bombs and laser targeting control with my left.

  Then, I had it in my crosshairs.  By now it was just about one
  thousand meters ahead.  The sky was like the fourth of July on both
  sides of me.  I saw a flash of whitish-green light flare up past me
  about 20 or 30 feet away.  It was a wild SAM missile they'd shot up
  at me in total desperation. They were nearly blinded by the earlier
  attacks and so were impotent, I thought to myself.  Then, I almost
  flew into a bunch of their flack to my right, but I maneuvered
  perfectly just after I dropped the first of my bombs.  Then I pulled
  back on the stick and watched the target out of my rear camera.  I
  was climbing at about a thousand feet per second. It felt like a
  great ride in a carnival.  I just kept pulling on the stick and
  struggled to concentrate on the target in my rear-view* gunsite.
  Then, just before I thought I was going to black out*, the SAM site
  went up in a blast of billowing black smoke and white light. Oh,
  man, what a feeling!

  I was quite a target just spinning up and away from the target like
  that so I immediately pushed back down on the stick and dove for the
  relative calm and safety of the deck. I felt a slight vibration in
  my descent and I knew that I'd taken some kind of a hit, but
  everything kept on working just fine, so I figured I'd been hit by a
  bit of shrapnel in the fuselage or the tail somewhere.  It was a
  close call, but nothing that a fighter pilot worries about.  If
  you're alive and the plane's capable of flying you back home, you
  pretty much don't care about any little thing like a bit of
  shrapnel.  We expect to bring some of the enemy's weaponry back home
  with us anyway, like taking a souvenir.  We like that kind of stuff.
  You can show it off to the kids when you get home.  My ground crew
  was the best and they'd patch us up in no time and I'd be back in
  action before I could shower and shave.

  I flew the plane through a couple of victory rolls just to make sure
  that everything was really OK, and it was, so I proceeded to my
  second target.  It was on the way home and it was as important as a
  SAM site because it was a suspected ammunition dump.  We had
  information that this building was a storage facility for things
  like SKUD missiles, SAM missiles, artillery shells and that there
  might even be a couple hundred shells with chemical or even nuclear
  warheads.  It was a great target  - very high priority.  And if it
  was as carelessly defended as my last target, I knew I would have no
  trouble with it.  I looked at my Navigation screen and I changed
  course about 90 degrees to the North for this ammo storage depot. I
  knew from my briefing earlier that it would look like a very
  innocent factory.  The Iraqi's even built a false facade around it
  and claimed that the whole thing was a 'baby milk factory'.  They
  even went so far as to bottle a few hundred bottles of the same
  white liquid over and over again and showed it to reporters.  You
  had to admit, for being overall stupid like they were, the Iraqis
  could still be clever.  I guess the 8-year war with Iran taught them
  a few tricks like this.

  I want to iterate right here that I call the enemy 'stupid' not
  because I'm a racist in any way.  I just happen to believe that any
  people who would side with a maniac like Saddam has to be stupid, or
  mentally deficient in some way. I don't know what it is exactly.
  I'll leave it up to the historians when this is all over, but I've
  had several months to do damned little else than get my plane ready
  for war and watch TV to see what the enemy is like that I'm going to
  be facing and I have to be honest with you, when I saw how stupid
  they seemed to be to allow this turkey to lead them into an 8-year
  war with Iran which they barely won.  The only reason they won is
  because the Ayatollahs over there in Iran are even more mentally
  deficient than the Iraqi leadership.  Believe it or not, but the
  Iranians were actually winning the war with Iraq because they
  outnumbered the Iraqis by four to one.  But just as victory was at
  hand, the Ayatollahs decided that they ought to arrest all of their
  top military leaders and execute them or put them in jail.  Now,
  this is roughly equivalent to arresting Eisenhower just before D-day
  and claiming he was a spy or something.  I mean, their mentally
  deficient, all of them. Do you see what I mean?

  Well, enough jawboning and let's get back to my first sortie. I had
  to evade lots more of their 'AAA' all along the way, and I had to
  pass up plenty of big, beautiful targets too, let me tell you.  That
  depressed me.  My only consolation was that I would probably be back
  in the next few days to take them out.  I was flying over railroad
  stations, what looked like army depots.  I saw dozens of airfields
  with planes sitting all along the runway like little ducks following
  their mommas.  I have to admit here and now that I couldn't resist
  this target.  I made a second pass and I used my machine gun to
  render as many planes as possible out of commission.  I wasn't
  supposed to do that, but I just couldn't help it.

  We carry about 2000 rounds of 20mm gattling gunfire.  It shoots at
  about 400 rounds per second. So, in sum total, we have about five
  seconds of gattling gunfire to spread around.  In this pass over
  about five of their MIG-23's, I fired off about four seconds of
  fire.  So, I had about one second left.  I couldn't tell how much
  damage I did, but I didn't think these planes were going to get into
  it right away.  This wasn't alot of protection if I was attacked by
  an enemy plane which had managed to take off and get behind me.  But
  I saw nothing on my screen and none of the rest of the squadron had
  seen anything up in the air that was not friendly, so I figured I
  was pretty safe and it might save my life or someone else' life if I
  took the initiative. Don't forget, besides the second or so of
  cannon fire, I still had both my sidewinder missiles on my wingtips.
  These are the deadliest weapons for air-to-air combat in the world.
  But don't tell my commanding officer, he might not see it exactly as
  I did.

  Anyway, I could have made a second pass at the second row of planes,
  but I decided to remember my orders were to take out these two
  targets tonight.  With one down, there was one to go and I was
  ready.  There was still no sign of enemy fighter planes anywhere.
  The radio was alive with the exuberance and celebration of one
  target after another being blown away.  There was nothing coming to
  me about any dogfights anywhere.  I found that extremely unusual and
  I thought for a minute that maybe Saddam had some kind of a trick up
  his sleeves.  What if he blew up all our bases in Saudi Arabia with
  some kind of secret weapon.  He'd been hinting all week long prior
  to the deadline that he had a secret weapon of some sort.  I hoped
  that it was just a big bluff.  If it was, this guy was going to go
  down in history as one of the biggest bluffers of all time.  I just
  hoped that I could get in a poker game with this jerk some day.

  I flew along for several minutes watching the landscape light up all
  over the place from explosions that my colleagues were dropping all
  over the place.  It was turning out to be one of the greatest
  successes in military history. I felt very proud to be part of it.
  Someday, my grandkids would be sitting on my lap and the story about
  what I was doing would come on TV and they would ask me what it was
  really like and I would tell them all about it.  I only hoped that I
  could remember every last detail.  I wanted to memorize everything.
  Lucky for me, my plane was taking all the important flight
  information down through its two video cameras, one in the nose and
  one in the tail.  I made a mental note to make a copy of the video
  tape and send it home so that I would never forget it all.  I knew
  that the planes' cameras could not capture the sight of all the
  cruise missiles going down main streets of Baghdad and it couldn't
  capture the bright flashes of light all over the darkened landscape,
  nor could it capture the surprise the Iraqis must have been feeling,
  but I knew that I would live to tell about it and I guess that's
  what I'm doing here.

  I had to dodge several anti-aircraft batteries throwing everything
  but the kitchen sink, all of it wandering around the skies
  harmlessly.  It was more and more obvious to me that the Stealth
  guys had rendered the enemy almost totally blind.  He still had a
  few thousand pairs of eyes down on the ground searching the darkness
  for us, but these were no match for the electronic eyes, the radar
  sites that my friends had obliterated earlier.  I was very glad to
  be on the American side of this fight.  I think if I was an Iraqi
  citizen I would have some very nasty things to say about my
  commander-in-chief and the very callous and careless way that he
  exploited his own people.  I guess that's what dictators do best,
  isn't it.

  I was at the point where I almost wished that an Iraqi MIG-29 might
  take to the sky to challenge me.  Anyone who followed this guy
  Saddam, deserved everything we dished out, but then I remembered
  some of my Christian teachings.  You know, the one about, 'do unto
  others, as you would have them do unto you,' and then I realized
  that it would be best for all concerned if I didn't have to shoot
  anyone down.  If there was only a way that I could warn the enemy
  pilots to eject just before my missiles hit.  That's how I'd want to
  be treated.  But this was war and no one had any right to expect
  such humane consideration.  I thought that it was a terrible shame
  that war ethics had evolved to such a low state on our planet and as
  I gazed up at the field of stars above me, I wondered if there might
  be any other planets out there where they had evolved such a gentle
  set of ethics as my Sunday School teacher might like.

  I didn't have more time to wonder such thoughts because at that
  moment, my radar screen screamed about my secondary target
  approaching.  I was just a few minutes from the 'milk factory'.  I
  had no idea that it was to become famous due to the large amount of
  press reporting that CNN was giving it. To me, at that moment, it
  was merely a target with a very high military priority assigned to
  it and that was the kind I was trained to take out and take out with
  all the power given me.  And so, I armed a maverick missile
  underneath and two 2,000 pounders.  I got the center of the factory
  in my cross hairs, rolled a couple times, in an evasive maneuver, to
  make a smaller target of myself to the enemy gunners below, and then
  pressed the button that released the maverick missile.  Two seconds
  later, I released the two bombs and guided the pack of projectiles
  to within a few feet of each other.  Then, I nosed the plane into a
  spiraling climb and looked through my rear camera, keeping the
  crosshairs on the very same spot on my target.  I climbed a few
  seconds more and then I saw the factory collapse under a huge
  explosion.  Mission accomplished!

  I headed for home.  I made a rapid dive for the safety of a low
  flight pattern and let my navigation unit point me home.  I put the
  ship on automatic and basically just watched below for any other
  targets of importance that I could report back about.  I saw several
  military looking vehicles trundling along the roads and I saw a
  couple columns of trucks heading away from the city.  I made a note
  of their exact location for headquarters.  Then, I realized that I
  had another maverick missile and one more bomb.  I radioed back to
  HQ for permission to take out the truck column since this was most
  likely a detachment of troops trying to get out of harm's way.  I
  was granted permission. I was very excited.  I already had a very
  successful sortie and this would cap it off nicely.

  I rolled around almost 180 degrees, pushed the stick down hard and
  pulled back on the throttle so that I would lose a little speed and
  sink down closer to the enemy trucks.  I surveyed my radar and
  infra-red systems and so nothing of any importance other than my own
  friendlies* moving around and doing the same kind of thing I was.  I
  surveyed the background and made sure there were no hotels or hills
  in the way of my escape.  I lowered the flaps to bleed off a little
  more speed and picked up the convoy in my sights.  At night, and
  through my infra-red scope it looked like a ghostly sight out of
  some kind of bad horror flick.  A few scenes from my favorite war
  movies flashed through my brain. I thought that they would be making
  movies about this little war soon.  I suddenly thought about
  President Ronald Reagan* and all the acting jobs be had concerning
  World War II.  I wasn't in a movie, however, and I wasn't acting,
  and those weren't actors out there who were going to die.  I felt
  very sorry for them.

  Then I squeezed off the rest of my cannon fire at the lead truck.
  It exploded immediately.  I must have hit the gas tank.  It was such
  an explosion, it destroyed the truck behind it.  I only had a couple
  hundred rounds left, but in that second of firing, I nailed the
  third and fourth truck and blew them all to kingdom come!  I
  launched my other maverick missile and guided it straight to the
  fifth truck in line.  It exploded and took out the sixth and seventh
  one as well.  Then, I dropped my remaining bomb on the eighth truck
  and this explosion rolled right through the next several trucks. I
  couldn't tell exactly how many, but I figured the entire column was
  pretty well gone.  I heard a couple of bullets thud into my fuselage
  just underneath and behind me, and so I figured a few of the
  soldiers had survived, got out and were taking pot shots at me.  I
  knew that their small arms fire would not penetrate very far into
  the craft and my seat had a sufficient amount of flack armor around
  it that I didn't have to worry much.  But just in case, I pushed the
  throttle all the way forward, pulled back on the stick and got out
  of there as fast as I could.  They could always damage a fuel line
  or hydraulic line and cause me some real difficulty, but they
  weren't that lucky that night.

  I headed for home, all my ammo used up.  I felt very good. I just
  hoped that there were no surprises on the way home. I knew the Iraqi
  planes that I shot up were not going to bother me tonight and that
  made it even sweeter up there knowing that most likely the only
  planes flying the friendly skies of Iraq tonight were our own.  I
  made it home without any further incident.  I landed without a
  problem and looked for the bullet holes on the underside of the
  plane with my ground crew.  There were a couple of small holes, but
  nothing vital was damaged.  They'd patch up the skin of the plane
  within a matter of minutes, just enough time for me to have a quick
  breakfast, a cup of coffee, get debriefed by my Commanding Officer,
  and then climb back aboard and head for the next set of targets.

  In a debriefing session, I am supposed to tell everything that
  happened on my mission.  I describe the damage done to the targets
  and I report any sightings that might be militarily significant.
  Then they tell me about any other information that I might need to
  know about.  So, it was here that I learned that no other Iraqi
  planes were challenging us.  Some had been seen taking off, but in
  all cases they were running away.  They apparently knew that they
  were no match for our superior technology and practical skills.
  This made me feel much better.  A couple of planes were missing in
  action, but one had suffered engine failure over Iraq and the other
  was not known.  I figured some damn Iraqi gunner got lucky.  I knew
  that a special unit of helicopters and commando's had been formed to
  search for and rescue any of our downed pilots, so I said a little
  prayer for them and as it turned out, most of them were recovered
  before they became POW's.

  But a few were captured and tortured and put on display for the
  American people.  I just want to state for the record that I think
  that any political or military leader who would do that kind of
  thing to combatants like myself is lower than pond scum and I hope
  more than anything that this Saddam guy is captured after the war
  and then put on trial for his war crimes.  He's using terrorism,
  military action, even ecological terror to have things his way.  If
  the world is going to survive the next several hundred years, we're
  going to have to treat these power-hungry dictators for what they
  are, war criminals.  It's the only way to make sure that this sort
  of thing doesn't happen over and over again. I just wish that the
  kids demonstrating at home would realize that we're doing this for
  them.

?"CHAPTER THREE"?"ORDER FORM"?SOUVENIRS?BEGINNING?CATALOG

*

:"CHAPTER THREE"

|CHAPTER THREE




  My name is Lt. Captain Mike McCormick.  I've been in the Air Force
  for about ten years.  I'm part of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing out
  of Lakenheath, England.  We fly a very versatile and effective
  fighter/bomber, the F-111, also known as the 'Aardvark'.  This is a
  very beautiful plane. It's the only one in our Air Force that have
  swing-wings. This means, they can be swept forward for an easier
  take off and landing and better control in bombing missions or they
  can be swept all the way back for air combat and maximum speed.
  With this very effective design we can be used for very important
  and precise bombing missions.  We have a night flying capability and
  an infra-red imaging system that gives us a clear, magnified view of
  our targets in day or night and any kind of weather.  We can carry
  conventional or nuclear bombs.  We have the best radar systems in
  the world and we're powered by two 25,000 lb thrusters, the Pratt &
  Whitney TF-30-100.  The plane seats two, the pilot and the WSO,
  weapons systems officer.  This way I concentrate on flying and my
  WSO can concentrate on hitting the target.

  We're the same group that put that other two-bit dictator in his
  place, Moammar 'Quadafi Duck', as we used to call him. We have an
  even more daffy leader, Saddam Hussein who were going after today.
  This guy, of course, makes Moammar look like Florence Nightingale.
  I want to say up front that I'm glad there are protesters in our
  country making all that noise about peace.  I love peace too and I
  hope someday that we do really 'Give Peace a Chance', to quote the
  popular song.  I think that this world can use a little more peace
  and prosperity.  I hate the fact that some of my bombs are killing
  or injuring a few Iraqi children or innocent by-standers.  I can't
  help that.  I don't lose sleep over it.

  I just hope that someday we can all learn to solve our problems
  through some other less destructive means.  History teaches,
  unfortunately, that men like Saddam Hussein don't have the same
  attitude about the sacredness of life that we have in this country
  and, therefore, if left to his own devices, people like him will
  bring this kind of pain, suffering, destruction on many more of us
  if there is no force like ours to stop him in his tracks.  The great
  part of our country is that there are others who see the situation
  differently and they have the right to voice their concerns and
  opinions.  But the vast majority of people on the planet, at least
  for the time being, approve of the way we're handling the situation.
  I just hope we continue to handle it properly and continue to have
  this kind of support.

  We spent the first five months of this war just sitting around at
  the base, waiting for the order to attack.  In the time we had to
  shine up our equipment, drill, train, play cards, eat, sleep, etc,
  we all had a great deal of time to think about the war that we knew
  would probably come eventually.  And when you sit in a God-forsaken
  country like Saudi Arabia, you begin to really appreciate your own
  country.  The Saudi's wouldn't allow us to drink any alcoholic
  beverages.  They wouldn't allow us to watch the movies that anyone
  can watch back home.  They wouldn't even allow the bible to be on
  their soil.  I thought about all this and I wondered just who or
  what we were risking our lives to save.  It's a strange state of
  affairs when the United States is required to commit money and lives
  to save the likes of these filthy rich Sheiks of Arabia.  It seems
  to me that they're nothing more than camel herders who happened to
  find themselves sitting on billions of barrels of a substance that
  is sorely required in country's like ours - and that is obviously
  why we were here.  I didn't like it much, but I was willing to do my
  job, because war is never pretty.  It's never very much fun.  It's
  very rarely for a cause that means anything in the long view.

  World War II was different.  We were saving great nations like
  France and Italy and Britain and many others from a true homicidal
  maniac, Adolph Hitler.  But in all the thousands of wars throughout
  history, this is the only one I can think of that was worth the cost
  of all those lives and all that money and all that damage to the
  environment.  This was not that kind of a war.  It was being
  justified because Saddam threatened our way of life, but I have to
  agree with the protesters to the extent that they say that it's a
  war so that we don't have to pay 2 dollars per gallon.  It's a damn
  shame, but in reality, maybe we should be paying 2 dollars or even 3
  dollars per gallon, because this would stimulate the discovery and
  development of what they call 'alternative energy sources*, and
  there's lots of these believe me.

  Like I say, I would never object like this to my superior officers.
  Indeed, the only reason I'm saying it now is because the publisher
  has sworn to use fictitious names in these articles.  I like that
  anonymity because it allows me to speak my mind without fear of
  ruining my career in the Air Force.  Yes, I'll stay in the Air Force
  because I'm looking forward to taking the great retirement benefits
  when I'm about forty years old.  I'll be able to work at another job
  and collect my retirement pay from the service which is very
  attractive.  I love my country, but I honestly don't know what I'd
  be doing right now if it weren't for the great benefits they give
  the veterans of the four services. There's no other country in the
  world who is so generous. But even if it weren't for the benies, I
  would probably still be sitting here in the war zone doing what I'm
  doing. Why?  Because I've always been a lover of adventure and I
  don't think I could stand to spend my adult life behind a desk in a
  more peaceful type of business.

  The war is very popular right now, probably because there have not
  been many casualties.  I think Saddam* is correct, however, in
  assuming that the war would be much less popular once the news
  coverage starts to display hundreds and then thousands of body bags.
  I hope for the sakes of my friends in all the services that this
  never happens.  I hope that they find another way out of this mess.
  They say that if we keep up the air war, there may never be a need
  to send in the ground troops which is where there would be the
  highest number of casualties.  I'm willing to fly until I drop if it
  means that I will be saving the lives of my fellow servicemen.  I
  will stay and make the sacrifices that are necessary.  I would
  gladly forego seeing my family and being in my beloved country for
  another year, maybe even two years, if it meant that no American
  ground troops would have to be killed in combat.  But, I'm not so
  sure that this is the best kind of motivation to be here.  I'm
  beginning to think that there has to be a better way to solve our
  problems in this world.

  We never see the real damage that we cause from several thousand
  feet in the air, but we're aware of what happens to the poor
  innocent people of Iraq.  I don't believe that the average Iraqi
  citizen truly supports a maniac who would kill every last one of
  them for his own personal gain.  I don't think they are getting the
  kind of a deal we get in our own country.  I just wish the average
  American would really appreciate the great amount of freedom that
  they do enjoy comparatively speaking.  And at times like this, it
  truly irritates me that less than half of the registered voters ever
  bother to go to the polls and exercise their greatest freedom.
  Everyone in the world has to demand more control over their
  governments.  The Iraqis have to take responsibility for the jerk
  they have leading them to their deaths and we, in the Western
  nations have to take more responsibility for the leaders we have.
  We have to do more than just give lip service to our great country
  in great patriotic times like this.  We have to participate in the
  process.  We have to give them notice that we are watching and
  monitoring and thinking about what they do in our name around the
  world.

  Well, that's all from my soap box.  Every time I shoot my mouth off
  like that, I stop and thank God that I live in a country that allows
  me to shoot my mouth off like that. When you've spent a few days in
  a country like Saudi Arabia, you really appreciate all of our
  American freedoms.  If you had something like published in Saudi
  Arabia and speaking about the Saudi government, you'd have your
  tongue cut out, and I'm not kidding.  I personally witnessed a
  be-heading a few months ago.  The poor guy was accused of stealing a
  camel, and he couldn't afford an attorney.  The trial was very
  brief, one day, in fact, and the poor 'b......d' lost his head in a
  public square.  It was truly appalling.  I lost my lunch after
  watching this spectacle.  They actually use the same kind of
  execution technique they used hundreds of years ago.  A very large
  fellow walked over with a huge, razor-sharp sword.  He took one big
  slice in the air and cut the man's head without severing the neck
  completely.  This way the head didn't roll away unceremoniously
  littering the street.

  Well, despite all these questions, I'm still here doing my job.  I
  give thanks that this war is not as bad as the Viet Nam War.  In
  Viet Nam, we had no business dropping bombs on people who were
  fighting to overthrow French Colonialism. We were once a colony of
  Britain.  For some reason, our government decided to fight on the
  side of the French way back in 1960 after the French began to lose
  their colony of South Viet Nam.  Now, this was an obvious mistake on
  the part of our government.  I allow them one mistake of this
  magnitude, but I wouldn't want to allow them another!  I hope this
  Gulf War is not another.

  Well, that's war.  War is hell!  It's never fun, never glamorous.
  It's not like it is in the movies.  In the movies, people die with a
  grunt or a groan and that's it. In real life, people die, usually
  after several moments or even hours of extreme pain and suffering.
  I've watched many war movies and it makes me mad the way they show
  how great and how exciting it is to be in a war.  I already said
  that I enjoy the adventure of it, but you have to realize that I'm a
  jet pilot.  I have to face no real danger.  If I'm killed, it will
  be an instantaneous type of thing.  I'll die from an artillery
  explosion near my cockpit or from a missile up my ass.  I don't have
  to worry about dying from stepping on a mine or from a bullet in the
  chest, or from any number of ways that I don't even want to think
  about.  I just wanted to get that off my chest because I know that a
  great many people may think that the story of this war may seem like
  glorifying war and that's the last thing I want to do.

  Like I say, we sat around for months before the war and thought
  about stuff like this.  Few of us ever wavered, however, from doing
  our duty and I think that's because we come from a nation of very
  great people.  We endure.  We do our duty.  You can depend on the
  American citizen.  This is why everyone wants to live in America and
  they're killing themselves to try to get into the United States.
  Well, one day, all of a sudden, we had to stop thinking about all
  this and we had to commit ourselves to the battle.  I was ready for
  this because of the greatest training of any military organization
  anywhere in the world.  Much could be said about being prepared for
  anything, and this country certainly is.

  We received our orders and were debriefed on the morning of the
  sixteenth of January.  We discovered that we were going to be the
  arm of the military that would attempt to render the enemy's Air
  Force totally ineffective.  My mission was to fly to three different
  airfields in Iraq and bomb them so that the Iraqi Air Force would
  not be a factor in the upcoming battle.  I liked this strategy.  I
  knew that if we could neutralize the enemy Air Force, our ground
  troops would have a much easier time of it later on.  I liked
  hearing what I was hearing.  I knew that we would have a very
  difficult task, but if we could surprise the Iraqi Air Force and
  destroy them on the ground we would be victorious. It was as simple
  as that.  I knew that our technology was much more advanced than
  theirs and I hoped that we would indeed catch them by total
  surprise.

  We did!  We flew over Iraq and we could tell that they were totally
  surprised.  Our Stealth fighters had been highly successful, weren't
  even detected, and obliterated their largest air warning systems.
  Our F-4 Phantom jets had gone in behind them and they were not shot
  down in any great numbers, because of the Stealth missions and so
  they were in turn able to destroy more of the enemies radar
  stations. And now it was our turn.  The guys who had gone before had
  taken out much of their ability to see us and shoot us down, so I
  knew that we would not be in as much danger as the previous waves of
  jets.  And it would now be our very great pleasure to shoot up the
  enemy's Air Force so that we would have complete air superiority and
  then be able to do just about anything we wished over there.

  Our Squadron had a total of ten ships in it.  We were dispersed all
  over the desert so that the enemy could not make a big score on our
  resources with one of his SCUD missiles.  (By the way, I heard that
  'SCUD' stands for Saddam Cowering Underneath Debris.)  We had to
  circle the base a few times so that our ten planes could form up in
  the now familiar wings like the way geese fly in formation.  We flew
  in two wings of five jets.  I often wonder what a great sight we
  must have been from the ground and what a terrible sight for the
  enemy to see hundreds of these formations flying unchallenged over
  his skies.  At any rate, we chattered back and forth about the kind
  of celebrations we would have when we got back to base.  Of course,
  none of this included alcohol or women due to the Saudi objections,
  I've already stated.

  About half an hour into our mission, we got within sight of our
  targets, three enemy air bases scattered in and around Baghdad.
  Each wing would take on a base.  Two of my wingmen would stay high
  in the sky to fly cover and make sure we were not surprised by enemy
  jets we couldn't see.  We were being very careful not to lose any of
  our friends.  This meant that these guys were armed mostly with
  air-to-air missiles which would not be very effective on ground
  targets.  The other three of us were armed with 2,000 lb
  laser-guided bombs and Rockeye anti-armor cluster bombs. These two
  munitions would prove to be very effective in knocking out the
  hardened shelters in which they placed their best fighters, and in
  rendering their airfield inoperable for several days or even weeks.

  I remember thinking about how happy I was to be flying this kind of
  mission, but I was also very desirous of finding any evidence of
  Saddam Hussein himself.  I wanted to be the guy who dropped a big
  surprise on him and put him out of the decision loop in his poor
  unfortunate country.  I kept an eye-peeled for anything that might
  give us some information about his whereabouts, but alas there were
  no cars driving around with a neon sign spelling his name.  If there
  were, I'm sure one of us wouldn't have been able to resist taking it
  out.  I think if they had sought Mr. Hitler out later in the 30's
  and assassinated him, this would have saved the world a great many
  million lives and so much devastation. My main problem with war, I
  thought, as I approached my target, was that it took away from the
  peaceful pursuit of happiness.  What I really wanted to do was to
  get back to my family and get my life back on track with my family.
  Well, my Weapons Systems Officer, Lt. Jim Curry, yelled at me that
  our targets were now approaching over the horizon. Our two wings
  split up as planned and my group headed for the airfield designated
  as 'Duckpond 13'. The other wing went after 'Duckpond 12'.  If we
  had ammo left, and were unopposed, we could hit 'Duckpond 14' as
  well.  We were flying just a couple hundred feet off the deck and
  were very comfortable at this height because we all had what's known
  as FLIR, or forward-sensing infra red. This displayed the landscape
  like an eerie moonscape on our instrument panel. The plane's
  controls were tuned to keep a specified distance over this landscape
  at any speed.  We were in contact with the flight of F-111's up at
  higher altitudes and they kept telling us not to worry since there
  was no sight of enemy planes.  Some had been spotted on the edge of
  our radar's range or about a 100 miles away and they were flying
  away from the battle.

  The airfield came up much faster than I'd imagined.  I had to
  quickly give my wingmen their instructions to go in after me.  We
  split apart and I sped up while my buddies slowed their approach
  just a little.  In a matter of seconds the airfield was just below
  and I had to maneuver with all my skills to get my sights lined up
  on a row of jets lined up at the side of the runway.  They weren't
  manned by anybody. I poured several hundred rounds of cannon fire at
  them and I believe I hit most of them.  Then I heard Jim, my MSO,
  drop our laser guided bomb on the hangar at the end of the runway.
  Then, I yanked back on the stick and pushed the plane to its
  vertical limit.  I watched as the crosshairs on my windscreen
  wandered to the center of the hangar and within a fraction of a
  second, it went up in a big black cloud.  You can't hear the sound
  of the explosion traveling at this speed until several seconds after
  you see the smoke. It rocked my plane and nearly jolted me out of my
  seat. These bombs were extremely powerful.  It almost seemed like a
  small nuke hit the place.

  As I continued rocketing straight up, over my shoulder I could see a
  plane just taking off on the runway below and behind me.  If I
  didn't do something quickly, he might be able to get off a few shots
  in our direction and I wasn't going to let that happen.  You had to
  admire his pluck.  He was the only enemy pilot who had any that day.
  Here he was trying to get up to take on at least five American
  planes who had him in their sights.  I gave him a mental badge of
  courage or stupidity, I wasn't sure which.  I pulled all the way
  back on the stick and then hard over to the right so that I
  barrel-rolled over the loop and flipped over at the top so that I
  could come down behind the plucky little fellow just getting off the
  ground at the other end of the airfield.

  I had the advantage of a few hundred feet even though he was pushing
  his nose up into the sky as hard as he could.  It was a MIG-29 and I
  was happy to have the chance to get in behind him so quickly because
  a MIG-29 is the only plane we knew could match us pound for pound
  for maneuverability and firepower.

  I was so close I could see the back of his head in the cockpit.  It
  took me a split second to decide whether to hit him with cannon fire
  or an AIM 9-L missile.  In that split second, I hoped that he might
  eject, but he was too low and I knew he could just as easily pull
  out either left or right and evade my attack.  I don't know why he
  didn't do either. To this day, I wonder if he knew I was behind him
  or perhaps that he simply didn't have the training and experience to
  make the necessary maneuvers.  I worried that it might have been
  some fifteen year old kid in that cockpit.  There are many nights
  when I wake up in a cold sweat over this question.  At the same
  moment, I figured I was so close to him the resulting explosion of
  his ship could damage mine if I used the missile, so I pushed the
  button on the top of the stick and I saw the shells tear through the
  tail and then the forward part of the fuselage.  I cringed as I saw
  his head turn into a crimson fountain coating the interior of his
  cockpit with blood.  I yelled for him to eject, but it was too late.
  There would be nothing left of his brain to make that decision.  At
  least it was quick and he probably never felt a thing.  One minute
  he was in this world a part of a strange thing called war, and the
  next moment he was united with his God.

  The debris of the MIG-29 drifted down to Earth in a silent splash in
  the sand.  My wingmen were yelling at me and congratulating me for
  the 'kill'.  They were just finishing up their bombing run and
  between the three of us, we had splattered five or six jets all over
  the runway and then we'd completely obliterated all the hangars and
  outbuildings connected with the airfield and now we would make one
  more sweep over the field and I watched as Jim dropped our cluster
  bombs.  I always watched these things in total wonder.  It was
  almost beautiful, the way they made a neat little pattern of
  explosions on the ground.  They made hundreds of small craters and I
  remember thinking that it looked like the surface of the moon down
  there.  If any planes took off from that airfield in the next month
  or two, I would have been very surprised.

  We made one additional pass and poured a few more hundred rounds
  into the hulls of the planes sitting on the tarmac. We wanted to
  make sure that few if any of these planes would ever be used in
  combat.  I don't believe that the enemy has the spare parts
  available to repair these planes.  From what I saw, even our ground
  crews would have trouble getting them back into operation within a
  month.  We didn't waste any more bombs on them because we felt we
  could do more damage on the second airfield with them rather than
  pound the rubble below into dust.  It would not be the most
  efficient use of the munitions.  To put it another way, we would be
  more cost-effective in battle if we saved the ammo for the next
  batch of planes.  The ones at 'Duckpond 13' down there were
  certainly not going anywhere in a hurry.

  I heard over the intercom that our other squadron was having the
  same basic level of success at 'Duckpond 12'. They did not have the
  added fun of shooting down a plane trying to take to the air,
  however.  I was very happy for them. I was not truly thrilled at
  having to kill a fellow airman even if it was the enemy.  It was
  much nicer to have a nice clean mission destroying planes, unmanned
  and sitting out in the open and a few hangars that were probably
  deserted at the time.  If they weren't deserted, there would be a
  few very slow and stubborn people in that rubble.

  I radioed HQ about all our success, sent the other squadron back to
  base and told my guys that we had enough ammo left to take out
  'Duckpond 14'.  I asked them if they were game and they all yelled
  an enthusiastic affirmation of my plan. We were all pretty excited
  at the smooth way things were going.  HQ still had no evidence on
  any radar system of enemy aircraft attempting to take us on in
  combat.  In a way, I had to marvel at Saddam's intelligence
  gathering ability.  He had obviously been briefed correctly in that
  none of his pilots were a match for any of us hotshots of the USAF.
  He must have decided that it was better for him propaganda wise to
  look like he was the underdog and that's how he arrived at the
  decision not to fight.  It just would have confirmed what we all
  knew about his military forces. They were not up to snuff with a
  truly modern and effective force.

  I just barely had time to get permission for the next stage of our
  attack, when the target came up in our scopes. 'Duckpond 14' was
  just like the other two with all their ducks lined up in a row on
  the side of the runway.  I knew they were not decoys because they
  reflected our radar beams just like the real thing.  Decoy's made of
  wood or anything other than fighter plane materials would echo back
  in a strange pattern that our radar system was 'intelligent' enough
  to detect.  These planes were the real Mccoy.  We strafed them by
  flying in one after the other just like the last time, with two of
  our wingmen flying cover at altitude just in case.

  Jim had just dropped our last laser-guided bomb when I noticed
  something very strange a way off in the distance.  I had to turn my
  attention away for a few seconds while I watched my partner guide
  the laser pulse at the hangar and watched as it blew itself to
  smithereens.  I told my other two wingmen to finish off the rest of
  the targets on the ground and I flew off in the direction of the
  twin lights I had seen moving off in the distance.  I radioed in
  that I was in pursuit of two 'unfriendlies'.  I pressed a button on
  my panel that electronically asked for verification that the targets
  in my sights were not friendly planes.  We have what's known as IFF,
  'If Friend or Foe' in our planes.  But before I got angry at these
  guys and gave them a taste of my missiles, I wanted to be certain.
  The signal came back verifying my own instrumentation.  Indeed, they
  were enemy planes, two of them, flying fast and low towards the
  Eastern horizon. They had probably escaped from 'Duckpond 14' and it
  meant that the hangar I had just trashed was probably empty of its
  valuable weapons.  This made me angry, but then I realized that I
  could probably get them both anyway with a little creativity and
  stealth.

  I told Jim to shut off our radar so that they wouldn't pick it up on
  their own systems.  I pushed the throttle all the way forward.  They
  did not have the advantage of the terrain following equipment I had
  and so they would be forced to fly much slower than I would.  And
  sure enough, within a few minutes I could tell that we were closing
  the gap.  I checked my fuel tanks.  If I caught them within the next
  five or ten minutes, we'd have enough fuel to get home.  After that,
  we'd have to ditch in enemy territory.  We didn't want to do that. I
  turned on all afterburners and I thought I could feel the desert
  turn to glass under the heat of my engines.  I felt great even
  though we had no air cover over us now.  And my buddies were just
  finishing off the last airfield and would be heading home by now.
  Jim and I were all alone deep in enemy territory and we both sat
  back and enjoyed the sensation we would probably never have again in
  our lives.

  We both felt invincible.  Here we were in the best all-around attack
  fighter in the world.  Oh sure, all the hotshot F-15 pilots thought
  they had the best plane in the world, but they did not have the same
  feeling for being a warrior as I did.  I had always felt that the
  F-15 was overly committed in its design for air-to-air combat.  My
  'Aardvark' was just as comfortable in the air combat role as it was
  in attacking ground targets as we had just proven.  I flipped a
  switch on my panel and the wings of my beautiful plane slowly and
  elegantly swept themselves all the way back for maximum speed.
  Airplanes, to me, are like ladies.  Some of them prefer to be with
  just one kind of man.  I always felt that my little 'Aardvark' could
  'get it on' with just about anything that came her way.  I was
  pondering all kinds of mysteries of love and war when I realized
  that we were almost within missile shot of the two Iraqi jets.  Our
  Aim-9L missiles can travel for about forty miles before they use up
  all their fuel.

  Jim let me know that we had them in our sights and he requested
  permission to fire.  I gave it to him with a nod and I watched
  intently as the two triangular shapes on my radar screen were
  rapidly being followed by our missile shapes.  They hit home at the
  same time and there were two large circles of light on our screens.
  We'd gotten them both.  They didn't even know we were coming up
  behind them. I had hoped again that they would eject in time, but
  they didn't.  Jim and I hollered about the successful double kill
  and we chattered excitedly all the way back to base.  When we got
  there we were greeted by the rest of the boys in our wing.  They had
  heard that we had the most kills of the day. I was quite relieved to
  be back by now.  Suddenly I felt that I had taken all the risks I
  wanted to that day.  But it was early yet.  We would take a few
  hours nap and be back at the attack twice more that long day.


?"CHAPTER FOUR"?"ORDER FORM"?SOUVENIRS?BEGINNING?CATALOG

*

:"CHAPTER FOUR"
|CHAPTER FOUR






  My name is Captain Ben Benjamino.  I've only been in the Air Force
  for about 8 years.  I'm assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Base in
  North Carolina.  I'm lucky enough to pilot the most superior
  military plane in the world.  The F-15E Strike Eagle.  My jet is
  equipped with the best radar in the world, the APG-70.  We also have
  the LANTRIN system, (Low Altitude Targeting for Night) as well as
  FLIR (Forward Looking Infra-Red).  We also have something called
  TSD*, (Tactical Situation Display).  This is a lot of complicated
  equipment and so to run it all we have a second crewman, the Weapons
  Systems Officer (WSO) seated behind me.  The combination of the
  APG-70, LANTRIN, and the TSD gives my plane a remarkable capability
  to find and strike ground targets with great precision, day or
  night, and in adverse weather conditions. The F-15 can also carry
  additional weapons on the stub pylons on its external conformal fuel
  tanks.  It can carry almost any weapon in the Air Force inventory.
  Strike Eagle crews like to say, "If they make it, we can carry it!".

  Our mission was to take out part of Saddam's NBC, (Nuclear,
  Biological, Chemical) war making apparatus.  We were given six
  factory sites in the Southern portion of Iraq and two near Baghdad
  that our wing would be responsible for eliminating.  You couldn't be
  flying a better plane for this kind of mission.  We are the fastest
  plane in the air so none of Iraq's fighters were going to be able to
  shoot us down.  In fact, we were all kind of hoping that we would be
  challenged by a few MIG-29's, the best of the Soviet fleet, so that
  we could have some fun.  Unfortunately, the Iraqi pilots knew that
  it would be suicide to try and take on any American plane.  If they
  did, we would swarm all over them. We would have early warning of
  their direction and location. We would have them in our sights long
  before they even knew where we were.  If they did surprise us we
  could jam their radar systems so that their weapons would be almost
  totally ineffective against us.  And with our superior flying
  skills, even if they got past all this, we would still win in any
  kind of a dogfight.

  The only tough part of my mission was the long wait.  We'd gotten
  here just after Saddam invaded Kuwait, in early August and here it
  was January when we finally got the orders to go.  Now, that it's
  over, I'm glad we had to wait so long because the President wanted
  to wait until he had all his forces in place.  All throughout
  history the road to ruin is lined with military men who moved too
  quickly.  Most people don't realize that even in these modern times,
  an army moves on its stomach.  This actually means that you have to
  have the means to feed and supply an army with food and ammunition
  in order to be certain of victory.  If we had invaded any earlier,
  we probably would still have the victory, but it would be much less
  certain.

  The waiting was murder.  Let me emphasize this.  We had very little
  diversion.  Because of the Moslem restrictions on living the kind of
  life I would call, a 'wholesome American lifestyle', we couldn't
  drink.  We couldn't read, we couldn't watch TV.  Of course we didn't
  have our wives either.  It was miserable for me.  Back home, I had
  the ideal life.  I missed it very much.  We would fly and talk about
  flying all day long and then I had the luxury of going home to my
  beautiful wife and kids.  It's amazing how much you appreciate
  things when they're not available to you.  I had never been on such
  a long, lonely mission like this one before and I hope that I never
  have to again.  I'm real glad it's over.  There was one compensation
  for it all.  I got to be a part of history.

  I think that as a result of what we did over there, the Nuclear
  threat in the area is postponed for a decade at least and perhaps
  much longer if we can get Saddam out of there for good. anything.
  The peace of this planet depends on our ability to limit the spread
  of nuclear weapons.  A crazy idiot like Saddam is likely to rear his
  ugly head many, many times in a century and with nuclear
  capabilities, we could have a real problem.  Imagine what the world
  will be like when dozens of countries get this terrible and awesome
  weapon.  The ones we unleashed on Iraq, conventional weapons were
  terrible enough.  There were many innocent women and children killed
  in this war and I regret that very much, but 'War is Hell'.
  Everyone knows that and when you live in a country with a crazy man
  for a leader you take the risk of being killed in either of several
  different ways, none of them very pleasant.  I've heard stories of
  this crazy tyrant jailing and torturing children and then killing
  them, sometimes with his own hands.  He even held many prisoners in
  this way until a ransom was paid by the family. He's nothing more
  than a terrorist.  He's no leader.

  If there only a way to guarantee that people like this could never
  take over a whole country.  A city, a town, a village, something
  without an army, would be acceptable, but never an entire country.
  I don't how to do that but I hope somebody is working on the
  problem, because without a solution, we're going to go the way of
  the dinosaurs.  It may seem strange to hear a military man like me
  talk this way, but the greatest military leaders were constantly
  warning people of the horrors of war because they knew about them
  first hand. General Patton felt like me, so did the great General
  Eisenhower.

  Well, you want to hear about our mission to Iraq.  It was fun, I
  must say.  We knew that it would difficult for the Iraqis to put up
  a strong defense because the Stealth guys had taken out much of
  their central nervous system and the F-4 phantoms had taken out many
  of their nearest and best airfields and many of their planes had
  been destroyed on the ground.  We did not know that it would be such
  a cake walk, however.  But it was.  We took off and we immediately
  were in touch with the AWACs planes circling high above and keeping
  an eagle-eye out for enemy planes.  Whenever they spotted some, they
  were always heading in the opposite direction from the action.
  That's how we knew that they were smart enough not to take us on.
  If Saddam had given the order not to engage us, it was the only
  smart thing he'd done since starting this war.

  We flew for about a half-hour, maybe less and we came up on our
  first target, a chemical weapons factory out in the middle of the
  desert.  It was protected by anti-aircraft batteries which circled
  the entire complex.  As soon as we got in range, they put up a hell
  of a show.  I decided that we should render them as ineffective as
  possible, so being the wing leader, I ordered everyone to follow me
  and to strafe all their gun positions.  We had the advantage of them
  because we could see them, every single one of them. We could even
  see their people running back and forth and loading the ammo into
  the guns.  They, however, could not see us.  We were often past them
  by several hundred meters before they realized that they were being
  blown apart by our bombs which floated down behind us.

  Most of their missile batteries were so exposed that all we needed
  to do was shoot a few hundred rounds of cannon fire in on them and
  it was enough to blow the missile sky high. Since they were made of
  solid propellant, this served as a great explosive for us to ignite
  very easily with our tracers from the gattling gun.  I loved taking
  their 'AAA' this way even though this was not part of our battle
  plan. As soon as I saw that it worked so well, I decided that I was
  putting it into my battle plan.  If the brass didn't like it, they
  could relieve me and send me home.  I didn't much care for
  bureaucratic bullshit.  If I felt I had an advantage over the enemy
  that the brass in the Pentagon had not counted on, I was going to
  use it and I'll be damned if they were going to tell me how much
  risk to take.  If these gun batteries were out of the way, then we
  were much safer in the rest of the mission.

  So, this is how it went.  For the next several minutes we flew in
  low and continued to destroy every missile and anti-aircraft battery
  within striking distance of our attack.  There about twenty of them,
  and we nearly used up all our cannon rounds taking them out, but it
  was worth it. Now, that we had complete safety in the sky, I
  directed my wing to form up again for a bombing attack on the
  weapons factory.  We flew up to about ten thousand feet and, one by
  one, we dropped our laser guided bombs down on the site.  I didn't
  care about how many people might be inside because we had given them
  plenty of time, with our previous attacks on the gun batteries, to
  clear out of the factory.  I mean, they must have known that this
  was our main target.  If they weren't bright enough to realize this,
  I couldn't really sympathize.

  Once the laser guided bombs are dropped, it's just a simple matter
  to float around up there and watch as the thing is guided to its
  target by the laser beam we have glued to the target.  There's
  nothing can stop the inevitable destruction of what we want to
  destroy, especially if you don't come up to take us on with
  airplanes.  I couldn't help but feel how surprised they must have
  been to see us come in on them in the middle of the night, pick out
  all their most effective defenses and eliminate them without taking
  a scratch ourselves and then just taking our precious time to
  destroy their factories.  It was really something.  In World War II,
  a bomber pilot had very little chance of coming home alive because
  the enemy flack was very effective and the bombers were so slow,
  they were sitting ducks up there.  In our speedy little
  fighter/bombers, it would take a very lucky shot to get us, and of
  course a few of them got lucky once in a while and they have about
  eighteen of our pilots as prisoners.  Out of thousands of sorties,
  eighteen planes is not a very significant percentage.

  And that's pretty much all there was to it that first day. We
  followed this factory up by visiting a Nuclear weapons plant on the
  North side of Baghdad and I used the same tactics of taking out
  their 'AAA' batteries before dropping our bombs.  We had run out of
  cannon rounds by this time, so I directed my guys to use their
  maverick missiles, great for this kind of shooting, and when we had
  run out of these we used our Sparrow Air-to-Air missiles.  This left
  us pretty much defenseless if we were attacked by Iraqi jets, but
  there was no evidence of any intent to do so on their parts and even
  if they had, we could still out run them.  I knew we could stay away
  from them long enough until I could call a few of our friends in to
  take them off our backs, if that should become necessary.  Needless
  to say, it never did. Since they had no intention of attacking us,
  they had no way of knowing our defensive condition.

  On the next run, we had a biological weapons research facility just
  a few minutes away on the Northern side of Baghdad. This presented
  us with a bit of a problem since it was right in between two
  buildings that were dormitories or apartment buildings, probably for
  the staff who were there to manufacture a weapon of incredible
  cruelty, death by a terrible disease.  This weapon would presumably
  be dropped on our men on the ground and could conceivably turn the
  tide of war.  If several thousand of our men were to die from this
  weapon, American public opinion may have turned away from the
  President's desire and we might be forced to withdraw.  We in the
  Air Force did not intend for these terrible events to take place.
  We knew that we would have to be very careful not to take out the
  civilian targets just a few hundred feet away from the research lab.

  For these reasons, we were equipped with GB-15 smart* bombs. They
  are 2,000 lbs of high explosives with a TV camera in the nose.  We
  can watch the glide path of the bomb from our cockpits and maneuver
  the bomb with instructions from our plane until we guide it right
  exactly to the target designated.  I flew the plane to within a few
  miles of the research lab and then let my WSO take over.  At this
  point, all I had to do was to fly the plane near the target so that
  my WSO could guide the bomb the rest of the way.  This, in my
  opinion, was the best military invention in recent history, because
  even though the area around this research lab was heavily defended
  with 'AAA' batteries, we did not have to get very close to it.  Our
  bombs could glide in silently to their target while we watch it and
  guide it from a safe distance.  It was also true that we could take
  out the 'AAA' batteries, however, since these batteries were on the
  top of hotels and in the parking lots of office buildings, we would
  have killed innocent civilians and we were not prepared to do that.

  We managed to hit all our targets that morning in much the same
  manner.  When we got back to the base, we looked the plane over and
  we found a half dozen small holes in the fuselage which were
  repaired before our next scheduled sortie some four hours later.  I
  would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the folks who
  build our weapons systems.  I'm alive today because my plane is
  reliable, effective and it does exactly what it was designed to do
  without putting the pilot and crew in any unnecessary danger.  I
  think that our country is one of the very few who considers the
  safety of its fighting men.  Life to our way of looking at things is
  sacred and very precious.  No other military system in the world
  treats its military people this way and I think this is why we are
  usually successful in all the many military campaigns that our
  nation has found it necessary to engage in.

  I've never been much of a 'rah-rah' kind of wild-eyed patriot, but I
  am very proud to be an American and proud to have the opportunity to
  fly the best fighting aircraft in the world for the best country in
  the world.  I wish that there didn't have to be wars like the one we
  have recently fought in, but that's the kind of world we live in.
  As long as war is considered to be a viable option for governments,
  we'd better be damned sure that we are always on the winning side
  and that the winning side is the correct side.


?"CHAPTER FIVE"?"ORDER FORM"?SOUVENIRS?BEGINNING?CATALOG


*

:"CHAPTER FIVE"
|CHAPTER FIVE





  My name is Colonel Harry Jacobs.  I fly an Air Force A-10,
  Thunderbolt, affectionately known as the Warthog*.  We're part of
  the 23rd Tactical Fighter Wing out of Englund Air Force Base,
  Louisiana.  We fly the most dangerous aircraft in the world if you
  are enemy troops deployed in and around armored vehicles.  This
  plane is the last of the 'stick and rudder' airplanes and we like it
  that way.  It was mainly designed around our main weapon, the
  General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger.  This is a 30mm Gatling gun.  Many
  modern jet fighters and attack planes carry 30mm cannon, but none of
  them approach the GAU-8/A's power.  It fires a .78 pound, 30mm
  armor piercing projectile at a muzzle velocity of 3,500 feet per
  second. This is a very heavy projectile for an automatic cannon, and
  that is a very high velocity. And these are not ordinary armor
  piercing projectiles.  The armor piercing penetrators are fabricated
  from depleted uranium, an extremely dense material with outstanding
  armor piercing capability.  And what happens after the armor has
  been penetrated has to be seen to be believed!  Heated by the
  tremendous energy of the impact, the depleted uranium oxidizes
  rapidly and violently, spraying the inside of the armored vehicle
  with flaming metal fragments which ignite fuel and detonate
  ammunition. The A-10A carries 1,174 rounds of this ammunition, and
  the pilot can select one of two rates of fire, 2,100 or 4,200 rounds
  per minute.

  Impressive as that is, the A-10A can also carry 16,000 pounds of
  weapons.  These can include standard Mk 82, 83, and 84 bombs,
  Maverick missiles, laser guided bombs, Rock-eye anti-armor cluster
  munitions, Mk 82 Snakeye retarded bombs, many types of antipersonnel
  cluster munitions, quadruple U.S. Army Hellfire anti-tank missiles,
  and multiple 2.75 inch rocket pods.  The A-10A is designed to fly
  off the deck at altitudes of 50 to 100 feet.  Low altitude
  maneuverability is critical, and the A-10A has it. Ground attack at
  low altitude is not the safest mission in the world, but this plane
  is designed to be hit and survive it.  The pilot's seat is
  surrounded by a titanium armor "bathtub" which is designed to
  withstand Russian 23 mm cannon shells.  Fuel is carried in special
  tanks filled with reticulated foam to reduce the chances of serious
  fuel loss or fire if one of the tanks is hit.  And in an emergency,
  an A-10A can fly back to base with one engine out. If a squadron of
  A-10a's is mad at you, you're really going to know it!

  Our first missions were relatively unexciting.  We were deployed to
  take out stationary ground targets that might impede the progress of
  the main attack wings of our Air Force.  This means that we hit
  several anti-aircraft batteries, artillery positions, communications
  and command centers as well as any large troop concentrations that
  were moving around at night.  Since the Iraqis were mostly dug in at
  this time, there weren't many moving targets for us to hit and I
  like to go after moving targets because they represent much more of
  a challenge.  Also, because the A-10A is not a very fast plane, only
  450 miles per hour, we were not give very high priority targets at
  this time.  We found ourselves being shot at, and that was exciting,
  but we were not being shot at by anything really impressive.  If I'm
  going to risk my life in a war, I like to risk it for something of
  great military importance, therefore, these first days of the war
  were not my best.  I kept looking up at the guys flying the F-15's
  and the F-4's and wishing that I had one of those.  Thankfully, in
  the final, more important days of the war, we were being looked upon
  by the other flyboys as having the most fun because the A-10A was
  designed for supporting ground troops in battle.

  The ground troops need to be able to call in a plane such as mine
  whenever they feel threatened by enemy tanks and armored vehicles.
  The Iraqi military, even after the many weeks of heavy aerial
  bombardment by the coalition forces, still possessed many thousands
  of these kinds of weapons and they would have been a terrible threat
  if it weren't for the A-10A's.

  The most memorable mission I flew was the day that several
  battalions of our troops found themselves surrounded by Iraqi
  forces.  There had been a few days of bad weather and so our air
  forces were not a factor.  The enemy took this opportunity to move
  some of his tank battalions.  Our soldiers found themselves walking
  into an ambush for which they were not fully prepared.  The fighting
  was fierce. From our position a few hundred feet up, it looked like
  a very bloody battle was underway.  We had been called in by one of
  the guys down there and so our squadron of five Warthogs went in
  with full battle dress.

  When we arrived at the battle field deep in the Kuwait desert, we
  found that about a thousand of our troops were nearly out of
  ammunition and almost completely surrounded. They could not retreat
  and there were no other units in the area to come to their rescue.
  Many tanks and armored vehicles, from both sides, were littering the
  sand and the smoke clouds they were emitting were making visibility
  very difficult in spots.  From the looks of things, I'd say that our
  boys were giving much more than they got.  There was a ring of
  destroyed Iraqi tanks lined up for miles in all directions.  I think
  that our Bradley fighting vehicles and the M1A1 tanks must have
  taken out ten to twenty enemy vehicles for every one of ours that
  were destroyed.

  Finally, out of ammunition, our remaining tanks, approximately
  twenty five to thirty of them, were parked in a circle and in a
  small natural abutment of sand dunes, they were making their last
  stand.  From the North, mostly and partially from all other
  directions, the Iraqi tanks were advancing on our position.  We had
  a few self-propelled howitzers in the middle of the circle and they
  were peppering the Iraqi tanks coming toward them and making many
  good shots.  The enemy was still coming with about fifty tanks and
  almost as many armored personnel carriers.

  I flew over the battlefield in a huge circle so that I could take in
  everything that was happening.  By radio, I learned from an army
  lieutenant down below that they were almost totally out of ammo and
  were desperate for some kind of relief.  They had lost about half of
  their people and they could see the enemy approaching with hundreds
  of fresh re-enforcements.  This lieutenant was not very pleased with
  his situation and blamed intelligence for getting him into this
  mess.  I told him to relax and that help had arrived. He didn't
  think five ugly planes like ours could do the job, but I assured him
  that he would be back at his base in time for supper.

  My wing aircraft were close enough to see me gesture for attack
  formation.  We went in slow and easy and we fired our gattling guns
  at the lead tanks in the enemy column. I'd say that we put out of
  commission about fifteen of the enemy's T-72* Soviet tanks and
  BMP's.  They quickly realized that we were up there and began to
  break up into smaller groups so as to make smaller targets for us.
  I instructed my wingmen to follow me on our second pass and to use
  our radar homing missiles on the remaining tanks.

  It's truly amazing what happens when you hit a tank with one of our
  missiles.  It not only blows itself to bits, but the fifty-ton hunk
  of junk actually leaps off the ground about five feet.  The gun
  turret pops off like a piece of popcorn jumping out of the frying
  pan.  The gun itself melts like hot butter.  I was never prepared
  for this.  It made me real glad that I was on the giving end of
  these weapons.  They are truly awesome!

  We made pass after pass over the enemy's tank column and we used up
  all of our missiles and all of our cannon fire. We even dropped a
  few bombs on them as well.  We saw one tank after another become
  engulfed in flame and boiling smoke and fire.  It didn't appear to
  me that they had any armor at all on them at all.  They seemed like
  they were made of paper.  It was sad, in a way, for the Iraqi troops
  inside these things. One of the enemy got lucky, however, and he
  shot a stinger missile up at my wingman in the plane right behind
  me.  I remember feeling the shock wave as it blew his plane apart.
  We had all kinds of defensive systems, but in this kind of a close
  battle it was difficult to react to every situation as fast as you
  must and yet keep up the offensive pressure on the enemy positions.
  The pilot ejected, Major John Allworthy.  We tried to protect him
  when his parachute hit the ground, but the enemy's infantry swarmed
  all over him and we couldn't shoot anything at them without hitting
  him.  We had to let him go.  I could tell that he was all right, but
  it looked as though he was in a state of shock.

  We radioed into to Search & Rescue and gave them all the necessary
  information about the capture of Major Allworthy. We knew that these
  Special Forces Commandos would be airborne within minutes of our
  call for help.  If there was anyone who could help the Major on the
  ground, it was this squad.  They flew Apache helicopters and they
  were armed to the teeth.  When I saw them train near their base in
  Tennessee, I remember thinking that fifteen or twenty of these guys
  in World War II was probably all we needed.  They were mean and they
  themselves took no prisoners even though they were trained to go
  retrieve ours.  I tried to guess what their tactics would be in
  trying to find Major Allworthy.  By the time they got to the scene,
  he would be many miles from here.  I wished him luck and did a
  victory roll high over head so he could get the message that help
  was on the way.

  After about half an hour, it was all over.  The remaining tanks
  turned and headed off to the North.  I would have pursued the rest
  of them and pounded them into the sand, except that we were
  practically out of ammo by now.  In all, I believe we destroyed
  about forty tanks that day and dozens of armored personnel carriers
  and several artillery pieces. The sand actually ran red with their
  blood.

  Needless to say, my lieutenant down below was extremely grateful.
  Just as I had promised, they were back to base by dinner.  We had
  suffered some losses, but these paled in comparison to the enemy's
  losses.  I found out later from the lieutenant that he had suffered
  only a half dozen killed or wounded.  The Iraqis must have suffered
  several hundred, or perhaps as many as a thousand casualties that
  day.  I felt sorry for the dead and wounded, but in the final
  analysis, they had made the choice to be there that day.

  Yes, I know that there have been stories about execution squads in
  the rear areas of the Iraqi army, killing any soldier who tries to
  desert or to run away.  Even so, these people had allowed themselves
  to join Saddam's death squad at some point earlier on.  I think it's
  very important for all of us on this planet to take responsibility
  for our actions in life.  These people were dead, not as a result of
  our bullets and missiles and cannons, but because they had made the
  fateful decision to align themselves with death itself. They had
  chosen to place themselves in front of our bullets and missiles and
  cannons.  I did not make that choice for them.  Indeed, I had made a
  similar choice for myself, but I was not faced with the decision of
  joining an army headed by an insane dictator.  In their place,
  fighting for that lunatic Saddam, I don't believe that any sane
  person, or anyone with a conscience could make that kind of choice.
  I know this may sound a bit hard and cold, but I honestly believe
  that if everyone who thinks about joining any military organization
  would think about the true significance of what he or she is doing,
  the world would be far better off for it.



|THE END (OF PART ONE)


|EDITOR'S NOTE:

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  War, the most successful war in the history of the world!

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?SOUVENIRS?BEGINNING?CATALOG

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?"CHAPTER ONE"?"BACK TO THE BEGINNING"?CATALOG
*

:HOTWORD

  This is an example of a HOTWORD*.  Throughout this ELECTRONIC BOOK,
  whenever you use the UP-ARROW key to highlight a word with a - * -
  next to it, HIT ENTER AND a screen will pop up with additional
  information.
>.PAUSE []
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:SAM

  The SAM missile, (Surface to Air Missile), was supplied to the
  Iraqis by the Soviets.  It is about ten feet long and speeds to its
  target, US planes, guided by radar beams. American planes, however,
  are supplied with radar jamming electronics that confuse the
  guidance system of the SAM missiles which is why very few American
  planes have been shot down by these missiles.
>.PAUSE []
>.MACRO  [^HS]
*

:BASRA

  Basra is a town in the South East corner of Iraq which is
  strategically very important to Both Iran and Iraq.  It is situated
  on the Gulf and therefore provides access to a seaport.  Also, it is
  the center of one of Iraq's richest oil fields.  This city has been
  in the hands of no fewer than 252 countries in the last five
  thousand years.
>.PAUSE []
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:"F-117"

  The F-117 Stealth Fighter is designed with very oblique angles, is
  painted with a radar resistant paint, and has a special composite
  skin all to reflect radar waves up into the sky or down into the
  ground and away from the originating source of the waves, so as to
  render the plane almost invisible to enemy radar.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:BAGHDAD

  The capital of Iraq is in the Northern half of the country. It is
  the city that Saddam Hussein uses as his Command headquarters and is
  therefore a legitimate target of the war to enforce UN sanctions to
  get Iraq out of Kuwait.  In Baghdad, Saddam has built several
  underground bunkers that are built so strongly they could take a
  direct hit by an Atomic Bomb.  He changes his position every night
  so that U.S. forces can not know with certainty exactly where he is.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:'AAA'

  AAA is the term American pilots use to describe the entire range of
  anti-aircraft and artillery fire that is fired into the sky to deter
  them.  It has been very ineffective up to date because our planes
  are attacking at night and they are systematically going after radar
  guidance sites that help to aim these weapons. >.PAUSE >.MACRO [^HS]
>.pause
>.macro [^HS]
*

:FLIR

  FLIR or Forward Looking Infra-Red, is a system of electronic sensor
  and monitor similar to the technology used in many common everyday
  video camera's, AND MAY BE THE ONE TECHNOLOGICAL EVENT THAT WON THIS
  WAR WITH SO FEW AMERICAN CASUALTIES.  With it a pilot can see an
  image of the ground underneath him even during dark, moonless
  nights. The pilot can guide his missiles and rockets to several
  targets by placing them in the crosshairs of the FLIR gunsite on his
  forward screen which keeps him looking 'heads-up' at the target. The
  Iraqis, if attacked at night by American forces are almost at our
  mercy since most of their troops do not have this system, while all
  of ours do.  Fighting against our forces equipped this way is
  similar to trying to fight a gang of 50 vicious attackers while
  being blindfolded.  I would not want to be an Iraqi soldier in this
  war!
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:PROPAGANDA

  There has been much propaganda on both sides as there is in any war.
  It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth.  Iraqi
  propanda is put out to make Arabs think that the war is fought for
  some lofty goals.  American propaganda is put out to make Americans
  think that the war is for even loftier goals than those of the
  enemies.  In reality, there has never been any lofty goals achieved
  by any war in all of Human history.  War is only a terrible waste of
  lives and a wanton destruction of the environment.  The truth is,
  we, as a civilized world, must find an alternative to war before we
  destroy the Earth!  This is the only truth about war.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:INSTRUMENTS

  Modern aircraft have what's known as 'Heads-Up' instruments. This
  means a radar picture of the enemy up to 100 miles away, is
  projected onto the front windshield, allowing the pilot to pay
  attention to flying and targeting the enemy without having to lower
  his gaze to the instrument panel below.  This comes in very handy in
  a dogfight.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:"F-15'S"

  The F-15E, Strike Eagle, is the world's fastest and most
  maneuverable fighter plane.  It is armed with the best radar
  equipment enabling it to see enemy fighter planes as well as ground
  targets.  It is equipped with air to air missiles that can locate an
  enemy plane up to 100 miles away.  It can drop bombs of any kind,
  including nuclear.  With radar guided bombs and missiles, it is
  capable of pinpointing a target and destroying it without taking out
  civilian targets just a few meters away.  Then, it can rise up and
  counter act enemy fighter planes.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:COMPOSITE

  Composite materials are made up of graphite materials that are
  non-metallic similar to the material used in tennis rackets.  This
  product is then laminated into a strong skin which absorbs some of
  the radar energy aimed at it by the enemy.  The shape of the Stealth
  fighter or bomber, then reflects the rest of the radar waves up and
  away from the originating source, thus rendering the plane
  practically invisible.  Radar jamming equipment is also used to
  further confuse the enemy radar.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:BOMBS

  Laser guided bombs are extremely accurate because the pilot, or the
  WSO merely aims a laser beam at his target and while maneuvering the
  plane, strives to keep the laser on the target.  The bomb has a
  laser sensor in its nose so that it can actually follow the beam to
  the target as if it were on a wire.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:"MIG-29'S"


  The Mig-29 is the best fighter plane in the Soviet Air Force and
  they sold hundreds of them to the Iraqis.  Still no match for the
  American Strike Eagles, it can present a grave threat.  If piloted
  by an experienced pilot, it can use similar techniques that we would
  use to locate and shoot down the enemy.  It is not as fast as the
  F-15, however, and Americans have the advantage and shot down many
  of these in this and other wars.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:STICK

  The stick is the control shaft that the pilot holds in his hand.
  Moving it forward directs the plane down and pulling back on it
  pushes the plane upward.  It is also furnished with several triggers
  so that the pilot can control the plane and enter into a dogfight
  without really thinking about it.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:SURFACES

  There are literally dozens of small panels on the wings and the
  fuselage of the Stealth fighter that must open and close in a
  certain harmonic pattern to maintain a certain flight path.  The
  shape of the Stealth fighter makes this necessary because they are
  not designed for aerodynamics, but for stealth.  They are very
  difficult to fly and pilots undergo many hours of special training.
  A very powerful computer must be used to direct all of these
  surfaces to produce the desired effect from the pilot's control.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:AWACS

  The Awacs plane was very instrumental in this war because, filled
  with highly sensitive and top secret radar equipment, it can "see"
  for several hundred miles into enemy territory and direct our pilots
  to their targets as well as warn them of enemy planes that might be
  in the sky.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:SCREEN

  Most U.S. fighter planes are equipped with 'Heads-up' instruments
  which projects the radar information on the windshield directly in
  the line of sight of the pilot so that he can watch his flight path
  and see his targets on his screen even though they may be as far as
  100 miles away.  He can also watch the progress of his missiles in
  flight as they seek the enemy plane and then destroy it.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:TIGRIS

  The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers are the location of the most ancient
  civilization that we know of.  In the rich and fertile valley of
  what is now Iraq, the Mesopotamian civilization flourished thousands
  of years ahead of the ancient Egyptian Empire and may be the very
  birthplace of all other modern civilizations including our own.
  Most of our modern law and ideas about government is founded on
  the Code of Hammurapi, an early leader.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:"MACH 2.5"

  Mach 2.5 means two and one half times the speed of sound.  Sound
  travels at approximately 750 miles per hour.  Therefore, Mach 2.5
  would be approximately 1,875 miles per hour.  The top speed of an
  F-15 is classified but is thought to be higher than this.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:SHELTERS

  The Iraqi command placed many of their best jet fighters in hardened
  shelters, hoping that our bombs would not be able to destroy them.
  They were very misinformed.  We were able to drop 2,000 lb high
  explosive bombs that were laser guided, found their target,
  sometimes right down the ventilation shafts, and blew the whole
  thing sky high.  Saddam lost hundreds of planes this way.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:NAVCOM

  American planes have a top secret little black box inside them that
  tells the pilot where he is (NAV) and allows for communications with
  Headquarters (COM) who also knows where all our pilots are.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:TRACERS

  Anti-Aircraft shells have a tracer shell with an incendiary device
  every ten or twenty shells so that the gunners can see where they
  are shooting from the paths the tracer shells make in the sky.
  During this war, the tracers were a spectacular sight more awesome
  than any Fourth of July celebration ever known!
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:MISSILES

  The cruise missile is guided to its target via a computer and a map
  placed inside it.  With an air-breathing jet engine, it flies to its
  target and actually follows roads and rivers and other landmarks fed
  into the computer from satellite photographs.  When it reaches its
  target it then detonates with devastating results.  This missile is
  so accurate it was launched from ships several hundred miles away
  from Baghdad.  The missiles flew at about 100 feet off the ground
  and could be seen by many Iraqis.  Then, when it reached a military
  target it would simply fly right into it and detonate.  This is an
  awesome weapon.  It took the Iraqis by complete surprise.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:SKUD

  The Skud missile was purchased from the Soviet Union.  But they sold
  the Iraqis only missiles that would be capable of flying a few
  hundred miles.  The Iraqis, however, with the help of the Germans
  adapted them so that they could fly to Israel, some four hundred
  miles away, but with only a limited payload of explosives.  This is
  why the SKUDS that fell in Israel were so wimpy.  Given a bit more
  time, however, the Iraqis were ready to put a nuclear warhead in
  this missile and the entire outcome of the war may have been much
  different!
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:GOD

  Saddam Hussein publicly claimed that God was more powerful than than
  the Coalition forces and he also said that God would be on the side
  of Iraq.  Well, God is obviously more powerful than any Earthly
  force, but it would appear now that he was wrong about the second
  part of his new religion.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:OUT

  The modern jet fighter is so fast that when it makes any kind of a
  turn at full speed, it produces 'G' forces on the pilot.  Most men
  can take a force of about 7 or 8 G's.  But sometimes the force can
  get to 10 which can cause unconsciousness in the pilot.  This has
  led many people to believe that in the future, no jet planes or
  bombers will be piloted by Humans, but by computers who are not
  effected by this force.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:"REAR-VIEW"

  The pilot does not actually have a rear-view mirror as we do in our
  cars.  This view is actually produced by a camera placed in the tail
  of the plane, but it is viewed up front on the 'Heads-up' display.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:reagan

  President Ronald Reagan was responsible for the largest military
  build-up in the history of this nation.  At the time, during the
  1980's, he thought we would be fighting the Soviets.  In reality, we
  needed these weapons to keep the peace in the Gulf, AND THE SOVIETS
  WERE OUR ALLIES.  Kind of ironic, isn't it?
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:FRIENDLIES

  American planes are equipped with a sensor system that tells the
  pilots whether he is tracking a 'Friendly' or an 'Enemy' plane.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:SADDAM

  Saddam Hussein made his bones in the 'Bath' party as an assassin.
  It is known that he killed his first Human being at the ripe old age
  of fifteen.  Later, he became known as a reliable source for
  political assassinations.  Then, during the sixties, he became very
  powerful by being appointed the head of the Secret Police.  In this
  role, he began a plan to become the most powerful man in Iraq by
  eliminating his opponents.  It is no wonder that, absence any form
  of democratic institutions, this kind of unbridled evil will
  prevail.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:SOURCES

  A senator from Hawaii said it best.  He said, "If we spent the
  amount of time and energy on researching alternative energy sources
  as we spent in this war, there wouldn't have been a war!"
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:tsd

  The TSD or Tactical Situation Display, is a screen that looks much
  like a computer screen.  It shows the pilot the ground targets that
  are approaching and it gives radar in a form that pilots have to be
  trained for many weeks before they can understand it all.  It's a
  very effective way for the pilot to find his target and to destroy
  it once he's near it.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:SMART

  These bombs are known as smart bombs because they have sophisticated
  electronics built into them so that they can be guided to their
  target either from a laser beam or by a radar beam.  Some of the
  laser-guided bombs and missiles can be guided to their targets by a
  soldier on the ground who places the laser beam on the target and
  the bomb does the rest.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:WARTHOG

  The plane is nicknamed thusly because it is designed to fly slow and
  to destroy the enemy.  With its weapons, it can lay waste to a an
  entire city within minutes.  It is highly effective in destroying
  tanks and armored personnel carriers as well as destroying entire
  army's.  The coalition forces had the benefit of about two hundred
  of these planes in the KTO, or Kuwaiti Theatre of Operations.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*

:"T-72"

  The T-72 is the Soviet Union's most advanced tank.  It doesn't
  compare to an American A1M1, however.  There is not as much heavy
  armor, and the cannon is not as large, nor is the laser sighting as
  good as ours.  This puts the Soviet tank crew at a distinct
  disadvantage.
>.PAUSE
>.MACRO [^HS]
*


:catalog
>.f_exist[order] .then[.execute[del order %Q]]
>.window [text center center 22 80]
>.bcolor [text white thinsolid1]
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>.v_exist[ title ] .else[ .define[ title ] ]
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|Following are descriptions of some of the
|virtual books available direct from

|THE UNLEARNING FOUNDATION.
|ALL DONATIONS ARE TAX DEDUCTIBLE

|To place an order for any title,
|select "Yes" when prompted.

|If your printer is ready, a complete
|order form will print at the end of
|the catalog.

|As shown on the order form,
|these titles are $10.00 each
|plus $2.00 shipping and handling
|per order.
|Please specify diskette size (5.25" or 3.5")
*

:"OPERATION DESERT STORM"

  OPERATION DESERT STORM - COMPLETE         Edited by Edward R. Taro

  Unfortunately, the version of Operation Desert Storm you are now
  reading is not complete because it is distributed as a 'Freebie'.
  In order to compensate the author of this book, we need to break it
  into two parts.  When you order this book, you get both Part 1 and
  Part 2 of this fantastic story!  In this way we can compensate our
  authors and they can continue writing more wonderful adventures for
  you.

  "OPERATION DESERT STORM  -  COMPLETE is the full story of the Recent
  Gulf War.  It includes the stories of the pilots who flew the
  missions to destroy the radar sites and missile sites AND THE
  STORIES OF THE GROUND troops who blew away the Iraqi Soviet-built
  tanks and artillery. It's a great story about the most successful
  war in history.  Over in only 100 hours, there has never been so
  much destruction leveled on so many people in so short a time.


  You will also read about the many acts of heroism in piloting the
  Apache helicopters which were so decisive in this war, the tank
  commanders who blew away thousands of enemy tanks, artillery,
  armored personnel carriers with very accurate weapons, as well as
  the many interesting and intriguing stories of the ground soldiers
  who had to flush out all the thousands of enemy prisoners of war to
  rescue the country of Kuwait.  You will also learn about the Iraqi
  atrocities in this war. (Not for the squeamish.)

|If you order now - GET A FREE GIFT!

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*


:"STAR WARS"
  STAR WARS - EPISODE VIII - The Jedi Storm.   by Michael Mathiesen

  This is based on the characters and stories first provided by George
  Lukas.  This is the next episode in a long and rewarding saga.  It
  tells about what happens after 'Return of the Jedi'.

  This may turn out to be the most exciting part of this saga. Luke
  has become a complete Jedi with powers to equal that of his new
  opponent, the new Emperor, the grandson of the one he and Darth
  Vader killed, and he's not pleased with Luke for so doing.  But Luke
  has discovered a new weapon, a very powerful weapon that the Emperor
  would kill to get his hands on.

  Luke is going to be faced with some very serious challenges to his
  knowledge of the 'Force'.  He is going to have to make some very
  difficult choices, but in doing so, he will bring the knowledge of
  the 'Force' to everyone, including you.  This book is written by a
  man who is so involved with the New Quantum Physics, that everything
  portrayed in this book can actually happen in the very near future.
  You will find out that the 'Force' is real.  It is the glue that
  holds everything together in the universe.  Modern physicists are
  now finding that this is actually the truth!

  They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and in this book, you
  will learn that there is very little difference today.  After
  reading this book, we promise that you will not only feel very
  entertained, you will also feel very highly educated in the ways of
  the universe.  Some of you will use this for very special purposes,
  and others may use it for the 'Dark Side' of life.  Which way will
  you go?  Order this complete book and find out.

  Now, a battle looms ahead that will either destroy the Empire once
  and for all, or it will set the Rebel Forces back for many
  centuries.  This battle will require all the strength and skill of
  the Rebels and it will take the next great leap in faith by Luke to
  bring his powers to bear on the Empire without flirting with the
  'Dark side' of 'The Force'.  Does Life imitate Art?  You will be the
  judge!  Will you be a Rebel or part of the oppressive Empire?


»» Would you like to place an order for this title now?
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*


:"ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY"
  ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY  -  FINALLY, somebody's done something about it!

  This ELECTRONIC BOOK is the first of its kind.  In it we actually
  begin the next step in THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION!  Educate yourself on
  the most important issues of National Importance and then vote on
  some of the solutions to this country's greatest problems.  You will
  print out a ballot and mail it back to the NEW AMERICAN DEMOCRACY,
  where it will be tabulated and the results declared to be the
  POPULAR LAWS OF THE LAND!

  This book will establish a Real Democracy in America and is the
  first of its kind anywhere!  With this book, we can take control of
  our government and actually stop the influence peddling that goes on
  in Washington.  This program will defeat the lobbyists.  It will put
  an end to the two-party system and give the power back to all the
  people.  It will end government by crisis after crisis.  It will
  allow each of us to participate and give our two cents worth in a
  manner that works.  It will bring America back to the forefront of
  democracies and make us the envy of the world.  It will, in fact,
  help us guide planet Earth through its most troubling times.
  We begin the process by reading this book and then using modern
  technology to actually help solve national problems.  The problem
  with the world is that we can put men on the moon and soon on Mars
  but we use a political system that was devised in the horse and
  buggy days.  Let's upgrade the system now before it collapses!

  Operation Desert Storm reminds us that many millions of brave young
  American boys have given their lives for Democracy and many millions
  of people all over the world are giving their lives for the first
  precious promise of Democracy.  Now, it's our turn to do our part!
                      STAND UP AND BE COUNTED!


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*

:"Elvis Presley's Guide - Universe!"
|ELVIS PRESLEY'S GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE!

  Have you ever wondered why Elvis Presley's spirit seems so
  Earthbound?  Fifteen years after his death, people still see Elvis
  Presley's spirit walking around.  If you read this book, you may
  agree that it could be because Elvis still has something very
  important to say.

  Well, this author, didn't actually see 'The King', but he was
  visited by Elvis in his dreams for forty consecutive nights.  In
  these dreams, Elvis explains everything you will ever need to know
  about life after death and beyond what our senses can tell us.  It's
  a very good read, a quick tour through some of the most interesting
  concepts ever talked about.  When you finish this book, you actually
  feel as though you've been on a trip through the center of the
  universe and back.  You also feel as though you have knowledge that
  will help guide you through the rest of your life.  Try this one, if
  you're interested in the ultimate adventure novel!

  One of the greatest thing about this book is your introduction into
  what is rapidly becoming known as 'Virtual Reality'.  This is the
  gateway into the next century!


|If you order now - GET A FREE GIFT!

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*

:"TOURS DE FORCE"

|TOURS DE FORCE

   A very off-the-beaten-path travel guide.  The authors take you to
   places on the Earth where you can finally relax and enjoy the Earth
   the way God intended it to be enjoyed.  Some of the places visited,
   include the remote parts of Hawaii, Mexico, Bali, Tahiti, Europe,
   and even places in America where you can get to cheaply, without a
   great deal of hassle and when you get there, you will honestly
   believe you're in Paradise.

  This guide is not meant for the traveler who wants to find a Hotel
  with all the amenities and then hang out like most Americans.  This
  travel guide is for the truly adventurous.  It is filled with air
  fares that are generally unknown to the public and much cheaper than
  what you would find at your local travel agent.  It give much
  useful information about what you can expect at each location.  Most
  importantly, it is filled with fresh new ideas about how to take the
  family on an adventure that they will never forget and will leave
  them with a renewed sense of the beauty of their planet.

»» Would you like to place an order for this title now?
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*

:"THE LONGEVITY COOKBOOK"

|THE LONGEVITY COOKBOOK!


  Whether you are young or old, one of your main areas of concern is
  how to live an extra ten years or more beyond what might be your
  'normal' life expectancy.  The last ten years of life are the best,
  don't let anyone kid you.  They will only be that way if you make it
  possible to reach them, however.  Eating right, changing your diet
  to one of extremely low fat and cholesterol is the best and cheapest
  way to do this very thing.  The cause of the number one killer of
  men and the number two killer can be virtually eliminated, put in
  remission, for at least ten years just by changing your diet to the
  manner in which this cookbook prescribes.

  But this is not easy, unless you know how.  In our modern, rush -
  rush, fast food & styrofoam society, there are limitations in
  everyone's lifestyle that make eating right, difficult, if not
  impossible.

  Until now!  With the 'Longevity Cookbook' you will learn how to
  prepare meals that have zero cholesterol and that taste good, in
  many cases better, than what you're 'dying on' now.  There are
  hundreds of recipes and tips about how to make things that you can
  take with you to the office or jobsite so that you are never tempted
  by the purveyors of death, the typical American restaurants.

  And every meal is extremely economical to make.  Not only will you
  lose weight, feel younger, stronger, healthier, have better mental
  processes, elevated moods, etc., but you will also SAVE A GREAT DEAL
  OF MONEY!  No need for the expensive weight-loss clinics and plans,
  an no need for health insurance or doctors!  Believe it or not, the
  author of this book, cancelled his health insurance and has not seen
  a doctor in over ten years!  Although in his late fifties, he can
  outperform, athletically, many men twenty years his junior!

  Try this one, you'll thank us for years to come!

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*

:"virtual reality"
|VIRTUAL REALITY

  This book is not for everyone.  It's the first primer on 'Virtual
  Reality'.  It's a 'HOW TO' with hands on demonstrations of how to
  program for virtual reality, how to create a 'Virtual Reality' for
  your own amusement or for profit and the amusement of others.  It
  teaches us that the life we live in is a product of all our
  'experience'.  In other words, life is a constantly changing fiction
  bestowed upon our minds by our senses.

  With modern technology such as the computer, the laser disk, and
  'Virtual Reality' programming, we can extend, improve, radically
  alter this fiction by extending our senses into this new
  technological realm.  This is 'Virtual Reality'.  A flight simulator
  is the earliest and simplest example.  In the next several decades,
  there will be many more of them.  Perhaps you will be one of the
  pioneers!

|ORDER NOW AND GET A FREE DEMONSTRATION DISK.

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*


:"Electronic Bible."
|THE ELECTRONIC BIBLE
|or
|HOW TO WRITE AND CREATE 'VIRTUAL BOOKS' LIKE THESE!

  This book explains everything you need to create 'VIRTUAL BOOKS' or
  the kind of books that you are now reading.  They are meant to be
  read on a computer screen and never actually make it to paper media
  unless the reader wants or needs to print it on his own personal
  printer.  The implications of this new industry are varied and
  exciting.

  Creating 'Virtual Books' is fun.  All you need is a personal
  computer.  You can get ideas about what might sell from the list
  here in this catalog.  Everyone at one time or another has thought
  about writing a book.  The problem is, not everyone wants to publish
  your book because it usually costs between $50,000 to $100,000 to
  manufacture, distribute and promote a book so that it pays back the
  investors.  With Electronic publishing like the one you're reading
  now, the entire investment is only $10.00.  That's right.  For
  $10.00 this Electronic Bible - actually a kit - will give you
  everything you need to make an electronic book including the program
  that puts it into the format that you see on your screen!

  All you need is an idea for something that lots of people would be
  interested to know, or be entertained by.  That's the first rule!
  The second rule is, 'Don't try to re-invent the wheel'.  Order this
  kit today and you will avoid all the pitfalls!  Well worth the small
  investment to save you a great deal of time and money.

|If you order now - GET A FREE GIFT!

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*

:"SINGLES DIRECTORY"
|INTERNATIONAL SINGLES DIRECTORY


  This is a database of over 10,000 names and address of single men
  and women around the world who are actively searching for a life
  partner.  Included in this database are attractive men and women,
  mostly women, from all over Asia, Europe, South America, and of
  course all fifty states.  Included on the disk is a database manager
  so that you can sort by sex, height, weight, hobbies, interests,
  religion, age, etc.

  The database comes with their names, addresses, phone numbers,
  interests, religion, height, weight, hair color, length, everything
  you need to make an intelligent choice.  Sort out a few dozen and
  then send them a mail merge letter, get their photos and then make
  your choice.   That's exactly what this author did and he is now
  married to a beautiful Asian girl of his dreams!

  Also included are tips on how to write to your new 'pen pal'.

»» Would you like to place an order for this title now?
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*

:"POOR MAN'S GUIDE"
|POOR MAN'S GUIDE TO RICHES!

|or HOW TO PLAY THE CAPITALIST GAME!

  If you live in this 'Capitalist' society, you SIMPLY MUST HAVE the
  information in this book!  It's as simple as that.  This is a
  complete guide to becoming a millionaire, which is the way that we
  currently measure financial success.  With a million dollars or more
  in the bank, even today, a man, woman or even a family can live for
  the rest of their lives without ever having any financial worries.
  With one million dollars, you can let your money do all the work for
  you and life becomes very enjoyable.

  The problem with our 'Capitalistic' society is that we don't teach
  people the rules at an early enough age for most of us.  Most of us
  have to learn these lessons as we progress through the system.  This
  manual will teach you everything you need to know to get through
  this Capitalistic society with your wits intact and with a big bank
  account.  It's an unfortunate fact that 95% of all people who retire
  in this country, do so with less than $5,000 in savings.  Why?
  Mainly because they did not learn the rules of the game early
  enough.

  With this guide you have all the rules of the game from how to play
  the stock market, to tax strategies that will allow you to keep more
  of your winnings!  But, it's not just an investment book, this is
  much more.  You will learn about how to maintain your credit rating,
  a very important piece in the puzzle and how to find things you need
  at one tenth the cost of Retail.  We could go on and on about the
  merits of this book, but let's just finish by saying that this book
  will return many thousands of times its nominal ten dollar
  investment, even if you only read one chapter!  There are ten
  chapters all together.

  If you don't do it for yourself, do it for your family!

»» Would you like to place an order for this title now?
>title=^page
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:"COMPUTER CATALOG"
|HARDWARE & SOFTWARE CATALOG

  This catalog provides you with oodles of products designed to help
  you increase your computing pleasure.  Included are things like RAM
  Cache programs to speed up your computer by as much as TEN TIMES!
  Newer, faster, bigger hard drives, laser drives to store GIGABYTES,
  even voice-recognition systems.  Hi-resolution color monitors, new
  mice and trackballs, as well as the new operating systems, like
  Microsoft Windows 3.0, or for smaller, less powerful machines like
  GeoWorks - Ensemble.  Try running ten programs or more AT THE SAME
  TIME, like we do with Windows!  This is the greatest and most
  promising new environment for computers ever and we have all the
  latest new technology to run with it.  How about a memory up-grade
  or a new color printer?

  This catalog is specialized and like no other on the market because
  it carries only products that work great, without bugs of any kind,
  and are the easiest to use.  We actually review all the programs we
  carry and make sure they do what they are intended to do.  Whether
  you want to produce forms, do automated accounting, newsletters or
  if you want to run your business with a powerful but inexpensive
  network, this catalog is for you.  If you own a computer, sooner or
  later you will need the helpful advice and products listed here.

  This catalog is updated monthly.  If you order now, you will get the
  latest volume and be updated regularly AND ...

|YOU WILL GET A FREE GIFT!


»» Would you like to place an order for this title now?
>title=^page
?Yes .execute[ ECHO ^title >> order %Q ] ?No
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:"computer consultant"
|HOW TO BECOME A COMPUTER CONSULTANT

  If you already own a computer, you could be earning thousands of
  dollars right from your home.  This author does just that.  With
  this book, you'll know how he did it and how to do it and avoid the
  pitfalls.  In this 'Virtual Book', you will learn how to begin doing
  business with your computer, the types of clients you want, the way
  to charge so that you earn a minimum of 100.00 per hour.  How to
  market yourself.  Where to look for business, how to use your
  computer to get business and so on.

  The author has been totally independent for the last five years as a
  self employed computer professional and he works out of his house.
  He earns in the neighborhood of six figures per year.  And he has
  time to spend on fun things whenever he wants.  He used to have to
  commute two hours each day.  Now, his commute is 10 seconds from the
  bedroom to his office in his living room.  If you ever dreamed
  of being your own boss, making your own schedule, getting out of the
  rat race and making a living doing something you enjoy doing, then
  this book is for you.

»» Would you like to place an order for this title now?
>title=^page
?Yes .execute[ ECHO ^title >> order %Q ] ?No
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:"tax advisor"
|THE TAX REDUCER                              by The Tax Experts

  "Nothing's guaranteed in life, except death and taxes!"

  That's how the old saying goes.  But it was probably the first tax
  collector who coined this phrase for his own benefit.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, the best U.S. Supreme Court Justice in our
  history once said that, "It is not only the right, but the duty of
  every American citizen to do whatever he can to lower his income tax
  liability."

  If you feel, as this author does, that you are paying too much
  income tax, and you want to lower them but still sleep at night,
  this book is for you.  In it are hundreds of strategies to legally
  lower your income tax bite every year from now on.  This small
  investment will return thousands of dollars in dividends, if you
  take this advice - That's guaranteed!

  Whether you are an older person selling a home or lots of Real
  Estate and looking at a huge Capital Gain tax, or if you are a 'wage
  slave' and feel that Uncle Sam is getting too much of your hard
  earned money each year, you will benefit greatly from reading this
  book.  In it also are names and phone numbers of people who can help
  you directly.  These are professionals who can take you through the
  more complicated strategies.

  You probably are aware that the wealthiest Americans pay far less
  tax than most people in the middle class.  How is this possible?
  They have better tax advice, that's all.  Well, now you can get the
  same strategies that the Rockefellers and the Senators and
  Congressmen use to lower their taxes to the rock bottom.  This book
  will tell you everything you need to know to lower your taxes to
  zero, if you like.  It's all TOTALLY LEGAL and it can none of it can
  ever be changed because the wealthiest and most powerful Americans
  use these strategies for their own benefit.  If anyone ever tries to
  change this set of laws, the wealthy and powerful JUST SAY NO!  Why
  not take advantage of the same principles they use?

  This book will show you how it's done.  Written by the experts who
  deal with the IRS on a daily basis, this book is amazing at what it
  reveals and every strategy in the book is totally legal.  Death is
  indeed inevitable, but the amount of taxes you pay is entirely up to
  you!

»» Would you like to place an order for this title now?
>title=^page
?Yes .execute[ ECHO ^title >> order %Q ] ?No
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:"real estate riches"
|REAL ESTATE PRIMER


  You've seen the TV shows that promise that you can get rich by
  getting into Real Estate and using a method that the guy on TV has
  done millions of times and now he's willing to share it with you for
  only $299.95 and you get a set of tapes and a workbook that is
  essentially what's contained in this book for only $10.00.

  In this book you will get the secret of making a fortune in Real
  Estate and these strategies also don't require any cash down!  These
  are the tried and true methods of investors for hundreds of years
  and none of them require a degree in Rocket Science to figure out.
  We'll tell you right now, the whole key to making money in Real
  Estate, the Stock Market or antique jelly bean bottles is that you
  must buy low ans sell high.  There's no other basic way to make
  money and the strategies in this book will explain to you several
  dozen tried and true methods for locating and putting together the
  successful Real Estate deal - deals that can make you five thousand,
  ten thousand, a hundred thousand dollars in a single transaction.

  And the best news is that you don't need a Real Estate License and
  you don't need one single cent to get started.  We'll show you how
  to tap the greatest asset that you already have and you don't even
  know that you have it.

  This system comes with a complete money-back guarantee!

  Use it with our book on TAX FREEDOM and you can retire as a
  millionaire in two years!

»» Would you like to place an order for this title now?
>title=^page
?Yes .execute[ ECHO ^title >> order %Q ] ?No
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:"NEW AMERICAN BIBLE"
|THE NEW AMERICAN BIBLE - ECOLOGY OF MIND

  Joseph Campbell said that "We can put a man on the moon, but we
  still worship gods who rode donkeys."

  "This New American Bible - Ecology of Mind" is the new Word of God as
  told to this author in 1987.  It gives us the faith we will need to
  handle the kinds of problems we face from this point on into the
  the coming new millennium.  The kinds of moral problems in ancient
  times were relatively simple compared to the ones we face today.
  Pollution, Corruption in government.  Superpower, supercomputers,
  superspeed, drugs, sex, lies & videotape are things that the old
  Bible could never foresee.  The New American Bible helps us face the
  modern technological world.  It will give you renewed faith.


»» Would you like to place an order for this title now?
>title=^page
?Yes .execute[ ECHO ^title >> order %Q ] ?No
>.next
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:{close}


|Thank you for your attention.

|Be sure to contact THE UNLEARNING FOUNDATION for
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