In my right mirror, I saw two two bright FLASHES and could see Shorty wrenched around back there, looking over his right shoulder at something down our 4 o’clock wing line.
The fading orange light was moving shadows upward on my canopy as the flares Shorty had instinctively popped were falling to the ground.
“Boss! I just saw ...muzzle flashes; right!"
Shorty losing his chill shocked me more than the words he was saying.
Shorty Bone never lost his chill.
I had rolled the jet and pulled 30 degrees right, still down on the deck, having just retracted gear and flaps.
We were accelerating low and fast in the gloomy dark air past 380 knots before dawn - over the brownish-gray mud walls and houses just outside the wire north of Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan.
In the backseat, Shorty was unstowing our Sniper targeting pod to look at the dirt.
"Shorty - What The...."
Before I could say it, Shorty was directing our wingman:
"TWO CHECK 30 LEFT"
..."TWO!" replied our wingman.
They were just airborne 20 seconds behind us passing the burn pit and over perimeter road.
“Small Arms fire right side," amplified Shorty, regaining his chill.
We were all less than 200'' off the ground, afterburners blazing in the cold, murky, smoky morning air, accelerating to get enough speed to zoom up from Bagram to an altitude high enough to protect us from threats.
I was leading the first Strike Eagle two-ship of the day, airborne well before sunrise on a 'Dawn Patrol' mission assigned to support a British SOF operation in distant southwest Afghanistan.
Although the cold February air made our engines powerful, the low density of the high altitude mountain air (4800’') combined with our massive load of bombs meant we had to take a fair amount of time accelerating down low to build up enough speed for the zoom-climb."I saw something really bright down there - Muzzle Flashes or an RPG or something - just north of the road - looked like it may have been aimed at us."
Shorty was never wrong, and if we indeed had guns firing at us in the morning dark that close to our base, we had a serious problem ahead for the missions launching after us.
Sky-ing our F-15E up 70 degrees nose-high towards the mountains north of Bagram I decided to Wheel it up in a left-hand orbit.
"Shorty - I'll coord with tower and Top 3 in the main radio, you talk Two onto the spot in the back radio."
Shorty began working with our #2 WSO (Weapons Systems Officer in the back seat of the other jet), giving him a 'talk-on' to the shooter's location using their targeting pods to see the spot together. I turned down the volume on that radio.
I called Tower in the main radio to tell them what had just happened and to stop all other aircraft launches behind us. I then switched frequency to talk to the Top 3 in our squadron at the 335th FS Chiefs' duty desk:
"Top 3, Dude 11."
"....Dude 11, Go...."
"Paco, we just saw small arms fire off the end of the runway, less than half a mile. Call Security Forces and get them rolling that direction. We will coordinate direct with you to pass coordinates once we locate the shooters."
After about a second of stunned delay "....Copy that, boss, I'm on it!"
"Tell 'em to push it up, Paco."
"I've got Paco on the front radio, send him the digits, Shorty."
Paco updated us, "Dude 11, SF is rolling, I'll send you their FM freq when able."
As Shorty was transmitting details of the ground coordinates to Paco, I was looking out the window, down left over the canopy rail with my eyes. I could see 3 vehicles moving quickly up perimeter road from west on the north side of the base.
At this point, I was thinking about our planned mission ahead - we had a tanker rendezvous time to meet - down southwest of Khost to get us topped-up with fuel for the planned mission with the Brits. We had a hard Time-On-Target at a spot far away, west of Kandahar.
We needed to move out.
I didn't want to stay anchored over Bagram Air Base any longer; I wanted to get south, ASAP.
After about five minutes, we felt like they had it under control. With Shorty monitoring the team finding the spot northeast of the departure end of the runway, we began to see it was a benign situation.
A single shooter inside the circular berm was apprehended quickly, and the security detail appeared to have him well sorted.
We blasted south to meet our KC-10 tanker, a little late for the rejoin, but all a bit energized from what was a very unusual Bagram Dawn Patrol departure.
Something different!
----------
5-ish hours later, after landing from our mission with the Brits, the Security Forces team told us our morning friend was a farmer, with an AK-47 machine gun, who said it was his only weapon. He said he was "hunting ducks”from inside that dirt berm for his family to eat.
I never noticed ducks at Bagram but at the time there were plenty of large black birds in the area. Those ugly birds were the size of buzzards and they were indeed migrating through past Bagram at the time. We were all mindful of avoiding them due to the bird strike hazard after takeoff. So I suppose the farmer's story might have been reasonable - these people were dirt-poor and probably hungry. The Security Forces told us they believed the man, but they planned to patrol the area extensively to make sure.
Although the Afghan’s story sort of made sense....I really didn't believe it.
I took his hunting personally
To this day, I remain skeptical that an Afghan farmer was duck-hunting in the dark - off the end of an active combat runway using an automatic machine-gun to feed his family.
