purwanto

Ask any American infantryman why he never lets an A-10 Warthog pilot pay for his own beer, and he will tell you about a day like December 2, 2010. Sixteen soldiers from the 201st Engineer Battalion of the Kentucky Army National Guard were clearing a mountain road out of Kandahar, Afghanistan, when rocket-propelled grenades crippled their first four vehicles at once. Heavy machine-gun fire poured down from fortified stone positions along the ridgeline, pinning the sixteen Americans in a kill zone with nowhere to retreat. After forty minutes of brutal combat, Specialist Mauricio Arias and Sergeant Joseph Parker looked at their rifles and realized the platoon was down to its final magazine of ammunition. Rather than wait to be overrun and executed, the sixteen soldiers prepared to fix bayonets and charge straight up the hill on foot. Then two A-10 Warthogs from the 303rd Fighter Squadron dropped out of the sky. In the lead cockpit sat Captain Tony Roe, callsign Crack. On his wing flew Captain John Tice, callsign Sapper, a former enlisted U.S. Army combat engineer who knew exactly what it felt like to be bleeding in the mud below. Calling the platoon leader on the FM radio, Roe asked the soldiers to pop a smoke grenade and declared Emergency Close Air Support. Why is that declaration so rare? Because declaring Emergency Close Air Support means the pilot personally accepts full legal responsibility if a single round strikes friendly troops. On his first pass, Roe squeezed the trigger of his thirty-millimeter cannon, but a digital elevation glitch in the targeting computer sent the shells high over the ridge. Without wasting ten seconds, Roe switched off the computer's elevation data, keyed in the altitude manually by hand, and dove back into the wall of machine-gun fire. Flying low enough for the soldiers to read the numbers on his fuselage, Roe unleashed seven high-explosive rockets just forty meters from the American trench while Tice made six consecutive strafing passes with his thirty-millimeter Gatling gun. To the sixteen men on the ground, that low tearing roar sounded like angels singing. When the smoke cleared, thirty-two enemy fighters were dead, and every single American soldier walked out alive. Nine years later, at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, Arias and Parker sat in the audience and stood with tears in their eyes to salute the two pilots as they received the Distinguished Flying Cross. To a politician, the A-10 is an old budget line, but to an infantryman on his last magazine, that ugly gray jet is a brother coming down from heaven.