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Viper Pilot
A Memoir of Air Combat
by Dan Hampton
William Morrow
It’s the fifth day of the Second Gulf War, and things are already getting hairy for Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Hampton.
A unit of the 3rd Battalion 2nd Marines is trapped north of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, and it’s up to Hampton and the three fighter planes he leads under the call sign ROMAN 75 to save their asses.
The Marines have put out a desperate “emergency close air support” signal — a mayday call for any and all fighter planes to abandon their existing missions and fly to the scene.
“ROMAN . . . God’s . . . hurr . . .” the Marine unit implored over a garbled radio transmission punctuated by the pop of automatic weapons.
For God’s sake hurry.
“They need help right now or they’re going to die,” Hampton tells The Post.
Problem is, the worst sandstorm in recent memory, a khamsin, has turned the sky to oat meal. Two other sets of fighter planes couldn’t even find the grunts and turned back.
Hampton’s got experience on his side — he’s been at this since the late 1980s, in the cockpit for more than 100 combat missions.
But suddenly his aerial convoy became a one-man show.
One fighter has engine problems and is sent back; two others are armed with anti-radiation missiles — great for taking out surface-to-air missile controllers but useless in this fight — and are told to stand down.
So it’s just Hampton, his F-16 bearing down at 500 mph, and his Gatling gun spitting out 20 mm shells like watermelon seeds.
It’s up close and personal — he’s only flying a few hundred feet off the ground and can see trucks exploding and Iraqis scattering behind bushes, or dying.
One enemy truck is turned into a smoldering lump. He circled back to take care of the rest. “Never attack from the same direction twice,” he says.
“ROMAN 75 is off to the south and west . . . vehicles burning. The column has stopped in place,” he tells the Marines.
It’s not over just yet.
The khamsin is even worse on the way back, blackening the sky like squid ink. No use flying through, Hampton went up to the heavens, 15,000 feet, then 25,000 — over the fray.
Peace — for a few seconds at least.
“Coming out of that darkness and into the sunlight . . . it was that ‘ahh’ feeling.”
It’s not every college kid who commutes to class in a single-engine Cessna. But Dan Hampton, one of the most decorated pilots in Air Force history, never wanted to be ordinary.
“I always loved to do things that most kids didn’t do,” he describes in his new memoir. “At 16 I decided I wanted to fly.”
The teen made the best use possible of his newly learned skill — he’d rent a plane and fly a few miles to Texas A&M, where he was studying architecture.
“Mostly to show off for the girls,” he admits. “I love to fly, and the fact that young ladies were attracted to those sorts of things was just a side benefit.”
It’s also in his genes. Wade Hampton, a Civil War general, is a distant relative; great-great-grandfather John Mullen ran up the San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt; and his father, Col. Daniel Hampton, was an A-4 Skyhawk attack pilot.
After A&M, where he was enrolled in a military prep program called the Corps of Cadets, Hampton joined the Air Force in 1986. He learned to be a pilot and later a fighter pilot.
From a Cessna he eventually graduated to an F-16 Fighting Falcon — called the Viper by pilots because the plane resembles a snake — flying 151 combat missions and taking out an unprecedented 21 surface-to-air-missile nests in battlegrounds such as the First Gulf War and War in Iraq.
Hampton, 48, made his mark with an Air Force squadron called the Wild Weasels — the first planes dispatched into hostile territory whose job it was to draw fire to reveal the enemy’s position.
“We’re the ones who they are going to put in a POW camp for seven years because we’re the ones who go out and do the fighting and take the chances,” Hampton says.
And he’s collected an arm-load of hardware along the way — four Distinguished Flying Crosses with Valor, eight Air Medals with Valor, five Meritorious Service Medals, to name a few.
He even earned a Purple Heart, rare for an airman. And it didn’t even happen up in the clouds.
It’s 1996 and Hampton was a captain stationed in Saudi Arabia, staying in Khobar Towers at the Dhahran air base.
“We were maintaining a constant presence, flying over southern and northern Iraq to irritate Saddam. He couldn’t bring stuff in, and he couldn’t fly. He knew we were there, and there was nothing he could do about it.”
The flyovers were also a source of irritation for Osama bin Laden. “He saw our presence in Saudi Arabia as an insult.”
At around 10 p.m. on June 25, a tanker truck stuffed with 20,000 pounds of TNT backed up against the perimeter of the housing complex and exploded, killing 19 servicemen and one Saudi. “It completely vaporized anyone near it,” says Hampton, who was about 100 yards away from the blast at the time but hardly unscathed.
“I was blown through a wall that was fortunately so badly made that there weren’t wall studs every 18 inches. I made it through most of the wall,” he says. He suffered superficial flesh wounds, hurt his knee and dislocated his leg, which still aches over a decade later.
“At the time, I don’t know why they gave me a Purple Heart — I wasn’t charging up Hamburger Hill or anything. But over time, my thinking changed. Every time I take a step I can feel this.”
The military officially said Hezbollah Al-Hejaz was responsible, but al Qaeda remains a culprit, Hampton says. Ironically, the concrete blocks at the housing complex all bore an infamous stamp.
“They all said Bin Laden Construction Company,” he said. “His father was a construction mogul.”
In 2001, Hampton was again confronted with a stamp of a bin Laden — this one on the World Trade Center. At a base in South Carolina after a routine rotation in southwest Asia, Hampton heard that there had been an accident in New York.
“I was airborne by noon, leading a four-ship of armed F-16s over Atlanta’s Hartsfield international airport,” he writes. “Never in a million years had I thought I’d be flying combat air-patrol missions in my own country.”
“I took it very hard. All of our fighting was done overseas, done in someone else’s country. We prided ourselves in keeping America safe,” he said.
It was surreal — F-16s rarely, if ever, fly with live missiles in the US.
“You’ve got to make that decision to shoot down planes not behaving correctly. You are always mentally prepared to do that. But I had no intention of shooting it down unless I saw it roll over and dive for downtown Atlanta,” he admits.
He flew within a few feet of a Delta flight to make sure the pilot wasn’t a terrorist. “He was clearly the pilot. He wasn’t that surprised to see me. He knew what I was doing,” Hampton recalls.
“But I’ll never forget the 100 or so round faces pressed up against the side of the plane as two armed and lethal F-16s came up beside them. They looked like a bunch of deer in headlights.”
It’s close to sunrise on Jan. 19, 1991, and Hampton’s among the 75 jets screaming toward Mosul.
He’s loving his ride.
“An F-16 is so responsive, like a sports car,” he says. “Imagine driving with your hands on the wheel of a car — the wheel doesn’t have to move, but when you think of turning left, it moves. That’s what it’s like — you’re basically flying with your mind.”
It’s never boring. “You never know what’s going to happen, so you can never sit back and go into ‘airline mode,’ ” Hampton says.
Why would he with so many toys at his disposal? Air-to-air radar-guided missiles, heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles, laser guided bombs, cluster bombs, a 20 mm canon and guided air-to-ground Maverick missiles.
And at a top speed of Mach 2 — about 1,522 mph — it’s a bit faster than his favorite land craft, the Porsche 911 Carrera.
“I could see Iran on the left and Syria on the right. You could see all of Iraq stretched out before you, and the air is filled with fighter jets — that’s when it hit me, we’re going to war,” he says.
“SAM off the ground . . .” the radio warns. “That’s when you realize there’s someone down there trying to kill me.”
All he could do was react. Launch missiles. Take out the nests with anti-radiation missiles, which cripple launching radar. Destroy the MiG base. Take out the hydro-electric plant.
“It was really violent when my rocket motor ignited — it kicked the jet sideways,” he recalls.
Back out, things didn’t get friendlier.
“The Iraqis sent about six guys to sit on barren, frozen mountaintops with shoulder launch missiles.”
“We avoided them,” he said. “But we never made that mistake again.”
Another hurdle passed, but another heading straight for them.
“It’s a MiG-21 fighter,” Hampton said. “We’re about to shoot this thing, but can’t positively ID it as an Iraqi, so we had to visually ID it.”
“As we get closer, we realize it’s not a MiG. It’s a Turkish fighter, F-104!,” a Vietnam-era jet painted the same color as enemy aircraft.
“Why someone thought it would be a good idea to practice intercepting 100 armed Americans is beyond me.”
“The fact that this guy didn’t get blown up over his own mountaintop is commendable,” Hampton says. “But fighter pilots have to be very disciplined.”
But can they be as disciplined as a drone aircraft?
Hampton bristles when he’s told he might be the last of his kind — even if the Air Force three years ago was training more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined.
“It’s attractive politically when a drone goes missing, you don’t have a flag-draped coffin showing up in New Jersey,” he continues. “But a drone is not going to react the way a human will. It’s a guy in an air-conditioned trailer out in Nevada looking at a small screen.”
Maybe so. But the math is stacked against human pilots. Most missions flown today are by drones, and there are fewer and fewer men like Hampton who can tell stories of dogfights and sandstorms.
But Hampton believes that can’t last forever.
“If and when we go to war against someone who fights back, drones aren’t going to cut it,” he says. “You’re going to need guys like me.”