"...Tico was hit by an SA·3. He had an uncorrelated missile launch on his radar warning receiver (RWR), and as he turned, he visually acquired the missile guiding on his aircraft from below. He timed his missile break turn, the missile overshot his aircraft and detonated behind him. Unfortunately, the miss distance was not sufficient to guarantee the safety of his aircraft, and Tico observed large, peeled-back holes on the surface of the jet with fuel, oil, and hydraulic fluid forming a smoke trail behind him.

While Tico was egressing, all the warning lights in his cockpit had illuminated, and he had no indication of airspeed, heading, or altitude. Fortunately, Capt. Bruce Crutch Cox was nearby, and the two of them formed a Flight as they headed south. As the two were egressing, Crutch received some very unusual radar warning indications. Abaut that time the AWACS called bandits airborne and heading south out of Baghdad. The bandits in this case were MiG-29 Fulcrum fighters. Crutch pitched back to look at the source of the threat warning with his radar and saw that he was flying line abreast with one of the MiGs. As he turned into the MiG and locked onto it with his radar, it turned and ran. Since Crutch didn't have the fuel to chase him, he turned his attention back to helping Tico."

January 13, 1991

Hi Everybody,

Well here it is Sunday night, Jan 13. Under the best of circumstances we’ve been told that it would take a month to pull all of the troops out of Kuwait – Iraq has until 5AM on the 16th (our time) so we’ve all got a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. We haven’t had an Intel briefing in about 10 days, but just watching the flightline tells the story. We have about 2/3 of our 16’s loaded up – 4 AIM-9’s and either Mk. 82’s, 84’s, or Cluster Bombs. The Canadians have almost everything loaded with 4 AIM-7’s and 2 AIM-9’s. Today the French loaded 2 Matra Magic’s (French Sidewinder) and 2 Super 530 (big radar A to A missile.) The Qataris are flying loaded F.1’s, Alpha jets with gun pods, Gazelles with HOT’s and Sea Kings with Exocets. We’ve also got a pair of P-3’s staying here with us.

Everybody here is a little nervous, but overall in good spirits. We were relieved to hear that Congress passed the “use of force” resolution – at least they’re not going to keep us here for another six months to let “sanctions” work. From what we hear the Iraqis can get just about anything they want from the Jordanians and Iranians. We got a hospital in the day before yesterday – a 14-bed field hospital from TJ – so we’ve got about 50 new faces around here.

Well, enough talk about that – now on to important stuff. We’re all restricted to base – so I missed out on some shopping that I wanted to do – oh well. I doubt we’ll get off base again while we’re here – we’re just too big a target. I watched yesterday’s Bills vs. Dolphins game on tape – looks really nice there – snow in Buffalo – looks like no sun either. Ha ha you suckers – guess what it is here – overcast with rain. We’ve had rain 3-4 times this week (all last night) and pretty much the whole week has been cloudy. We’re having highs right around 70, although when the sun peeks through it’s still bright enough to cook you on the spot. It’s still cool at night – but not as bad as Christmas week – after I called you it got really cold – I now believe that the Qataris have said that they’ve had flurries here before. We got wool blankets to go with our sleeping bags – it’s not that cold, I use the bag as a mattress and sleep under the blanket. It looks like I won’t be able to call again; they’re going to stop all morale calls (this is war – you can’t have morale) but I’ll keep trying.

Other than that, I’m trying to think what else is going on – hmm, not too much. Oh yeah – I got the package from Miller – no beer (damn!) but everything else – I’m set for candy until 2000. They also sent a couple pairs of nice (expensive) sunglasses, a great bright pink Lite t-shirt, a Lowenbrau hat, cookies, sunscreen (please – no more sunscreen!) writing paper, envelopes stamps, rubber bands (?), a first aid kit (already come in use a couple of times), mixed nuts, skin lotion, foot powder, Slim Jims, Kool Aid, Gatorade, microwave popcorn and brownies, Lifesavers, tissues, vitamins, Q-Tips, chapstick, pens and pencils, post-it notes, felt-tip markers, batteries, a pencil sharpener, a wallet, a rain poncho, keychains, scotch tape, along with a couple of magazines (like gold here) and an entire Syracuse Sunday paper – oh year, and an Elvis Christmas cassette tape – is he working for Fred Miller now? (All copied off the customs tag…) It made for a happy day in our tent. Thank everyone up in Fulton for us.

Well, that’s about it from here – it’s time for bed. I’ll write again soon (although I think it’s going to get kind of busy around here.) Take care and write soon. Don’t worry about me – our main worry is warm water for the showers in the morning!

Mike

From:
Sgt. Michael P. Kopack
401st TFW (P) / 401st EMS
APO New York 09869

Thanks for sharing that, Mike I think we can forget quickly what life was like before satellite phones and email.

October 6th 1990

Hi Everyone!

What's up on the home front? Here everything has settled down to a constant routine and truthfully there isn't much to write about. Today is Saturday, and for me, a day off. Normally we all get Fridays off (Islamic holy day) but yesterday I volunteered to help Transit Alert's weekend duty. I went in at 7pm and we were very busy until they let me go at 2:30. During that time we recovered, serviced, and launched 2 US C-130's, a C-21 (Lear Jet) a CC-137 (Canadian 707), and about 4-5 CC-130's. Tomorrow the CF-18's should be in. The pilots are from all the squadrons in Germany, but all of the maintenance is 409 Sqdn. Our ramp is going to be pretty full here with the Qatari AF's Alpha Jets and F.1's (all in hangars) our 24 F-16's (614TFS/AMU), 18 CF-18's and the rumor is 8 French AF F.1's (although we're all hoping for Mirage 2000's). During the past week I've also learned how to launch A-10's (2 from MB) and RAF Jaguars (nice in tan paint)(Prehistoric nightmare of an airplane) The F-15D from Langley that was lost was practicing low level intercepts against the Jags. The Canadians are really helping us out by bringing in a lot of stuff including ground troops for air base defense. On the American side we've got 88 AF SP's from Comiso Italy who haven’t spent much time around a flightline before, se we feel a lot better with the troops here.

The weather here is starting to get...reasonable. The last few days we've had highs about 95 and lows down in the low to mid 70's with the humidity starting to come down. So, what we've got here is perfect beach weather. Unfortunately along with the cooler weather it's also getting windy. Today we've got winds about 25mph with higher gusts. Twenty-five mph winds plus fine dusty sand equal...I've got sand in my hair, ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. A couple of days ago we got some more rope, so we "strormproofed" (hopefully) our tent.

What's up with Syracuse football? Two ties in two weeks? I don't know if they've played any games since then, our news here runs about a week or more behind. Occasionally we get a couple of 3-4 day old NY Times or Boston Globes, these we guard with our lives and could probably sell for $5 a piece. Mail here is really slow - running about a week from Spain and at least 2 from the States. So far I've gotten 2 Insights and my pay statement from 15 September (yesterday).

So far we are eeking out our simple day to day existence, which mostly consists of an MRE for lunch, off to work at 3:00, chowhall for dinner (almost better with another MRE), back to work until 11 or 12, sit in the rec tent and watch a movie or two, sleep, and MRE for lunch, etc...

Our morale is still good (it'd be better with a cold beer - we've heard that the Emir said it would be Ok) but I can see people wearing down, just in the time I've been here - just from boredom and a lot of stupid rules.

Take care, we'll talk to you later -
Mike

February 11, 1991

Hi Everybody!

What's up at home? Everything here is fine - we're still flying hard and coming home safe. Our life here is slowly returning to normal. When we're not at work, we're now allowed to wear civilian clothes - but we still carry our masks. Work is still rough - I'm back on nights (finally)(6-6). We're phasing jets like crazy - our normal three day (72 hour) inspection is down to 1 (about 26 hr.) The airplanes are flying so much we're on our 10th jet this month (in Spain that's equivalent to almost 2 1/2 months work.)

Our morale is pretty high - although we're all pretty tired. That should be helped by the fact that we're starting to rotate days off. Something else that helped our morale was that our officers were breifed that King Fahd (of Saudi Arabia) wants to give each of us $10,000 for coming to the desert - of course our government turned it down - but we understand that the King is pretty insistant (we weren't supposed to know this, but it leaked)(of course we're not actually expecting anything - but it did help our morale.)

Well, that's about it from here - here are some stickers. One's the Doha Air Base sticker (w/ the flags). Hang onto the other four - they're the only ones I've been able to get my hands on - they're the four Qatari AF sqdns (Alpha Jet, Mirage, Gazelle, Commando - Westland version of the Sea King.)

Take care, write soon,
Mike

PS - Dad, I've been able to get a few photos of Commandos, Alpha Jets and a few F.1's - along with some CF-18's - I'll have to hand carry them back to Spain.

Monday February 25, 1991

Hi Everybody!

What's up in CNY? Everything here is fine. Almost 2 days into the ground war and we're all hearing good news from CNN, BBC, VOA, and QBS. The ground war hasn't really changed our life any - our pilots are flying CAS, but back here at the base, things are just about the same as they have been for the past six weeks.

The day before yesterday we had a SCUD alert about 5AM - we sat in the Canadian bunker for about 45 mins (they've got much better bunkers than we do.) The rumor was that a Patriot got it from Bahrain - although we also heard that it landed pretty close.

You can feel the weather here changing. We don't need sweaters or long underwear at night any more, and the humidity is coming back - this morning the runway was closed due to fog. Hopefully we won't be around to see 120 again.

The news from TJ is that the shutdown is really going on - the 613th (Gold) will deactivate in August, followed by the "Fighting 612th" (Blue) in October, and finally the Lucky Devils (614th - Red) in January. So far I haven't heard anything official about what will happen to us - although we've heard Aviano for one squadron and Ramstein for another and possibly England for the third?

Mail here is pretty slow - we have a delivery once or twice a week - stateside mail takes from 10 days to three weeks to arrive (pretty good!), TJ mail takes 4-6 weeks (really bad), especially when that's the only contact a lot of dependants have with anyone. When it comes to mail, I do pretty well, between you guys, the SU crew team, and a couple of "Any Servicemember" people, I do better than most people.

They're pouring concrete floors in our chowhall, so our dinners are catered from downtown all week. This is sort of a mixed blessing - the food is better, but other than dinner it's MRE's (icky poo).

Where did school get the tape from Colonel Emma, our ex-base commander made... (I'm starting an hour later - we just had another air raid warning - SCUD???) I'm really surprised that they got the tape - all his family is in CT.

Well, it's about time for us to get back to work, so I'll sign off for now. We're all still doing fine. Take care and write soon!

Mike