THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 22, 1996 TAG: 9606240199
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: AZRAQ, JORDAN LENGTH: 230 lines
They rise each morning to shake out their boots for scorpions and tarantula-like ``camel spiders.'' They battle the blistering desert sun and wind all day, tasting dust in their scrambled eggs and brushing it off uniforms fresh from the laundry.
Some, at 30,000 feet over Saudi Arabia, feel a rush of adrenalin as powerful as a jet's engine as they fly or refuel fighters headed into Iraq.
On the ground, others are tired and bored. They pass long days waiting for equipment to break or malfunction; its reliability leaves them with little to do.
For 1,100 Americans, roughly half of them based at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, the spring of 1996 has been an unlikely mix of exhilaration and tedium in a place as desolate as the moon but with all the intrigue inherent in the Middle East.
``I keep saying if the military ever gives me a job, I'll quit,'' said Lt. Col. Gene Stone, a tanker pilot who is among those enjoying themselves. ``It keeps giving me hobbies.''
``It's time to go home,'' said Senior Airman Jennifer Crim, a supply officer who was married just three weeks before the Air Force ordered her here. ``People are getting short-tempered.''
The troops and their 34 warplanes are test subjects for a new instrument of U.S. power and diplomacy, an ``Airpower Expeditionary Force'' designed to enhance America's ability to respond to trouble in the Middle East and to strengthen U.S. ties to some not-always-solid Arab allies.
The 4417th AEF, as it's known, is the first such force to deploy at full strength. The troops, deployed in April, live in ``Tunes Town,'' a tent city pounded into the desert alongside a Jordanian airstrip and named for their commanding general.
It's quite a place.
Six mornings a week, Brig. Gen. William R. ``Tunes'' Looney III, the AEF's boss, dispatches a dozen Air Force fighters and a pair of KC-135 tankers to help keep Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military under America's thumb.
The fighters, taking off from Mwaffaq Al Salti Air Base, are assigned to a single target area selected the day before by U.S. Central Command. The targets usually are military facilities that American forces would go after in the initial hours of a new war with Iraq.
The four Langley-based F-15C Eagles in each package are aerial dogfighters, in charge of suppressing any Iraqi jets that might threaten the mission. Since the Gulf War ended in 1991, the United Nations has barred Iraqi air traffic - civilian and military - from flying south of the 32nd parallel. The quarantined area covers about one-third of Iraq.
The F-16CJ and CG Falcons, from Idaho's Mountain Home Air Force Base and Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, respectively, carry air-to-ground missiles and laser-guided bombs. The CJs sniff out, and if necessary would hit, surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites, clearing a path for the bomb-laden CGs.
In more than two months of almost daily missions over Iraq, the AEF's pilots have yet to see any of Iraq's Soviet-built MiG fighter jets or to be threatened by SAMs. ``They know if they turn on their (radar) emitters and lock us up, we'll blow up their . . . SAMs,'' Looney said.
Still, trouble lurks every time they cross the border. F-15 pilot Capt. Doug ``Snake'' Johnson of Syracuse, N.Y., recalls a deployment last year when a MiG came up to the line, then turned and flew along it for several minutes.
``I watched him. I was ready to shoot'' if he turned south, Johnson said. `My heart was pumpin' pretty good.''
Even now, more than five years after the Gulf War's close, the United States keeps 220 combat aircraft in the region - a total that swelled to more than 250 when the AEF arrived and topped 300 when the AEF and the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier George Washington were both on the scene.
The presence of the AEF's fighters, which will head for home at month's end, made it easier for the George Washington to leave the Persian Gulf in May for operations in the Mediterranean.
``Our strategy is based on a near-continuous presence in the region,'' said Navy Capt. Mark Neuhart, a Central Command spokesman. In addition to the planes, America keeps an average of about 10,000 Army and Air Force troops in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Mideast nations; that total roughly doubles when a carrier and a Marine Expeditionary Unit sail into the Gulf.
By all appearances, Looney is popular and respected among his troops. ``He likes to be on the tip of the spear,'' said one admiring pilot, watching the 47-year-old general suit up for an F-15 mission.
But as they look forward to coming home at the end of this month, not everyone deployed here shares Looney's feeling that Azraq and Tunes Town are ``as close to being in the west as you could be'' in the Middle East.
Some troops are veterans of deployments in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where American forces live in modern apartments with semi-private baths. Here, they sleep on cots in air-conditioned tents.
``Going back to Dhahran is almost a luxury now,'' said Tech. Sgt. Tomas Arias Jr., a Langley-based F-15 electrician.
While pilots are off on their missions, ``I pour water out of a cup and watch it form mud puddles,'' said Airman 1st Class Clint Lowe, describing how desperate he has become for ways to pass the time.
Assigned to inspect and maintain aircraft ejection seats, Lowe has had almost nothing to do during the AEF's mission; the checks he can perform while the seats are installed take only a few moments and in two months he hasn't had a single failure.
To fill empty hours, the AEF has a library, video games, movies and a satellite dish that captures CNN and other channels from home. There also are hot showers, working toilets, and a kitchen that serves three hot, if not always taste-tempting, meals every day.
The Jordanians have invited off-duty Americans to swim in Mwaffaq Al Salti's pool, and there's even a beer tent - the troops can purchase up to three cups a night and drink it under camouflage netting in a cordoned-off area. The cost: a dollar per cup.
There are things to do off the base, as well. Chartered buses carry AEF troops to Amman, Jordan's modern capital 50 miles west of Azraq, on their days off. There also are regular, day-long excursions to Petra, site of a well-preserved Roman amphitheater and spectacular palaces that were carved into mountainsides around the time of Christ.
English is widely spoken in Jordan, and the visiting Americans were warned about getting into political discussions with their hosts. Despite persistent rumors about terrorist threats, the people have been uniformly friendly.
``If I know I'm going to do a three-month (temporary duty), I would definitely come back here,'' said Staff Sgt. Robert Parfigt, a Langley-based AEF utilities technician.
Assigned to oversee daily cleanups of the AEF's latrines, Parfigt got a lesson in Jordanian hospitality when he visited the home of a man hired to do the work. Parfigt recalls casually asking his host about where in Azraq he could buy cigarettes; the Jordanian quickly excused himself, returning later with a fresh pack of smokes that he insisted Parfigt accept.
Near closing time outside the beer tent, some camp residents seem interested in more than drink and idle chatter. People pair up. A hand brushes a shoulder here. An arm slips around a waist there.
Men outnumber women about 10-to-1 in Tunes Town, and here - like everywhere else in today's military - both are trying to adjust to new rules that put them side-by-side in such remote, lonely outposts.
Several men and women who asked to remain anonymous said that despite warnings about fraternization in Looney's ``General Order No. 1,'' romances have blossomed, wilted and blossomed again during the AEF's stay in the desert.
She didn't know about anyone in particular, one enlisted woman allowed, except for the couple she overheard in the throes of passion outside her tent one night.
``It happens at home, too, doesn't it?'' said another.
The 1,100 deployed troops include about 10 married couples, all among the enlisted and all sleeping apart in Tunes Town. A few have sought and won permission to spend an occasional night off the base, taking a hotel room in Azraq or Amman, but Looney turned down a request by several couples that he designate one or more tents as ``family housing'' and allow them to live together.
She's glad to see her husband around camp and grateful that they can spend time together in the evenings, one woman said, but at times both of them feel like a hungry dog that sees a bone he can't quite reach.
Jordan's isn't the only culture to which Lt. David Postoll has had to adapt during his weeks in the desert.
A 30-year-old New Jersey native, Postoll is a Navy man flying an F-15 as part of an exchange program.
Assigned to the 94th Fighter Squadron at Langley since December, Postoll said he has found the Air Force a ``more corporate'' organization than the Navy, with a more relaxed relationship between officers and enlisted people.
Deployed ships berth and feed officers and enlisted separately, doling out extra space and privileges by rank. In the AEF, officers and enlisted personnel sleep side-by-side, stand in line together for dinner, and mix freely at the beer tent.
Postoll has taken some ribbing from his Air Force comrades over naval aviation's well-publicized problems with safety and sexual harassment, but the Eagle pilots know he had to be good to be selected for the program and they have welcomed him.
The 30-month exchange is designed to expose participants to the different ways their sister services do business. The things Postoll tells his current squadron-mates about the way the Navy trains pilots and operates planes should smooth their dealings with the naval aviators they would surely have to work with in a war zone; when he returns to the Navy, Postoll figures to have a lot to teach his colleagues there about Air Force practices.
In the Navy, Postoll flies the F/A-18 Hornet, a fighter-bomber. He likes its versatility and dual-mission capabilities, he said, but the F-15 is the better aerial dogfighter.
She was always ``kind of the tomboy'' in a house with five brothers, so Capt. Jennifer Nelson isn't intimidated by her status as one of two female pilots assigned to the AEF.
Both women fly KC-135s - a military version of the Boeing 707 - but Nelson, 28, the daughter of a retired naval aviator, has her eyes on the Eagles. ``I want to fly 15s, really bad,'' she admitted.
Her father is an avid fisherman who flew Nelson and her brothers from lake to lake in the area around their northern Minnesota home while they were growing up. Along the way, he trained each of them to fly.
Now, ``the guys I fly with (in the Air Force) are like brothers,'' she said.
Still, Nelson has a sense that some of the male pilots are watching her and other women moving toward fighter jobs a bit more critically than they view up-and-coming men.
``If someone has a bad experience with a female, that's what you're going to hear about for months,'' she said. A similar mistake by a male pilot would likely be ignored or shaken off quickly.
Though Nelson said she has escaped hazing and sexual harassment, she has no illusions that the Air Force is free from the kind of troubles that have rocked naval aviation, most notably the infamous Tailhook Association convention of 1991.
``I think, in the Air Force, you just don't hear about it,'' she said.
One of the very important aspects of this deployment is the interaction of the two air forces,'' said Wesley Egan, the U.S. ambassador to Jordan.
A career foreign service officer posted here about two years, Egan said he approached King Hussein about hosting an AEF last December and got quick approval.
The king is more than just a friendly host, however. After their morning missions over Iraq, the AEF's planes and pilots have been devoting afternoons to mock dogfights with the Jordanian F-1 Mirage and F-5 Tiger jets permanently stationed at Mwaffaq Al Salti.
The Americans also have been teaching the Jordanians the finer points of flying and caring for the F-16. The Clinton administration plans to transfer 16 early model F-16s to Jordan next year - hardware for which Jordan will pay just 47 cents on the dollar - as part of its reward for abandoning the neutrality it maintained during the Gulf War and signing a peace treaty with Israel.
But while Jordan has taken sides, King Hussein maintains one important and - for the Americans in the AEF - ironic tie to Iraq. Day and night, tanker trucks loaded with Iraqi oil rumble past Mwaffaq Al Salti, carrying fuel for homes and businesses throughout Jordan.
Processed into jet fuel, some of that Iraqi petroleum comes back to the base for the king's Mirages and Tigers. And until the Americans leave here at the end of the month, some of the fuel goes as well into their Eagles and Falcons, bought and burned to keep Iraq from again disturbing the peace.
``They know that we own their country, we own their airspace,'' Looney says of the Iraqis. ``We dictate the way they live and talk.
``And that's what great about America right now. That's a good thing to have, especially when there's a lot of oil out there that we need.'' ILLUSTRATION: BILL TIERNAN color photos/The Virginian-Pilot
Airman 1st Class Dennis Demski, 19, eats Fruit Loops as the sun
rises over ``Tunes Town,'' a tent city pounded into the desert
alongside a Jordanian airstrip and named for the commanding general.
An F-15 from Langley pulls in behind a KC-135 tanker for refueling
over Saudi Arabia for the flight back to base in Jordan after a
sortie over southern Iraq.
Jordanian Brig. Gen. Yahya A. Karaimeh, center, and U.S. Brig. Gen.
William R. ``Tunes'' Looney III, in blue ball cap, listen to a rock
'n' roll concert on a recent Sunday night.
KEYWORDS: IRAQ JORDAN U.S. AIR FORCE by CNB