Pilots Vow to Keep Up Attack on Iraqi Targets and Psyches

By JOHN BALZAR

Jan. 19, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

EASTERN SAUDI ARABIA — Yes, it’s an air war. But it’s also a war of morale.

The American pilots who are taking the “lightning and thunder” of Desert Storm straight to Saddam Hussein returned Friday from a second day over the skies of Iraq, their morale high and barely contained. Again, they had bloodied one the world’s most bellicose militaries, and the Americans knew that more than the desert sands were shaking under the little sliver of new moon in the Persian Gulf.

U.S. Marine pilots kept up the near round-the-clock bombing of Iraq’s vaunted Republican Guards, held in reserve in an arc stretching along the northwest of Kuwait. The terrible punishment they delivered included the 500-pound cluster bomb, which rains deadly bomblets over a wide area.

“It’s been a constant, continual bombing with no letup,” said Col. Manfred A. Rietsch, commander of Aircraft Group 11 based at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro. “We will destroy tanks, bunkers, go after their vehicles and whatever is of military value. And if we keep hitting them round-the-clock, it’s bound to have a psychological impact.”

With the U.S. and coalition sorties numbering in the thousands and successes overwhelming, pilots--and the tens of thousands of ground troops that cheered them on--could only wonder about the savage toll being taken on the psyche of the enemy to the north. Hardened, that’s how the Iraqis thought of themselves. But are they hard enough for this? And will they be hard enough to take it again tomorrow?

Col. Al Whitley, commander of the U.S. Air Force 37th Tactical Fighter Wing, which flies the F-117A Stealth fighter, was in the first wave of planes to shatter the skies over Baghdad at the opening of the war. Among the explosions and trails of missiles and anti-aircraft tracers, Whitley looked out of his cockpit and saw . . . highway traffic.

“I have never seen so many people leave a city,” he said. “It was bumper to bumper leaving the city. I don’t think they were going to the Saddam rally that night.”

The pilots, of course, are among the few U.S. eyewitnesses to see the full fury of the opening of this war. Cocky men by nature, they returned to their bases in Saudi Arabia and to their ships off the coasts. Their game stories and the amazing pictures they brought back filled the wardrooms, enlivened the mess halls and consumed the press pool reports.

The first target of the war? Pilots disclosed Friday that it was a communications building just south of the Tigris River in Baghdad--a 12-story structure that swallowed a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb just as Americans started swallowing some of their doubts about the high-technology weaponry of the modern and often controversial defense industry.

“You pick precisely which target you want--you can want the men’s room or you can want the ladies’ room,” said one Stealth pilot.

This story was compiled in part from Pentagon combat pool reports reviewed by military censors.