Word: nimitz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Late on Saturday in the Persian Gulf, the U.S.S. Nimitz had received no attack order from the Pentagon, but everything was pointing to a confrontation. In contrast to last month, when intelligence information took days to reach the aircraft carrier, the CIA was rushing satellite-reconnaissance photos to the Nimitz's dimly lit combat center in just minutes. Out on the flight deck, pilots in F-14s and F-18s who were executing as many as six sorties a day over southern Iraq reported that Saddam was preparing for an American attack by dispersing his surface-to-air missile batteries...
Kevin McLaughlin is at the pointy end of Bill Clinton's spear. Late last week Lieut. McLaughlin--his call sign is "Proton" because he once was a nuclear-reactor operator--sat in the ready room of his F-18 Hornet squadron aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz, a 95,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier steaming in the Persian Gulf. If Clinton decided it was time to punish Saddam Hussein for his defiance of United Nations inspectors, Proton would climb into his $28 million Hornet--the U.S. Navy's premier fighter-attack jet--and shower Iraq with...
...squadron who flew into Iraq the first harrowing night of Desert Storm in 1991. "Everybody on the ship is prepared," McLaughlin says. "We all understand our role here as instruments of policy--gunboat diplomacy. Now it's like the old adage, 'Put me in the game, coach.'" The Nimitz's fighter pilots had devoted two weeks to poring over secret lists of targets in Iraq, according to Pentagon officials. The strikes, by Navy and Air Force jets as well as by cruise missiles, would be at the suspected weapons facilities Saddam has tried to hide from U.N. inspectors. Fighter pilots...
...aviator slang for flights over southern Iraq. The missions were routine, and until recently flyers joked that they would "have a better chance of seeing Jesus than an Iraqi jet." Even the past week, the skies had been quiet. No Iraqi radar had been turned on to "paint" the Nimitz's jets as targets, so far as the pilots could tell. Still, "every time you get in the jet and go over Iraq, you never know if this is going to be the day they're going to take a potshot at you," explained McLaughlin, 29, from Newport Beach, Calif...
...that something will happen, so guys are going into the box with that mind-set." It was the threat to the U-2 spy plane that was setting off the pilots' internal alarm bells. They knew that if Saddam Hussein even tried to fire at a U-2, the Nimitz air warriors would be launched in reprisal. When a U-2 flew early last week, the pilots "spooled up," sensing that the call might come quickly. Now, with more U-2 flights planned, the flyers were spooling up again. The feeling toward Saddam in the ready rooms was about...