Sat Images After The Fact

He walks into the ready room, his hair matted with sweat. Fellow pilots looked up expectantly from their recliners. "Hey, how'd it go?" one asked. "You drop?"

"Yep," the pilot answered, still in his 70-pound olive green flight suit, with the hose from his oxygen mask draped around his neck like a scarf. Then he delivered the comic-book line fighter pilots frequently toss around, a shorthand for mission accomplished.

"Kaboom!"

Silent Kill

In fact, Navy pilots in the air campaign over Iraq usually hear nothing when their bombs explode and often don't see the blast, either. Their war is based on precision weapons, bombs guided by lasers and satellites to targets with often pinpoint accuracy. Since the start of military aviation, pilots have been cushioned to some degree from the carnage of combat. But the prevalence of sophisticated weaponry in this conflict offers an unprecedented level of psychic insulation.

A satellite-guided JDAM bomb can travel up to 15 miles after it is launched from under a jet's wing before it finds and devastates its target. For a pilot 33,000 feet in the air, there is no screaming to hear, no explosion, no sound other than his own breathing.

"Afterwards, you see imagery from satellites, but you don't see them carrying people off on stretchers," said Eric Doyle, a 29-year-old F/A-18E Super Hornet pilot from Houston. Doyle and the other 16 elite pilots who fly the Super Hornets don't talk about killing.

The men, mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, instead focus on the electronics of their weaponry and supersonic jets. They swap tales of maneuvers in the sky - how a jet veered at the last minute to avoid missiles fired from the ground, how another dove below a friendly plane that was too close or ran into trouble with a tanker. They collect metal fuses from their dropped bombs as souvenirs.

Not Something To Think About

"We know we're killing people," said Lt. Stan Wilson, 33, who enlisted in the Navy at 18, left to attend college and then rejoined to become a pilot. "We don't talk about it, don't worry about it. I don't know how this sounds, but we're more selfish than that. I worry about my car payments; the other guys worry about their girlfriends and wives."

Wilson, a barber's son, gets a hero's welcome when he goes home to Iowa. A color photograph of him is displayed in the barber shop; he is a favorite speaker at the local American Legion post. He doesn't want to consider whether his bombs have killed civilians. "I'd rather not know about it," he said.

Post-Strike Matinee

One recent afternoon, a half-dozen Super Hornet pilots on the USS Abraham Lincoln were clustered around a television in their ready room, a space the size of a small classroom where they spend most of their time when not flying or sleeping.

They were watching video shot from the cockpit of a Super Hornet during a sortie the night before. The television showed a bright light darting north on the dark green screen, pausing over the target framed in a white box, then bursts of white and orange. The men delighted in the explosions.

Their backs were turned on another television across the small room. It was tuned to CNN and showed news footage of bloody, bandaged Iraqi men lying on beds, casualties of U.S. assaults. The pilots never glanced at that screen.

They live in a competitive world where success is measured by delivering bombs to targets. "My job is to hit whatever target I've been assigned to hit," Cmdr. Jeff Penfield, the commanding officer of the Super Hornet squadron, said. "I don't think about it as human life. I aim at hard things, and if there are people around, I don't think about it."

But some of the pilots said they consider the moral dilemma of their work. "I reflect on it on a daily basis," said Cmdr. Dale Horan, 39, the squadron's executive officer, who bears enough resemblance to the actor Woody Harrelson that his call sign is Woody. "I want to do well," Horan said. "Yes, I get excited when I'm successful and my bomb hits the target. But we're expending precious treasure - blood and lives as well as equipment and money."

Talking With God

During the first days of the air campaign, Horan said he had several conversations with God. "I wanted to know why I was not getting worked up about the fact that I was going to drop bombs and kill people probably," Horan, who is a Lutheran, said. "How was it that I was comfortable about this? I'm a Christian, and I don't believe in killing people. So why was I feeling OK about this?"

Rob Kihm, 28, a pilot from Los Angeles, dropped a laser-guided bomb on a large Iraqi ammunitions depot outside Baghdad on March 29Saturday night. The next day he was still feeling the exhilaration of hitting the target, evading enemy missiles and then speeding back to the safety of the ship.

"It was the biggest explosion I'd ever seen," said Kihm, who was smitten by the movie "Top Gun" in junior high school and gave up a career as a chemical engineer to become a fighter pilot. "You're seeing something exhilarating that most people don't get to see. The natural reaction is to get excited."

But in quiet moments, Kihm considered something more troubling - whether he killed Iraqi soldiers near the depot. "You start thinking about these guys, and you know they're probably not willing combatants, that they have a gun to their heads," said Kihm, who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and is known as the peacenik of the squadron. "So how are you supposed to take this bombing? I don't have a good answer for that."

Horan said he found solace in an unwavering belief that the war is just. "I just feel very satisfied with this mission and our purpose and the way the U.S. is going about this," he said. "Innocent people are going to die because of what we do. But this is not firebombing Dresden or Tokyo," cities leveled in World War II. Every pilot interviewed in the Super Hornet squadron echoed a version of this statement. To a man, they said they were able to drop their bombs because they trusted that military commanders were choosing targets in a way that minimizes the deaths of innocents.

"I have faith in the way we're doing things," Lt. Stephan Dean, 29, said. "I don't think that's deluding myself."

FMI: www.defenselink.mil