“We were a different breed of cat right from the start. We flew through the air while the others walked on the ground,” opined General Carl Spaatz, one of the founders of military aviation in WW I.  Today an old cat demonstrates that U.S. military aviators are still a breed apart, as America perfects the gruesome art of air warfare.  The US Navy’s F-14 Tomcat is a swing-wing, twin-engine, two-place fighter capable of speeds over Mach 2—twice the speed of sound.  In its thirtieth year of service, the Tomcat is older than many of its pilots and the aircraft carriers it lands on.  It was a mainstay of the Afghan air war, stalking the skies 24/7 with born-again virility from updated see-in-the-night technology and laser and satellite-guided “smart bombs.”
   Home for the old Toms is a floating steel office building, apartment, airport and hangar rising 18 stories above the waterline with a flat, four-and-a-half-acre antiskid steel roof.  It houses 5,500 souls dedicated to the support of up to 80 fighter planes.  The modern aircraft carrier is a bigger stick  than Theodore Roosevelt ever dreamed of when he announced his soft-spoken strategy for international relations.  At the sharp end of that stick, shaped like a spear point when its wings are swept back, is the venerable Tomcat. 
    The carrier is the centerpiece of a 7-10 ship and submarine battle group with more firepower than most nations, a portable archipelago used to “reinforce diplomacy,” as politely put by Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  The enormous investment in such highly mobile diplomatic reinforcement has again yielded a gratifying return for freedom lovers at home and abroad in the war against terrorists.  Long-suffering citizens of Afghanistan, just about as close to the ends of the earth as you can get from America, celebrated their newfound freedom just seventy-eight days after the first Tomcat strikes led off an unprecedented air armada against their despotic terrorist-harboring government.
    The young men (and a very few women) who crew the Tomcats, a pilot and a Radar Intercept Officer, “RIO” for short, are the most highly motivated, talented, trained and unabashed patriots Americans could ever hope to have defending our nation.  It has been so since the dawn of aviation.  In WW I similarly inclined young men eagerly volunteered to fly horribly unreliable fabric fighters before parachutes were invented.  In WW II Canadian poet/aviator John Gillespie Magee, in his ode for the ages—High Flight—likened it to “…touch[ing] the face of God.”  Shortly thereafter he met his Maker doing it.  Fighter pilots today get paid to do what they would gladly do for free, driving a bullet around the wild blue.  It’s a feat 99% of all young men could only dream of, most of whom would lose their lunch if they tried.
    K-robb is one of the daring one percent.  The “K” stands for “Killer,” in the offbeat nicknaming system of the fighter squadron.  A Naval Academy graduate four years younger than the Tomcat, K-robb set foot on the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis in the Arabian Sea just eight days after he graduated from Tomcat school.  Three weeks later he was sitting in the cockpit of his F-14 mounted on the catapult for his first combat mission as a member of Navy squadron VF-211—called the “Fighting Checkmates.”
    There were plenty of reasons for a raw rookie or even a veteran to be afraid.  All had heard the dire media warnings about a far away, hostile land with legendary warriors who had not been subdued by external force since Alexander the Great.  Every fighter crew had heard of the sporting games the enemy played with the severed heads of their Russian foes in an earlier war.  The POW treatment of American pilots in that part of the world going back to World War II is common knowledge to every fighter jock.
    When K-robb entered the fray the enemy was holed up in an area of the Hindu Kush Mountains in eastern Afghanistan, some of the most hostile mountainous terrain in the world.  It was a cave-ridden area that the former USSR had found impregnable in their war with Afghan rebels two decades ago. Over such territory one enemy missile, one bullet, one loose nut, or one broken turbine blade out of hundreds spinning at 14,000 rpm in an aging engine built by the lowest bidder, and K-robb and his RIO could experience a “nylon letdown” into their worst nightmare. 
    But it all gets willed into the subconscious on the catapult when the pilot salutes the “shooter” (the launch officer) and waits out that interminable one-second interval until a kick in the tail drives his stomach into his spine with the force of six g’s—six times gravity.  Fearless?  No, there is no such thing among sane men.  Such is the stuff of courage ingrained in our warriors.  Ronald Reagan, called it “the formidable will and moral courage of free men that is America’s exclusive weapon.”
   The catapult’s steam-driven piston explodes down a cylinder just below the deck and thirty-six tons of lethal Tomcat, six tons heavier than the ship’s anchor, are hurled into the sky.  In two seconds it accelerates past 150 knots, trailing thunderous twin blowtorches.  In K-robb’s words, “A cat shot is the greatest roller coaster ride you ever had…times twenty.”
    Enroute to the target was not a two-hour sight seeing trip, especially for a new guy. K’robb’s fear of “messin’ up” exceeded his fear of the enemy.  Then there was a tanker plane to find over the northern Arabian Sea and a 20-inch diameter basket—a giant metal badminton birdie—at the end of the tanker’s refueling boom angling down from below its tail, in which he had to fly his Tomcat’s refueling probe.  It was never a walk in the park with the Tomcat’s big twin tail fins poking up into the tanker’s slipstream. It required a closure rate of 1 knot at 400 knots and then precisely matching the tanker’s airspeed as the Tomcat got heavier and heavier with fuel.  And that was just the first of at least three refuelings on every six to nine-hour mission in support of Operation Anaconda.
    The operation was launched March 1, 2002, to drive the terrorists out of their last and most formidable mountain stronghold.  It entailed the most concentrated force of air power assembled for that conflict.  In the airspace in the vicinity of an eight-mile box of geography more vertical than horizontal, dozens of a dozen different kinds of fighter and bomber aircraft orbited in holding patterns waiting for directions from “Bossman.”  That was the call sign of an airliner-sized command post loaded with electronic gear and controllers called AWACS—Airborne Warning and Control System.  Air warfare today is an immensely complex choreography with a web of instantaneous audio and visual communication links between earth, sky and outer space reaching all the way to the White House.
     The Tomcats were there to fly close air support for the small, “crazy brave” teams of Special Forces troops, called Forward Air Controllers—FACs—who had infiltrated the snowbound, thin-aired terrain to find the enemy and the caves in which they hid and direct air strikes on them.
    Close air support is no longer close.  For the most part the days are over when the airborne hunter must get down in the weeds to shoot the bear, where sometimes he gets the bear and sometimes the bear gets him.  Tomcats stay 5-25,000 feet above the target and five to ten miles away and deliver weapons with more accuracy than a Vietnam era fighter pilot delivered from fifty feet above the target.
    The RIO is the human factor responsible for that incredible accuracy. He got that title from the early days of the Tomcat, when it’s primary mission was air-to-air combat.  He is now the ultimate computer game geek.  He manages the smart bomb deliveries, analyzing the imagery, punching in target coordinates for the Tomcat’s JDAMs (satellite guided bombs), or fixing the target in his laser crosshairs for their GBU-12s (laser guided bombs).  He must strive for a maximum score as a cramped, heavy-breathing passenger hurtling through space, maneuvering in three dimensions while fighting the vertigo induced by g-forces assaulting his inner ear balance mechanism.  His window on the world is a square computer screen with multiple shades of green, the product of infrared sensors creating a picture, in daylight or darkness, of what is on the ground.  That screen and the instruments surrounding it feed him vast amounts of information that he must interpret and react to as quickly as possible with a delicate touch on his laser control.  The difference between being the best and being a close second can mean life or violent death for a fellow warrior on the ground…or for an innocent bystander, the enemy’s cover of choice.
    While “collateral damage” is a non-issue for our foes, the sanctity of one innocent life still drives America’s rules of war, even to the point of putting our own warriors at greater risk.  It is drilled into the head of every airman who pickles off a bomb and it’s a major part of the stress under which he works.  One mistake can end a career.  Two Air National Guard fighter pilots are currently facing a court martial hearing for accidentally killing four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.  If convicted of all charges they could spend up to 64 years in prison.  Every veteran Tomcat crew has an anguished tale of a rich target that was passed up because of nagging doubts as to authenticity or possible collateral damage.  All of them have heard the FAC on the ground frantically calling, “Abort abort,” just seconds before they were to drop a bomb because of a change in the fluid chaos of the battle. There are few trades that demand so much of a person.  In a press conference Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “We have some incredibly gifted young men.”
   In the jargon of the pilots’ lounge, Anaconda was a turkey shoot, and K-robb’s inaugural contribution did his flight leader proud, earning his new moniker, but his day was far from over.  The hardest part remained—flying the Tomcat from 150 knots down to zero in two seconds.  Nothing the pilot does the whole mission is more challenging, or occurs when he is more exhausted, than coming aboard the carrier.  Unlike a committee-driven airliner gliding from over the horizon onto two miles of stationery concrete, a flight of Tomcats arrives 800 feet overhead the carrier at 500 knots.  In fifteen-second intervals each plane smartly banks eighty degrees, making a U-turn onto a racetrack-landing pattern, a thrilling sight for the crews working on deck.  Turning onto final approach at 150 knots with wings swept wide like a gliding goose, the Tomcat driver aims at a 600-foot-long runway moving forward at thirty knots with a small sideways vector because of the carrier’s angled landing deck.  It also has a vertical vector, bobbing up and down as much as twenty feet, depending on the seas.  The pilot must land on that moving runway so that his tailhook snags one of four arresting cables—ideally the third—spaced forty feet apart beginning sixty feet from the blunt end of the ship.  There are no other options aside from trying again, so the instant his wheels hit the deck the pilot jams his throttles full forward so that he still has flying speed, should his tailhook bounce and miss the cables, a not uncommon occurrence.  Success is a jarring deceleration with two tired, sweat-soaked bodies straining against seat belt and shoulder straps—sweet pain indeed.  And the Tomcat and crew have earned the right to do it again tomorrow…or tomorrow night.  With all the megalomaniacal tyrants and terrorist vermin wreaking global havoc, the end of such tomorrows is not in sight for this extraordinary breed of cat.