tecnisub

It looks like a scene that no Hollywood director would dare put in a movie because audiences would never believe it was real. Yet the official U.S. Navy photograph taken on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on July 6, 1991 proves every word of it. At fifteen thousand feet over the Indian Ocean, Navy Lieutenant Mark Baden was flying a Grumman KA-6D Intruder, with bombardier-navigator Lieutenant Keith Gallagher sitting beside him in the right seat. Without warning, a mechanical failure triggered the ejection seat under Gallagher while the glass cockpit canopy was still locked shut. The seat rocket blasted twenty-six-year-old Gallagher straight through the thick acrylic glass roof, but stopped halfway up the rails. His boots and legs remained jammed inside the cockpit while his head, shoulders, and chest stuck straight out the top of the airplane into a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour hurricane of freezing air. Worse still, his parachute pack popped open in the slipstream, wrapping white nylon shroud lines tightly around the Intruder's vertical tail fin like a giant net. Hammered against the metal frame by wind forces strong enough to dislocate his shoulders and rip his helmet visor off, Gallagher blacked out. Inside the shattered cockpit, Pilot Mark Baden looked to his right, saw only Gallagher's boots and limp legs, and assumed the blast had killed his friend. Why did Baden not pull his own ejection handle and abandon the crippled airplane? Because if Baden ejected, the firing rocket of his own seat and the pilotless crash into the ocean would kill Gallagher for certain, and a moment later Baden saw Gallagher's gloved hand move in the wind. Dropping the nose toward the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln below, Baden slowed the jet to one hundred and forty knots so the wind would stop suffocating his friend. With a shredded tail fin, an open canopy roaring like a tornado, and a human being sticking out the roof, Baden lined up on the pitching flight deck. He slammed the Intruder onto the steel deck and snagged the number-three arresting wire while deck crewmen swarmed the fuselage to cut Gallagher out of his harness. Gallagher survived with a dislocated shoulder and bruises, returning to active flight duty six months later because his pilot refused to leave him behind.

In February 1991, military pundits on television warned that Iraq's elite Republican Guard divisions, dug into the desert sand with Soviet-built T-72 tanks, would inflict heavy casualties on American armor. On the afternoon of February 26, 1991, nine American M1A1 Abrams tanks from Eagle Troop, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment drove into a blinding sandstorm at a map line called 73 Easting and settled the argument in twenty-three minutes. Thirty-year-old Army Captain H.R. McMaster was leading Eagle Troop's nine sixty-ton Abrams tanks and twelve Bradley fighting vehicles as the lead reconnaissance screen ahead of the main American corps. Howling desert winds whipped sand and rain sideways, dropping naked-eye visibility to barely a hundred meters. An entire brigade of the Iraqi Republican Guard's Tawakalna Division was waiting in prepared defensive berms just over the next rise, confident that no tank crew could see or shoot accurately while moving through a sandstorm. They did not know what American engineers had bolted inside the turret of the M1A1 Abrams. At 4:07 PM, cresting the low desert ridge at twenty-five miles per hour, McMaster's lead tank spotted eight dug-in T-72 tanks straight ahead and opened fire without slowing down. Why did every American shot hit dead-center while the Iraqi tank shells missed or bounced off? First, because the Abrams' thermal imaging sights cut straight through the swirling sand and black oil smoke, turning hot enemy tank engines into glowing white targets two miles away. Second, because the Abrams' gyro-stabilized one-hundred-and-twenty-millimeter smoothbore cannon stays locked onto its target within fractions of an inch even while the sixty-ton tank is bouncing across desert dunes at thirty miles per hour. And third, because each American shell was an M829A1 Silver Bullet, a dart of solid depleted uranium, the exact same dense metal fired by the A-10 Warthog, traveling at a mile per second to punch straight through sand berms and Soviet steel armor alike. Instead of stopping at the ridge to wait for the main division behind him, McMaster ordered his nine tanks to charge straight through the middle of the enemy brigade before they could regroup. In twenty-three minutes of relentless combat, Eagle Troop's nine Abrams tanks and twelve Bradleys destroyed twenty-eight T-72 tanks, sixteen armored personnel carriers, and thirty trucks without losing a single American tank.