My First Combat Sortie By Lt. Ryan F. Dillon
After years of training, I finally was ready to go in-country on my first combat sortie. I didn’t know at the time that this flight would be an all-expenses-paid, week-long trip to Kandahar, Afghanistan. s a squadron nugget, I have taken pride in being the proverbial fly on the wall. The senior pilots in the ready room often boasted about six-hour missions, dueling with the iron maiden, and the flurry of paperwork and cockpit management that awaited me in the skies over Afghanistan. I was eager and humbled by the opportunity to support our troops on the ground in Operation Enduring Freedom. Training was over, or so I thought. The squadron started me off easy with a day launch and recovery on the wing of our operations officer. That morning, I felt excited, afraid, and overwhelmed. I was excited because I finally would get to exercise skills I had been refining for months. Fear of the unknown and of making a mistake kept me sharp during preflight mission planning. This hop would take me to a place I never had been before: the skies over a country where there was a real enemy. As with any flight off the aircraft carrier, it’s easy 22
to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks required of each flight. I vividly remember the skipper telling me that every flight encompasses an entire FRS syllabus: carrier qualification, tanking, air-to-air, and air-to-ground. He highly recommended I compartmentalize every piece of the flight from takeoff to landing. My plan was to get airborne, execute a running rendezvous on my lead, and comply with the transit procedures over Pakistan to my destination in southern Afghanistan. The next hurdle in my flight would be to in-flight refuel. Tanking is my least favorite thing to do, and sure enough, we were scheduled for the iron maiden. The KC-135’s basket is significantly heavier than any other refueling drogue I’ve tanked on, and I knew it had the upper hand on the probe of my vulnerable Hornet. The tactical portion of the flight seemed straightforward, considering the immense amount of training I did on our 8,000-mile transit over here. I think my flight lead was happy to know I would be a good wingman by Approach
