It was a large and complex mission, involving both Air Force planes out
of England and Navy aircraft launched from carriers in the Gulf of
Sidra, attacking five separate targets, three in and around Tripoli and
two at Benghazi. In all, eighteen F-111s had been assigned to the
objectives at Tripoli, and of those, nine had been slated to hit the
two-hundred-acre compound of Libya’s leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi.
But the planning for the El Dorado Canyon had been intense, a strain on
pilots and crews that robbed them of sleep for the forty-eight hours
preceding the mission. Then, Spain and France had both refused overfly
privileges for aircraft participating in the raid, forcing the entire
contingent out of England to go the long way around, down Europe’s
Atlantic coast and past the Strait of Gibraltar, a flight of three
thousand miles that took six and a half hours.
That flight had been an epic nightmare, requiring multiple midair
refuelings and continuous, nerve-wracking close-formation flying, a
tactic designed to make several planes appear as one on enemy radar. One
of the pilots became disoriented during refueling and, “flying on
automatic,” followed the tanker halfway back to England. By the time he
realized his mistake, it was too late to rejoin his flight. Four more
scrubbed the attack because of breakdowns with the aircraft’s electronic
systems, especially with the F-111’s radar, which proved to have a
disturbing tendency to break down during long flights. A sixth Aardvark
went down at sea just off the Libyan coast, the only American plane lost
in the operation. The cause of the crash was unknown, but pilot error
was a definite possibility. A seventh F-111 aircrew probably
misidentified a checkpoint on the Libyan coast, though equipment
malfunction was also a possibility; whatever the cause, the bombs missed
Qaddafi’s compound and landed near the French Embassy. Civilians died,
including French nationals, in what was ironically and with bitter black
humor referred to later as retaliation for the French refusal of
overflight privileges. Of the nine original aircraft tasked with the
mission, only two actually hit the target. Damage to the compound had
been relatively light.
Adding injury to the insult, one of the casualties, unfortunately, had
been Qaddafi’s adopted daughter.
The bombing of the Libyan dictator’s compound had not been a direct
attempt to kill Qaddafi–it was known that he only intermittently stayed
there–but it had been intended to deliver a strongly worded warning
against continuing his terrorism campaign against the West. In that,
probably, the raid had succeeded, but the poor performance of the
Aardvarks in that part of the mission had been a shock. During the
planning, it had been estimated that at least four or five of the nine
F-111s would be able to complete their bombing runs; two aircraft had
simply not been enough to ensure the raid’s success.
In fairness, it was important to remember that the other elements of
Operation El Dorado Canyon had carried out their parts of the mission
flawlessly, causing heavy damage to the other targets.
Tombstone signaled for an enlisted man standing nearby to bring him a
cup of coffee. On the PLAT monitor, the Prowler’s curiously flattened
stabilizer tipped suddenly into the air as its nose went over the side.
It hung there a moment, suspended, then vanished below the edge of the
flight deck. The deck crew were already lined up along Catapult Three,
walking their way slowly aft as they searched for bits of debris. Other
men were using fire hoses to wash down an area of the deck astride the
rear of the cat, sweeping away mingled gasoline, oil, and blood.
He wondered if the accident had badly shaken the men of the deck crew.
Coming on top of a sailor’s suicide, an incident like that could further
erode morale, might even cause further carelessness and more accidents.
On another PLAT monitor, this one showing activity forward at Cats One
and Two, an EA-6B Prowler howled off the port catapult, while hookup men
locked the cat shuttle to the undercarriage of an F/A-18 Hornet to
starboard.
Steam boiled across the deck, obscuring the crowds of color-coded men
hurrying about their elaborate choreography of readying, inspecting, and