“Go on then. Start her up.”
The voice was slick, dripping with the kind of condescending amusement that only a young officer convinced of his own immortality could muster.
I didn’t turn around immediately. My hand was resting on the enormous rubber of the front landing gear of the A-10 Thunderbolt II. The rubber was warm. Alive.
The Arizona sun beat down on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, making the air shimmer above the concrete. To everyone else, it was just heat. To me, it felt like the breath of a dragon I hadn’t ridden in thirty years.
“Show us how it’s done, Old-timer,” the voice persisted.
I am Roger Bentley. I am 82 years old. My knees ache when it rains, and sometimes I forget where I put my reading glasses. But I remember the vibration of this machine better than I remember the sound of my late wife’s voice. And that kills me inside.
I wore my old leather jacket. It was cracked, peeling, and far too hot for the weather. But I couldn’t take it off. It was the only thing holding my crumbling spine together.
I finally turned to look at him. Captain Davis.
He was young. Clean. His flight suit was pressed so sharp you could cut yourself on the creases. He stood there with a gaggle of young airmen, smirking, playing to his audience. He saw a wrinkled relic. He saw a nuisance.
“Come on now,” Davis jeered, pointing a manicured finger at the cockpit. “You were telling my guys how you flew by the seat of your pants. Surely you remember how to flip a few switches? Or is all that glass too much for you?”
I didn’t look at his face. I looked at his boots. Not a speck of dust.
My eyes drifted back to the nose of the plane, just below the canopy. The paint was weathered, but I could still see the ghost of the name painted there decades ago. Dead Eye.
And below that, the massive, seven-barreled maw of the GAU-8 Avenger cannon.
“The auxiliary power unit requires a ground check before ignition,” I said. My voice sounded like gravel grinding in a blender. It wasn’t the voice of the Major I used to be. “Hydraulic pressure needs to be stable at 3,000 PSI. You don’t just turn a key, Captain.”
Davis blinked. The technical accuracy threw him off for a split second, but his ego recovered fast.
“Oh, we’ve got a real expert here,” he laughed, stepping closer. His shadow fell over me, cold and heavy. “Look, sir, this is a restricted area. I’m going to have to ask you to step away. We can’t have civilians climbing all over a multi-million dollar asset.”
He spoke slowly, loudly. As if I were a child. As if my brain had rotted away with my youth.
“I’m not a civilian,” I whispered.
“Right,” Davis sneered. “And I’m the Chief of Staff. Sir, show me your visitor pass. Now.”
He jabbed a finger at the patch on my chest. A crudely stitched scorpion inside a circle of sand.
“And what is that? Your nursing home bingo team logo?”
The airmen behind him shifted uncomfortably. They knew this was wrong. But I just stood there, feeling the weight of the ghosts standing behind me. The men who didn’t come back. The men who d*ed screaming on the radio while I rained fire from the sky to save them.
Davis didn’t see a hero. He saw a senile old man trespassing on his playground.
“I’m losing my patience, Grandpa,” Davis snapped, his hand drifting toward his hip. “Move along, or I’ll have security drag you out.”
Part 2
The Echo of the Canyon
The heat on the tarmac at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base was no longer just a weather condition; it was a physical weight, pressing down on my shoulders like a lead vest. But it wasn’t the sun that was making it hard to breathe. It was the suffocating indignation of being treated like a criminal in the one place on earth where I should have felt most at home.
“I’m losing my patience, Grandpa,” Captain Davis had said. His hand was hovering near his hip, a gesture of authority that felt like a slap in the face. “Move along, or I’ll have security drag you out.”
The threat hung in the hot, shimmering air between us. Security. Drag you out. Psych ward.
The words bounced around my skull, clashing with the memories that were fighting to surface. I looked at the young officer. He was pristine. He was perfect. He was a product of simulators and classrooms, of PowerPoint presentations and climate-controlled briefings. He looked at me and saw a wrinkled, trembling old man in a leather jacket that smelled of mothballs and old tobacco. He saw a liability.
He didn’t see the blood on the leather. He didn’t see the scorch marks on the soul beneath it.
“You want to see my credentials?” I asked again, my voice barely a whisper. My throat felt dry, coated in the dust of a desert thousands of miles away and thirty years in the past.
“Slowly!” Davis barked, stepping back as if I were about to pull a weapon. He signaled to the two young airmen behind him—boys, really, with faces as smooth as the polished aluminum of a transport plane. They looked nervous. They shifted their weight from foot to foot, glancing between their Captain and the old man standing by the nose gear. They knew, in that instinctual way that soldiers have, that something here was fundamentally broken.
I reached into the inner pocket of my jacket. My fingers brushed against the worn leather wallet, but they also brushed against something else—a phantom sensation. The cold, hard stick of the A-10. The throttle in my left hand. The vibration.
As I fumbled for my ID, the tarmac beneath my feet seemed to dissolve. The bright blue Arizona sky darkened into a brown, choking haze. The smell of jet fuel and asphalt was replaced by the acrid, metallic tang of cordite and burning oil.
I wasn’t in Tucson anymore. I was in the “Killbox.”
The Killbox: February 26, 1991
The sky was screaming.
That’s the only way I could ever describe it to civilians, though I rarely tried. The radio traffic in my helmet was a cacophony of panic, static, and the clipped, terrified voices of men who knew they were about to die.
“Ranger 6 Actual, this is Ranger 6! We are taking effective fire from the north and east! They have armor! Repeat, they have heavy armor!”
The voice belonged to Captain Miller. I had met him once, briefly, in a mess tent in Saudi Arabia before the ground war kicked off. He was a young kid from Georgia with a picture of his fiancée taped inside his helmet. Now, his voice was cracking, strained by the kind of fear that turns bowels to water.
I was flying at 2,000 feet, banking hard to the left. My aircraft, A-10 Thunderbolt II, tail number 780618, groaned under the G-force. We called her the “Warthog” because she was ugly, slow, and spent her life rooting around in the mud. But to the infantry, she was the most beautiful thing in the sky.
“Ranger 6, this is Hog 1-1,” I keyed the mic. My mask was tight against my face, smelling of rubber and sweat. “I have your position marked with smoke. Confirm you are danger close.”
“Danger close! Danger close! We have T-72s cresting the ridge! We are pinned! If you don’t drop now, there won’t be anyone left to drop for!”
I looked down. Through the canopy, the desert floor was a confusing quilt of beige and brown, punctuated by the black smudges of burning vehicles. I saw the green smoke popping—the Ranger position. And less than three hundred meters away, I saw the monsters.
Five Iraqi T-72 tanks were maneuvering in a wedge formation, their main guns traversing toward the small depression where the Rangers were dug in. They were hunting. And the Rangers were the prey.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat that matched the thrum of the twin General Electric TF34 engines behind me. This wasn’t a video game. This wasn’t a drill. If I missed, I killed Americans. If I didn’t fire, the tanks killed Americans.
“Hog 1-1, engaging,” I said. My voice sounded surprisingly calm, a stark contrast to the chaos in my mind.
I rolled the heavy beast onto her back and pulled the nose through the horizon, lining up the shot. The ground rushed up to meet me. The tanks grew larger in my HUD (Heads-Up Display). I could see the muzzle flashes from their coaxial machine guns suppressed the Rangers.
I flipped the Master Arm switch. I selected the gun.
The GAU-8 Avenger. A 30mm, seven-barreled Gatling gun the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It didn’t shoot bullets; it shot milk bottles filled with depleted uranium.
I centered the reticle on the lead tank. I waited. Patience. You have to wait until you can see the rivets. Until you are so low you can smell the fear.
One second. Two seconds.
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