Operation Southern Watch

Okay.

If you remember, after the first Iraq War, we had what was called Northern and Southern Watch, and basically that was preventing any type of military flights that were happening in Ir- in Iraq.

That was a sustainable operation.

It was conducted through air power, and it lasted for a long time.

There were no air-to-air threats, so we flew them down low.

And then we were called away as Iraq started to heat up, and, uh, we took the Kitty Hawk through the Straits of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf and supported joint operations over Iraq as part of Operation Southern Watch, which was the no-fly zone, which was later expanded during the Bush administration.

But we were out there to fly what turned out to be what I call my first combat mission, even though I was flying Operation Southern Watch, and those were considered to be combat missions.

The first one where I actually dropped bombs was on January 13th of 1993, two years after Desert Storm.

And it was just one of those things where at the end of the Bush administration, Bush 41 said, "Hey, I'm tired of my guys getting shot at during these OSW missions.

And then we went back to the ships and left Mogadishu, left Somalia for good after the new year.

And we went up into the Persian Gulf to continue on with the float with the Jebel Ali and the United Arab Emirates because we were in support of what was Operation Southern Watch, the southern no-fly zone.

You had Southern Watch, which was the south part of Iraq.

The Iraqis weren't allowed to fly after the Gulf War.

That dual capability is rare, it is expensive, and it is why the F-15 Echo has remained in production and in service for decades after programs that were supposed to replace it have come and gone.

The Strike Eagle has flown in the Gulf War, in Operations Northern Watch and Southern Watch over Iraq, in Allied Force over the former Yugoslavia, in Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, in Iraqi Freedom, in Operation Inherent Resolve against the Islamic State.

The mountain home jets that just came home from the Middle East are part of a lineage that has been actively employed in combat or near combat environments for over 30 years.

That context is worth keeping in mind.

Mm-hmm

... within, within a couple of years previous, we had gone out to, uh, gone overseas to, uh, Turkey and to, uh, Saudi Arabia to operate with, uh, Operation Northern Watch and Operation Southern Watch, uh, over, uh, Iraq during the days when, uh, Saddam Hussein was still around.

In terms of your crew, the people involved, how many jets were there in the squadron to begin with, and how many actually went up that morning?

Uh, we had a, a total of approximately 20 aircraft, uh, that were at our disposal.

As you said, George Bush said, "We can no longer tolerate these lingering threats that may destabilize the region or American interests or threaten us at home, and we are going to deal with them once and for all." The world of, of Iraq in two thousand and two was also not just a calm and steady presence either.

We had to maintain forces there as part of Operation Northern and Southern Watch.

We were, you know, imposing and maintaining an oil embargo that was keeping oil off the international market.

We were dealing with the really corrupt and inefficient food for oil program that was not only lining the pockets of corrupt Iraqi bureaucrats, but also starving the Iraqi people or the, the economic pressures were.

And people forget as well, by the way, that in that nineteen ninety-six declaration of war and the ninety-eight fatwa, one of the prime reasons that Osama bin Laden said he was at war with the United States was the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia that were there to maintain Northern and Southern Watch.

So all of this is connected.

Everything goes back to our presence in the Middle East, which, by the way, I'm, I'm not a Tucker isolationist or anything like that.

So Desert Shield, Desert Storm, I was in maintenance at the time during that, and we were kind of running a 24-7 op at that point.

From Desert Storm to 9-11, we had participated in Northern Watch, Southern Watch, Bosnia, Kosovo, all of those actions.

But that, you know, that's all somewhere else, right? That's not here, not really doing anything from Bangor.

But 9-11 starts, you know, we're actively involved from Home Station.

Desert Storm, I think you see that start to change.

Again, big operation, active duty needs help, we go do it, but we play a much more major role.

And then from there to 9-11, the idea that we're going to go and help out, like I said, all the deployments to Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Watch, Southern Watch, those kind of things, we start doing a little bit more to augment on a day-to-day basis.

And then 9-11 hits, and post-9-11, we're no longer a reserve that comes to help in the time of need.

I'm spat out into the world and living life relatively easy.

Of course, we're doing Northern Watch and Southern Watch and all these sort of like peripheral combat experiences.

Yeah,

yeah.

It was, I mean, like you, Stacey, it was...

It was just normal training.

I mean, the biggest thing that we did was, as you mentioned, Northern Watch and Southern Watch.

And everyone knew that that was, I mean, for the most part, pretty uneventful.