Letters from War—Distant Thunder

By Donald Harward

Preflight is invariably a noisy time—even though preflights usually take place in the very early morning. The world around me is already well into the day’s activities by the time I start to peer through my still sleepy eyes at the myriad of parts that comprise my flying machine.

However, one morning, amid all the noise of jets taking off and landing and helicopters hovering around on the ramp, there were some brief periods of relative quiet. It was during one of those short oases of calm that I heard it—far away, but unmistakable. First came the “boom, boom, boom” of big guns firing. Then, after some time, the familiar “crump, crump, crump” of those deadly 105s or larger 155s finding their mark. Once heard, these sounds are never forgotten, Yes, outgoing or incoming artillery has a very distinctive sound indeed—and it is all too familiar.

Familiar to me, at least. I suspect the average family living in “who-knows-where-ville” probably has no idea what real artillery sounds like.

“Mommy, what’s that?”

“Oh, that’s the 155s firing, dear.” Perhaps Dad correcting: “No, actually, those are 105s—listen to the slightly higher pitch of the report.”

No. I’ll bet that conversation never happens at all—which is a good thing. Most people live in such opulent peace that a sound like that would probably strike panic into their hearts and overload the local phone system with emergency calls. But to some—a chosen few—it is just another “normal” sound in a very different sort of everyday life.

I began thinking back to the times when I had heard similar sounds before—the sounds of the machines of war. My first real exposure to the big guns was probably when I first went to Grafenwoehr, Germany, as a young army sergeant. “Graf”, as we all called it, was—and remains—the site of a large armour training base for both the US and German armies where the guns hammer away at the German countryside 24/7 in endless training.

My first trip to Graf was in the turret of a trusty M-60A1 tank in which I served as the commander’s gunner. A buck sergeant at the time, I had not yet won my slot to flight school and was still an enlisted soldier. I remember parking behind some very large eight-inch tracked artillery pieces as they fired. Eight inches does not refer to the length of the shell but the diameter of the bore of the cannon—a full eight inches across (203 mm for the metrically inclined readership)! Its shells—which it hurled some considerable distance—weighed so much that they were not easily handled and had to be pushed around on a kind of sled device. If you were looking at just the right spot when those guns fired, you could actually see the huge projectiles leave the tubes on their way up and outbound.

That M-60 tank was not to be trifled with either. It mounted a deadly 105 mm gun (4.13 inches in English-speak). Tanks’ guns are not artillery, but rather, direct firing weapons, meaning that they fire in a direct line (like a rifle) rather than “lobbing” their projectiles like big cannons. Our mission at the time was to train to become proficient at dispatching Russian tanks—a job that I eagerly (and foolishly) looked forward to. We were pretty good at our craft and could easily hit a tank-sized target every three to four seconds, even if on the move. This was back in the days before all the electronic do-dads that make the modern tank crewman espresso while simultaneously engaging a hoard of enemy armoured vehicles!

Another “once heard, never forgotten” sound is the “brrrrrrr” of the Dillon or General Electric miniguns; that sound is eternally burned into my memory. Miniguns turn any aerial platform upon which they are mounted into hellish killing machines and are nothing short of terrifying to those on the receiving end.

Shortly after I was recruited to join the Army’s Special Operations Aviation, I remember watching a pair of “Little Birds” (Hughes OH-6 Cayuse) working out on the range at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The Little Birds were flying in towards their target, “bumping” up briefly and then pushing over. At the point where their noses aligned with the target, the distinctive long “brrrrrrr” sound of the miniguns’ firing began. The aircraft left smoke trails from the many hundreds of rounds being consumed and showered brass cases and steel links behind them. The target was momentarily “alive” with a shower of sparks and ricochets; so many, in fact, that the effect was like a vertical wall of sparks such as one would see when welding steel! That sound creeps into one’s inner being and, once there, is always recognisable.

For many years now, I have known the sound of the minigun; at times, pairs of them pouring their streams of fire outwards from where I sat. Let me tell you, even sitting behind one, it is quite something when one of those guns goes off. For a pilot, sitting in front of one and slightly off to one side while it is firing, is almost an out of body experience. It is as if someone has poked a tiny hole into the very gates of hell and its contents are spraying through that hole at supersonic speeds. Now imagine that the hole is directly behind you and you will start to get the picture. When you first hear the sound of a minigun up close, your every instinct is to get away from it—as far away and as quickly as possible! However, I have bumped the helicopter so many times myself in a heavy gun bird with two willing Dillons in the back ready to digest nine thousand rounds of ammo that I have grown accustomed to the sound. I have heard those guns go “hot” on so many occasions that I can scarcely remember specific occasions. Now, to me—as they say in the movies—it has become “the sound of freedom!”

The sound of the way-too-big 30 mm Gatling gun fitted to the rather blunt nose of the A-10 “Warthog” (a similar “brrrrr” but lower pitched than that of the minigun) is another instantly recognisable auditory experience that I first encountered in Germany. At the time, the A-10 was an important but not yet battle tested member of the combined arms team of aerial and ground warriors. These solid attack aircraft were working on a range at Hohenfels at the same time as my tank platoon. During a “” (where we were moving cautiously down a range while silhouettes of T-62 Russian tanks began to pop up), the Warthogs arrived to save the day. Until this point, as a young twenty-something sergeant, I had thought I was virtually invincible inside the lumbering steel hulk of my modern battle tank. The work of the A-10s was spectacular to see and hear!

While the targets kept popping up, we were fighting our platoon in two groups. The heavy section had over watch with three tanks, while the two most forward tanks—the light section—advanced carefully. In theory, it was the job of the light section to get a fight going, while the heavy section was supposed to provide overwhelming firepower to destroy anything opposing us. However, as any soldier with a few more years’ experience (and cynicism) would point out, one of the “principles of war” is that “no plan remains intact after contact.” From my years of practical application of many well thought out plans, I can confirm that this cynical “principle” is pretty much a true statement!

We were moving steadily down the range—picking through our mighty targets of plywood one by one and drilling them with 105 mm holes—when a pair of A-10s turned up and stole the show. They came ripping in just above the treetops, pulled up steeply, rolled inverted, pull their noses up (down) and waxed the whole darned stinking range! They killed everything in about three milliseconds. The pilot of the second aircraft did a double tap. After the inverted bump, he rolled upright and immediately shot a cluster of tanks then snapped off hard to the right. In the middle of the turn, he turned back into another bump, shot another group of tanks—while upside down—and then split off to my left. Whoa! What the hell was that? Our entire company of tankers was thinking the same things: (1) Did we really just see that? (2) We are out of work, and (3) Do the Ruskies have anything like that to shoot at us with?

And yet, oddly enough, the A-10 is not a favourite of the US Air Force. I believe it must be some quirky fraternity thing, because, in my opinion, anyone who loves to fly a warplane and kill stuff should be kicking down doors to fly that beast. Of course, the A-10 is a close-air-support aircraft, which means it lives near the dirty, army-infested ground and any self-righteous true fighter pilot lives for only one thing: to kill another fighter. A real fighter pilot likes to take off from his or her base and rocket up toward MiG Alley for an afternoon shoot-fest, then back to base for steak and a couple of whiskey sours at the “O” club (all of you zoomies out there reading this know it’s true). But for me—a muddy-boot army soldier—the A-10 reigns supreme.

The A-10 came into its own in the blackened desert north of Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm. Those Warthogs accounted for many times their weight in enemy casualties. From the base I flew out of initially (KKMC or King Khalid Military City), the Air Force’s A-10s sortied relentlessly. Their young pilots would even skip lunch in order to sortie faster and destroy more stuff before nightfall. Even then, they did not stop flying. I can’t begin to imagine the terror the Iraqi soldiers must have felt when they heard the sound of the Warthog’s General Electric CF-34 turbofans or, worse still, its terrible GAU-8 cannon. Believe me, there are many Iraqis alive today who will immediately wake from a dead sleep at the sound of that gun firing.

Heck, it affects me the same way. Just the other day, after an exhausting ten hours or so in the cockpit, followed by a few more hours of answering stupid emails from a bunch of clerks in the States, I was enjoying a deep, deep sleep. All at once, I was awake and sitting upright—as were two of the three other pilots with whom I shared the room. Reaction number one: awaken. Reaction number two: determine the location. Before I was even fully awake, my senses had my head turned toward the left. Then, an instant later, another BRRRRRR! It was the unmistakable sound of an A-10 firing a burst.

As reason slowly overtook startled reaction, I remembered we were only a couple of miles from the Tarnac range complex at Kandahar, Afghanistan. “Sounds like an A-10,” I said in the darkness. Pat, directly opposite me, (who should have been asleep) answered immediately “Yeah, an A-10,” while Tim made the comment that it was “probably over at Tarnac, test firing.” I chuckled and noted that all three of us had had exactly the same reaction. Meanwhile, Dave continued to snore.

Then there are the bad sounds—the ones you never get used to completely. The worst, of course, is incoming mortar, artillery or rocket fire. The most common of these for us in Afghanistan are the 107 mm Russian rockets. The first sound you hear is the BOOOOM when they explode. The next thing you hear is the whelping “giant voice” alarm and a little Indian guy’s voice saying “Rocket attack, rocket attack!” Because he is Indian, his pronunciation makes it sound more like, “rocket ah-tick, rocket ah-tick!” So immediately after the explosion, and the apprehensive second or two awaiting the impact of rocket number two, comes the little Indian guy yelling “Rocket ah-tick, rocket ah-tick”. This is actually quite amusing—at least for everyone who didn’t just get hit!

Apart from the incoming stuff that can actually kill you, the most frightening thing you’ll ever hear is the good guys shooting big rockets outbound. Now, how many of you think an outgoing rocket sounds like the Space Shuttle being fired into orbit? If you raised your hand, that’s a good thing—because it shows that you live in a place where it never happens! If you didn’t raise your hand, what did you hear? Was it television footage of a Patriot during Desert Storm, or an “Attackum” in Afghanistan or Iraq? I’m sure some artillery type is bristling right now at the way I butchered the Attackum name (it’s actually ATACMS—Army Tactical Missile System) but hey, I’m just an aviator of obvious low breeding and poor education; a product of—please forgive me—the lowly Army!

Well, here’s a news flash, folks: those ATACMS do not sound anything like the Space Shuttle being launched. They sound like volcanoes—the ones that formed the earth—all exploding at once. The first time I ever heard one, I’d have to say it nearly startled me to death! I was living in a different compound at the time, on the perimeter of the ever-growing Kandahar airfield. The access road to the base’s guard towers ran right past our accommodation, which, as far as rockets were concerned, was either a bad or a good thing. My building sat some thirty feet away from a Hesco barrier wall, which was only around twenty feet away from that access road. Unknown to me, during the hours of darkness that night, the Army had parked a tracked ATACMS launch vehicle adjacent to my room! Sometime around three a.m.—in the late watches of the night when decent people ought to be sleeping—my world changed violently.

From a deep, deep sleep, in which I had been roaming around in dream land with my wife and children, I was blasted into reality by 150+ decibels of ear ripping full-on “afterburner jet noise”! My flimsy PVC plastic door, which was usually bright white, was now bright orange! My first thought was that a rocket had hit us and we were on fire. Then, a microsecond later, I thought perhaps one of the Dutch F-16s might have crashed into our compound immediately after takeoff while still in afterburner. However, the fire-like orange light and the deafening sound started to decrease, as if whatever was causing it was getting further away. Obviously, if an F-16 had crashed on us, it couldn’t have continued its takeoff. So what the heck was going on?

Then, as the sound continued to diminish, there came a shower of something on our tin roof. It sounded as if someone had dropped a load of gravel from some height. Several seconds later, when the world hadn’t ended, I hopped out of bed and cautiously opened the door. The orange light was now gone but as I looked down the hallway, I could see big Pete looking out the window in the door at his end of the building. Even in the pale light, I could see his big South African smile as he turned to look at me and said, “That was a big one!”

Big what? Meteor? Atomic bomb? What? Then someone more knowledgeable than me voiced that name that I will always remember: “Attackum”. Immediately thereafter—thanks to Google and the internet—we all became Attackum-smart.

To look at those things and to actually experience one being fired is altogether different. Suffice it to say, you don’t want to experience something like that—unless you’re the type who needs to climb into the engine of a Boeing 757 during the takeoff roll just to heighten the senses.

I could get into learning about the Patriot sound, but it’s very little different from the “Attackum”. It’s all bad; there’s nothing nice about it whatsoever. Even if you knew one was to be fired and you were given a countdown, you would still jump halfway out of your skin when it actually went off.

So, I guess, in retrospect, when I hear the boom, boom, boom…crump, crump, crump of distant artillery, I guess it isn’t really so bad after all. The fact that I know that sound (and a whole catalogue of other noises, and a dictionary of terms that are meaningless in everyday “back home” conversations) while many of you do not is also a good thing. It means that some dedicated, selfless people are doing a great job of keeping such sounds away from your ears. So if you get a chance, take a knee in some private place and pray to your God. Thank him for these people and for the fact that because of what they do, you do not know about such things.