Sixty Seconds over Tripoli

At 1:55 A.M., Libyan time, the first of the small fleet of F-111 bombers that had taken off from England six and a half hours earlier was still 50 miles from Tripoli, racing over the dark sea at 600 miles an hour. At an altitude of 200 feet, the 40-ton plane was still under the enemy's radar horizon, invisible except for the flaming exhausts of its twin engines. Inside the cramped cockpit, side by side, sat the pilot and a weapons-systems officer. Only a few stars could be seen through the clouds, but the sky was not empty. Above and around the 17 attack planes closing in on the target flew a vast armada of electronic-warfare planes, aerial tankers, night fighters, command-and-control planes, communications-intelligence planes, rescue helicopters, all circling in the dimly moonlit night, their radios silent lest the Libyan defense forces be alerted. The entire complex attack--code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon--had been carefully orchestrated so that the first bombs would start falling on Tripoli at two A.M. local time.

Far away in Washington, it was 6:55 in the evening. Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, had just put down the telephone after alerting the press corps that he would have an important announcement to make--at precisely 7:20 P.M. He made no mention, naturally, of a military attack on Libya. But since Washington had been rife with rumors of such an attack for several days, the producers of the nightly network news shows, due to go on the air at seven P.M., were quick to assume that something was about to happen, something that would be concluded by 7:20. One producer later said, "They were spelling it out for us clear as daylight."

And so it was that, as the lead plane roared over Tripoli, the noise of the TF30 P-100 engines reverberated simultaneously in the ears of the suddenly awake and frightened inhabitants of Tripoli and, through the telephone receiver thrust out his hotel window by NBC correspondent Steve Delaney, across the ocean to the TV sets of the network audience in America. "Tom!" shouted Delaney to his anchor man. "Tripoli is under attack! I can see planes going overhead. I can hear lots of explosions!"

Careful timing had turned the war on terrorism into live prime-time entertainment. As other TV correspondents followed suit, the nation--or at least the Eastern and Central time zones--listened as a group of highly trained U.S. Servicemen launched a military mission unprecedented in history: the attempted assassination of a foreign head of state with 2000-pound, laser-guided high-explosive bombs precisely targeted on Muammar el-Qaddafi's offices and home and on the tent where he was known to relax.

In so doing, the American military also rained bombs on a naval-cadet-training school at the entrance to Tripoli harbor, on the city's airport and on the densely populated Bin Ashur residential district. Over the eastern city of Bengasi, the Navy, meanwhile, bombed the airport and a downtown district, though without the benefit of live TV coverage. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Robert Sims, summed up the essential feature of the operation the next day. Speaking to the Pentagon press corps, he said, "I don't think we've had anything like it in U.S. military annals."

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To hear the few men who will talk about it, even in strictest anonymity, the military professionals involved in the raid had little sense of their place in military annals. For the most part a modest and unflamboyant lot, the crews of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing based in Lakenheath, England, 248 men in their 20s, were kept out of the public eye after the raid, presumably to prevent reprisals by Qaddafi supporters seeking revenge. Almost a year after the bombing--its anniversary comes on April 15--American regulations still make it virtually impossible to interview these men. Nonetheless, I was able to spend some time with several of them under agreements of complete confidentiality. Besides observing a kind of dispiritment on the part of many of the men, I found it evident that the making of history was not, for the most part, paramount in any of the crew members' minds.

Although the operation had been described to them by their superiors in Washington as a mission to "destroy the nerve center of terrorism" and to "demonstrate resolve," the men with whom I spoke referred to the night in simpler, more personal terms. It was reduced to such factors as staying in formation with the tankers on the long flight around the coast of Europe to Libya; not having the engines stall out during the tricky maneuvering of an aerial refueling; spotting the correct "radar offset point" for finding the target in time; dodging enemy fire in a plane less maneuverable than a Boeing 707; hoping that the automatic ground-avoidance system wouldn't fly the plane into the water; getting home alive.

The unique factor for most, though not all, of the 48 crewmen who lifted off the Lakenheath runway and roared out toward the North Sea that evening in April 1986 was that this was their first combat experience, the significance of which can be understood only by those who have flown in combat. A senior Pentagon officer, survivor of 100 missions over North Vietnam, summed it up: "Going and dropping bombs on a foreign country is an emotional experience; you can't rehearse it." Even for those few "leftseaters"--pilots--who had combat experience, this was an initiation. They were not the same people who had flown over Southeast Asia in another war a long time ago. One veteran of the raid said to me with a shrug, "Thirteen years, kids--it makes it another kind of experience."

On the other hand, combat missions were what these fliers had been preparing for during all the years of training flights. There had been many drills with Libya as the mock target. They wanted to make the flight, not pretend this time. There was pride involved. "Airlift [transport] crews get to do missions all the time," one prematurely grizzled colonel said to me. "They pick up a cargo of trash here and deliver it there, and that is their mission. Our mission is to fly combat, and we don't get to do that much these days." That was why, when the unit commander issued the list of crewmen who had been handpicked to fly over Tripoli, two of the chosen--a gregarious 33-year-old pilot from Puerto Rico, Fernando Ribas-Dominicci, and a quiet weapons-systems officer who had risen from the ranks, Paul Lorence, 31--actually thanked their commander. Colonel Sam Westbrook, the ambitious but popular wing commander, later told Lorence's parents, under grim circumstances, that the two men were the only ones to have shown their gratitude.

When it was all over and the men had flown back to Lakenheath, some of them so tired after 14 hours in the air that they had to be lifted from the cockpit, none was individually profiled in the newspapers, as Charley Beckwith, leader of the failed Iranian hostage-rescue mission, had been. Nor were they showered with medals and honors, as had been bestowed on the major and minor participants in the conquest of Grenada. Instead, they were instructed not to talk with anyone, least of all journalists. Many, of course, must have been relieved by the press restrictions, especially since the British papers were harping at some length on the effect their bombs had had on Libyan homes, civilians, children.

But to the airmen, the prime frustration came from the fact that months after the raid, neither the British critiques nor the gushing tributes that appeared in the American media (The Washington Post: "a raid that went right") truly conveyed what the experience had been like. Shortly after my arrival in England to discuss the raid with some of the participants, I mentioned to one officer, as a preamble to our guarded conversation, that I had just flown across the Atlantic.

"You mean you rode across the Atlantic," he said, correcting me firmly as we sat nursing Cokes in a deserted bar on a Sunday afternoon. "You rode sitting in a chair that you could get out of if you wanted to take a piss. You didn't have to use a piss bag [which uses compressed rubber to soak it up] or try to hold it for seven hours. You didn't have to fly the plane 50 feet off the wing of a tanker the size of a DC-10, with three other fighters beside you in the dark and in the weather [clouds], when all you could see was the tanker's wing light. You didn't have to maneuver to refuel four times on the way and then go into combat and then do it all over again to get home."

Those words were not spoken with rancor, nor in any particularly boastful way, but I began to get a vivid picture of what the glib references to a "2500-nauticalmile flight to the target" really meant for the men who had had to do it. On the other hand, as ignorant as I might have been of what it took to go on a bombing mission in an F-111, I realized in the course of this and other conversations that there were aspects of the operation that had not been fully explored in the many preflight briefings. They included the reasons these professionals were sent out that night and the origin of the machinery they were given to do their jobs. They are worth reviewing briefly before turning to the moment when 24 F-l11 planes loaded with 500- and 2000-pound bombs lumbered down the Lakenheath runway in (continued on page 144)Tripoli(continued from page 132) flights of four, struggled into the air and set course for Tripoli.

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Pilots everywhere have a tendency to be loyal to the planes they fly, no matter how deficient the machines may be. The serious-looking men who fly the F-111s parked in tidy rows on the ramp at Lakenheath are no exception. They refer to their aircraft as "fighters," with the implication of dogfighting in the mode of Top Gun, and to themselves as "fighter pilots," a reference that sometimes causes smirks among the more flamboyant types who fly the sleek F-16s and F-I5s specifically developed for air combat.

As Aviation Week & Space Technology later reported, the raid provided the first "opportunity for U.S. air forces to apply many of the technologies incorporated since the Vietnam war."

Up till that point, it had been the Navy that had all the action against Libya. In August 1981, Navy fighter planes had downed two Libyan jets over the disputed waters below Qaddafi's "line of death" across the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra. The Navy was back in 1983, when it was given high-profile missions shelling and bombing Lebanon. In March 1986, the carriers of the Sixth Fleet once again challenged Qaddafi's claims to the Gulf of Sidra, firing at antiaircraft-missile radars and attacking Libyan naval patrol craft, with the reported loss of 56 Libyan crewmen.

Combat soldiers and aviators do not usually care much about the ceaseless bickerings between the generals and the admirals at the very top of their Services. To these ranking authorities, however, the question of which Services get to take part in missions is a crucial one of "turf," because it affects their budgets. If there was to be a major bombing action against Libya, then the Air Force was going to be part of it; and, since contingency plans called for highly accurate strikes against selective targets, that clearly required the aviators of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing.

This particular unit was the natural choice for any Air Force strike against Libya, because it was equipped with the very latest technology for precision bombing. The air generals had been promising such a capability ever since World War Two, when they had predicted that Germany would be knocked out of the war by pinpoint bombing of key war industries. It had not worked then--the bombs tended to miss by thousands of yards--any more than in the Vietnam war, when key targets survived years of assault by the latest that bombing technology could offer. By 1986, however, Air Force generals had bought the newest gadgetry advertised as capable of bombing within feet of a target. So confidently did they promote these devices, a combination of radar and an infrared-laser system called Pave Tack, that Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger would later claim it was "impossible" that the bombs could miss.

Pave Tack cost around a quarter of a billion dollars to procure, and it is conceivable that its sheer cost had something to do with the Secretary of Defense's confidence. But during Pave Tack tests carried out in New Mexico in 1984, 25 percent of the bombs went wide. As to the F-111 radar, it had actually been tested in combat in Vietnam, and bombs had missed by as much as three quarters of a mile. Another piece of equipment, the terrain-following radar unit, which was supposed to guide an F-111 automatically at very low altitudes, had showed a pronounced tendency to guide planes instead straight into the ground or the water. Finally, the F-111 itself, because of a small wing area and poorly performing engines, is acknowledged to be a sluggish and hard-to-maneuver aircraft.

Meanwhile, planning had become more intense in the Pentagon at the beginning of 1986, after two gangs of gunmen had opened up with machine guns at travelers at Rome and Vienna airports, killing a total of 20, including an 11-year-old American girl. Although neither the Italian nor the Austrian police could find evidence of Libyan involvement, Qaddafi, in a moment of callous buffoonery, had publicly congratulated the attackers, thus giving further ammunition to those who considered the Libyan leader the orchestrater of world-wide terrorism. In the following weeks, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up the basic plans for a surgical strike against the "terrorist nerve center," paying due regard to the prerogatives of the Air Force.

In March, the Sixth Fleet had its encounter with the Libyan antiaircraft missiles and patrol boats. Although this action, officials later conceded to The New York Times, had been intended to provoke a military coup that would topple Qaddafi, the Libyan leader remained firmly in office and publicly defiant. Privately, he tried to arrange peace talks with the U.S., an offer that was speedily and unequivocally rejected. A "senior White House official" told The Washington Post that Qaddafi was expected to unleash further terrorist attacks in the near future.

At Lakenheath, the tempo of training increased.

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On Saturday, April fifth, at 1:49 in the morning, a bomb went off in a disco called LaBelle in the Friedenau district of West Berlin. More than 230 people were injured. Two people were killed outright: a Turkish woman and an American, Sergeant Kenneth T. Ford of the U.S. Army. U.S. officials moved almost immediately to lay the blame at Qaddafi's door. Reporters were told that intercepted communications (normally the most closely held kind of intelligence) showed a Libyan role in the bombing. By April seventh, Richard Burt, the U.S. Ambassador in Bonn, had stepped into the limelight with an on-the-record assertion that there were "very, very clear indications" of Libyan involvement in the bombing. That same day, ABC News reported that a personal communication from Qaddafi to his agents in East Berlin had been intercepted in which the Libyan leader personally offered "praise for a job well done." It was on that day, according to later reports, that President Reagan made the decision to go ahead with the raid "based on the Ambassador's conclusions, which were shared by other top officials."

All that week, the level of rhetoric against Qaddafi by U.S. senior officials, on and off the record, mounted ever higher. On Wednesday, April ninth, Vice-President Bush described him as a "mad dog," while the same day, General Bernard Rogers, the Supreme Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe, informed an audience of Atlanta school children that the evidence of the Libyan leader's complicity in the disco bombing was "indisputable." He went on to give a dramatic description of how military authorities, with intelligence of an impending attack and racing against time, had combed the bars of West Berlin to warn off-duty GIs, unfortunately arriving at the blasted disco "15 minutes too late."

Lost in the generally horrified reactions were such telling revelations as the one reported by Leslie Gelb, then the New York Times national-security correspondent. On April eighth, the day after Burt had made his announcement, Gelb quoted senior officials as admitting that "they had no direct evidence to prove" Libyan complicity in the bombing (and that the ABC announcement was therefore untrue) but that the Administration intended to press ahead with its public campaign identifying Qaddafi with the attack. In a confession of extraordinary and cynical frankness, one source told Gelb that the campaign was "our way of sensitizing Americans and Europeans about the problems and preparing the groundwork for follow-on responses."

In West Berlin, another professional was voicing doubts as well. Manfred Ganschow, director of the Staatsschutz, the West Berlin equivalent of the FBI, had more than 100 men working on the investigation of the disco bombing. He had no political ax to grind; he was a working cop. He confided to a reporter who called to check on the investigation some weeks later, "I have no more evidence that Libya was connected to the bombing than I had when you first called me two days after the act. Which is none."

Ganschow had, from the earliest moments, access to all relevant information. LaBelle was a disco of some notoriety, and as far as he was concerned, the bombing could have been the work of local dope dealers or pimps, who have a violent way of settling business disputes in West Berlin. As to the dramatic account by General Rogers of the desperate last-minute attempt by West German police to warn GIs of an impending attack, Ganschow found no evidence of such an alert.

In the months ahead, buried in other news reports, came evidence that there were any number of candidates for the Berlin bombing, with the strongest evidence being against the Syrians. Of course, those questions had no relevance for the men of the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing, who were awakened around five o'clock on the afternoon of Monday, April 14, listened to their final briefings, then climbed into the cockpits of their F-111s to await the signal to roll onto the runway.

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At 7:36 in the evening, the first of 24 planes lifted off and headed out toward the sea. Of the 24 F-111s that departed Lakenheath, six were spares in case any planes developed equipment problems by the time they were due for the first refueling. The crews carried with them detailed infrared pictures of three target areas. One group of three planes was to attack a so-called terrorist diving school whose position at the mouth of the Tripoli harbor made it perfectly suited for the bomb-aiming equipment (water lines show up well on radar). Another group of six, which would be the last to attack, was assigned to the area of the Tripoli airport used by the Libyan military. Nine of the planes, however--the lead aircraft--were targeted for the Al Azziziyah barracks. Within the barracks was a soccer-field-sized compound that was known to contain the home, offices and tent of Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Back in Washington, someone on the staff of the National Security Council had already drafted a statement that described the death of Qaddafi in the raid as "fortuitous."

Civilian casualties were not part of the plan. As one officer back at the Pentagon eloquently explained, "What we didn't want was some mother with her kids and her arm blown off on the cover of Time magazine, and we went to great trouble to avoid that." In fact, planners were confident that the precision afforded by the high technology encased in these modern aircraft would spare them such embarrassments. Just to be safe, crews were instructed not to bomb if there was any sign that the equipment was not in full working order.

The armada turned south after crossing the coast and then west down the English Channel to link up with the first of 42 tankers and the three electronic-warfare EF-111 planes that were also going to Libya and back that night. When they refueled for the first time, off the Bay of Biscay, three of the planes reported mechanical malfunctions and turned back. Their numbers were compensated for by spare aircraft--the other spares turned back--and the convoy roared south through the darkness, 150 miles of flying metal from head to tail.

The two-man crews, sealed in their cockpits, were seated with the pilots on the left and the navigators/weapons-systems officers on the right. Their elbows almost touching, they could talk to each other above the roar of the engines only through their face-mask microphones. Conversations that night were nervous, businesslike--no light chatter--about the state of instruments, about their position, about the time left until their next refueling. Refueling, when it came every 90 minutes or so, was an exhausting business. The heavily laden and underpowered F-111s were barely maneuverable enough for the pilots to connect with the fuel line extending from the tanker. To work the plane around, they had to "stroke the burner," or turn on their afterburners for small and precise bursts of extra power.

North' of the Algerian coast, each flight of four planes nosed up to its attendant tanker for a last drink of fuel before dropping off. At that point, Qaddafi's chances of surviving the evening improved slightly. In a mischance dreaded by every navigator, one of the planes specifically targeted for the A1 Azziziyah compound headed off in the wrong direction after leaving the tanker. By the time the crew realized its mistake, it was too late to do anything but give up and turn toward home.

The 17 remaining bombers dropped down low, to just above the surface of the sea. The huge and complex mechanism of El Dorado Canyon now began to execute the opening stages of the attack. Attack planes from the Navy carriers flew toward the coast, firing off antiradiation missiles designed to home in on and put out of action the radar antennas of the enemy defenses. The electronic-warfare planes began jamming the radars that escaped or could not be reached. Larry Speakes alerted the press in Washington.

If the Libyans paid any attention to these signs of impending trouble, they did not show it. The streetlights of Tripoli continued to burn brightly. Qaddafi was lying in his tent, reportedly watching a movie about Vietnam on his VCR.

After flying inland, the lead flight of planes began the final run back to its targets. The planes were moving faster now, up to 900 feet a second, their afterburners spewing flames into the sky above the city. Afterward, some of the crew members reported that they could remember every detail of every movement they had made with their hands, which instruments they had touched and when. But as the city lights flashed by beneath them, each man was frantically busy. Although no more than 12 minutes was to elapse between the beginning and the end of the raid, for the members of each crew, the war was briefer still: the 60 seconds it took them to make their attack run.

In theory, all that was required to hit the target was for the weapons-systems officer to glance at the big attack radar screen in front of him and identify his radar offset point. That was a readily identifiable landmark, such as the spit of land at the mouth of the harbor, picked out for him beforehand from intelligence photographs taken of the area when the mission was being planned. Once he had found it, he merely had to align the cross hairs on the screen over that point and punch a button. That would tell the navigation computer exactly where the plane was in relation to the offset point and the target. Now the plane could be directed straight toward the target while the right-seater switched his screen over to infrared, picked out the actual target, aligned the cross hairs over it and punched another button. That caused a laser beam to shine on the target. At the proper moment, the plane would flip up and then into a hard turn, releasing and lobbing the bomb forward. The bomb then would pick up the hot spot created by the laser beam shining on the target and lock onto it. The result, while the plane turned safely for home, would be a perfectly destroyed target and no armless mothers on the cover of Time to embarrass the Reagan Administration.

But that night, the complex system often failed to cope with the realities of combat. Experienced pilots know that the system can go awry, and they use precious reserves of attention and energy while coping with it. During the attack run, the weapons-systems officers concentrated on finding the target. The pilots, meanwhile, were meant to be working the electronic-warfare instruments, while the automatic pilots took care of flying the plane. However, in the words of one veteran, "very few pilots will trust the system"; instead, they had to monitor the terrain-following radar to make certain it did not fly them into the ground. At the same time, the (continued on page 164)Tripoli(continued from page 146) pilots had to watch for enemy surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles, which can be dodged, though only with difficulty in an unmaneuverable F-111 flying low. All this, even without the stress of combat, can lead to the feared phenomenon of "task saturation," which occurs when a pilot has too much to do and comes apart under the pressure.

As the first crews began their attack runs over Tripoli, the weapons-systems officers realized that their offset points were not as easy to spot as had been promised in the briefings back at base. Now the screen was filled with fuzzy images, among which they had to search for the right point while the ground raced beneath the plane and the seconds ticked away. There was no heavy antiaircraft fire as yet, just a barrage of small-arms bullets from the revolutionary guards patrolling the streets below. In that confused environment, one crew in the first wave careened out to sea without ever finding the point that would steer it to Qaddafi's compound. Another crew found that the equipment was not working. They went home without killing the Libyan head of state, either.

Even when they had located the right offset point, the weapons-systems officers found it extraordinarily difficult to pick out the target on the infrared picture, for the "heat picture" of a building may change significantly between midday, which may be when the targeting picture is taken, and two A.M. Similar distortions occur with changes in seasons. At the best of times, which do not include moving at 600 miles an hour while being shot at, it is hard to distinguish one building from another. That may be why one of the planes aiming for the terrorist diving school at the harbor's edge sent bombs crashing into a school for naval cadets next door.

Even correctly aimed bombs can go astray. Despite stabilizing devices, the pod slung under a twisting, wrenching airframe will shake slightly, causing the laser beam to jitter. That, in turn, will cause the bombs to lose energy and fall wide as they try to steer onto the rapidly shifting hot spot of the laser reflection. The essential point, well understood by combat veterans, is that such mishaps are inevitable, however sophisticated the technology. And predictably, that night, at least four and possibly more of the 16 laser-guided bombs that were dropped (some of the attackers were using laser-aimed but unguided bombs) went wildly off target. A miss rate of 25 percent is not unimpressive by World War Two standards, but that was not what the systems had been built for in 1986: They were intended to allow precision bombing of targets without error. Senior officials had evidently believed the military's assurances that such imprecision could not happen, for they refused, at first, to accept reports that at least one bomb had ripped the walls off the French embassy.

Yet it is to these realities of high-technology warfare that Muammar el-Qaddafi may well owe his life. Of the nine planes dispatched to bomb his compound, only three succeeded in dropping bombs on it. Five others failed to bomb at all. One bombed and missed, hitting the Bin Ashur residential district with grim consequences.

Hardly had the last plane disappeared out to sea, watched and reported by NBC's indefatigable Delaney, when America erupted in a chorus of approval. Conservatives and liberals alike showered congratulations on the President for his courageous action. The White House happily reported an unprecedented barrage of supportive telephone calls from the public.

In the midst of the celebrations, the first reports of what the raid had actually accomplished on the ground began to filter back to the U.S. Qaddafi, it appeared, had survived, though the Libyan press reported that his adopted baby daughter had been killed and two of his sons injured. (The Administration later suggested that Qaddafi had no such daughter; correspondents on the spot interviewed the doctors who had attempted to treat the child and concluded that the Libyan reports were accurate.)

Within a few hours, correspondents were sending dispatches from Bin Ashur, which had received the impact of four or five bombs. "In the wreckage of what had been a comfortable two-story villa," the Associated Press reported, "rescuers found the body of Mohammed Ibrahim al-Shirkawy, an elderly merchant. His body, still dressed in night clothes, was buried in rubble on the top-floor bedroom. Across the street in a one-story villa reporters walked through pools of blood on the marble floor. In one room where neighbors said children had been sleeping, bed sheets soaked in blood lay strewn about the floor...." The total casualties were subsequently estimated at more than 100 men, women and children.

Of all those who witnessed the scene, only one man--ABC News correspondent Charles Glass--got the chance to confront the U.S. Secretary of Defense, appropriately enough on live television. On the morning after the raid, Weinberger went on Good Morning America and cast doubt on reports of civilian casualties and damage to embassies. He suggested that the bad news had come purely from Libyan sources and therefore lacked credibility. Glass, listening patiently on an open phone line in Tripoli, was finally allowed to ask one question.

He had just returned from the Bin Ashur neighborhood, he said. "We saw the damage to the French embassy. We spoke to the Japanese ambassador, who told us that he heard the American planes come over his neighborhood at two o'clock and bomb the neighborhood and saw many of the casualties himself. We saw two bodies and ... part of another body. We saw eight very badly wounded children and another 20 adults who were injured. We spoke to two Greeks who were wounded and one Yugoslav worker who was wounded. So I'm wondering if the Secretary believes now that it was only Libyan sources that we're hearing from."

Even this recitation failed to extinguish the Secretary's sunny confidence. He replied, "There were people of all nationalities working in and around the headquarters of the Libyan terrorist activity, and we made that one of our targets. But we made efforts to avoid collateral damage, and we will certainly report on what we know about it when we have that information."

Despite the Secretary's promises, reports on that aspect of the raid were never issued. The Pentagon claimed that cloud cover over Tripoli in the days after the raid prevented any aerial reconnaissance for bomb-damage assessment, a curious assertion in view of the fact that the TV pictures of Tripoli showed blue skies and that, furthermore, the Pentagon had no trouble producing crystal-clear photos for internal and heavily classified briefings. When the Pentagon finally issued an "after-action" report to the press three weeks later, the evidence of the TV pictures was ignored in favor of a claim that "any other damage claimed by Libyans, if actually true, most likely resulted from Libyan ordnance falling back to earth."

This excuse--that the Libyans had caused the "collateral damage" with their own antiaircraft missiles--ignored the fact that, according to experts on such weaponry, this had never happened during the entire course of the Vietnam war. All such weapons, U.S. and Libyan--i.e., Soviet--are fused to self-destruct either after a certain amount of time or at a certain altitude.

By the time that report was issued, the attention of the Administration and the public had shifted elsewhere. The press release, largely ignored, acknowledged implicitly that the raid's technological success had been less than spectacular. Two bombs that had gone off target by 700 yards were described as "near misses." As early as four days after the raid, State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb declined to address the subject of Libya. It was as if the entire affair had been a TV show that the sponsors had taken off the air.

But the show was not over in Libya, where the stunned populace mourned their dead and, contrary to the hopes expressed by the Reagan Administration, rallied round their leader, Qaddafi. Nor was it over for the fliers back at Laken-heath. They had casualties of their own to mourn.

Ribas-Dominicci and Lorence, the two crewmen most grateful to have drawn the mission, failed to make the rendezvous with the tanker along with the rest of their flight after the attack. They had been the tail-end Charleys of the attack, heading for the airport, the last of the targets to be attacked and, thus, a target defended by then wide-awake Libyan gunners and missile crews. Afterward, an Air Force officer told a grieving relative, "Air Force and Navy intelligence never did get all the Libyan antiaircraft positions straight." The fact that a Libyan missile site had gone unlocated despite months of intensive and massive intelligence efforts, the work of hundreds of analysts and tens of thousands of high-resolution photographs is further testimony to the false reassurances of high technology.

Like many such military units, the Lakenheath wing is a close-knit community of Servicemen and their families. While the dead fliers' wives and children were looked after by their friends, the senior officers on the base felt it only fitting that the two should receive an official tribute. They therefore recommended them for posthumous Silver Stars. After all, President Reagan had described them as "heroes of our hearts." General Charles Donnelly, Commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, felt differently. He rejected the proposal, awarding Ribas-Dominicci and Lorence Purple Hearts, the all-purpose decoration for any kind of injury suffered in combat, from a scratch to a death.

The men who went on the bombing raid to Libya did not fly for the sake of a decoration or gratitude from the high command. Nor do most of them, as a group, dwell long on their roles in "showcasing new technologies"; or on whether the disco bombing should have been avenged by bombing someone else, or anyone at or on why they ended up going to war live on network news. It takes someone who's been there, who has survived both the enemy and the explanations, to understand the real odds they faced. One veteran of an older, more savage war put it in perspective. "They didn't do too badly," he said, "considering what they were up against."

"The terrain-following radar unit showed a tendency to guide planes straight into the ground or the water."

"It is to the realities of high-technology warfare that Muammar el-Qaddafi may well owe his life."