Battle Scars of a Fallen Air Base    • Share   • Read Later
During the preflight briefing, the commanding officer is
pounding home the landing advice. "Don't go north of there,
don't go east of there, don't go west of there," Lieut. Colonel
Mark Casburn tells the gathered crew whose HC-130 I am about to
board. "Come in from the south, and leave from the south."
"There" is a newly captured air base in southern Iraq the
coalition is rebuilding to relieve pressure on the 200-mile
supply line into Iraq from Kuwait that has been subject to
constant Iraqi harassment. And getting "there" in the lumbering
HC-130, a big, slow target for surface-to-air missiles (SAMS),
means flying about 300 feet above the desert and passing through
a gauntlet of Iraqi radar systems. Because of all the surface-
to-air- missile beacons in the area, alarms go off in the cabin.
And one pesky mobile SAM battery has been roaming around and
targeting incoming planes for weeks?hence the southern approach,
coming in above a stretch of remote d