The A-10 friendly-fire tape: tragedy or titillation?
by Kim Ponders

A note showed up in my inbox this afternoon with a link to a video from the UK Telegraph, prompting me to "take a sober look before the link gets removed", and because the note came from a reliable source, I did, and I was horrified.

I was not horrified because the video was of the "heads-up display" of an American A-10 that accidentally fired on a British convoy in Iraq in 2003, killing a soldier. That was simply tragic, because the accidental "blue on blue" killing of friendly forces is, to some extent, unavoidable and acceptable in wartime. I was horrified for another reason: because the tape was so clear. I found myself listening to it, getting caught up in the drama of the kill, knowing the language and remembering it from my own little war, and knowing--knowing--that the kill was going to result in the death of a British soldier, and wanting to hear it anyway, and also wanting to hear what came next, how the pilot would react (predictably, with tears, anger, and denial). I was, in short, a voyeur.

“We’re in jail, dude,” the wingman says over the frequency after they learn from the command station on the ground that they’ve just killed a British soldier. There's a heavy silence. This is not how they began the day.

(True to form, the British come in long after the action is over and tell the A-10 fighters to “abort”—military slang to call off the mission.)

There is a lot of heavy breathing on the last part of this tape. A lot of silence. A lot of pondering, in which you can almost hear the pilots’ minds turning over and over, wishing to call back the moment, the missile, anything to bring them back to that time before they had committed a crime, before they had become killers.

And that, of course, was my second horrifying thought. That in a part of my mind, they had only just then become killers.

Submitted by Kim Ponders (view blog) on Tue, 02/06/2007 - 6:00pm
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Comments

 

a little context

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8-wr8_qRBQ

video of just one friendly fire from the first gulf war where more died than in this incident.

 

war is a balance of caution and aggression. if you make the troops second guess themselves too much they will hesitate when they should have taken action.  and sometimes things are just an unfortunate series of events with or without human error/errors.

 

from what i've seen in the british press this has been blown out of proportion because its more about being anti iraq anti bush, anti america than this actual incident.   the foaming hatred you see in articles like this http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2005619,00.html#article_... show its not just about the incident.

 

considering how they foam at the mouth on this incident it seems they've forgotten 500,000 americans lost their lives over 2 world wars fighting with the brits. they've lost all perspective because of their bush hate.

Submitted by wetnap on Fri, 06/13/2008 - 04:19
 

"True to form"?

> (True to form, the British come in long after the action is over and tell the A-10 fighters to “abort”—military slang to call off the mission.)

Nice. Classy. The fact that the pilots had (according to the transmission of the tape I saw, on last night's news) switched to a *private* frequency, which "the British" didn't know - true to form, "the British" failed in their grasp of telepathy in this instance.

If I were to write "true to form, the Americans were more worried about covering their backsides than worrying about the dead and dying on the ground" you'd be all over that statement. True to form.

Submitted by Koan on Tue, 02/06/2007 - 22:12
 

Koan, Actually, the pilots

Koan,

Actually, the pilots are always talking among themselves on a private frequency. This keeps everyone from clogging the main frequency to the command/control center on the ground. "True to form," in most cases, the big-picture command people on the ground (US/Brits/whomever) are usually the last ones to find out what's happening because it takes so long for information to take its cicuitous route from, say, a battalion on the ground to the pilot in the air. Therin lies the tragedy like this one. So please don't be offended. I've worked very closely with the British military and always respected them.

And your comment about the Americans covering their backsides is, in fact, right. They did, and the fact that the tape came out now (a the lowest point of the war) and not in 2003 when we ought to have released it, is a classic US military PR bungle.

Submitted by Kim Ponders on Wed, 02/07/2007 - 06:47
 

Kim, thanks for clarifying what you meant

Patently, I misinterpreted what you meant - I read it as a criticism of the British military ("never there when you need them", kind of thing) rather than an observation on the tortuous lines of communication (and the risk of tragedy inherent therein) within which they have to operate.

This was an inquest - a legal hearing to establish the circumstances in which a death occurred - *not* a forum for assigning blame. The idealist in me would hope that it was in everybody's interest to uncover the circumstances that lead to blue-on-blue mistakes, and minimise the possibility that those circumstances could recur. Sadly, the impression that this episode has left - here in the UK, at least - is that the US military *didn't* want to uncover those circumstances, or admit to them, but to bury them. Not for one moment did I assume malice on the part of the pilots - but the disrespect to the widow that was implied by the unwillingness to release (or even admit to) the tape, was staggering.

Submitted by Koan on Wed, 02/07/2007 - 11:11
 

Agreed.

It was such a bad move to classify the tape on so many levels. Was it simply somebody trying to pass the buck, so that he/she wouldn't have to deal with the bad press when it happened, or did those in charge really believe it was in the best interest of security or morale to keep the tape under wraps? A common phrase in the US military is, or used to be: Bad news doesn't get better with age.

Now we in the US have earned the ill will of our strongest allies in the war. I don't blame the pilots, either--it's clear they were trying to distinguish the bad guys from the friendlies. I blame the people, whomever they are, who thought that hiding our mistakes would somehow make us appear stronger.

Submitted by Kim Ponders on Wed, 02/07/2007 - 12:47
 

A10 friendly fire!?

"it's clear they were trying to distinguish the bad guys from the friendlies"?!!!

They weren't trying very hard! They mentioned 'orange markings' several times but helped each other to come to the conclusion that they were 'orange rockets'!

Yet another instance of gung ho amatuer ANG american pilots not wanting to RTB with unexpended stores.

The US embassy spokesman said it was clear the pilots were 'contrite'; I couldn't hear it. Worried that they were in trouble 'we're in jail dude', quite possibly.

Although why? No inquiry (was there really one held?) has ever penalised an american for killing allied troops.

For those of you with short memories, the majority of British deaths in the first gulf way were caused by american 'friendly fire'.

The attempted withholding of the cockpit tapes, and the continued refusal of the american authorities to co-operate with the inquest just confirms our impression of cowardice and ultimate disrespect.

Submitted by pastis on Thu, 02/08/2007 - 16:28