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 Qaim, which is near the Syrian border in western Iraq.
 It was considered a politically important target because
 they had already launched several SCUDs at Israel and the
 Israeli's wanted to make sure we were doing everything
 in our power to get rid of the SCUDs, since they had
 been targeted from day one. The objective that night was
 to go up and seed the SCUD missile storage areas with
 cluster bombs and try and blow up the missiles that were
 down there. We also planned to put some time delay ones
 down there so the guys who went out to load them might
 get surprised when a time delay CB went off...they might
 not be so anxious to go out there and upload missiles.
 It was a very heavily defended target area. Some guys
 had gone after it the night before and several of them
 had to jettison their bombs for SAM launches. So we knew
 it was going to be a fairly tough target. We took off
 about 9 o'clock at night, and it was basically a medium
 altitude profile to the SCUD missile storage area. We
 went up and met our tanker in western Saudi Arabia and
 then pushed across the border. There were 12 F-l5Es from
 the 335th and we were being followed a couple of minutes
 later by 12 more from the 336th. The plan was to head
 basically to the northwest and then once we got to a
 preplanned point we would turn in on a northeasterly run
 into the target. That enabled us, on this heading, to
 make a map of the target area looking out from the side
 of the air-plane with our resolution mapping capability.
 We went in after we completed our mapping leg and turned
 towards the target; we were about 15 miles from the
 target when the action began to pick up. We could see
 a lot of triple A out over the target area. There was
 a lot of 23 millimeter going up and also a lot of the
 bigger stuff which made a lot of bright explosions. As
 we turned towards the target, we got RHAW (radar homing
 and warning) indications of multiple SAM launches. There
 was one SAM launch from the right side, and there was
 another launch that we call "uncorrelated"...in that the
 machine didn't know where it was coming from. I looked
 out the right side of the airplane and saw...and immedi-
 ately put out some chaff to hopefully decoy the missiles.
 I looked out the right side of the airplane and saw two
 fireballs and said, "Yeah, those look like SAMs," and
 sure enough, they were. I watched them for a couple of
 seconds and they weren't moving on the canopy, which is
 an indication that they're guiding on you. I was flying
 with Colonel Eberly (Col David W. Eberly) and told him
 to come right for the SAMs. As I was doing that, I was
 putting out some chaff, and as we banked to the right,
 there was a big explosion out the left side of the air
 plane and immediate impact. It felt very similar to
 being in a big car wreck. The airplane felt like it
 stopped; you could definitely feel that. You hit some
 thing. The damage was determined to be excessive, so

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