Craig Andrle was in the cockpit of his F-16, waiting to take off from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan when another American warplane descended out of the sky toward the runway — a hulking AC-130 gunship.
“I’m holding short of the runway, and I see the AC-130 landing and I’m like, ‘oh shit. That’s not good,” Andrle told Task & Purpose.
The mere sight of the gunship was a tip-off that something had gone wrong in a firefight just over the horizon. In a mountain valley about 50 miles away, a unit of Army Rangers had run into a hornet’s nest of resistance. The AC-130 was returning from that fight, even though it should not have been.
For one, the crew was flying during daylight, a sure sign that the fight was particularly intense. And second, the big plane was back in Bagram because, as Andrle heard on the radio, its various guns and cannons were “Winchester” — out of ammo.
“That thing is basically a flying, tank-killing machine, and we just ran that thing out of weapons. So, you know it’s a bad day,” said Andrle.
And Andrle was headed right for it.
As soon as the gunship cleared Bagram’s runway, Andrle and his wingman in a second F-16 from Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, roared off with full afterburners toward the battle, less than a 10-minute flight away.
Over the next hours, in a 2017 mission not previously reported outside of an Air Force press release, Andrle would pull off a flying day that would fit on any list of Air Force combat flying lore.
In a span of just a few hours, Andrle would rush to the firefight, drop every bomb on his F-16 and strafe enemy positions with his cannon. Once empty, he would roar back to Bagram at full afterburner, switch over to the squadron’s fully loaded “spare” F-16 and fly it directly back to the fight — and drop every bomb on that second jet, too.
On both flights, Andrle was dropping bombs less than 10 minutes after take-off.
Only after he was completely out of ordnance did other U.S. aircraft, including the re-armed AC-130, arrive to take over.
“I told my squadron, we were a customer service-oriented organization,” Andrle said. “And that day, our customers were the Army Rangers.”
Iowa farm to a ‘Wild Weasel’
Andrle grew up on a farm in Ely, Iowa, a town with a population just over 1,000 in the 1990s. He did not grow up dreaming of flying, but rather just getting to college. When he was in high school, an older cousin got a Naval ROTC scholarship.
“I thought, well, it’s a good way to pay for college. So I applied for an Air Force ROTC scholarship and got that and then graduated from the University of Iowa and got a pilot slot,” said Andrle. He got married to a woman from Grand Rapids, Becky, and started what would be a 23-year career flying F-16s. “I wasn’t one of the guys who, like, knew I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a kid or anything like that. But once I started flying, I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
Though he joined the peace-time military, the 9/11 terror attacks struck when Andrle was in basic pilot training. Once qualified as an F-16 pilot, Andrle deployed four times: twice to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan.
While his first three deployments ranged from slow to “steady” operations, the fourth, in late 2016 and early 2017, was by far the busiest.
By 2016, Andrle was a lieutenant colonel and the commander of the 79th fighter squadron at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, a fabled flying unit known as the Tigers that traces its roots to the “Wild Weasels” of the Vietnam War. Tasked with a mission that would come to be known as Suppression of Enemy Air Defense, or SEAD, Wild Weasel pilots used a tactic that was as daring as it was dangerous: they went out and deliberately got shot at.
In modified jets carrying specially designed High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, or HARMs, Weasel pilots trawled for tell-tale radar signatures. When the missile radars would “lock on” to a weasel’s jet, they’d fire a HARM to track directly back to the radar.
But that still left a missile flying towards the weasel’s jet. Unable to outrun the missiles, they learned to outfly it with high-g turns and dangerously low flying.
The Weasel mission remains a source of pride among modern pilots like those at the 79th, who wear a patch with a cartoon weasel over the community’s unofficial motto for its missions: “YGBSM.”
“You Gotta Be Shitting Me.”
“Annihilate” ISIS
In late 2016, Andrle led a deployment of the 79th to Bagram just as the war entered an eventful period.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis had just proclaimed that the U.S. would “annihilate ISIS anywhere on the globe,” shifting the focus of wars across the region to finding and hitting the terrorist organization. Most of that fight quickly erupted in northern Iraq and Syria, with the U.S. shifting assets away from Afghanistan.
By the time the F-16s from the 79th arrived in Bagram, they were the only close air support fighters in the country.
“The unit before us [at Bagram] had 18 jets,” said Andrle. “They cut us down to 12 and we dropped way more munitions.”
With just a dozen planes, the 79th was tasked with keeping two F-16s in the air 24 hours a day, in four-hour blocks. Each plane carried three bombs — two 500-pound MK 82s and a 2,000-pound MK84 — each equipped with the Joint Direct Attack Munitions guidance systems, or JDAM.
And like nearly all flying units, every mission required the team to prepare a spare — a fully fueled and ready-to-fly plane with a full load of weapons and ammo that was held in reserve in case a scheduled aircraft developed an issue before a mission began.
Daniel Lasal was a crew chief on the deployment. The grind to keep two fighters in the air constantly, he said, was a non-stop juggling act with long hours.
“With 12 jets, you typically always have one getting inspections done, or you typically always have one that’s hard-broke,” Lasal told Task & Purpose. “And then maybe one other that’s having some issues that maybe isn’t as maintenance intensive, but it’s not going to fly for the next day or two. So now you’re down to nine. You get two in the air. Now you’re down to seven. And then two are sitting ready. So that’s down to five. Five backups. So you have another sitting spare. So you very quickly run out of aircraft.”
To keep the maintenance troops invested in the mission, the 79th’s pilots began hosting a movie night, of sorts, on Fridays. First on a classified laptop, and then on a big-screen TV in the hanger as the crowds grew, pilots would play footage of the weeks’ strikes from their gun and weapons cameras. The pilots who flew each mission would stand by the screen and talk through what the target was, what was on the screen and the decisions they made that got them there.
At first, just five or six of the maintenance team showed up. But within a few sessions, said Andrle, “the building was packed, and people were lined up down the hallway to watch the attack because we were that busy. So instead of just seeing a jet take off with bombs and come back without bombs, we would bring them to see the videos of the strikes.”
But mostly, said Andrle, the best motivation for the whole unit was planes returning from missions with no bombs on the wings.
“They love it, man,” he said. “If we’re busy, they see the value of what we’re doing, because they’re humping out there on the line to get the jets ready, keep them flying, keep the weapons on.”
Across the six-month deployment, said Lasal, the 79th didn’t miss a single flying line.
“There were some nights where we’re, like, fixing a jet as guys are stepping out to the aircraft ready to go fly it,” Lasal said. “It’s last minute, like, let’s put this thing back together and get ready to go.”
A close-by, heavy battle
As the deployment rolled on, the pilots at the 79th often supported an Army Ranger task force also based in Bagram, and worked to win the trust of the special operators. Night after night, the pilots on the operations desk at the 79th would meet with or call the Ranger headquarters to prep for that day’s mission — when and at what coordinates would the raids or patrols be, what frequencies, call signs and procedures did the joint tactical air controller, or JTACs, use to direct their airstrikes.
Just as the Wild Weasels of Vietnam made SEAD missions their own, post-9/11 fighter pilots have mastered CAS, or close air support — putting bombs, bullets and other weapons into the middle of a firefight. At the heart of CAS is the “9-line,” a list of key information about a target — heading, distance, location of friendly forces, etc — that a JTAC, or even a novice rifleman, can quickly pass to a pilot to set up an attack.
Occasionally, gunfights and CAS missions would come so thick, that every F-16 mission in a 24-hour cycle — all 12 flights across six four-hour alert periods — would drop weapons in support of a ground fight.
“We called that batting for the cycle,” said Andrle.
Through the winter of 2016 and into 2017, the 79th pilots worked to win the Rangers’ trust.
“We built a good relationship with the Army units down in Helmand,” said Andrle. “In that relationship with them, whenever something was going on, we would know, we would call them from our operations desk, and talk to them to say, ‘hey, what’s going on today?’ And let them know who’s on station for you. We would kind of prioritize going and working with those guys. And that kept us busy.”
On April 17, 2017, a task force of Army Rangers were moving through a river valley of Nangarhar province and entered a town. In buildings on all sides, enemy fighters were waiting.
The two F-16s already in the air from the 79th responded quickly and expended all their weapons, as did the AC-130 also supporting the Rangers.
That was when the call came for Andrle and his wingman, Capt. Adam Fuhrmann, or “Hawk,” to launch.
As they taxied out, the AC-130 landed, out of ammo.
“Oh shit,” thought Andrle. “That’s not good”
A call for help arrived the moment the jets took off.
“As soon as I got gear in the well, I got a text message [on the F-16s communications system]. It was a 9-line.”
He jotted the information on a kneeboard as the F-16s rapidly chewed up the miles toward the fight. In the valley, fighters barricaded inside a multi-story building were pouring fire on the Rangers. The JTAC was calling for the F-16’s biggest bomb, a 2,000-pound JDAM, to flatten it.
Normally, a pilot dropping bombs wants to see their target before releasing their weapons, both to confirm they have the right target and to be aware of what not to hit nearby.
“I want to get eyes on, I want to confirm what’s going on on the ground,” Andrle said. “Give some confirmation with the JTAC that I’m on the right target. But they were getting shot at the time from this building. So they wanted it gone.”
Sight unseen, Andrle set up his run-in.
“I just drove to 10 miles out from the target, and turned in,” he said. “I’m trusting the guy on the ground, that the coordinates I read them are what he wants destroyed. And they give us the [rules of engagement], So I know they’ve done their due diligence on the ground.”
On his first pass — less than eight minutes off the runway at Bagram — Andrle released the JDAM.
“I hear ‘good hits, good hits, say when ready to copy the next 9-line,’” Andrle said. “All right, here we go. And then it was just kind of rapid succession of 9-lines.”
Within minutes, Andrle had dropped all his bombs and Fuhrmann had dropped two of his three. That left the F-16’s 20mm Vulcan cannon, which the two used to strafe until their fuel began to run low. While on missions, the F-16s refueled one at a time, one sprinting away to gas up from a tanker while the second F-16 stayed over the Rangers until the first returned.
Andrle quickly found the tanker and moved into position.
But then a thought occurred to him: even with more gas, he’d have no more bombs to drop. But the spare back at Bagram was fully loaded.
He called the pilot manning the 79th’s ops desk, Brad Oatman, known as “Quaker.”
“I said ‘hey, is the spare jet available?’ And they’re like, ‘let me check — yeah,’” Andrle said. “Alright, I’m gonna come get it.’”
Just yards below the refueling boom for the tanker, Andrle waved off, rolled his F-16 inverted and dove away.
“I was leaving,” he said. “And then went as fast as I could go back to Bagram.”
A fast launch
By luck of the maintenance rotation, the spare F-16 was the unit’s “flagship” jet, which in normal operations at home would belong to Andrle as the squadron commander. With a tiger-theme paint job, it represented the squadron and was parked in the first position on the flight line.
Lasal was assigned to the jet as its crew chief, an honor among a squadron’s maintenance troops.
“You kind of get evaluated against all your peers,” he said. “It’s the boss’ jet and it stands out the most so you put a little bit extra care [into] the aircraft. You want it to be the cleanest one, the one that’s most taken care of. For when your [VIPs] show up and, like, the USO tours, that’s the aircraft that guys have visibility in.”
When Andrle and Fuhrmann first took off, Lasel had hoped for some downtime.
“When the jets take off, we normally get a little bit of a break,” he said. “So I went and sat down and started to eat lunch, hanging out with some guys. And all of a sudden the radios start chirping and you can tell something’s going on. And one of the tech sergeants comes up and he’s like, ‘Hey, man, one of the jets is coming back. He’s empty, and he’s going to take your aircraft.’”
Still, Lasel did not yet grasp the moment.
“I didn’t realize, probably, the urgency of the situation,” Lasel said. He was prepping the plane, taking covers off, when another pilot ran up to him and handed him several sheets of paper.
They were 9-line cards. Andrle had called ahead and said he had used all of his cards on the first round of strikes. “That’s the first and only time that’s ever happened. And I was like, ‘oh, man, something crazy must be going on.’”
Within minutes, Andrle’s jets taxied onto the 79th’s ramp. After shutting down, Andrle climbed out and made a beeline for Lasal.
“I give him a salute and shake his hand, which is what we do,” Andrle said. “I told him, ‘Hey man, I’m really keyed up so don’t let me miss anything. But we gotta go fast.”
Lasal was thinking something similar.
“He’s like ‘I’m thinking about other things right now, so make sure we do this safely,’” the crew chief remembered. “I was like, ‘no problem, sir. We’ll get you out of here.’”
As Andrle climbed in the cockpit and began activating systems and running checks, Lasal worked through his pre-flight inspection of the plane’s exterior, a task built into his muscle memory from tech school and hundreds of other launches.
Down the right side of the plane, he checked for oil or hydraulic leaks, and double-checked that safety pins were out on the landing gear and wing tanks. Talking with Andrle over a headset wired to the plane, Lasal crouched under the bombs on the plane’s wings, checking that the JDAM sensors and Andrle’s cockpit systems were set to the same codes.
Finally, Andrle said “Pull comms, pull chalks, I’ll give you signals” — a final call to watch as the pilot moved the plane’s control surfaces, ensuring the flaps and brakes responded properly.
“I want everything to go right the first time as quick as possible,” Lasal said. “Because, you know, any little thing to delay him means his wingman maybe can’t stay on station and has to break contact to go refuel without another aircraft up there. Which would suck for the ground dudes.”
With a final wave and salute, Andrle taxied out to the runway and roared into the sky.
On a normal day, a pilot who lands an F-16 might be ready to climb down from the cockpit 20 minutes after touching down, while those headed out to fly generally “step to the jet” an hour before take-off.
From touchdown to wheels up, Andrle was on the ground at Bagram for just 39 minutes.
As his boss flew away, Lasal took a moment to review the previous half hour.
“I just kind of stood there where the aircraft was parked,” he said. “It was one of the — no, it was the fastest launch of my life. I was replaying everything. Kind of double-checking myself like, ‘okay, yeah, we did brakes. Yeah, we closed that panel. Yeah, all the pins were pulled, everything was on safe.’ And then, yeah, once he took off, I was like ‘good to go.’”
Second pass
Just as on his first flight, as soon as Andrle was airborne, a 9-line was waiting.
There was another large building with dug-in fighters. Fuhrmann still had his final bomb but it was 500 pounds and the Rangers wanted the 2,000-pound bomb that Andrle was returning with.
Again sight unseen, Andrle dropped the bomb on his first pass.
“I hit that building, I dropped another 500, then it was quiet for a minute,” he said. But when fire erupted nearby, the Rangers had both pilots drop their final bombs on a treeline.
Soon, two more of the 79th’s F-16s arrived, as did the AC-130, with fresh ammo, relieving Andrle and Fuhrman. As he climbed out of the cockpit for the second time that the day at Bagram, he briefly considered the moment.
“I felt like I was crazy,” he said. “I’d never heard of anybody doing this. I was like, ‘I can’t believe we just did this.’ And I know it’s cliché, but it’s not that I did something, but we did something.”
The mission was, he said, a team effort.
“There was never, like, ‘well, I don’t know if we should or can.’ It was ‘okay, cool. Let’s do it. Let’s go.’ You know? And everybody just, they just made things happen. And it was awesome.”
Post-deployment
The 79th “hit for the cycle” several more times on its 2016 to 2017 deployment. Lasal couched the deployment in these terms: On a previous deployment, he had been a crew chief for a plane that dropped bombs 12 times in 6 months. On this one, his plane dropped bombs 38 times.
Two pilots in the 79th, Capts. John Nygard and Salvador Cruz, were awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses for a close air support mission during a different Ranger firefight, that time at night. Two Rangers died in the fighting, but the bombs dropped by the two allowed 88 to survive, according to an Air Force release on the mission. When the Rangers returned to Bagram, two Rangers sought out the pilots and told them they would almost certainly have died without their air support. In appreciation, the Rangers gave the pilots their velcro Ranger tabs from their uniforms, Andrle said.
Furhmann, Andrle’s wingman, is now a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base. Lasal left the Air Force and joined the Army as a warrant officer. He now flies Apache attack helicopters. Andrle, he said, wrote a letter of recommendation for his warrant officer application package.
In 2023, Andrle, then a colonel, retired as the commander of the 388th Fighter Wing at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. In the year since, he and his wife moved back to Iowa. He was awarded no medal or commendation for the two-jet mission. As the boss, he said, there was no one to write him up.
“I was the commander. We were just doing our job,” he said. “We were busy and we were doing everything we needed to do and I didn’t worry about any of that stuff.”