Story of an F-14 POW

[MigBuster 2,884]

The dramatic story of a US Navy Tomcat RIO, POW during Operation Desert Storm.

 

 

In the early morning of Jan. 21, 1991, the F-14B (BuNo 161430, at the time designated F-14A Plus) from the VF-103 “Sluggers,” callsign “Slate 46”,  flown by Lt. Devon Jones and RIO Lt. Lawrence Slade, was hit by an Iraqi SA-2 Surface to Air Missile.

 

The crew was forced to eject due to the violent flat spin which followed the SAM explosion.

 

During the descent, the two men saw each other for the last time before entering the clouds and once they put their boots on the ground their fate was quite different.

 

In fact, while Lt. Jones was saved with a spectacular Combat SAR mission, Lt. Slade tried to go as far as he could from the Tomcat crash site, walking for about 2 ½ hours in the desert using his radio every hour without receiving any reply.

Then, while Slade tried to hide himself near a little knoll, the Iraqis found him.

“At about 1030, a white Datsun pickup truck came around the knoll,” Slade says in the book Gulf Air War Debrief.

 

“It was probably bad luck because I don’t think they were looking for me; they were just driving by. Two men stopped and got out. One had a 12-gauge shot gun, the other, an AK-47. […] They approached me, but it never crossed my mind to pull out my pistol. I was obviously had. They made me strip off all my gear.”

The two men were very polite and after they put Slade between them in the pickup, took him in their tent where they fed him.

Then, after the lunch, they put him again in the pickup and they asked him if he wanted to go to either Saudi Arabia or Baghdad. Of course, he told them Saudi Arabia, choosing the most northern town he could recall. Slade knew that if the trip took three hours, it would have been Baghdad; eight, Saudi Arabia. Sure enough, 3 ½ hours later they pulled into an army camp, and he knew it wasn’t Saudi Arabia. For the rest of the day Slade was shuttled to six different camps, blindfolded and handcuffed. Nevertheless he was for sure a subject of interest, since people came out to see him, take pictures of him and poke at his gear. They’d pick on him, kick him, and if they spoke English they’d say things like “You kill our children.”

Slade spent the following three days in Baghdad where he experienced very harsh interrogations, then he was transferred in the first of several prisons where he spent his POW (Prisoner Of War) experience.

As he recalls: “In retrospect, I was shot down on the fourth day of the war and they had already had a few prisoners: a couple of Tornado crews, an A-6 crew and a Marine OV-10 crew. ”

 

Lieutenant Slade and his fellow POWs changed different prisons in Baghdad where they also experienced several allied bombs raids, the most intense of which was the one that took place on Feb. 23, when 2,000-lb bombs almost completely destroyed their jail.

 

But for sure the most impressive experience faced by Slade were the interrogations by Iraqi jailers. He had a total of six interrogations, some of what they called soft-sell, where they just asked him questions. Then there were the hard-sells, where they pounded on him. For the most part, they didn’t use any classic torture methods. They just beat him up, tied his hands behind his back and double-blindfolded him to the point where he couldn’t even blink.

They beat allied prisoners even when they answered their questions. Slade, as well as the other POWs answered to the questions just to make beatings stop “even though the answers were complete garbage. Some I didn’t know the answer to, and I’d tell them, then I’d make up something. I could hear them writing it down. I thought, ‘You idiots!’ […] Some time toward the end of February, they banged me up against the wall and broke my seventh vertebra.”

During these interrogations Slade was blindfolded and never saw his interrogators, probably so that he could not identify them later, or perhaps because the Iraqis understood how terrifying it is to be blind in the hands of  a torturer.

 

Lt. Slade endured interrogation, torture and starvation in the Iraqi hands for 43 days: even if his six weeks as a POW were not anywhere as long as six years in North Vietnamese prisons, to Lawrence Slade every week must have seemed like a year.

 

 

http://theaviationist.com/2015/05/25/the-story-of-an-f-14-tomcat-rio-who-became-prisoner-of-war-during-the-first-gulf-war/

[Antares81 16]

I know about thi story, Jones was saved duringa RESCUE Op. COMBAT-SAR whit CH-53 Pavw Low and two A-10A.

[SkyStrike 15]

I know about thi story, Jones was saved duringa RESCUE Op. COMBAT-SAR whit CH-53 Pavw Low and two A-10A.

 

Right!... This mission is playable in Jane's USAF during the Gulf War campaign.... This was the only US combat loss of an F-14....

[ironroad 218]

Most of the allied-aircrews during that time frame had specifically trained against an massive Soviet-style IADs threat with the SA-2 being an integral part of the system (although before the SA-10/20 came on the scene, I willing to guess the SA-5 was probably the feared "bad boy" of the era).

 

Although the SA-2 is late 50s era tech and was considered obsolete by that time, it was (and still is) nothing to fool around with. An SA-2 is also what shot down an F-15E during the first night of the air war.

 

Edited May 26, 2015 by ironroad

[+ST0RM 145]

Great story, but the source is a hack, IMO. David Cenciotti (The Aviationist) rarely writes anything of his own. He just passes along stories from various sources. And often are very far fetched. And if it is his own,  he uses the same over-dramatic language used in media. An RC-135 is a "Spy plane" instead of an ISR platform. Same meaning, I know, but over used for flare.  

 

God forbid posting facts to his stories. He deletes them from comment.

[MigBuster 2,884]

Most of the allied-aircrews during that time frame had specifically trained against an massive Soviet-style IADs threat with the SA-2 being an integral part of the system (although before the SA-10/20 came on the scene, I willing to guess the SA-5 was probably the feared "bad boy" of the era).

 

Although the SA-2 is late 50s era tech and was considered obsolete by that time, it was (and still is) nothing to fool around with. An SA-2 is also what shot down an F-15E during the first night of the air war.

 

 

The SA-10 (S-300PT) system was in service from around 1978 and the Soviets could have had up to 100 * SA-10 sites of different versions by 1990.

 

The last new SA-2 was the S-75M4 - accepted into service 1978 (and others were brought up to this standard apparently). The Iraqis used the S-75M2 (SA-2F) - originally a 1968 system in the 1980s v Iran.