Combat Story (Ep 10): Vince "Snapper" Sherer Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II "Warthog" Fighter Pilot

uh he had a mechanical and electrical kind of a compound emergency which is super rare that was initiated by a gun run and the troops didn't contact danger close so it's me alone and unafraid for the rest of this and so i'm doing re-attacks i'm getting updates they are moving they're trying to break contact and so i end up doing five or six by myself nobody's covering uh straight runs to try to um get these guys to be able to move south and break contact i was so fired up that i get to go fly a jet again one more time welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugit and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story vince snapper shearer is a retired air force a-10 thunderbolt warthog fighter pilot over a 20-year career he flew 300 combat missions and logged 1300 combat flight hours in the a-10 and mc12 across four deployments to afghanistan vince supported troops in contact at danger close range at times without a wingman over a decade of evolving combat and technological change he's the personification of the a-10 pilot and gives an inside look at what combat felt like from the cockpit enjoy hey vince uh thank you for taking the time to share your story yeah good to be here ryan thank you so i want to get into how you found your way to the air force but just to start out here i i'm curious what your call sign was and how you got it okay yeah that's usually uh kind of secret information that you gotta go to a bar and have a couple beers to tell about but you know i'm retired i gotta give you a peek behind the curtain a little bit i guess uh so i go by snapper and i think there are a few of those out there in the air force um it's kind of relating to uh for some reason uh somebody glommed on to the idea that i was a sensitive new age pilot a snap so that's the acronym for a sensitive new age pilot snap and my last name has two ers on it so e-r-e-r-s-h-e-r-e-r they just put an extra er on the end to snap their snapper and that's the first time i've told the concise true story of the origin of my call sign there's so many other awesome stories that i could tell they're lies they're kind of more fun but hey that's good i mean it's it's two pilots talking so at least half of what we say will be true i'm sure what is a sensitive new age pilot and if that is if it's too risque for for this oh no just say so okay so uh i went through pilot training in 2002 2003 this is when youtube's kind of blossoming becoming a thing people are starting to produce videos so this is one of the first produced videos that is kind of fighter pilot centric and it was the f-16 instructors at their follow-on training unit so um the ftu looked uh teaching the new f-16 guys and it's the instructors going look at these new guys coming in here i can i can curse right yeah okay so these new guys coming in here and they're all like sniffing the flowers and stuff they're carrying briefcases and umbrellas and to work what is this sensitive new age going on so it was uh it was a video that was produced you could probably find it look up sensitive new age pilot and you'll see some f-16 stuff oh that's awesome okay so that was kind of uh a recent thing that had come out when it was my naming time you know so that was within the lexicon of the fighter pilot community at that point was the snap very cool all right uh that's interesting i've never heard that so i'm i'm going to check out the video because i want to see this and so you'll have to like reference some other folks that have flown with me to realize if the name is apt or not am i a sensitive nerdy guy you're not a sensitive new age guy like that's my i mean my initial take uh um so let's go back to um kind of before you join the air force okay the guys that i flew with um often had this moment in time where they're like oh my god i want to fly from a young age that maybe they saw an aircraft somewhere that whatever it was movie what was what was like the spark for you to fly okay there's i think it's kind of a couple of phases so uh growing up there was no military background really in my family i didn't get brought up with you know the knowledge of the officer corps or anything like that so it came up through the idea that this would be cool and kind of picture it we're we're kind of a poor family living in portland oregon uh my brother's room is down in the unfinished basement in this small house like a built in 1916 house it's dark no windows and we've got this like garage sale equipment of stereo equip equipment we've got like a 24 inch screen and a vcr we're playing top gun down there and he's like he is really rushing to get accepted to the air force academy get uh recruited for wrestling he was actually prepared for wrestling and go the air force academy and so we love the movie and we'd always crank it up on these gigantic speakers and just totally blow the house up with with the opening scene fighter jets going off the carrier and getting all fired up we're just yelling down there uh so that got us fired up thinking that this is freaking cool man we want to do that but we had no inkling that we could do it it was just like this pipe dream you know and then luckily he and i were uh so the next phase is we do well in aca in athletics in high school and so we have this opportunity my mom's supporting us and we end up getting to be accepted both of us he's two years ahead of me uh he gets recruited for wrestling i get recruited for football and have to be at the academy yeah air force academy so uh i wanted to play football and that kind of melded into my primary goal playing division one football and wow i can fly jets on the side and then when i get there it's like okay football's putting me at risk for not being able to fly because i'm getting hurt so much so uh long story short is we didn't think we could do it we thought it was freaking awesome flying jets would be cool we go to air shows we watch top gun uh in this little basement and boom we are accepted to the air force academy and my brother goes and uh becomes a badass wrestler at the academy i play football for a few years uh but i quit i'm getting hurt and decided to go do the pilot thing oh very cool did he go on to fly as well well uh he started it but that's kind of one of the one of the tragic things in my life that really shaped and allowed me to get to where i'm at is uh he got a motorcycle accident uh right after track select at undergraduate pilot training was in a coma for like six months brain damage permanent brain damage um and now still 20 something years later requires a little bit supervisory care so um that shifted my mindset to more from more of a nonchalant everything has been kind of uh happening really easily really well very lucky to have such athletic genetics and then it gets real and if i had not been woke up and and things didn't get real for me i probably would not have the amount of motivation and dedication to flying and flying fighters and flying what i wanted the a-10 and getting that as my first choice had the accident not happened i would have been more distracted more nonchalant so in a way the tragedy you got to kind of look at the yin and yang of it it shaped me and made me who i am and probably put me on the path to becoming uh a retired a-10 guy yeah how old were you when that happened i was a sophomore at the air force academy when i got a phone call um i guess it doesn't matter i was like i was in a girlfriend's room on a saturday night and uh i almost got kicked out of the academy because i was in a girlfriend's room yeah night when they when they found me and uh but i had to make phone call that night to my mom and say hey he's in intensive care and so next day go out to mississippi and uh you know we have to figure out what's next it's pretty rough wow was it pretty uh obviously a huge event but did it change like overnight you're thinking kind of the way you described the path that set you on yes absolutely i was uh partying and stuff and you know having fun and again nonchalant things are coming easy and it would wake up it was like okay i didn't touch any uh beer for three years nothing ease after that yeah and so it really did change laser focus he was my best friend we would go out and we wouldn't even have tacos just like each other and uh we speak volumes just by body language and we'd ride dirt bikes together we'd go camping all the time we're just like these two big massive folks of men you know he's a black champion wrestler out there he had 26 inch arms and you know like 510 uh he was probably 230 solid muscle yeah six one two forty five you know yeah well and and then this happens you're not invincible you gotta wake up you gotta live your life responsibly and not put yourself in scenarios that could uh get you hurt so yeah jesus um all right so you're you're in the basement you're watching top gun yeah this is the thing why not go in the navy and be flying off a carrier so first of all brother was accepted the air force academy right yeah we should go hang out together yeah uh and second um i thought air force was a little bit cooler than navy i mean i like the planes a little better it was kind of a naive idea it was because the airplanes looked cooler and i knew a little bit more about it even though i'd watch top gun maybe just i didn't want to go on boats i didn't want to be i thought the air force looked cooler i liked the f-16 i liked the f-15 we still had freaking f-111s and uh f117s back then if it had not been for your brother would you have found your way to the air force still you think i think so um because of football at that point in my life coming up through high school division one playing football was uh like my primary goal yeah again a young kid naive primary goal that's all i can see is i want to go play football for division one so that's my big goal that i never really accomplished i was on the team i traveled the team but i never stepped foot on a varsity down playing air force academy football i played a bunch of jv and all that stuff but i never got to go play on the field at the d1 varsity level it's no joke getting onto a d1 team though so i mean yeah i hear you all right so i i did rotc so i was not an academy um cadet but i do know like how competitive it was to get the branch you wanted in the army just through rotc then if you get you know like you get into flight school that's a whole process i would love to hear about what that's like in the air force so okay when you're at the academy how competitive is it to get into flying and then is there a delineation between jets and and the other type of flying and then once you're in into flight school i'd love to hear about that process yeah i'll talk through the process a little bit it might surprise you that it is dependent on the availability of pilot slots and the culture within the cadet ranks as to how competitive it will be to get a pilot slot upon graduation first of all you have to be pilot qualified it used to be early on that you had to be qualified to get accepted to the air force academy kind of seems like it makes sense right you got to have the eyes you got to have the physical to go fly that's not the case anymore so uh i think the statistics are moving to less than fifty percent of the academy acceptees the guys that are at the academy now guys and gals are actually pilot qualified in the first place so that narrows the pool from about a thousand cadets per class to about 500 third pilot qualified and then uh we went through in the recent years a uh a lowering of the available pilot slots to go to training because of pipeline uh blockages and slowing down and that type of thing so it varies wildly year to year on how competitive it is to get a pilot slot on graduating from the air force academy there are years that uh less than half the people that want it get it and there are years that they can't fill all the slots and they're making anyone that is pilot qualified go to flying even if they don't want to so the other piece of that is we have a lot of people now through the culture that realize that you know our job is busy guys are going to be the pace of work as a pilot regardless of heavies or fighters is going to be fast it's going to be you're deployed a lot if you're not into that if you want to be you know home a lot then your choice logically would not be to go to the flying pilot pipeline so uh the decisions at the cadet level are more these days going to i don't want to be a pilot so they have to say no you're going to go fly so then you get a pilot slot and you have to go through the undergraduate specialized undergraduate pilot training construct which is changing right now there's a lot of movement going on there's you point uh upt 2.0 going on at randolph air force base right now you're trying to reduce the timeline of training required to get a full up round sent to a unit to go participate uh but when i went through it was specialized undergraduate pilot training which was uh three phases okay phase one is so you get your you graduate the academy you get your acceptance you're probably qualified and you get a slot okay so you've made the cut first time and this is everybody everybody who's gonna be a pilot is starting at the same level yep okay either rotc or there's there's a couple different tracks that go into being a pilot in air force there's i uh got hired into a guard unit idaho national guard has 8-10 units out there in boise they go interview a dude off the street joey bagadona's you know delivering pizzas just graduated from college and is trying to get hired he gets hired they say we like you we want you to be a eight-time pilot for us they give him a pilot slot he goes and he knows that he has to succeed all the way through the three phases and not fail out to become that 810 pilot at the air national guard unit guess what the recruiters at the air force academy didn't tell me that that existed they're like if you want to fly you got to go to the academy and here's how you did so the way through the academy is you get thrown into a general pilot position but i like this national guard thing where you know what you're going to fly if you can make it through yep you go through and you go maybe you're going to make it through and let's see what you get nobody knows so uh first phase academics you gotta study learn be able to understand three dimensions understand uh the rules and regulations of aviation and past tests and do well enough to go to phase two which is your first flying phase when i went through is t37s uh and now it's t sixes as the primary trainer it's uh about six months long there you learn uh how to fly a little bit and then the top players out of that group go to the next specialized break so the specialized break after phase two which is t6 this turns into when i went through it was uh four tracks there was t-ones which is uh like a corporate jet trainer for heavies uh those spokes would go to c17 c5s those type of things there was a t44 for c-130s so that was a specialized track for c-130 pilots there was a uh-1 for helicopter pilots and then there was the t-38 for fighter bomber pilots so i selected t38s and then you know made my next cup you know so the goal as i graduate is i want to fly a-10s i'm going to do it for my brother i'm going to keep my nose to the grind still i'm going to stay focused at um end of phase two vince is is the decision point for these four forks in the road essentially exactly how competitive is that phase two like at the end to figure out which tracks it's brutal man there is a freaking six-inch long math equation for the flight commanders for the undergraduate pilot training students to develop the order of merit so all the every grade you got on any flight all your test scores and then you get a 10 my flight commander thinks this of me which gives me lots of scores or not so it's 360 degree look at you and you're getting graded so everybody gets put on the order of merit then the air force gives you uh this is how many slots we have for each of these four tracks now we have people are going to set a dream sheet and say this is my top second third and fourth choice and so you probably get 25 of the people getting their first choice and then the people that didn't do well enough they want to go fighters in my era everybody wanted to go fighters it was like it was it was fights in the hallway to go to fighters and then i came back to be an instructor at phase two at in t sixes and people were like i'm going to t-ones i don't wanna nobody wanted to go to t-38s wow it was perceived as such a harder way to go that it was just a different motivation there wasn't anything that was i mean there's there's guys that were still fired up and wanted to be pilot and and go kill people and blow up but most people just wanted to go see the world and take their briefcase under their c5 and go stop in spain for the weekend that see i feel like that is the sentencing right yeah okay precisely so anyways then you go to so that's another big cut you've made the cut through your competition with your peers to get to t38s at least in my class yeah um made it okay next thing is go through t-38s which they're ratcheting up the professionalism the expectations the accountability for not being good at flying uh and people get washed out people are getting cut people aren't making it they're like okay you're gonna have to go do something other than pilot in the air force wait they don't wash you out into like the t-ones or the t-44s they wash you out so some are just gone wow if you ratchet this heat up on a kid and he breaks and he starts lying about what he did in the airplane he's gone he's done he's not fine yeah so we we find those type of things we find weaknesses with people and we weed them out so then you go through and then you have assignment knight that is the big one so uh holy crap you could go from t-38 i'll narrow it down to t-38s now for my experience uh you go f-15s f-16s um you go you can go to first assignment instructor instructor pilot which is fake so t38s or t6s uh you could go to there was uh they were just starting f22 drops when i was involved here so um i ended up getting the one 810 in my assignment night and my flight commander told me hey dude you were going to be a f-16 guy until 30 minutes prior to us hitting go on your your drop night uh i did a back door deal talked to guys on the phone and we swept away to get you the a-10 so i got my first choice man and i'm not saying this to be bragging or whatever i've been so lucky i mean i was nostalgia and i was focused laser focused and dedicated to getting this and lucky all the way through my air force career to get first or second choice all the way through for airplanes and assignments um so i i couldn't have done it better i couldn't i couldn't have planned it better uh and how different would your life have been if you had done like a foot one phone call kind of like changed the trajectory yeah it would have been completely different i mean who knows the the culture's a little bit different so the hog guys are kind of like the the big uh meatheads you know that are all about the dudes on the ground and supporting guys on the ground and we always make fun of the f-16 guys like they're the bmw bmw driving frosted tip you know i crossed my hair they're all prima donnas you know and then you got the f-15c drivers that are all pointing with their elbows and measuring dicks and always so super competitive that they're all and then you got strike eagle guys that are kind of like hog guys but they're all weird because you got whizzos and so yeah it would have been a very different look probably if i went vipers yeah that so that that was a question i was going to ask that you just did because at least in the army aviation community like you have the same competitive nature and like here are all the airframes available here's the oml all right number one choose number two choose but there's still like personalities with airframes that seem to match up pretty nicely and i assume that the same exists in the air force absolutely yeah all right how long from that time when you you go to like phase one until you get assigned to hogs for instance how long is that that's a year they do that in a year yeah wow that's faster than i want well okay i did six months before that getting the private pilot's license okay i waited six months after that to get to the next cut which is introduction to fighter fundamentals so that's another three to four month course where they go okay now we're going to introduce you to uh air-to-air fighting shooting my watch stuff and some air-to-ground dropping bombs and doing straight friends and if you can't handle it going 500 knots then there's another cut go do something else wow to like a heavy unit because you can't go that fast your brain doesn't work fast enough to go that fast and so that's after you got a tense yeah that's the training pipeline from there yep so i got uh assignment night i get a-10s i wait uh two months at columbus in a break-in training program i get maybe one or two flights at columbus waiting for a training slot at introduction to fighter fundamentals in shepherd texas uh i go to shepherd um and those are the worst months of my air force career at tomorrow the instructors that the three primary methods of instruction from the instructors there were the old school 1969 to 1975 fear renal fuel and sarcasm those are the three primary means so um it's it's not necessarily an enjoyable process to go through as a student it will harden you it will get you a little bit of a perspective yeah and it will establish a level of uh capability and professionalism because you're just gonna get the knocked out of you every time you show up to fly if you have something wrong it's it's called out and you're you're basically belittled and and talk too until it gets better um it does it's not as much like that anymore we've transitioned a lot away from fear ridiculous sarcasm um we can do things better and more efficient and we're trying to get we're trying to turn that corner but uh i think that era was still pretty rough it was it was not fun and that was that was in a10 training no this is this is regardless of what you're going to you go to uh a fighter you got to go to introduction to fighter fundamentals so it's a three to four month kick in the balls yeah to weed more people out so that you don't waste time at the 30 000 an hour airframes yeah you know i'm saying you're still doing this in t-38s and you're trying to get rid of the weak swimmers and cut some more so that you don't lose assets time in the a10 or f16 squadron so there's a few different flights that you have to fly depending on where you're going to an f-15 guy is going to have more air-to-air f-15c guy is going to have more air-to-air flights in his iff program that guy's going to have because i got to learn air-to-ground the f-15c guy doesn't even want to look at an air-to-ground sorting waste wasted space in his brain he's knocking penguins off he's never going to get back so yep wow okay so so you get through that at the end is it a like um duty location night is that kind of like the final thing that's that's why you get an assignment at undergraduate pilot training i got assigned uh 810's davis mauthan now i've got to pass iff to actually go there did it passed it um hated it so so like from the time you're young you're looking for a10s you finally get it the first time you sit in there like what did it feel like for you oh man uh okay the first flight i'll go right to the first flight because and sorry vince i want to hear this like you're solo in the cockpit right like there's no you're just like nobody helping you big ass tank of a plane 400 knots the uh the steps behind me is here that's i'm walking up five steps to get into the cockpit it's it's 15 foot drop from the camper that's a big airplane no one's with you so this is solo like there are no two-seaters you're in operation yep you're on your own i can't wait to hear this so we go we do our academics we do some stems we know how to start it uh we've we've read the operations limits we know how to not kill ourselves generally um but holy crap there's a lot of stuff to turn on and when you go out there and you're doing it for the first time you better have your together and this kind of translates to uh the the wartime stories too the better your preparation the less your anxiety it's 100 direct correlation so uh and i'm always very hard on myself and this kind of has been a theme throughout my life that if i recognize a point where i could have done more or spent more time reading or done something like this then i i feel it in my brain so i got super super anxiety ridden as i'm walking out to the airplane for the first time like man i could have done this better i could have done this better i could have slept here and i'm introducing all the second guessing bs into my brain um so i'm getting really nervous man we're stepping out there and it's hot it's tucson arizona um probably a hundred and some degrees i've already lost six pounds of sweat before you can get to the airplane uh we get out there and those switches are hot enough to burn your hands if you're not wearing gloves under the tucson sun so uh add that to the mix you're just drenched in sweat i'm like hyperventilating i'm shaking my heart's beating a million miles a minute i'm like i can't believe i'm gonna go fly this thing this is awesome i'm scared uh let's do it um so when you when i get that way at least i have to go back on training and the training is i'm finger dragging a checklist and i'm like taking probably i took probably 12 minutes longer than i needed to ops because i'm i'm going finger dragon one step at a time on a checklist because because i'm so freaking nervous and i don't want to screw this thing up yep uh i just remember feeling flushed i mean i feel like everything's uh overheated i'm shaky we get the thing started and as soon as i tax you out i'm like getting a feel for how it taxis i get to the eor and i realize that there's a whole other level of anxiety that i haven't reached yet as i'm sitting there getting armed up and ready to take off like this is real deal holyfield now man it's like it's we're about to get airborne and uh guess what happens in the airport you got two choices you the punch out of the thing or you gotta land it yep oh yeah um luckily went through the training mission and and no issues but that the inner turmoil and anxiety uh had a massive payoff when i landed touchdown taxi back shut down walk away from the airplane and go debrief and pass the ride everything's good to go i'm like i can't believe i just did that i can't believe i just did that it was it was what you were hoping for like all that time absolutely all the time so i don't i don't know much about the t38 like how fast it goes but was was the a10 your first experience going like feeling that type of power i guess so they're a different type of power a t38 is uh it used to hold time to climb and speed records in the 50s in the 60s so the t-38 is a rocket it's like a dart it's a real sleek twin engine after burning super sonic jet the hog is a big ugly hershey bar wing slow uh powerful weapons laden bad so it's totally different and the so the flying part the landing it landing a t-38 is it's the second hardest airplane to land in the air force inventory and we send our students through it it's tough to land the margins are super thin a lot of people have died um in training in the t-38 in the landing takeoff and landing phase is that what's the hardest to land you two spy plane ah okay they have a camaro chasing it saying you're three feet two feet one foot touchdown oh geez that much support to land that thing so um okay you've got a really thin window of air speed and approach angle for the u2 same thing you're going anywhere from 150 to 170 knots uh approaching in a t-38 because they're just they're there's no wings you have to go really fast so and it's got no brakes so your margins are very very thin the a10 on the other hand uh it's this big massive beast of firepower that's that's built to go kill but when you're approaching the the it is so forgiving it's so easy to fly it's like a big drum like if you wanted to compare it it's like an old 1978 box chevy pickup truck with a three-speed manual on the floor it's like it's it's super forgiving you can bump into stuff no big deal whatever and then you've got like a t38 would be like a no traction control dodge viper it's like i don't get ahead of you you can up real easy yeah so those would be the comparisons how did you do check rides in a single seat aircraft you got a guy chasing you two airplanes no way there are things that they cannot assess where are your switches that's one of the beauties of a single-seat airplane i do what the i want with my switches i figure out what anybody else can can glean from what's going on with my airplane i make sure i got those things dialed but if i don't push the button and i'm not navigating directly to this point i'm looking on the ground and using my eyeballs to go where i want to go he doesn't need to know that yeah you know oh that's interesting so it's a little forgiving then yeah um hey so i think you and i might be around the same age vince where were you at 911 were you a junior or senior was i was casual status air force academy working as check this out the assistant to the women's tennis coach at the air force academy stop handing out in and out like tank tops and stuff for the girls that are going on i don't know it was ridiculous i was also teaching classes i was doing boxing on arm combat um judo being a stand-in instructor helping wrestle around with the kids and stuff like that what year was that like was it were you done with school and waiting to start yep i was done with air force academy i had had already graduated and i was providing help with the athletic department um and i was i showed up to work to the athletic department on september 11th and walked into the office and the tv was on with the first tower on fire and as i was there like five minutes later the second airplane hit and the whole air force career as an active duty commissioned officer was post 11 from that point yeah so i was in a similar boat not with the women's tennis team however i i do recall i i wonder if you felt the same way thinking like oh my god all right i'm going to go to flight school this just happened flight school is so long i'm going to miss this war how how did you rationalize that because you you had a couple gears in front of you yeah um i was fired up i was i was um able to kind of redouble my focus that i had gained from my brother's accident and um ensure that i can't change the path and i'm gonna do the best i can to do do my very best within the path i have ahead of me and i actually was i felt lucky that my timing was that it was because uh i could see the cadets that were sitting you know up to four or five years if they're doing prep school stuff before they're going to be able to do anything but go to school and i felt that every single day at the air force academy i thought i am sitting here wasting my time i hated it like this is i'm just spinning my wheels here this is stupid i need to get out of here and so um i was grateful to have been graduated and that i had a pilot training slot awaiting me it was it was on the books it was ready to go so yeah yeah okay awesome let's let's jump to combat then take me take me to the first your first combat flight where where are you at um what what year are we talking walk me through that first time in combat all right so uh first combat mission september 2005 so it took me that long to get a combat rotation from graduating in 2001 from the academy going through all the pilot training hoops and uh getting my first deployment uh i was interestingly led by my squadron commander martha mcsally now senator martha mcsally from arizona she was she was a good commander um i'll go back to my experience here was the emotions i described on doing my first flight it was similar but it was way more unknown it was i had a little bit of fear of the unknown on hey am i going to get shot at you know is there going to be am i going to be seeing tracer fires and battles down in in the battlefield i just don't know i'm completely naive and ignorant to uh what's going to happen uh so that made me real nervous and uh to add to it um we were operating with the 810a model aircraft at the time and we had retrofitted a lightning gen 2 targeting pod on it and had to do some trickery with switches since we didn't have it designed in the airplane in the first place so we're using a little monochromatic green screen four inch square display for our video feed from the targeting pod and we've got to do some like up up down down left right left right ba select start shift to make this targeting pod do stuff so it's prone to pilot error and mistakes um and when i get to a later combat story i'll i'll tell you why that is important but so i've got a little bit of uh worry about being able to implement the targeting pods systems efficiently and effectively in short notice um there's been a lot of talk we've been doing a lot of talking and practicing for for years now and now it's game time so first time stepping on the field in the real deal game is an emotional experience so um i think my first my first sorry as it got dark at night i see some flashes going off down south and i'm like hey man i get on the radio with my flight lead i'm a wingman i'm a young guy hey look there's some shooting downside he's like dude take a breath relax that's lightning there's that's clouds all right i can relax a little bit so were you guys in afghanistan yeah so bagram my experience is four combat deployments to bagram afghanistan i lived there for over two years and i've got 299 combat missions and uh one combat support mission for total 300. yes how many hours does that equate to for combat time for an a10 pilot it's just under 1300 hours so so three of those three of those deployments were a-10s and one of them was mc12s okay um so for that first flight it was a night flight it was day night day night late night and what is the standard load you guys would carry i'm sure it varied but like what was your weapons load in a normal situation i can't remember if this is my old yeah i think this is oh yeah see if this will come through there you go yep uh here is an a10 and it's a targeting pod this is not going to work with this background no i got you so we got a target pod we got a uh mark 80 uh let's see okay two no that's got a gbu 38 so it's a 500 pounder with a gps guidance kit on it um i think this is a later deployment scale i think we had two or four gb 12s which is laser guided that's these guys yeah laser guided gb12 yeah this is a later scout um we didn't have a lot of gb38s in 2005. we had the gb12s and gb10s so the 2000 pounders and the 500 pounders for precision guided and we had some dumb bombs to mark 82s if i remember right also we had illumination rockets uh we had loots or flares so you could do willy peat rocket um to mark we had high explosive rockets for targets we had uh illumination rockets and we also had uh illumination flares that were that would punch out the back of a carrier on the wing instead of shooting out forward okay um and you have the 30 mil right and a full load of gun 1150 rounds of combat mix which is defined by the theater so i think our combat mix at the time was target practice rounds and high explosive incendiary we didn't use any uh high explosive uh or we didn't use any armor piercing incendiary yeah which is the other we didn't want to put any du out so god okay all right so before we get to one of your like gnarly combat stories i need you to tell me can you just talk me through a standard engagement for you guys because for us it was a really as apaches it was very much like we could operate in a really narrow space i know you guys can too but i i would just like to hear how do you get set up how far out do you have to be how do you engage what what is that like for you guys yeah so um difference between apache call for fire kind of a five line type of deal and that the air force 810 9 line close air support call for not to go you go okay available see your place i see the bad guy um i'm ready to go up and in he says you're clear to engage and you go boom and it's it's done you're down there you're seeing it it's a lot of eyeballs you're not necessarily plugging things into the system yeah um a10 world a model 2005 is a different discussion it's completely different to answer your question in 2005 than it is now yeah so um to to give you a framework the 2005 answer if i get a task and i show up to a location with a jtac on the ground it's average you're doing all right if you go report in on the radio to weapons on target in 10 minutes that's a model now 2020 c model plus helm mounted queuing full data link if you are not putting bombs on target 30 seconds from the time you show up you're up get out really yeah with my helmet mounted queuing if anybody's on station already we got a data link i pull that data and i can use my eyepiece i go i'm looking at the ao okay that's my target that's where the jtac is and i can see it through my eyepiece from 100 miles away so i'm building my essay as i go yeah and i can talk on the radio and i can do things digitally and get ready to go i know where the target is and where the friendlies are i can look it up at it on my moving map get essay on where i need to do for my run in so talking through the 2005 version of the answer is um so fundamentals the the target drives your weapon so the jtac and you are going to have a discussion on this is the type of target that i have i have i think there's six bad guys inside a mud hut so i can't use my gun to get inside the mud hut i need to use a bomb okay so that the target drives the weapon and then the threat drives the tactics so in afghanistan the threat's always very low so we can do any sort of approach angles or repeated approach angles without having high risk to having my number two man getting shot down so i mean i could probably give you an answer on this thing for two hours but i've got to truncate some things there's so many different things that go into how you set your attacks up how you set up your geometry what you're doing in the airplane um so a couple more words on the uh the setup you're talking to a guy on the ground with the radio he says hey i've got this target for you and it's going to be um the nine line format so uh ip to target one through three is usually n a for afghanistan because you're over in the overhead there's low threat you're you're established overhead so you're getting uh a grid that you plug into your system uh and then in the a model 2005 you got a grease pencil and a big old pack of maps there's like four sections of maps this thick on the dash in the a model in afghanistan to get down to a one to fifty size map get your grease pencil out mark where the friendlies are mark where the target plots that he just gave you that um and doing this flying the airplane using four different radios getting grease on your map and getting ready to attack and talk to your wingmen and get this geometry figured out uh it's it's a lot of work heavy heavy workload in the hog especially uh o5 so we figured out uh where the friendlies are where the nearest friendlies are to this target we've got the target description done we're going to do a correlation so the guy on the ground is going to say okay call contact call contact which means i see i can see a main north south running road with our fob on the east side okay i'm contacting your fob i'm contacting the big road uh call the distance from the north end of the fob to the south end of the fob one unit of measure okay contact your unit of measure go two units of measure west of the main msr starting from the south end of the fob okay tell me what you see i see uh a mud hut with it looks like two buildings inside or a clot they say that's a uh a walled off compound with two buildings inside and um all right so that compound has your target in it the target is going to be the northwest corner of the compound that one building it's a square building single story call contact contact a single story what do you see on the south side of that building i see a cart okay that's your target tally target so now we're ready to go i know what the target is i know where it is i know where the friendlies are now i'm talking to my wingmen i'm not talking to jtac for a second i'm like okay this is going to be uh shooter cover gb 38 in from the south off west or in from the south back to the wheel and that's the the brief i'm going to give to he's going to be providing cover looking for any anybody uh shooting at me as i do my pass if it's a diving delivery for a gb38 we generally do a level uh stay out of the threat so um that's kind of something so the diving delivery so when we we would like bump up come in and have an attack angle how would you guys do it like how i assume you'd have to be pretty steep to get eyes on based on the way the cockpit looks we have um the ability to do anywhere from three degree dive on low angle strafe uh long range strafe type of stuff to all the way up to 60 high angle straight 60 degrees nose low and those are used for different reasons so if you need to get for example a high uh incidence angle for your weapon impact on a tank if we're doing armor-piercing incendiary bullets you don't want to shoot the side of the tank because that's got really thick armor you want to shoot the top of it so you do a 60-degree dime usually we're doing 30s they're kind of the bread and butter the 30 degree dive and that just gets you efficiently from your holding altitude you want to hold at a altitude that's efficient for your engine so you can you can stay for a couple hours if you're all the way down to 500 feet the whole time you're cutting 45 minutes to an hour off your play time so you want to be up in the mid teens low 20s for hogs and then you can set up a attack from that altitude into a 30 degree dive bomb or a level it's even more efficient to just fly over the target drop the bomb and stay at your yeah so if you're doing scraping you you're gonna be doing that in 2005 10 minutes to like from contact to you know around on target is the re-attack pretty quick then yes yeah it's just that initial setup takes longer yeah yeah and really it's because we are so uh emphatic about knowing where the friendlies are and that was such a hard thing to do in afghanistan because we had embedded afghan forces with our u.s forces so that communication game trying to figure out where all the good guys are before we start shooting is a challenge yeah so so take me to some of these gnarly engagements that you had okay uh let's see here um i wrote a few of them down just to jog my memory right here okay winter 2005 uh southern afghanistan um a little bit northwest of kabul we're based out of bagram so it's a long drive for us to get there has been ambushed they hit a improvised explosive device on uh on the road uh one of their vehicles is uh disabled can't move and they've got a casualty they need evac this is one of my first dozen or so missions i think it is um i hadn't fired anything yet i hadn't shot any weapons and fired the gun and shot any rockets nothing and um so things were they were still getting shot at by the time we got there they were still under fire and we're seeing the rpgs ricochet off the dirt and stuff and we're seeing their muzzle flashes and stuff going on uh we're down there trying to do shows of force so just hey we're here show the presents and it didn't stop the fighting at that point um so my i'm the wingman here and my flight lead says um okay get ready for dropping a bomb we've got a the jtag gives us a uh fighting position up on the mountaintop um that he wants us to drop a gb 12 on so it's laser guided bomb it's gonna be buddy lays my flight leads laser my bomb um the previous time that i dropped bombs on a targeting pod lazed attack was in training um learning the the target pod using this this up up down down left right ba select start and i dropped on the wrong target with my uh practice bombs i was looking at one thing in my system and in my hud and the targeting pod was looking at my target so this being a bolt-on setup it didn't tell me that i'm looking at two different things and so i drop on my hud symbology when i'm looking in the camera at my target and it drops down to zero seconds and nothing happens to my target oh man i'm like what the is going on this is training this is like the week before i went deployed dude so the last time i dropped something i up and i dropped on you're feeling good right now in combat for real like holy all right it's time for me to do this right so boom boom boom i figured it out i did my homework after that i mean i knew what i was doing but i was still like last time i did this i dropped off my wrong thing so i know i'm not going to do that three times make sure make sure make sure um so super nervous about it um drop that that bomb and it hits perfect um and so this is happening over five ten minutes or whatever um that i'm going through this attack and then they get hit with something else again and they're like we need to get that uh helicopter rescue here now they're thinking that they're gonna be able to reconsolidate get the guys into the cars and push through but then they're like okay we got another guy that's injured that needs medevac so um i end up getting on the radio and calling a helicopter and get the helicopter out there and then we provide support for the helicopter so i'm not really describing it very well but that was a very emotional situation for me too because now i'm hearing about the guys that are getting shot up and the only thing i can do we we can't go shoot because we can't see the bad guys and all the afghan friendly forces have scattered to the winds so only thing that we could shoot was this thing way up on a hilltop um and it does has no effect so finally after enough shows of force and kind of throwing rockets down my my flight leads throwing rockets down to kind of suppress these guys uh they stop shooting at them they break contact but now i'm escorting this helicopter in and i'm hearing the radio chatter about how bad the guys hurt and yeah they take a couple guys to the hospital and um one of the guys didn't make it one of the guys did so it was it kind of turned into a a very memorable mission for me first time to drop something and first time seeing casualties of war you know kind of on my watch i guess and hearing hearing the stuff on the radio is tough the first time but not like any time but just the commotion and guys who are so close to that action and and not when you can't i've definitely been in that situation where tactic on the ground and they're so close to the enemy that you can't even when we could see them we couldn't put rounds on because they're just it's too fluid yeah and you just feel helpless yeah yeah it's tough man and you know that's the only thing that is redeeming about all the time i spent in afghanistan is that a lot of times we were able to break contact and and help the guys on the ground regardless of what i feel like uh should we be there or not yeah yeah right now i hear you okay so that was your first engagement then basically and it worked you you put around on target you're still the junior you said like you got your lead you're still the wing man all right so yeah hit me with another one all right let's see here um somehow uh yeah this one was crazy this was uh i'm older a major this is my fourth deployment uh 2014 um i'm a singleton deployed to the wing staff at bagram afghanistan so i am plans programs at wing headquarters at bagram but i'm flying a few times a week with the deployed a-10 unit there the 303rd out of kansas city these guys are awesome they're just the best a bunch of good guys and that's the uh source of that video that i referenced for you earlier yep um the save the a10 video so i'm flying with these guys i'm the flight lead um we've got a a convoy escort going on out of a larger fob just south of kabul and they're going into the area that i call the uh the dragon's back so there's some mountains out there that kind of resemble a dragon so there's a road that's just south of the dragon's back going in and out of town there's no churros notoriously got uh bad guys around there so they end up taking fire and we're the only guys around just two ship a-10s on the flight lead um and they're they start screaming on the radio we're getting shot at two different angles um we do our nine line we get set up and i'm like okay there's some confusion on where good guys and bad guys are i'm confident enough to set down a willy pete mark i'm going to put a rocket down i want you to give me a correction off this willy pete um so hey wingmen our fighter to fighter is going to be trail shooters gun uh a rocket gun i'll be uh marking you need to listen up for your correction and it's in from the east off north uh friendlies are the uh south and to the east so vincent is that if i understand your lead you're going to mark with the willy pete round and then your wingman's going to come in and adjust off of that based on what he hears yeah from the ground okay yeah so i i throw the rocket down and he's like yeah man hit that mark hit that mark that's perfect and so number two rolls in and pulls the trigger and so in the a10 you've got a 2d 10 trigger there's pac one pack two a pack means precision attitude control so you you fly your airplane in put the nose on what you want to hit you hit the first detent and a system stabilizes the flight controls so that it keeps that hud target that gun cross on the piece of thing that's underneath it you within reason you can kind of adjust it with rudders a little bit you can kind of move it a little bit to adjust your fire but uh pack one and then he goes as soon as he goes to pack two something breaks in his airplane and pack destroys itself he loses his uh stability augmenting system and the bullets go everywhere i mean we are danger close troops in contact right now and his bullets just go everywhere and i'm like ah dude let's hear a radio call come on man and like the longest 15 seconds of my life just wanting to hear everybody's okay yeah yeah the the radio comes back good hits good hits and i'm like yes i'm like two climb high get out of here you're done he's like yeah i don't know what's going on with my airplane i'm like you're broke you know he he gives me two or three radio calls and i'm like okay climb up go home get out of here uh i don't want you to crash this airplane because it's starting to do all kinds of funky weird stuff he's losing displays and so uh he had a mechanical and electrical kind of a compound emergency which is super rare that was initiated by a gun run and the troops in contact danger close so it's me alone and unafraid for the rest of this and so i'm doing re-attacks i'm getting updates they are moving they're trying to break contact um and so i end up doing five or six by myself nobody's covering uh straight fronts to try to um get these guys to be able to move south and break contact and the one uh man i was so so fortunate to have uh kept my mind straight with we did two iterations of marking where i should shoot one of them they were from two different sources so we had a jtac talking to a guy who had a one of those m16 launchers he could he could throw a smoke out of or whatever and then there was another guy that was going to throw smoke but he was going to do it from his hand so the first one they they shoot a smoke mark out and say hit the smoke so i do a straight run and it's pretty clear on this one that i'm rolling in and i'm doing a straight run on the mark and north so i do it good to go the next time around i'm they're still moving i'm trying to update uh my essay on where the friendlies are keep doing the radio calls figure out where they're taking shots from and uh okay next guy's gonna mark with yellow and so i roll in on yellow smoke and i'm ready to pull the trigger and i go nope and i'm glad i did because i said confirm that yellow smoke is the enemy or the friendly because it was in a different place than i expected i'm like nope not shooting that great the jtx did shoot it and i'm like nope let's talk again ask that guy if you if if he's marking his position or the enemy and he came back and said it's his oh my god man so it just didn't feel right you could just sense it yeah and ah so that was pretty stressful but uh luckily that scenario are you using the advanced optics that you described well in that scenario it's so fluid that there's no other players that are following this and sending out data link data so this is back to my eyeballs and radios old school once we once we kicked it off and we had the initial lay down set up and we didn't have much of a timeline to get the initial lay down put into digital anyways because it was you know pretty quick to them getting into contact so dang yeah that was that was a i was happy to have been successful and then i'm getting called like hey uh i'm running low on gas ops sends me a message over the data link and says hey the weather's going below minimums over here and i'm like so uh i stayed a little longer a couple f-16s check on and by this time they're not taking fire anymore so i think i spent 850 rounds or something multiple uh multiple passes how long are you on what's that how long were you on station for something like that is it pretty it goes quick man i can't even remember how long that was um it does go very quick i mean i think it was probably an hour that i'm doing this yeah and it probably felt like about five minutes exactly oh man and then i'm i'm super amped up the f-16s check on i give them a hasty hand over because i'm already below my gas i'm supposed to have uh kandahar divert fuel and i'm like i'm 400 pounds below kind of hard to hurt but nobody else is here i'm not going to leave these guys yeah so that's a hard call oh my god yeah so i go up uh in land and i got so much extra gas i'm like i could have been there the weather was fine i could see the field from 30 miles away i'm like i could have stayed for another 20 minutes but uh anyways nobody got hurt uh they stopped firing at them and it was overall successful so pretty intense though yeah was that it's is it rare to have an a10 stay on station solo yes yeah i would imagine it's two two at a time is the normal so is that your modification what's that was that just a game time decision on your part or did you have to get authorization to do that uh no i didn't get authorization i that is pretty clear that you got to do what you got to do when you got the troops and contact thing going on and yeah if if it's uh nothing going on it's a boring day these guys are just you know lounging around yeah i'll probably go home with the guy but since there's action happening i need to stay there damn all right um if hey vince if you got another one i'd love to hear it but if not i got other questions for you let's go with the other questions i don't want all right i don't want this man i could hear this all day um we did a couple we were in a couple fights with some a-10s there and it was always really impressive to see it was always daytime i don't know if like how often you were doing shots at night but we tended to see you guys during the day when i was over in afghanistan yeah i interviewed a guy jtac wes bryant who um he was saying like within the jtac community it was the last question i asked him was hey as a jtac when you get on on stage like you're there if you could get any bird that you want what do you want and he's like always an a10 yeah just like that's what we want yeah um cool man so was there any uh was there anything that you took with you in combat that had like sentimental or superstitious value to you that you always had to have with you in a flight uh yes in fact um i brought a flag with me on every mission on the airplane was we had a flag for my daughter vivian who's 10 years old uh next month so uh yeah same flag each time yeah it was the last last two deployments i kept that flag uh for her so that is awesome yeah and i got it mounted into a shuttle box and a little certificate and all this stuff so i'm actually gonna give that to her for her 10th birthday sweet all right no that's cool so um do you envision i know how dangerous flying is but um like do you envision talking to vivian for instance about a similar career that you would have i am wide open with what the kids desires are i know there's good and bad wherever you're at i think there is massive benefits being in a fighter pilot community or aviation community because you're around such great people there are there are top of the line people in air force aviation period there's a bunch of careers yeah but if if you know who you are and you don't need to do that careerist thing then that's fine you don't you don't have to shun the careerist you know they still are very high functioning college graduated probably a master or phd and are intelligent and can make you a better person just by being around that group of people versus if you i i mean it's it's a good path yeah and it's it's great people so i would not discourage it but i would make her aware of some of the challenges and i think uh man especially for a girl air force county is a good place to be from not a good place to be it's it's it's got a lot of uh psychological challenges and if you're emotionally not prepared for it it can really be a bad thing for uh some females especially yeah um actually on that point i mean you mentioned the uh was it the commanding officer for your first unit yeah was a female 810 pilot how rare was that at the time ah man i think she was like she was the very first uh squadron commander fighter uh female fighter squadron commander that flew in combat as a female yeah so for not many yeah gosh how how what was that like at the time if if you're open to talking about it i'm just curious how i mean that is an intense alpha male community for the most part yeah and here you are in combat and you've got um clearly an accomplished leader who's a senator now right so it was that like it's an interesting thought man that it was there was a lot of people that were really pissed off that she was there i mean there's kind of a it's a divisive her callsign's wedge drives a wedge because you got people who are uh a supporter and people that are angry that she's there and so i was always a big supporter i mean i still am i think she's been uh unjustly vilified on a lot of stuff that is gender-based and it's that old uh the old bro network style of fear ridiculous sarcasm that that isn't necessarily the best way to go about uh doing things in a professional organization that put a lot of the people on the side of uh you know vilifying her in my opinion i think uh these days it's more of a we've got more shades of meritocracy versus some arbitrary uh delineator like gender um yep there i mean there's she wasn't the very best pilot she made some mistakes that were very visible and that kind of helped the the detractors pile on you know so whatever she she um was a was the best squadron banner i'd had up to that point and she spent uh i think two years if not more tracking down and making sure that each of us was uh given the appropriate medals and things and decorations that uh were put in for us so i got out of the blue call from her two years after her deployment saying did you get all your air metals no way i think so that's cool she goes did you get the the single sword of your metal like i don't i don't i don't know i didn't i didn't look i didn't read them um so i actually was missing one that just felt through the cracks it never never happened but um she did everything she could from her point of view to uh you know follow up and make sure that yeah uh what her responsibility was was taken care of yeah i got lots of respect for her on that yeah um so i have three boys the oldest is 13 i got an 11 year old and an eight-year-old um they're the oldest is in the flying man so how and i'm just a helicopter pilot and it's been a long time well what is this you're still that's right thank you thank you what is the best way to get them start like what's the right age to start because it sounds like you you went in after the academy right to start flying yep um if you could do it again where would you start out at what age and what type of experience you know i i've seen good and bad i've been an instructor at multiple different levels through the air force set up i've seen guys who start from scratch just like me after college and have done nothing with airplanes until they uh start with the air force training and do very well they do great they're fine i've seen people that start there and and don't do well and then i've seen people who have been uh with private pilot license for six years before they start within the air force and it's a huge detriment because they've they already know it all they learned it all and they can't be taught you know and then there's guys that have done it for a long time that allow themselves to augment their knowledge and move to the new way of doing it air force does things weird compared to civilians so uh be flexible and and accept how the air force does it versus you know getting butt hurt about how it's being done differently i know better right i don't think there is an advantage either way it depends on the personality of the person if they're going to be successful within uh whatever exists you know in however many years your kids are coming up i don't know what it's going to look like we're starting new point upt 2.0 now so that's a lot of virtual reality stuff uh you know 3d goggles and weird stuff going on so yeah i don't know what it's going to look like i don't know what would set you up for an advantage uh trying to be successful within that program because it's going to be different i hear you so last last question for you here is um and i think i know the answer to this but i ask everybody like kind of going back to the days you were watching top gun and you lose you know this difficult moment with your brother pursuing this path and all of the pain and psychological hardship you go through four combat deployments 1300 hours would you go back and do it all again i wouldn't change a thing i would not change a thing not one bit i like i said earlier um my pathway was better than i could have scripted it i couldn't ask for more i've been able to do things reach the pinnacle of the re the respected aviation world is flying combat in the a-10 right i mean that's if you look around the internet that's what people people will go click anything that has a10 on youtube they want to watch the street videos or whatever and i'm like i'm just completely baffled that i was able to be a part of it just this random stroke of luck this chance that you know i was a part of it and fit well and you know became a part of it for a period of time so yeah i wouldn't change the thing man and i lied because i have to ask you this one other thing that i read online you can correct me if not but there's there's some story about a picture that you took while flying yeah and i'm wondering if we can end on that because it's one of the best stories i've read and if it's true i would love to hear it yes okay so man so many folds in this story anymore the guy that took the picture has died of ptsd so he's a great buddy of mine i i gave uh a flag to his mom at his funeral at the air force academy cemetery so this story means so much to me in so many different ways it's a great like belly laugh story in its origins and it you know so many of my close friends and stuff uh have been able to be a part of it and so clyde you we're flying our first deployment return stories so it takes a week and a half to fly eight tens all the way across the globe to get back to tucson from afghanistan and we're following a tanker we're going 250 miles an hour 275 i think between 250 and 275 and the tanker's just going you guys come on let's go faster but we can't uh so we got hours and hours and hours and about hour five on our first leg out of afghanistan um i'm like all right hey lead i'm gonna go out to the left next to clyde he's like okay whatever just don't get lost so it's the next 30 minutes i start unbuckling everything i take off my harness they take off my g suit i get my uh the flight suit down and uh i start creeping up next to clyde on the left side i go hey man nice so i'm in my desk chair here i'm gonna reenact this on my desk here because there's not a lot of room inside the cockpit but so i was able to get up and do this and then kind of do that but i didn't have nothing on so i was looking at the south end of an unneutered bulldog uh and he snapped a picture of it as uh one of my favorite shots what race is wasting time man what range was he at when he takes this picture uh we're probably i was probably a couple hundred feet away from i didn't wanna i mean the autopilot is not good like you you hit the stick a little bit autopilot goes d and the airplane goes where it wants to go so i had to be really careful i didn't want to get too close to running to him because i was going to be looking the other way so yeah you got to talk man if you're not having fun you're not doing it right man you know and all these guys get so damn serious especially in this uh killing people and blowing up business don't take yourself too seriously go out there have some fun um and my last assignment the the dudes out on the line that did the maintenance they used to call me the wu guy because i get out i do a uh i go out there and go whoa because i was so fired up that i get to go fly a jet again one more time here we go yeah so always living good enjoy it that is awesome man well hey thanks for the time man this is this is great great experience thank you i enjoyed it myself i hope you enjoyed this combat story if you want to tell your own story go to combatstory.com if you know someone we should interview send me their info at ryan combat story dot com hearing these stories can be tough or bring back your own memories if you're battling ptsd please call the veteran crisis line at 1-800-273-8255-273-8255 safe

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 15,432

Rating: 4.9529409 out of 5

Keywords: Vince Sherer, Fighter Pilot, A-10, Warthog, Thunderbolt II, Instructor Pilot, GBU, Snapper, Air Force, Veteran, Combat, CAS, Close Air Support, Danger Close, Combat Hours, Flight Hours

Id: xKINXysZaYw

Length: 81min 19sec (4879 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020