THE HARM & THE USEFUL IDIOT
THE HARM & THE USEFUL IDIOT. By Steve Douglass Photo By Steve Douglass That week in Alamogordo started out feeling like a fishing trip where you weren’t told what kind of fish you were after. "Mark" made an odd suggestion to me. "How does spending a week in Alamo sound, monitoring the White Sands Missile Range with interception gear? I asked him what I was supposed to be listening for. He just smiled and said, “You’ll know it when you hear it.” So I cleared my schedule, made the trip, set up in a motel room, and started scanning. Day after day, it was the usual mix of routine traffic, fragments, and training chatter. But after about a week of recording and replaying everything, a pattern began to emerge. Certain call signs paired up consistently. The timing between launches lined up. The geometry of the flights wasn’t random. It sounded like Wild Weasel training. During that time period, Iraqi SAM sites were constantly harassing American aircraft patrolling the nor...
