![]() ![]() Pilots like Rodriguez don’t romanticize such exploits. It was the final splash of light on his retinas, probably arriving too late for his brain to process before being vaporized with the rest of his corporeal frame. This image recalls a kill registered by Rodriguez, who goes by Rico, and his wingman, Craig Underhill, known as Mole, during the Gulf War.Ī special-operations team combed the Iraqi MiG’s crash site, and this was one of the items salvaged, the last millisecond of incoming data from the doomed Iraqi pilot’s HUD, or head-up display. Even when it happens, modern fighter pilots are rarely close enough to actually see the person they are shooting at. Air-to-air combat has become exceedingly rare. It is a startling picture, memorializing a moment of air-to-air combat from January 19, 1991, over Iraq. A small F‑15 Eagle is visible in the distance, but larger and more immediate, filling the center of the shot, staring right at the viewer, is an incoming missile. It is a large framed picture, a panoramic cockpit view of open sky and desert. O ver Cesar Rodriguez’s desk hangs a macabre souvenir of his decades as a fighter pilot.
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