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    The most experienced A-10 pilot in history explains how to be ready for anything

    Pretty good for an Air Force guy.

    The most experienced A-10 pilot in history explains how to be ready for anything

    Air Force Lt. Col. John ‘Karl’ Marks made headlines earlier this month when he hit 7,000 hours of flight time in the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack plane, thereby becoming the most experienced A-10 pilot in history. But after all that time behind the stick, Marks’ words of advice for young aviators boils down to just two words: “Train hard.”

    As simple as those words are, they’ve served Marks well over the course of his 32-year career, especially when he was just starting out as a lieutenant in Operation Desert Storm. On February 25, 1991, Marks and his wingman, Capt. Eric “Fish” Salomonson, set a record for destroying 23 tanks in a single day. The two pilots were on a close air support alert mission, tracking down a report from the night before that there were “lots of Iraqi tanks on the move,” Salomonson told reporters at their base in Saudi Arabia shortly after the mission.


    “We launched out of here, didn’t quite know what we were going to see … sure enough there’s tanks all over,” Salomonson said. “We had tanks burning within five minutes.”


    Together, Marks and Salomonson killed eight tanks on two of their three sorties that day, and seven on the last mission due to a malfunctioning Maverick missile. As successful as the day was, the outcome would not have been the same without the intense training that came beforehand, especially in the six months leading up to Desert Storm.


    “When we first got here … we didn’t know the exact techniques that were best to work in the desert,” Marks said at the time. “By the time the war rolled around, we decided on what we thought was going to be the best course of action and it’s worked beautifully.”


    What goes unsaid here is that if Marks and Salomonson were less well-trained for the desert or for running close air support, they would have been less prepared if things went wrong, which would have put them at risk, or they might have destroyed fewer tanks, which would have put Coalition forces on the ground in greater danger.


    “We made the most of that opportunity because we had trained hard,” Marks told Task & Purpose. “The point is that you make every hour flying and every bullet shot count, so you don’t fail on a mission.”

    ***


    That situation only intensified when the Global War on Terror started after the 9/11 terror attacks. Marks flew in Afghanistan and Iraq, where his reserve unit, the 303rd Fighter Squadron, was the first Air Force fighter squadron to forward deploy into the country. By that time, the pilot had 14 years of experience in the A-10, but the aircraft kept changing to keep up with new technology.


    “Every time you get comfortable, they’d come out with some upgrades that always kept you on your toes,” he explained.


    The original production version of the Warthog were the A-10As, but by 2008 most squadrons were flying the A-10C, an upgraded and more technologically-savvy beast than its predecessor. Several of the key upgrades were collectively referred to as “precision engagement,”and included multifunction color displays, better data sharing with troops on the ground, and targeting pods such as the Sniper and Litening systems, according to Air Force Magazine. All of these gave the A-10 better precision and easier control systems, which were sorely needed in the complicated counter-insurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.


    Even so, Marks had to use every trick in the book and every A-10 skill he’d ever learned during one particularly intense fight in Afghanistan’s Kunar Valley in 2014. He and his wingman were keeping an eye on a group of Afghan and U.S. Special Forces troops patrolling the area when the troops on the ground took fire from Taliban fighters. For a time, the team tried to hold against the enemy force, but they realized they were being surrounded and had to retreat.


    The American team had an Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controller on the ground, but he needed help coordinating the final round of airstrikes as the team made it back to their MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles). Luckily, the A-10 had been designed with that role in mind, and Marks went from being simply another pilot to part-pilot, part-air traffic controller and part-JTAC. Generally, a JTAC is a service member on the ground who is responsible for coordinating air and fire support, often in the heat of battle, but in this case Marks took that role on himself.


    It was a tricky situation: Marks not only had to keep his plane aloft, but he also had to keep planes from running into each other or accidentally hitting friendly forces. As the firefight changed below him, the airspace became crowded with F-16 fighter jets, an AC-130 gunship and Apache and Little Bird helicopters showing up to help.


    Further complicating things was the fact that friendly troops were nearly surrounded. Usually, when a close air support pilot arrives in the air over a gunfight, they try to find the friendly troops, figure out where the hostile fire is coming from, and deploy ordnance, Marks explained. It’s more difficult to understand the situation when hostile fire is coming from multiple directions at once. Marks had to use both old-school tactics, like marking targets with white phosphorus, and new-school electronics to manage the chaos, but it still blew the minds of those around him.


    “That mission was unique just in the magnitude of the amount of things I had to use that I’d learned over many years of training,” the pilot explained. “My wingman afterwards said he was just trying to hang on, like ‘I don’t know how you did that.’”


    Whatever wizardry Marks used to pull it off, it worked: the entire friendly ground force got out of the firefight alive, with just a few non-critical injuries to show for it. For his role in the mission, Marks was given the President’s Award for the Air Force Reserve Command in 2015, according to an Air Force press release.


    “It was definitely a memorable mission for sure,” the pilot recalled.


    Being able to help out troops in contact is part of the reason Marks has kept doing his job for 32 years.


    “I’m very proud our biggest cheerleaders are the guys on the ground who say ‘this thing saved my life,’” he said. “That’s the proudest part of flying the airplane.”

    ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ


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