F/A-18 Pilot in Iraq: LtCol Neal Rickner

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today we’ll hear from Lieutenant Colonel Neal Rickner. Rickerner served in the US Marine Corps, completing a total of three tours in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. He first deployed as an F/A-18 pilot, and later became a Forward Air Controller. As a Forward Air Controller (FAC), he toured with an infantry battalion, tasked with coordinating air support based on the needs of the battalion.

LtCol Neal Rickner:

My name is Neal Rickner. I was an F/A-18 pilot in the Marine Corps, and I got out as a lieutenant colonel.

I was put on a plane when I was five-years-old to fly to St. Louis. I don't want to date myself, but it was TWA and was picked up on the other side by friends to spend a week in St. Louis and just fell in love with airplanes. So, from five to about say 12, I was just an airplane geek. I collected toys and played with airplanes of various sizes, just model airplanes and stuff.

And then at 12, might have been 13, I did one of those sort of junior high school trips to Washington, DC and it was on that trip where I found myself in a museum and I always get this quote wrong, but the quote is something to the effect of “The only thing needed for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.” And it hit me like a ton of bricks that I had to be part of the national defense. And it was shortly after that that somebody sort of gave me the idea that I could combine those two things, that I already loved airplanes, and I could be a part of the national defense and do those two things at the same time. And so, it was about 13 or 14 when I kind of put those two things together and just decided I was going to be in the military.

S o it was about that age. I was 13 maybe, maybe 14, but I think I was 13. I joined a cadet program called Civil Air Patrol. Somebody in my neighborhood told me about it. They said, “It's like Boy Scouts, but it's kind of more Air Force oriented.” And so, I went down that path, but I grew up in Southern California near Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. And, so the CAP, Civil Air Patrol needing place was just off of the base. It was actually off of Tustin, which is the helicopter base that was just a couple of miles from El Toro. And of course, the senior members there, this sort of adult leadership were Marines. And so, I went into this Air Force, Civil Air Patrol program, if you will, but was being taught by Marines and eventually sort of got this message, which all Marines have, which is that the Marine Corps is the best. And as a 13, 14-year-old kid, it was like focused on the Air Force, wanted to fly in the military, but then heard that well, the harder thing to do is go be a Marine aviator. It was like, “Well, sign me up for that. I want to do that. I want to be the best.”

I know each of the services will probably quibble with this description of it a little bit. But the Air Force, the pilot is the sort of center of the universe. The Air Force puts all of their effort, budget, resources behind putting the pilot in the right place at the right time to deliver combat power. The Navy is a combination of ships and airplanes, but really, it's owning the sea. So, their resources, tools, focus is putting the right combat power in the ocean in the right place, and you defend that capability with air. But really, it's about owning the sea. The army is the same thing, but it's about owning territory. The Marine Corps, it's a very simple mantra. It is, how do we get the Marine to take the hill, until the Marine plants the flag on the hill, nothing else matters. And so, if you're in the Air Force, you can own the sky. If you're the Navy, you can own the ocean. But in the Marine Corps until the Marine is on the hill with the flag planted, we haven't accomplished anything.

And so, in the Marine Corps, everything else is support. I blew the best airplane on earth at the time with all of the resources available to me to do good things in the air, but I considered myself support. We're taught that from the very first days as an active-duty Marine.

It's a second lieutenant. Every second lieutenant goes to what's called the basic school, call it TBS for short. As soon as you get your commission, the first thing you do is go to TBS. It's a six-month school, which teaches you all about the Marine Corps, where OCS is about evaluating whether or not you have what it takes to be a Marine officer. TBS is about training you to be a Marine officer. You spend six months learning all of the various functions in the Marine Corps. You start with infantry, then you go learn logistics, and you learn air, and you learn artillery. All of those things are taught in the basic school to give you a well-rounded view of all of the functions in the Marine Corps, including admin and logistic, all the things. But through each new module, whether it's a week or a two-week module, we're instructed through the infantry mindset that we're doing all of this, not for its own sake, but to support the Marine infantry on the ground, who's going to plant the flag on the hill.

And I'll take it a little bit further. Because after I was in the cockpit for about four years, I did a forward air control tour, a FAC tour, and that FAC tour was with an infantry battalion. So, I spent a year in an infantry unit, and I was assigned to oftentimes a sergeant or a corporal. And that sergeant or the corporal in the Marine Corps was tasked with the mission of the day, whether it was to take another city block or to go do a raid on a house. And if that Marine ran into combat, ran into troops in contact situation, we were in Ramadi at the time. And so, there were plenty of opportunities for this, that corporal or sergeant could pull out his pistol or shoot an M16 or call in a tank to fire a weapon, or he could ask me to come forward and deliver bombs on target. But it wasn't my decision whether or not to attack that target. It was the Marine infantry guy who was responsible for that. So, again, I was in a support role to give that Marine the tools and combat power that he needed at the time.

Flying the airplane at some level is just different than the fantasy. Once I had decided to go down this path, I did go to air shows and I watched the movies and what you see is airplane flying low and fast. And that happens, but it's not every day. And it's certainly not most of the time, but there were certainly times when I recognized my own connection with the airplane, had gotten to a point where I was just in concert with the machine. This is a $50 million airplane with tons of power and capability, and I'm operating in a way that I'm not even thinking about it. And things are happening. I am way ahead of the airplane. I'm sort of predicting what's about to come and leaning into that in anticipation and the reward of having that kind of connection with a machine.

And then not only your machine, but your wingman. You never go to combat alone. Usually, it's at least one other and sometimes 3 or 10 other airplanes. And when you can not only get your machine running in the right direction, but you're coordinated with your team. I mean, that's true in sports where when your team is connected and operating as one, that to me is a moment of euphoria. And in the same way, but times 10, when you get a machine and your buddies to operate in unison that is I'll just use the word euphoria. I would feel and experience the collective power. I think that's really what it was for me is just the collective power of 10 F/A-18s online coming for you. That was an amazing feeling to see all that come together and to feel it coming down range at 700 miles an hour.

So, we all get a call sign. It's also usually something that is meant to pick at something to sort of get under your skin. And look, I think there's a good reason for that. It's because we're all super high ego people, and it's to just check you a little bit. Hey man, we're your brothers. We're going to build trust by taking at your weak spots and building you up and then recognizing you for who you are. You can't front with us. We're going to get to know you really as you are, and in flying the best and the worst is going to come out. If you have a weakness, it's going to show.

So, my call sign was based on I walked onto the University of Arkansas football team. I'm five foot nothing, a hundred nothing pounds, and I'm slow and I can't jump. And I'm marginally athletic. IAnd so, it was based on the movie Rudy, where this guy walks under the Notre Dame football team, and he hangs in and he's on the practice squad. And by the end, he gets put in the game and carried off the field. And it's amazing. I did not get carried off the field. I never got in a game. I was on the practice squad. I did hang in. Well, I'll say this, I didn't play football in high school. I always wanted to, but I was a wrestler. And my wrestling coach was just opposed. He thought I was going to get hurt and I wouldn't be able to wrestle.

So, I never got the chance, and I really wanted to. So, I went onto the football team mostly just out of like, I think I can do this. Let me go out. And so, it was an amazing experience. I wouldn't give that up for anything. So, for my call sign, it was both positive and negative. It was sort of acknowledging that I'd done this really unique thing, but also dude, you're short, so there you go.

I was part of the shock and awe campaign in 2003, flying missions from Kuwait into Iraq for the initial invasion. But by a good measure, the most intense moments were when I was at a FAC, forward air controller on the ground confronting combat face-to-face.

There's a couple. The one that stands out the most is Ramadi was a highly contested place. We got there sort of in the fall of 2005, and we would go out on patrol, and almost every time we'd come into contact with people shooting at us, there were insurgents. There were the local sheiks had their militia, there was Al-Qaeda in Iraq. There were several groups that were really not happy with our presence there. And so, on average, I would say we would get attacked somewhere between five and seven times a day from small arms fire or rocket propel grenades or mortars, or maybe all of them all at once.

So, in the midst of that, we decided to put up an observation post in the central part of Ramadi because that was where the bad guys had the most freedom of movement, so in order to disrupt their activities, we put in an observation post. We called it OP or observation post Horrea, I think it was.

And so, we did that. We established that post, and they were quiet for a week, kind of responding or thinking about, I guess, what we had just done. We'd go out there for a couple of weeks at a time. At sort of towards the end of one of my rotations, I was sort of on the second floor of this three-story building. We had reinforced the top of that building with sandbags. Most of our fighting positions were on the roof, so on the third floor, and I was on the second floor, and we had sandbagged all the windows on the second floor. So, the second floor was pretty, pretty secure.

So, I was think on my second rotation out, it was another sort of week-long stay in this building where we just didn't leave the building except to go out and patrol. We patrolled to and from that building. But the day I have in mind, the bad guys, and to be honest, I don't know which of those groups I described previously it was, it could have been any of them. It could have been all of them at the same time. I don't know. But all hell broke loose, from the second floor it was mortars, machine guns, everything happening all at once. And it was just like the world just exploded. My job was to call an air support and defend that location. And to do that, I had to go up to the roof and then run across the roof to my position. I had pre-positioned my radio. I had good visibility into the places where they were likely shooting from. And so, I got to the top of the stairs, and I started running across the roof. And I say it this way, I felt, I didn't hear it. I certainly didn't see it. I felt what I now know to be a bullet, go right by me. And instinctively, before I knew anything, I was just face down on the roof. I was down. I knew I hadn't been hit, but I just mean, I had instinctively just sprawled out in reaction.

And I remember in that moment just thinking like, “Alright, you got a choice, man. Nobody's going to blame you for just sitting here. The bullets are still flying. Nobody would blame you at all for just staying put. You just almost got shot. You can just stay here, or you can get up and do your job.” And it was just so clear in that moment that I wanted more than anything to come home with honor or not at all. There was no doubt in my mind that I was going to get up and move across the rest of that roof and go do what I could do. It wasn't that I devalued my life or didn't value my life, it was that it was just not as important as doing my job.

And so, I did, I got up, I got over to my radio. I ended up on that day actually calling in an airstrike. And they hit us a bunch more after that. And I had other close calls, but that was the moment I remember most clearly making a conscious choice to choose honor and to choose my team and to recognize what I cared about most.

I got this perspective that we're all going to be on our deathbed someday. We're all going to, at some point look back in our life and say, “Was I an honorable person? Did I treat people well? Did I leave the world better than I found it?” And so, it really focused my thinking around what's important, what legacy I want to leave, and how I want to live my life.

I wrote an article when I got back from Iraq, from Ramadi, called there's no need for propaganda. Marine close air support really is better. Of course, I'm biased. But I had the experience in Iraq where some pilots from other services would show up overhead and just ask for a grid coordinate, hey, I can put a bomb on a coordinate. No problem.

What the Marine Corps does differently related to the mindset that we discussed before, which is that the Marine Corps centers its effort around the Marine infantrymen, Marine closed air support starts with the pilots understanding the battle space, understanding where the good guys are, where the bad guys are, helping to define how an attack would proceed. So, for me in Ramadi, the conversation with the pilots started before they even got airborne.

I actually invited, and it wasn't just me, me and my other FACs in the battalion invited the pilots from Alad, which was the airbase in Iraq, from which the F/A-18s took off from. We invited them to our base in Ramadi, and we sat down for a couple of days and just went over the map. We said, this is our battle space. This is where we're fighting from. This is what an attack might look like. Here are the names of some buildings from your perspective. There was one building from overhead that looked like an aircraft carrier, said we're going to call that the aircraft carrier building. And so, what we got in response to that was pilots who show up overhead familiar with the city, they were familiar with where we were going to be. And then we began a dialogue about that day. And the differences from what they had studied in the map and what they had known previously.

And what that generated was, one was trust and clear communication but also confirmation that we were talking about the same place. So, it is definitely true when shooting is happening, it's loud and the radio is not the easiest mode of communication.

But if you start with very clear, this is where the fighting is happening, this is where the good guys are, that's where the bad guys are, here's what we need you to do, they can then help because they've got a better perspective, a vantage point in some cases, and they can also help with weapon selection. And it speeds up the whole process.

One other thing that we were dealing with in Iraq was, they knew how long it took us to respond. So, oftentimes they would shoot at us with everything they had for like seven and a half minutes, because they knew that if they shot for 10 minutes, that they would get shwacked. So, they'd cut off at seven and a half minutes and go run and hide. So, having a close relationship with the aviators, and we talk on the phone before the takeoff, we'd debrief after they landed. That level of communication allowed us to get target or attack times down.

I remember one attack I did, it was aircraft carrier building, 360 guns cleared hot. I mean, it was that quick. They knew what they were looking for. They knew what weapon I was looking for. I had already gotten permission to shoot from my ground commander, which happened to be a sergeant. And that attack happened in about four minutes.

I want to give a little bit of leeway to my Air Force brothers and sisters, and that coming into a complicated battle, any battle space, but especially an urban environment that's really complicated and at the very micro level, one block off, and you're just in a whole different neighborhood. Showing up to a place like that with no pre-brief and trying to get familiar with where the good guys and bad guys are, it's hard. That's going to take at a minimum, let's just say 20 or 30 minutes, which is, as we talked about these attacks would be seven, eight minutes long. So, that's really hard to do. And which is why they really reverted to just give me a coordinate.

I do think there's a cultural element here. As I said, the Air Force, generally speaking, wants to put an airplane in the right piece of sky to deliver combat power. There are papers written on how air superiority can be a strategic objective. And that's sort of antithetical to the way the Marine Corps thinks about it, owning airspace isn't a strategic victory. You can own airspace all day long, but until you own the ground, you haven't accomplished anything in the Marine Corps mindset.

And so, I do think there's a different sort of starting point, but again, I want to acknowledge if you had a Marine with the right ethos, the right intent, but they showed up to a place without any pre-brief, they'd be just as worse off be, just as hard for them to get up to speed. But that is why the Marine Corps wants and needs its own air power, is because the connection I had with the pilots I was working with in Ramadi, I didn't just meet them in Ramadi. I knew those guys from flight school. I knew those guys from the previous squadron. I knew some of those guys for like six, seven years prior to getting to Iraq. I had already built a relationship. That's how I knew how to find them, call them, bring them to where I was in Ramadi, and build on the longstanding relationship I already had.

So, the ethos there is around the culture of how we work together and that we want to be closely integrated. Maybe not the sort of specific technical tactical proficiency of showing up to a battle space and expecting to be up to speed in a couple of minutes.

We actually did a raid on a building. We cleared the first and second floors, and then we thought the whole building was good to go. And then we heard somebody moving on the roof. And so, we got re-amped up, got in line to go up on the roof. We thought we had hostels up there. We got up there, it was like a baby goat, and the come down from, we thought we were going to get dead to, oh, it's a cute little goat on a third floor of an urban building in the middle of this very urban, dense city. We all just broke out laughing because you come down off of that sort of incredible high.

So, there were a lot of moments like that where yeah, if you didn't keep your sense of humor, and some of it to be blunt, was dark humor, because we were in this really weird place where I mean, I think everybody goes through some element of it's not the same for everybody. But you either sort of accept that you're more likely than not to die, and so just don't worry about it anymore. It's already done. You just move on and do your job. There are elements or versions of that same kind of mindset that everybody sort of adopts in one way or another. And because that's the case, there's often things that are more permissible to talk about or more available to joke about, let's say that in a normal environment would be pretty cringe-worthy. And things that I wouldn't want to repeat but were really funny at the time.

I did some things in Ramadi that were let's say challenging of the status quo. So, I work in innovation now. One of my very first sort of innovations, if you will, is that when we got to Ramadi, we were told that the general just wouldn't allow the use of air power. And for the previous two years, I think there'd been one attack using air power, and we were getting our butts kicked. Like I said, we were getting attacked five to seven times a day. But I'm a nerd. And I broke out the book big, thick manual, and I just started flipping through it. I'm like, I don't understand why we can't use air power here. It doesn't make sense to me. And in my reading of this, I read it like six times. It's a thousand-page document. I read the key parts over and over and over again. I just couldn't figure out why we couldn't use it.

And so, we went and talked to our battalion commander, and he said, “Well, I mean, if you have a question about it, go talk to your air guys.” My battalion commander was a lieutenant colonel. We went and talked to the colonel, and I say we, this was my other FAC that was there with me, his name is Byron Sullivan. And Byron and I went to go talk to the colonel, and colonel said, “You guys just don't worry about it. The general's not going to allow it. Just go back to your base and go sit in the OP shop or do what you're going to do. But as a forward air controller, you don't have any role to play here in Ramadi because the general just won't allow it.” So, I was the bookworm and I'm also a rule follower. The colonel told me to do that. I was probably just going to go back to the base and sit in my corner and not say another word. Byron's dad is a general, Byron is also just a little irreverent. And so, he's like, “Screw that. We're going to go talk to the general.” And I was like, “We're going to do what?”

We did. We found our transportation, got in a Humvee, went over to talk to the general, I don't remember how we got into the office, but we went to talk to this guy and he's like, “Wait, I never said that.” And no kidding, it was just it's the standard. That's just the way we've done it. It got handed down from battalion to battalion. It was a combination of … there's several lessons learned in this. One of the other things I teach my teams is you got to know the book in order to break the rules. The only reason I was willing to challenge the assumption is because I read the manual, but also your team matters a lot. I would not have been successful if it were not for Byron and his irreverence. I give him a ton of credit for just being willing to go ruffle some feathers.

And the two of us then invited our buddies down from … we started naming buildings, like I mentioned, the aircraft carrier building and others, these are tactical reference points. And what had been sort of the no use of air power in Ramadi for two years, in the next year or so, we used air power about 200 times.

So, I had five tours total. Two of them were to Westpac, to Japan and Asia. I did three tours in Iraq. The first was 2003 for the initial invasion. Then I did a FAC tour in 2005 and six to Ramadi, and then I did my final Iraq tour, the third one in 2007, which was surge, to us it didn't feel like much of a surge.

But yeah, I was back from Ramadi in the latter part of 2006 and got put back into an F/A-18 squatter, and where my task was to prepare a young squadron to go to Iraq and participate in the fighting that I had just departed from. So, I remember feeling a very deep sense of responsibility that I needed to take the perspective that I had learned in Ramadi and use it to design a training program for this very young squadron that was about ready to go back into the battle space. So, that was my task. And yeah, that deployment was 2007. And after I got back from that, that was sort of the decision point to get out.

I'd learned about our job as Marines and that we were support. But having spent that year with the infantry completely changed how I understood my role as a Marine aviator. I could say I was support before, but I knew my place and what my task was, which is why when I went to go train the squadron, I mean, I was a pretty intense guy, as you can imagine, coming back from a combat environment and feeling this weight of having to train the new guys. But that was a key part of it, was to try to help them understand their role in a much bigger picture. Normally, I mean, take Air Force and Marine, whatever, if you're a pilot, you feel important. You're in a very expensive airplane going fast, dropping bombs. It's all part of both the allure and the reward of doing something like that. But my job as a training officer is the person who was there to help prepare this squadron for Iraq, again, was to try to impart how much they were a part of a bigger picture and to use examples and stories and even create some of my own tactics that I knew were going to be effective back in theater.

So yes. To say that my FAC tour was transformative for me would be an understatement. It was a huge moment not only in my personal life, but in my tactical proficiency and my mindset for how to be the best pilot I could be.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Lieutenant Colonel Neal Rickner.

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