Meet the author

“Angles of Attack” is available at Wind and Tide Bookshop in Oak Harbor. Peter Hunt will be at the store at 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 15, to sign books.

When retired navy pilot Peter Hunt set out to record his experiences in the Gulf War, he couldn’t have known how prophetic his reminiscenses would become, as our nation braces for another possible war in Iraq.

“This was why we were here — to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and to irrevocably decimate Saddam’s offensive war-fighting capability.

Our patriotic feelings of absolute commitment to mission and country were reborn to the intensity of when we had first sworn our oaths. I was proud to be an American fighting man.”

So writes retired A-6 Intruder pilot Peter Hunt, in “Angles of Attack, an A-6 Intruder Pilot’s War,” of his experiences during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

Hunt kept a daily journal while on a six-month deployment aboard the USS Ranger during the Gulf War, and it forms the basis of the book he wrote seven years later.

“The journal allowed a richness of detail uncommon to this type of book — or so I’m told,” Hunt jokes with self-effacing humor.

While much of the book reads like a gripping war story, with lots of “Navy-speak” and alphabet-soup acronyms, Hunt’s human side is never far away.

“My point was to relate to the man in the street,” Hunt said from his Dugualla Bay home. “I wanted to give a feel for carrier operations — it’s not as clearcut as on TV news.”

It’s also not as clean: “No privacy, living on top of each other, dirty and constantly feeling oily from jet fuel-tainted water and ever-present aircraft exhaust,” Hunt noted in his journal.

Pilot Hunt, then 28, flew all his missions from the Ranger with bombardier Rivers Cleveland, who was also stationed at Naval Air Station Whidbey.

Hunt, now a pilot for United Airlines, tells of the fatigue the Intruder bomber crews felt as they waited on alert 24 hours a day, while having to complete mountains of paperwork.

“I must have closed my eyes,” Hunt writes, “because when I awoke my mug was empty, there was drool on my name tag and my watch said 1320. How come I don’t feel rested? I wondered.”

The fatigue could be quickly overcome by bursts of adrenaline when the order to launch burst from the ship’s speakers and the crews would spring into action.

“My body reacted and I grabbed my helmet, oxygen mask, and nav bag in one hand, knocked over my coffee cup, and raced for the door before the loudspeakers’ message had fully registered in my mind. I could feel Rivers at my heels. I bounced my survival vest off the open door, careened my head into the doorjamb, and put a small gash in my forehead before I regained my balance and bolted down the passageway toward the escalator.”

Hunt spends a lot of the book detailing the technical aspects of his bombing missions, which may lose some readers, but it’s his pervasive sense of humanity, even the humanity of the “targets” he is bombing, that makes “Angles of Attack” interesting reading.

Many of the squadron’s missions were flown under cover of darkness, or heavy clouds. Targets were programmed into a computer, and Hunt likens it to playing a video game.

While the U.S. government and the government-managed media ran images of a “near sanitary” war, Hunt shares that he was very aware they were bombing human beings.

He tells of a popular video clip making the media rounds called “The Luckiest Iraqi Alive,” in which an Iraqi soldier in a truck is targeted by an attack jet, but narrowly misses death when the truck drives out of range seconds before impact. Another video that was not generally distributed shows a group of Iraqi soldiers hiding in a ditch after their truck was targeted: “Seconds later the ditch blows up, undoubtedly killing all of its cowering inhabitants. ‘The Most Unlucky Iraqi’,” Hunt writes.

“The video was a reality check, a tangible reminder that there was a face to each of the casualties we produced with our attacks.”

Not that Hunt had any sympathy for the Iraqi architects of the war on Kuwait.

On a daylight mission over Kuwait City to provide cover from ground troops, Hunt got his first look at the systematic and senseless destruction of the city.

“I held my breath. Block after city block was in complete flames, each fire in a perfect line, not a building left untouched in each row. This was not from bombs, artillery or tanks — the Iraqis were systemically destroying the southern portion of the city, torching the buildings one after the other, block by block.”

“They’re torching the whole damn city,’ I seethed into my oxygen mask. ‘Block by block they’re destroying the f— place, Rivers.’ ”

Hunt’s squadron, the VA-145 Swordsmen, dropped more than two million pounds of ordnance and flew 1,358.8 flight hours during Operation Desert Storm. It was officially credited with detroying or severely damaging 33 tanks, 48 artillery pieces, 41 naval vessels, 25 missile components, 23 conventional and chemical munitions bunkers, 13 oil facilities, 7 communications sites, 5 hangars, 8 piers, 2 barracks, a bridge, a power plant, and a rail yard. The squadron also mined four critical lines of communications, Hunt records.

“The only number that was conspicuously missing was the one we would never know — how many people we killed,” he writes