As inspirational plaques go, the one that hangs inside the 354th Fighter Squadron isn’t pretty. Just a rough slab of plywood, cracked in the corner, with some hand-drawn letters.
But its message is simple:
Our mission is an 18-year-old with a rifle. ATTACK!
It’s a slogan the 354th’s wing commander at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base wants the pilots who fly the 354th’s A-10C Thunderbolt IIs — attack pilots, they call themselves — to think about every time they step up to their jet.
“It reminds every pilot here as they walk out that you are not the most important piece of this,” Col. Scott Mills, the 355th Wing commander at Davis-Monthan told Task & Purpose. “You are here to attack the enemy and to make sure that friendly forces achieve their objectives and come home safe.”
The 354th will be officially inactivated on Friday, a major milestone in the Air Force’s plan to retire its entire A-10 fleet by 2029. The squadron flew its last official sortie in late June and the crews and maintainers of the 354th’s maintenance and flying teams (which are known as the Fighter Squadron and Fighter Generation Squadron) took their final combined photograph in July, with over 100 pilots, maintainers and other support personnel in formation around one of the squadron’s jets.
It’s a picture that Mills says strikes close to home. The 354th was his first squadron as a new pilot, soon after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
“For me seeing that final picture, it not only showcased my own personal history but I felt like it really highlighted the history of Davis-Monthan and the history of the A-10 here,” Mills said. “It’s the symbol of Davis-Monthan for Tucson. It’s the aircraft we see flying overhead every day. It’s the aircraft that there are news articles written about when they’re overseas.”
The Air Force plans to pull 42 of its A-10s permanently out of the air by the end of September, 36 of which will come from Davis-Monthan and the 354th Fighter Squadron, according to base officials.
As of this week, the squadron’s planes — many close to 40 years old with thousands of hours in combat — and its pilots and maintainers have been stripped away to other units in Georgia or Korea or to the Air Force’s A-10 schoolhouse just down the flightline that has trained every A-10 pilot for decades. Those jets that didn’t find new flying homes were transferred across the base to where virtually all will eventually end up: the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group’s massive airplane storage yard more widely known as the “boneyard.”
Most of the crews and maintenance troops are already gone as well, either transferred to those A-10 units or reassigned to other airframes with most headed to units flying the F-35, the A-10’s designated replacement.
Not an airframe, but a mindset
For nearly a decade, Air Force leaders have said the A-10 needed to be replaced as the service’s primary ground attack fighter. But many lawmakers, former pilots and one-time 18-years-old with rifles who had fought beneath it rallied to save the aircraft.
While Mills agrees that pilots will always love the A-10, much of the battlefield nostalgia is misplaced he said.
“The attack mindset is never and will never be defined by the aircraft we fly,” said Mills. “The attack mindset is actually about the person on the other end … of the equation. The attack mindset is based solely on the soldier, sailor or Marine that’s on the ground. It’s the ability to act when no one else will to take action that is dangerous and put the needs of that ground team ahead of your own and ahead of your aircraft and do whatever it takes to make sure that at the end of the day, they are protected and enabled to achieve whatever their objective is for that day.”
Both Mills and the outgoing commander of the 354th squadron, Lt. Col. Patrick Chapman, are career-long A-10 pilots. Both have spent much of their careers with the Bulldogs, as the squadron is known. Mills was a junior pilot on the 354th’s first deployment to Afghanistan in 2002.
Soon after arriving, he found himself as the junior wingman to a senior A-10 pilot supporting a special operations team taking fire in a mountain ravine.
“I remember hearing the fear of the young soldier on the radio, knowing he was talking to us, trying to feel reassured,” Mills said.
The flight’s lead pilot, he said was Ed Summers, a now-retired pilot and “still someone I hold in very high regard,” said Mills. “I’m listening, and about half of his communication being important things about the mission and talking about the things that were going on. But the other half was just, he was reassuring and effectively just saying, ‘hey, you’re going to be okay.’”
From about 1,000 feet, Mills tried to make out the battle in the moonless darkness.
“Within minutes, their position had become compromised and watching from where I was, in a place of what I’ll just define as ‘safety,’ I could see tracer fire coming down the mountain into his area,” Mills said. “And knowing that we were about to roll in and bury our nose into this ravine and not even thinking twice that, absolutely, we’re going to do this.”
Only after the mission did Mills think about the position he had been in.
“The best thing I ever heard, when I asked my flight lead about it, because I was so young, I said, ‘you know, how did you balance the risk to us with all that was going on?’ And he said, ‘you always have to remember that we are not worth more than they are and we have to be willing to risk just as much.’”
Four wars, one mission
Few squadrons in Air Force history can claim the combat heritage of the 354th Bulldogs.
In World War II, the Bulldogs were the first in the Army Air Corps to fly the P-51 Mustang over Europe in December 1943. By the next year, 2nd Lt. Royce Whitman Priest was flying the aircraft on a mission that would later see him awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
Priest was the wingman on an August 1944 dive-bomb mission when the 354th’s squadron commander’s plane was hit and limped to a crash landing. Priest landed next to the stricken plane, threw his lifeboat and parachute out, loaded his commander into the cockpit and, as such stories go, flew for the sunset.
Two decades later, 354th pilot Maj. Merlyn Hans Dethlefsen was flying one of the squadron’s F-105s over Thai Nguyen, North Vietnam on a fire suppression mission against a key anti-aircraft defensive complex. His mission was to fly directly into teeth of surface-to-air missile systems and “an exceptionally heavy concentration of anti-aircraft artillery” around an industrial center, according to his Medal of Honor citation. Another flight would attack the factories, but it was Dethlefsen’s job to suppress the air defenses.
Though his plane took multiple hits, Dethlefsen knew that the main strike depended on taking out the defenses. Dethlefsen “ignored the enemy’s overwhelming firepower and the damage to his aircraft and pressed his attack.” With MiG interceptors also in the area, Dethlefsen made multiple passes, dropping bombs and strafing with the plane’s cannon, destroying the entire defensive battery. The strike package arrived uncontested.
Since the 354th began flying the A-10 in 1991, its pilots have been awarded the Air Force Association’s Mackay Trophy — an annual Air Force-wide award for the “most meritorious” single mission of the year — in 2017, 2019 and 2020, for missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In May 2017, 354th pilots Capt. Samantha Harvey and Maj. Tyler Schultz were awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses for a mission supporting troops in Syria and Northern Iraq. The crew responded to 50 Americans and a unit of Syrian Democratic Forces who were pinned down by heavy machine gun fire, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades. During five hours of flying, including through severe thunderstorms, the pilots dropped 1,500 pounds of bombs and ordnance and shot 1,300 rounds of the A-10’s 30-millimeter cannon, often at “danger close” range to the Americans and allies below.
Schultz flew four strafe runs while Harvey buzzed the firefight in a “show of force.”
“It was dark, but I had a job to do,” Harvey said in an Air Force release. “I thought to myself, this is the moment that I’ve been training for.”
Two years later, 354th pilots Capt. Alexander E. Boules and Maj. Charles C. Stretch won the award for their Hawg 71 mission from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Flying as a two-ship, the pilots were called by a team of 12 Afghan special forces soldiers who were being overrun and faced risk of capture.
Stretch, a senior instructor pilot, had 178 combat missions under his belt. For Boules, it was his second-ever combat flight.
Still, the senior pilot was stunned by the situation on the ground.
“It was the most Taliban I have seen in my life,” he said.
As the pilots arrived, the radio networks were filled with frightened voices speaking Pashto.
For almost eight hours, the two buzzed friendly forces, bombed and strafed targets they could identify and watched tracers sail past their canopies. They broke off 11 times to refuel in the air. All 12 Afghan soldiers escaped.
In 2020, Lt. Col. Joel W. Bier and Lt. Col. Leif C. Nordhagen won the award for another Kandahar-based flight, supporting an Afghan combat outpost under heavy attack from Taliban forces. As the only close air support fighters in all of Afghanistan, the two flew threw bad weather and mountainous terrain to drive off the attack and save 30 Afghan soldiers.
That mission, Nordhagen told his hometown newspaper, was an easy day compared to others on the same deployment.
“Of the three or four sorties I flew with Lt. Col. Bier, this is probably the least ‘exciting,’” Nordhagen told the HNGNews in Sun Praire, Wisconsin. “I think one other sortie supported an American special operations forces unit that was in a ‘complex troops in contact’ and another sortie required some precision strikes against some ‘high value individuals’ in a densely populated area.”
Final deployment
The Bulldogs final deployment came last fall as part of Operation Inherent Resolve over Syria and Iraq and began on a somber note. Chapman was the flight leader as the squadron’s A-10s flew into the region. It was Oct. 7, 2023 and their flight path took them over Israel, just as Hamas fighters were attacking civilian targets inside the country.
“It just happened to be part of our route into the region,” said Chapman. “And I actually keyed the mic to the rest of the formation and said something to the effect of, ‘there’s a lot of like fire and smoke down there. Is that normal?’ And then we landed and found out what had been occurring that we didn’t know previously, and that kind of set the stage for what was going on in the Middle East for … our last deployment.”
With that, the next generation of attack pilots will fly with the same purpose that 354th pilots have, even if in a different plane.
“A lot of the battlefields that exist today are threat-heavy environments. And every aircraft across the Air Force is designed for certain elements, and there are certainly elements that an A-10 would not perform at all well in. Where they would perform well, they have performed well for 30 years in every conflict United States has been in,” Chapman said. “These decisions are made by our senior leaders and they really are looking at the conflicts that are coming, the adversaries that are on the horizon.”
As for the legacy of the A-10 and its pilots, Chapman said he thinks the next generation of attack pilots will continue that tradition.
“We’re not defined by what we fly. We’re defined by the attack we bring with it.”
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