Parents Of Air Force Pilot Killed Over Iraq Want Justice

AFTER A LIFE devoted to the military, the parents of an Air Force lieutenant pilot killed by U.S. jet fighters over Iraq are dismayed by a military judge's decision to try only one of six officers accused in the shooting down of her helicopter.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas - Seven months after the fact, the calamity in the skies over northern Iraq unfolds clinically on the dog-eared documents that the Pipers keep in their upstairs reading room:

Minute by minute the two Air Force jets close on the doomed helicopters. "Engaged," calls the lead fighter. "Arm hot." Seconds pass as their missiles search. Then smoking wreckage below. "Good job," someone radios. Splash two.

For retired Air Force Col. Danny Piper, 49, and his wife, Joan, 50, each worn page in the story is painful. Wait, they want to shout as disaster nears. You are killing your comrades; you are killing our daughter.

Before the "friendly fire" shootdown of two American helicopters that killed Air Force Lt. Laura A. Piper, 25, and 25 other people last April 14, the Pipers were an Air Force family, faithful, devoted, almost "a poster" for the service, said her mother. Now, grieving and wounded, they have grown suspicious and fear they might not get justice.

Pilot escapes charge

On Wednesday, a military judge recommended court martial for one of the six officers accused in the case. He recommended dismissal of charges for three others, and lesser punishment for a fifth. A

decision in the case of the sixth is pending. But the recommendations are subject to review, and the pilot who destroyed Laura Piper's helicopter has not been charged at all.

The Pipers, though, already have been changed. Their loyalty has been soured. And a family whose very life had been the Air Force, these days feels disillusioned and angry.

They mourn now in the quiet living room of their home here, surrounded by mementos to a service they loved and belongings of the daughter it claimed.

"I want admissions of guilt," Joan Piper, who wears her daughter's Air Force Academy ring, said Tuesday. "That's what I want."

It is a demand she could never have imagined.

An immersed family

When Laura Piper was born in the hospital at the Air Force Academy, near Colorado Springs, Colo., on the day after St. Patrick's Day in 1969, her family was already immersed in the world of the Air Force.

Her parents had been married in the academy chapel. Laura, herself, would one day graduate from the academy, as would her younger brother, Dan - as would the pilot who last spring took her life.

Danny and Joan Piper, junior high school sweethearts from Venice, Fla., had pledged their lives to each other - Joan had moved to Colorado when Danny was an academy sophomore - and into the U.S. Air Force family.

They would serve at a dozen installations over 25 years, rearing three children and doing all that was asked of them. Danny would serve a hitch in the Vietnam War, and then years as a flight instructor, Pentagon staffer and a VIP pilot in Europe.

Joan would live with an Air Force wife's dread of the chaplain's car pulling up outside the house, never dreaming that the day it came it would be about her daughter, not her husband.

Laura entered the Air Force Academy and was graduated in 1992. She hoped one day to fly. But because of her fluency in German she took an assignment to Germany as an intelligence officer.

Duty in southern Turkey

Last November she landed temporary duty at the big Air Force base at Incirlik, in southern Turkey. She did a good job. And five days before the crash she proudly telephoned her mother: "My boss is going to let me go into Iraq on a helicopter." It was supposed to be a reward.

On the morning of April 14, two Army Black Hawk helicopters, called Eagle 1 and Eagle 2, were set for the trip to Iraq. Laura was in the rear of Eagle 2.

The helicopters were ferrying officials among Kurdish villages in the so-called "no-fly zone" over northern Iraq. The zone was set up at the end of the Gulf War to protect the Kurds from Iraqi government attacks.

Because a long flight was planned, special helicopters had been selected. They were equipped with sponsons - stubby wings that had tanks for extra fuel.

Two F-15 fighters, designated Tiger 1 and Tiger 2, took off from Incirlik to "sanitize" the zone of enemy aircraft. Not until they finished, they believed, would other allied aircraft enter. Anybody in before them was "fair game."

The lead pilot, Capt. Eric Wickson, who had been schooled in Connecticut and was a 1986 graduate of the Air Force Academy, and his wingman, Lt. Col. Randy W. May, commander of their 53rd Fighter Squadron who had shot down an Iraqi helicopter during the Gulf War, picked up "hits" on radar 40 miles ahead and low to the ground. He radioed an AWACS traffic-control plane, which responded that it saw nothing.

At no time did the AWACS crew tell the fighters that American helicopters had preceded them into the no-fly zone.

Wickson and May, meanwhile, had tried and failed to determine through electronic identification if the "hits" were friendly or hostile.

Wickson ordered an attack.

Afterward, when they landed at Incirlik, the pilots shook hands. But Wickson already was uneasy. On the way back, he had overheard the AWACS plane trying to raise the Eagles on the radio. "I knew Eagle flight was the helicopters," he said later. "I had just shot down two helicopters."

That afternoon, thousands of miles away, Joan Piper watched the Air Force cars drive up the street to her house in San Antonio. Her husband already had called with the dreadful news. Their nightmare was beginning.

At first, she and her family tried to be understanding. "I said to myself, `People were doing the best they could,' " she said. "We need to accept this. It's for the greater good. This is the cost of doing war."

But as months passed, as the investigative report came out, as the charges were lodged and the hearings were held, the understanding began to fade.

When the report was released on July 13, Joan found "negligence at every level."

When the charges came on Sept. 8 the family was upset that May was charged with 26 counts of negligent homicide, which Danny thought "overkill," and Wickson was charged with nothing. (Wickson was reportedly granted immunity in return for his testimony.)

And while five members of the AWACS crew were originally charged with dereliction of duty, the Pipers believed there were higher ups who also bore great responsibility.

Now, with further legal rulings ahead, they wait, not sure exactly what to think or what to do.

"A part of me says, "Yes, it's time to just let it go," Joan said. "But it's still not time to let it go."

Not yet, she said: "There's still too much that is unfinished."