国家地理:Wings Over The Gulf 波湾战机 - 6

（单词翻译）

F15-E. They started to come out only at night. They started to take advantage of environmental conditions which made it difficult for us to see them. And they began to move their operations' areas farther north.

The intense air attacks on Scud¹ sites did seem to have an impact. In the first five days of the war, Iraq fired an average of five Scuds² per day. In the month that followed, the average went down to one per day. Although Scud hunts became their priority, F15-E pilots were also sent against many other important, hard-to-hit targets, such as radar³ sites and airfields⁴. During the Gulf⁵ War, the 48 F15-Es sent to Saudi Arabia flew over 2,200 sorties. They dropped more than 11 million pounds of bombs. By all accounts, the new airplane and its pilots performed superbly in combat. But flying 300 feet above the ground at night in heavily defended territory will always be extremely dangerous, no matter how good the pilot or how advanced the aircraft. Two F15-Es were lost in the first week of the war.

The F15-Es had a tough job to do. They were flying at night, and they were the key to our Scud hunting events over Western Iraq. Unfortunately, we lost two of them during the war. One of them, we will probably never know what happened. It could have been shot down, or it could have flown into the ground. Another one, it was shot down probably by a surface-to-air missile over Western Iraq while hunting Scuds.

I don't know of any military man that really enjoys combat; it is something you learn to hate. You hate it because it's wasteful⁶, because of the loss of life. And you actually feel a sense of immorality⁷ in the taking of life. Nonetheless, in this case, it had to be done. But I lost friends over there. My former exec was one of the guys, who was lost in F15, and I'll tell you it hurts deeply.

This is the F-117 Nighthawk, better known as the Stealth Fighter. Until recently, the sight of this plane at an air show would have been unthinkable. For years, the F-117 was one of the air force's most closely guarded secrets. But in 1991, this mysterious plane was the cornerstone of the strategic air campaign waged against Iraq. And literally⁸ overnight, the F-117 underwent a drastic change of image. Prior to January 16th, it was a symbol of wasteful defense⁹ spending. The day after, it represented the high-tech¹⁰ military juggernaut that crushed Iraq.


juggernaut: An overwhelming, advancing force that crushes or seems to crush everything in its path 骇人的(毁灭)力量