Last of the Top guns

Viper Pilot

A Memoir of Air Combat

by Dan Hampton

William Morrow

It’s the fifth day of the Second Gulf War, and things are already getting hairy for Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Hampton.

A unit of the 3rd Battalion 2nd Marines is trapped north of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, and it’s up to Hampton and the three fighter planes he leads under the call sign ROMAN 75 to save their asses.

The Marines have put out a desperate “emergency close air support” signal — a mayday call for any and all fighter planes to abandon their existing missions and fly to the scene.

“ROMAN . . . God’s . . . hurr . . .” the Marine unit implored over a garbled radio transmission punctuated by the pop of automatic weapons.

For God’s sake hurry.

“They need help right now or they’re going to die,” Hampton tells The Post.

Problem is, the worst sandstorm in recent memory, a khamsin, has turned the sky to oat meal. Two other sets of fighter planes couldn’t even find the grunts and turned back.

Hampton’s got experience on his side — he’s been at this since the late 1980s, in the cockpit for more than 100 combat missions.

But suddenly his aerial convoy became a one-man show.

One fighter has engine problems and is sent back; two others are armed with anti-radiation missiles — great for taking out surface-to-air missile controllers but useless in this fight — and are told to stand down.

So it’s just Hampton, his F-16 bearing down at 500 mph, and his Gatling gun spitting out 20 mm shells like watermelon seeds.

It’s up close and personal — he’s only flying a few hundred feet off the ground and can see trucks exploding and Iraqis scattering behind bushes, or dying.

One enemy truck is turned into a smoldering lump. He circled back to take care of the rest. “Never attack from the same direction twice,” he says.

“ROMAN 75 is off to the south and west . . . vehicles burning. The column has stopped in place,” he tells the Marines.

It’s not over just yet.

The khamsin is even worse on the way back, blackening the sky like squid ink. No use flying through, Hampton went up to the heavens, 15,000 feet, then 25,000 — over the fray.

Peace — for a few seconds at least.

“Coming out of that darkness and into the sunlight . . . it was that ‘ahh’ feeling.”

It’s not every college kid who commutes to class in a single-engine Cessna. But Dan Hampton, one of the most decorated pilots in Air Force history, never wanted to be ordinary.

“I always loved to do things that most kids didn’t do,” he describes in his new memoir. “At 16 I decided I wanted to fly.”

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