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In the weeks ahead, the Richardsons and the troops they command will probably find themselves in the thick of the fighting. If so, Jim's Apaches will target the Iraqi Republican Guards around Baghdad; Laura's Black Hawks will carry the infantry of the first brigade to the front lines and deep into the enemy's rear areas. There's not much to be worried about in the northern and southern no-fly zones: U.S. and British fighter planes have been plinking away at Iraqi air defenses, to the point that there's not much left. But the defenses around Baghdad have just grown stronger, and Laura reads the intelligence reports with some apprehension.
This is her first time in a war zone; Laura says she is bothered less by the prospect of antiaircraft batteries than by the thought of facing a chemical attack. "There are things I can actively do to avoid or destroy an Iraqi air-defense site," she says. "There is not much I can do about a WMD [weapon of mass destruction] except sit there and take it." She carries 15 infantrymen aboard each of her battalion's 30 Black Hawks. Flying protective cover for the troops on the ground, Jim's 24 Apaches are killing machines: each carries Hellfire antitank missiles, rockets and a 30-mm gun. They are equipped to fight day or night, and when 24 of them are put together, they have enough firepower to annihilate most of an armored division. Ask Jim if he worries about what Laura will face in battle, and he says, "Not very much. She is surrounded by 305 people who will do everything they can to watch out for her." Besides, he adds, with tender confidence, "she has me watching her back going in and coming out."
They met in 1986 at Fort Rucker, where Army chopper pilots go to learn to fly. "Jimbo," to his friends, was a Myrtle Beach, S.C., surfer boy and rescue volunteer who finally got his act together in college: he joined the ROTC, graduated from the University of South Carolina at Columbia and set off to learn to fly. When he encountered Laura in a hallway during training, Jim says he immediately knew she was the one. She took a bit longer, which is to say, it wasn't until the end of her first week that she wrote to her grandmother and said she had met the man she was going to marry. First, she says, "I had to get past his dumb good-ole-boy act, but when I saw there was a lot more under the veneer, I fell for him." Being a psychology major in college probably helped.
For her part, Laura was always ready to fly high. She was the one who rode the roller coaster seven, eight times, until her parents were sick; she kept going. "She loved that free fall," her father Dr. Jan Strickland says. "She just really wanted to be a pilot even then." As if she wasn't already gung-ho enough, he hung big white plastic boards all over the house, on the walls, on the doors, in the bedrooms, on the stairs, each containing some motivational saying, along the lines of:
Straight from the bow truth is driven, they fail and they alone who have not striven.