High over northern Iraq, an F-15E crewed by pilot Lt. Col. Kevin “Rowdy” Murphy and weapons systems officer Maj. George “King” Welton heard “FOX 2″ on the radio: Another U.S. Strike Eagle had fired an AIM-9 Sidewinder at an Iranian drone.

“Well, we missed our shot,” Murphy told Welton. “I think we both thought, ‘Hey, that’s probably going to be the only one we’re seeing tonight,'” Welton recalled.

It was April 13, 2024, and Murphy and Welton were leading the DUDE 41 flight: four F-15Es from the 335th Fighter Squadron. Only days prior, Murphy had been home in North Carolina, part of the 4th Fighter Wing at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. But anticipating an Iranian attack on Israel, they’d been rushed overseas. Welton had already deployed, having gone ahead as part of the advance party.

“When that week started, I … was still at home with the dogs and the wife,” Murphy said. “I was not tied into all of the classified planning that was happening on the back end. … The extent of my knowledge was an unclassified phone call on my cell phone from my Director of Operations, who was with King at the time, and he said, ‘Hey, I can’t tell you everything that’s happening, but we need those airplanes.'”

Murphy knew what that meant: “What he’s really saying is, ‘If you can take risk to get the jets here sooner, we need you to do that.’ There was a sense of urgency.”

So after less than a day on the ground in theater, they were back in the air, ”trying to remember what it’s like to fly in Iraq,” as Murphy recalled.

The attack was like nothing anyone had seen before. Tehran sought to flood the zone, launching a barrage of nearly 100 drones to confuse and overwhelm Israel’s air defenses as it lobbed dozens of cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at Israel—some 300 projectiles in all.

The April attack marked an ominous first in Middle East military history: Iran’s first direct strike on Israel. It was also a critical test for the U.S., as well. Washington’s efforts to contain fighting between Iran’s proxies and Israel depended on how well U.S. forces could stymie the Iranian attack.

For Murphy, Welton, and fellow Airmen like Master Sgt. Christopher Oles, the production superintendent for the 335th Fighter Generation Squadron, it was both a logistical and tactical challenge.

“Aircraft were in country for [only] 22 hours prior to being back up, airborne again, and on a mission,” said Oles. More striking still: The mission was nothing like what they had prepared for.

“All our planning was based off of a standard AFCENT loadout, which was typically an air-to-ground engagement setup,” he recalled. But “after we got jets in-country, intel came down saying, ‘Hey, ‘There’s a potential for something coming up in the next 24 hours. You guys need to be ready to hunt.’”

Oles recalled it being unreal, unlike anything he’d seen before. “We’re loading eight missiles on one jet, like, ‘What are we going to do with all these?’” he said.

Tech. Sgt. Jashaunn Jasper, a weapons expediter in the 335th Fighter Generation Squadron, added: “In your mind, you’re thinking, ‘OK, we load them one time, they’re going to stay just like that, and they’re never going to fire off.'”

The DUDE flight was tasked with defending an area that was some 430 miles wide. During the engagement, they and coalition fighters from the United Kingdom, France, and other nations monitored the area, including Iraq and Syria.

Directed to run a combat air patrol in Iraq from east to west, Murphy and Welton had to blast Iranian drones out of the sky, minimize the risk of collateral damage on the ground, and avoid friendly fire. They knew about a tragic 1994 fratricide incident in northern Iraq, when two U.S. Air Force F-15C fighters accidentally shot down a pair of U.S. Army UH-60 Blackhawks over northern Iraq, and they knew U.S. troops and their partners were active in Iraq and Syria as part of the U.S.-led Operation Inherent Resolve, and potentially could be confused with their actual targets.

“There is helicopter traffic that is flying at the same speed, same altitude,” Murphy said. “It wasn’t necessarily a clean picture where everybody in front of you is guaranteed to be hostile. Each and every missile that came off the airplane, we had to make sure it was going into something that we wanted to die.”

For all of the planning, the aviators were still in for some surprises once the drones were shot down. The Airmen tried to engage over an area without villages or population below, but as they started to fire on drones, Bedouins and nomads below began to disperse to avoid the falling projectiles.

“The drones are full of gas, so they explode in a nice fireball about 1,500 feet above the ground, and then they stop moving forward and just kind of fall straight down in this burning fireball,” Murphy said. “What we thought was a completely empty, dark, nobody-out-there desert” turned out to be something different. “All of a sudden, probably about 10 to 20 trucks’ headlights come on, scattering away from the falling debris,” he said.

Over a frenetic 45-minute period, DUDE 41 expended all its missiles, downing six drones, then, as Murphy and Welton remained aloft, Welton located additional incoming targets and handed them off to a pair of Royal Air Force Typhoons for the kills. The stage for cooperation was set just days before the engagement itself.

“That was probably the fastest I’ve seen the [foreign disclosure] process work in terms of getting information that the coalition partners needed so that we could all work together effectively as a team and not just be in our own little stovepipes,” said Welton, a member of the mission planning cell and the deputy mission commander. “That was really cool.”

All told, the 335th Fighter Squadron downed two dozen drones as part of a multi-faceted defense that also included U.S. Navy ships in the eastern Mediterranean, a U.S. Patriot battery in Iraq, U.S. F-15Es from the 494th Fighter Squadron at RAF Lakenheath, and U.S. F-16Cs from the D.C. Air National Guard’s 121st Fighter Squadron, in addition to aircraft from partner nations. The American F-15s, F-16s, and coalition aircraft intercepted over 80 drones that evening, and U.S. forces’ shipborne and land-based air defense systems downed six ballistic missiles. The bulk of ballistic missiles were intercepted by Israel.

Near the end of the mission, Murphy saw Israeli air defenses in action, as hit-to-kill vehicles separated and struck incoming Iranian missiles directly over his aircraft.

“I start seeing flashes off to the side of the airplane. Even though we’re 250 or so miles away from where these things are being launched, I can actually see them launch off the ground,” Murphy said. “You see [the incoming ballistic missiles] penetrate the atmosphere as the cone of heat. And then these projectiles are moving so fast through space, they actually have a near-visible IR signature that you can see in the NVGs.”

The interceptions, Murphy recalled, were happening at “zero degrees left, zero right, and 73 degrees nose-high above the airplane.” Debris was falling in a “360-degree cone around the airplane,” shrapnel that could shred his fighter.

“You fly through it,” Murphy continued. “You think skinny, you pray, and you continue on the heading that you’re on.”

Murphy and Welton earned each the Distinguished Flying Cross for their roles in the mission; Oles and Jasper received the Air and Space Commendation Medal with a Combat “C” Device.

Other aviators from three other F-15Es from the 335th Fighter Squadron also earned DFCs, and other members of Seymour Johnson’s 4th Fighter Wing received decorations. Air Force tanker crews earned awards for their actions that night, as did Airmen from Lakenheath.

The mission opened a window into the strategy and tactics needed to deal with future threats.

“We try not to devolve into what we call a roving motorcycle gang, which is where everybody is pointed in different directions, and you’re just finding things and executing them,” Murphy said. ”So you run an engagement, you run an intercept, and then you attempt to get the formation back together so that we’re pointed in the same direction. We’re on the same page in what we’re doing. And the whole point there is to make sure that nothing is leaking through our line.”

Maj. Benjamin “Irish” Coffey of the 494th Fighter Squadron—which deployed to the Middle East months earlier—had already developed a game plan for intercepting the drones before that April night. The 335th Fighter Squadron improved it over the next seven months.

“It’s not an airplane, it’s lower, it’s slower, it’s smaller,” Murphy said, referring to the Iranian drones. “One of the biggest challenges is that the whole intercept just feels different from start to finish. We developed these [tactics, techniques, and procedures] literally on the fly. And the Air Force owes a debt of gratitude to Irish [Coffey] and King [Welton] for trying to codify these TTPs, because they were not written down anyplace prior to the 494th and the 335th getting out there.”

The Air Force has been disseminating information on how to kill drones to the U.S. Navy, which faces the threat of Houthi missiles coming from Yemen, and the U.S. Army.

“Over the rest of that deployment, we obviously just got much, much better at doing it and finding and shooting down drones. … We were able to refine those TTPs and get them down to a science: this is how you find a drone, this is how you employ against a drone, and how you verify that you’ve killed the drone,” Welton said. “The ‘Chiefs’ got 82 one-way UASs over the course of the deployment,” he added, using the squadron’s nickname.

The threat to the Airmen didn’t end with the downing of the drones. As the F-15s flew back to their base—which remains undisclosed for security reasons—the ballistic missiles the Israelis and U.S. had shot down were raining down near the installation. With the base at “Alarm Red” conditions, the jets could not land and rearm as planned.

Oles said his maintainers were determined to brave the risk, and said “‘I guess I’m done hanging out in a bunker,’” he recalled. “Honestly, I just blocked it out. If it’s my time, it’s my time.”

Murphy was impressed. The Airmen from Seymour Johnson were so new, they didn’t know the way to the chow hall, “but they knew what they were doing when it came to the business end of a Strike Eagle,” he said. “And they were out there in Alarm Red, with missiles flying overhead, coming out of bunkers, driving trucks full of fuel to get the airplanes back up. Because that’s what needed to happen.”

But when Murphy was preparing to land, there was a problem. “There’s nobody in the tower because they evacuated—true statement—and so the aircrew, we actually were sequencing ourselves, holding ourselves 10 to 15 miles away. We’re trying to just wait things out to see what’s going to happen next. And as we start running out of gas, we’ve got to bring it back to land. And so it’s just, ‘OK, I’m coming in to land. Anybody on the runway? Nope, we’re clear, cool.’”

That Monday, Murphy said he had been awake for 42 hours when President Joe Biden called the squadron commanders to congratulate them.

“I was on the phone with my wife at the time,” he recalled. “She let that set for a second, thought about it, and then she goes, ‘Kevin Murphy, you were the squadron commander, and the President of the United States is about to call! Get your butt into work and be there for that phone call.’”