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After a change-of-command at sea and another Bahrain port call, Lincoln was relieved by USS Constellation (CV-64). On Dec. 10, CVN-72 and her escorts set course due east for the journey home that would involve two more stops and take at least another month to complete. By the time it arrived in Perth, Australia on Dec. 22, the carrier had been deployed for five months. While crewmembers were undoubtedly excited to spend Christmas in the Land Down Under and return home, a sense of unease filled the air; tensions with Iraq were not de-escalating and Southern Focus operations continued uninterrupted.
By the first day of the new year, it was clear plans were going to change. Abraham Lincoln was ordered to “be available as required to meet national security requirements,” mil-speak for “you’re going to war.” The carrier returned to Australia, dropping anchor off the port city of Fremantle, and spent two weeks resurfacing the flight deck, which had been worn out by weeks of intense flight operations during Southern Focus. Meanwhile, fighters from CVW-14 trained ashore at an Australian military air base to stay sharp. By Jan. 20, with all aircraft aboard, the battle group began the journey back to the Persian Gulf.
How did the crew react to the news of the extension? Even a Lincoln spokesman admitted to the press that the change was difficult for the crew to take. But the battle group leadership made it clear on the day the extension was announced all were expected to embrace the misery or suffer in silence.
“We don’t need to be home holding our loved ones, we need to be here holding the line,” admonished battle group commander RADM John Kelly in his address to the crew on New Year’s Day, concluding with what could only be interpreted as an order – “Get over it!” The crew later had some fun with this, creating a deployment patch featuring a sailor being kicked in the groin with the phrase “Get Over It!” employed as an unofficial cruise slogan.
Upon its return to the Gulf in early February, Lincoln picked up where it had left off, conducting missions and strikes to further whittle down Iraq’s defenses. It’s F-14D Super Tomcats of Fighter Squadron 31 (VF-31) “Tomcatters” also flew reconnaissance missions using the Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod System (TARPS), gathering imagery for targeting intelligence.
The order-of-battle had changed dramatically since the carrier was last in-theater – more aircraft and ships had arrived, with Lincoln set to operate alongside Constellation and Kitty Hawk, the forward-deployed carrier based out of Japan. Two more carriers, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, would operate from the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Land-based Air Force warplanes, along with those of the United Kingdom and Australia, occupied airbases throughout the Gulf theater.
By this point, it was clear the U.S. was going to invade Iraq.
The main thrust of Operation Iraqi Freedom began on Mar. 20, but Southern Focus and special operations on the ground meant the fighting had been ongoing for some time. On the evening of Mar. 19, a long-range strike on Iraqi airfields in the far west of Iraq took place, involving warplanes from all three carriers in the Gulf, the Air Force, and the British Royal Air Force, along with special operations forces on the ground.
Abraham Lincoln’s F-14Ds, F/A-18Es, and the “legacy” F/A-18C(N) Hornets of VFA-25 “Fist of the Fleet” and VFA-113 “Stingers” launched strikes into Iraq on the first night, exhibiting far greater precision-strike capability than the Navy had back in the 1991 Gulf War. The Tomcats had recently received the D04 software update to deploy JDAMs and geared with the LANTIRN targeting pod for dropping laser-guided bombs (LGBs). The Super Hornets possessed the brand-new ATFLIR, which were fewer in quantity and proved somewhat problematic during the war, making the Tomcat-LANTIRN combination indispensable. As a side note, the Lincoln’s 2002- ’03 deployment was the only time F-14s and F/A-18E/Fs both deployed aboard the same carrier, making it a unique “super air wing” of sorts.
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