READY FOR THE FIRST SHOTS

By DOUGLAS WALLER ABOARD THE U.S.S. NIMITZ

Kevin McLaughlin is at the pointy end of Bill Clinton's spear. Late last week Lieut. McLaughlin--his call sign is "Proton" because he once was a nuclear-reactor operator--sat in the ready room of his F-18 Hornet squadron aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz, a 95,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier steaming in the Persian Gulf. If Clinton decided it was time to punish Saddam Hussein for his defiance of United Nations inspectors, Proton would climb into his $28 million Hornet--the U.S. Navy's premier fighter-attack jet--and shower Iraq with up to 3,000 lbs. of laser-guided bombs and HARM missiles. McLaughlin was ready, as ready as he would ever be.

The young pilots had spent hours over midnight rations ("midrats") picking the brains of the two senior aviators in the squadron who flew into Iraq the first harrowing night of Desert Storm in 1991. "Everybody on the ship is prepared," McLaughlin says. "We all understand our role here as instruments of policy--gunboat diplomacy. Now it's like the old adage, 'Put me in the game, coach.'" The Nimitz's fighter pilots had devoted two weeks to poring over secret lists of targets in Iraq, according to Pentagon officials. The strikes, by Navy and Air Force jets as well as by cruise missiles, would be at the suspected weapons facilities Saddam has tried to hide from U.N. inspectors. Fighter pilots have an internal alarm clock that puts them more on edge when they sense combat is near, and the flyers on the Nimitz, watching CNN day and night, have that feeling.

For a month McLaughlin, a four-year veteran in the Hornet, had spent practically every other day "in the box," aviator slang for flights over southern Iraq. The missions were routine, and until recently flyers joked that they would "have a better chance of seeing Jesus than an Iraqi jet." Even the past week, the skies had been quiet. No Iraqi radar had been turned on to "paint" the Nimitz's jets as targets, so far as the pilots could tell. Still, "every time you get in the jet and go over Iraq, you never know if this is going to be the day they're going to take a potshot at you," explained McLaughlin, 29, from Newport Beach, Calif.

If the order came, this would be Proton's first time in combat. "You go into the box with the mind-set that you're doing a job where anything can happen, but there never was a scary sense that something actually could happen," he says. "Now there's a much better chance that something will happen, so guys are going into the box with that mind-set." It was the threat to the U-2 spy plane that was setting off the pilots' internal alarm bells. They knew that if Saddam Hussein even tried to fire at a U-2, the Nimitz air warriors would be launched in reprisal. When a U-2 flew early last week, the pilots "spooled up," sensing that the call might come quickly. Now, with more U-2 flights planned, the flyers were spooling up again. The feeling toward Saddam in the ready rooms was about the same as it was in the Pentagon. In the words of Proton McLaughlin, "Everybody is saying, 'Come on, do something.'"