When F-16 Falcons Ate Hawks for Breakfast

The early morning sky over Bosnia was the color of ash, a dull, indifferent gray that swallowed the sun and smothered the mountains. February 28th, 1994 – winter clung stubbornly to the hills, the air thin and cold over a country already exhausted by war.

Six jets sliced through that cold air, low over the ridges and valleys, hugging the terrain like shadows.

They were Jastreb J-21s. Old birds. Subsonic attack jets with stubby wings and tired engines, born in the factories of the old Yugoslavia and never meant to square off against the newest predators in the sky. Their pilots flew them anyway, because that’s what they had. Because someone had ordered a mission.

Because war doesn’t wait until you’re ready.

In the lead cockpit, Ranko Vukmirović stared out through a canopy streaked by frost and age, his gloved hands steady on the stick. He wore the plain green flight suit of the Bosnian Serb air force, the straps of his harness biting into his shoulders as the aircraft bounced in the turbulent air above the hills.

His instruments glowed faintly. His altimeter needle bobbed below radar coverage. His breath fogged his visor with each exhale.

The radio crackled with the clipped voices of his men.

“Lead, this is Two. Holding at angels one point five.”

“Three in trail.”

“Four, Five, Six, we’re on you, lead. Formation good.”

Six Jastreb “Hawks,” in loose pairs, running a line toward a target deep in contested airspace. Volunteers, all of them. Nobody had been forced into this mission. They knew the no-fly zone rules. They knew who was watching the skies above Bosnia now.

They knew the Americans were up there.

Vukmirović glanced at his map, the folded paper creased from use and marked with pencil. The target was a weapons factory – a series of low buildings, warehouses, and ammunition storage sites. If they could destroy it, maybe they could blunt future attacks. Maybe the artillery shells that had rained on their lines would be a little fewer. Maybe the war would shorten by a day, or a week.

Maybe.

But it meant flying into the teeth of NATO.

He checked his fuel. Enough to get there and back if all went well. Not a drop to waste. His eyes flicked to the terrain ahead, where the hills began to flatten into a valley that cradled their objective.

“We’re coming up on target area,” he said, voice steadier than his heartbeat. “Stand by to climb.”

The Jastrebs had been staying below the radar horizon, skimming low over the snow-dusted hills to stay invisible. But you couldn’t bomb from the deck. To see their target, to use their simple optical sights, they would have to climb.

And climbing meant exposure.

Thousands of feet above and many miles away, far beyond the horizon the Jastrebs clung to, an invisible web of radar spun over Bosnia like a net. On a NATO AWACS, controllers leaned over their consoles, watching green traces sweep across digital maps. The sky was broken into sectors, each one monitored, each one judged: friendly, unknown, hostile.

A controller saw six faint returns appear where there hadn’t been any moments before.

“New bogeys,” he called out, his voice calm, almost bored with the routine. “Six contacts. BRAA three-two-zero for fifty-two, at seven thousand, flanking south-east. Likely fixed-wing. Stand by for ID.”

Fifty miles away, two F-16 Fighting Falcons cruised through the cold air, their gray fuselages blending almost perfectly with the clouds. Call sign: Black Flight.

Black One, the flight lead, sat in his cramped cockpit like a man wearing a machine. His helmet, oxygen mask, and harness wrapped him in a cocoon of Kevlar, nylon, and electronics. The world outside his canopy was wide and stunning—the snow-streaked mountains, the rivers winding through valleys—yet all he really saw were his instruments and sensor displays.

On his left hand, he rested fingers lightly on the throttle. On his right, he gripped the stick, the slightest pressure enough to send the jet slicing through the sky. Two AIM-120 AMRAAMs sat under his wings, sleek and deadly. Two AIM-9 Sidewinders watched the air with infrared eyes. Under the fuselage, a fuel tank bulged like a muscle.

“Black Flight, you have six bogeys,” the AWACS controller said into his headset. “BRAA three-two-zero for five-two, at seven thousand, flanking.”

Black One replied without a hint of drama. “Copy. Black Flight turning to intercept.”

He eased the stick and banked his F-16 toward the heading, feeling the g-force press him into his seat. Behind him and slightly offset, Black Two mirrored the maneuver, the second F-16 sliding into formation like it was glued there.

Down below, Ranko Vukmirović checked his watch, his position, the mental checklist he’d been running for the last ten minutes. Everything narrowed down to the next few moments.

“All aircraft,” he said, “climb to two thousand meters. We go in pairs. Two and Three, then Four and Five, then me and Six. Attack run on my mark.”

He eased back on the stick.

The Jastreb’s nose lifted. The ground began to fall away, the hills flattening out into a patchwork of fields and scattered structures. His altimeter crept upward. His engine groaned with the effort, a low, tired roar in the cockpit.

Around him, the other five J-21s followed.

And in that climb, they lit up NATO radar like a flare.

On the AWACS, the contacts that had been a little blurry, a little uncertain, sharpened. Their altitude readouts updated.

“Bogeys climbing,” the controller called. “Alt two thousand meters. Heading steady.”

On Black One’s radar screen, his onboard system picked up the faint returns as well—the Jastrebs, betraying themselves.

Back inside the Jastreb formation, one of the pilots broke the silence with a strained laugh.

“Lead, you think they can see us?”

“They can always see us,” someone muttered over the radio.

But there was no turning back. The target lay ahead—gray industrial blocks against the winter-dulled earth.

Vukmirović flipped the switch that armed his bombs. The old analog systems came to life. In the Jastreb’s cockpit, it wasn’t high-tech sensors and computer targeting, just simple iron bombs and a pilot’s eye.

“Stand by,” he said softly. “We’re almost there.”

Then his radio crackled, a different voice cutting in.

“American aircraft ahead of you.”

He lifted his gaze.

Far ahead, like scratches of paint on the sky, he saw them. Two contrails, crisp and bright, cutting across the horizon. Below them, the faint dagger shapes of the F-16s.

The pit in his stomach dropped.

He took a long breath, held it, let it out slowly. Time felt thick and viscous.

“I see,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He had flown missions before with American fighters overhead. They had warned, circled menacingly, but they hadn’t fired. Maybe they were only here to intimidate, to send a message. If they’d wanted to shoot, they could have done it already, from beyond visual range.

He clung to that thought.

Above and ahead, Black One’s HUD showed the line of six contacts now clearly. Rules of engagement were strict. Confirm violation. Confirm hostility. Confirm bombs dropped.

“Visual contact,” Black One said to his wingman. “Looks like J-21s. Six of them. Hawks.”

“Hawks,” Black Two chuckled. “Our Falcons are about to have a nice breakfast.”

They thundered forward, the F-16s closing the distance at supersonic speed. As they crossed paths with the Serb formation, they swept directly over them, a deliberate, unmistakable show of force.

For a moment, the sky was full of roaring engines and crossing contrails. The F-16s tore past, close enough that the Jastreb pilots could almost feel the shockwave slam into their cockpits.

“Haha, American Ferraris…” one of the F-16 pilots said, voice hot with adrenaline.

“Focus on the target,” Vukmirović snapped.

In the Jastreb cockpits, the pilots forced their eyes down to their primitive sights. The weapon factory slid into their crosshairs. It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t perfect, but in war “close enough” often had to be good enough.

One by one, from different angles, they pressed their bomb release buttons.

The old jets lurched as 550-pound bombs fell free, tumbling into the cold morning air. The pilots pulled up and banked away, each pair coming in at staggered angles to saturate the target.

Below, explosions blossomed among the buildings—dirty orange fireballs rolling outward, shredded by flying debris. Black smoke began to coil into the sky.

On the AWACS, an operator called, “Weapons detonation detected. Bombs on target.” That was all NATO command needed.

A new voice came over Black Flight’s radio.

“They dropped bombs.”

“Understood,” came the reply from the controlling authority. “You’re clear to engage. Weapons free.”

Black One didn’t need to be told twice.

“Roger,” he said, calm and cold. “Moving to engage. This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.”

At the very rear of the Jastreb formation, pilot Zlatan Crnalić watched the last of the bombs detonate. Relief flickered through him, a brief flash of satisfaction. Target hit. Mission complete.

“Target is hit,” he reported.

“Copy that,” Vukmirović responded. “Objective complete. Turn for home.”

Six J-21s banked together, turning back toward their base. Their engines strained as they tried to max out what speed they could, but they were subsonic jets in a supersonic world.

Behind them, the Falcons were closing.

Black One slid his F-16 into position behind the formation. On his right MFD, he selected air-to-air mode. The weapon cues shifted. He thumbed over to an AIM-120 AMRAAM. The HUD presented him with a floating box, framing the rearmost Jastreb.

Radar lock. Solid.

His thumb moved to the weapons release switch.

“Fox Three,” he called.

The AMRAAM leapt from his wingtip, its rocket motor flaring bright. For a heartbeat it flew straight, then its nose dipped, guidance system biting onto the J-21’s radar return.

It began to chase.

In his Jastreb, Zlatan Crnalić was scanning the sky, nerves stretched thin, when a sudden white glare filled his peripheral vision. For a moment he thought he’d been hit. Then his eyes tracked to his left.

His wingman’s jet had exploded.

The left wing of his friend’s aircraft simply wasn’t there anymore. A blossom of fire and shrapnel marked where the AMRAAM had connected. The Jastreb sheared sideways, pieces breaking off, smoke and flame pouring out as it tumbled into the valley.

“The Americans are behind us!” someone screamed over the radio.

“Scatter! Run!” another voice yelled.

The formation dissolved.

Each pair of J-21s broke off in different directions, diving for the ground, desperate to use the hills and valleys as cover. The sky that had been a structured wedge of aircraft became chaos.

Crnalić shoved his stick forward, plunging into a valley, the hills rising on either side like walls. He yanked and rolled, trying to break line of sight, trying to become just another shadow in the folds of the terrain.

High behind him, Black Two followed, F-16 nose pointed down as he dove into the same maze of hills. The Falcon could out-climb, out-turn, and out-accelerate the Jastreb. The only thing on Crnalić’s side was the terrain—and even that advantage was thin.

“He’s on my tail,” Crnalić muttered, half to himself.

From the F-16 cockpit, Black Two watched his target dance through the valley, the green shape of the Jastreb flickering against the ground on his radar and visually just ahead. He squeezed his trigger to select his next weapon.

“AIM-9 selected,” his systems confirmed silently.

He lined up the shot. The Sidewinder’s growl rose in his ears as its seeker locked onto the hot exhaust of the fleeing jet.

“Fox Two,” he called, voice matter-of-fact.

The missile leapt from its rail, a bright streak in the gray sky. It curved delicately onto the Jastreb’s tail, drawn like a moth to the flame of its engine.

Crnalić saw it too late—a dart of death closing fast. He slammed the throttle, rolled, dropped lower. Power lines flashed ahead, a web of steel hanging over the valley.

He skimmed over them. The Sidewinder tried to follow and exploded just behind his tail, too close to the wires.

The shockwave slammed into his jet. Shrapnel tore into the rear fuselage and vertical stabilizer, shredding metal. Warning lights lit up on his panel. The Jastreb bucked, its tail damaged, but somehow, miraculously, it remained in the air.

“I’m hit,” he shouted. “I can’t shake him off!”

He thumbed his radio switch again.

Nothing.

Silence.

The blast had chewed through his systems; his radio was dead. Alone, cut off from his comrades, he flew through the valley with the feeling that at any second another missile would slam into him and turn his world into fire.

Behind him, the F-16 pulled gently away.

“Crnalić, respond!” one of the Jastreb pilots called over the net.

“They got him… Keep going!” another voice insisted, believing the worst.

Farther north, in another branch of the same tangle of hills, Ranko Vukmirović and his wingman, pilot Pesić, were fighting their own private war with gravity and fear. They pushed their jets hard, engines howling, banking through tight turns that pushed blood away from their brains and made their vision gray around the edges.

“Keep low,” Vukmirović said. “Follow the valley. Don’t climb.”

His eyes flicked to his mirrors, to the corners of his canopy, searching for the telltale triangle of an American fighter.

He wasn’t searching for long.

High above and behind them, Black One had traded altitude for speed, roaring through the sky in pursuit of two more Jastreb tracks.

“Fox Three,” he called again, loosing another AMRAAM.

The missile carved a path straight toward Pesić’s aircraft.

In the Jastreb cockpit, Pesić never saw it. One moment, the sky was just sky. The next, his jet was disintegrating around him. The warhead’s blast tore through the fuselage, turning aluminum into shrapnel and fuel into fire. For an instant, his plane became a streaking torch – then nothing.

“Pesić is down! The American is on me!” Vukmirović shouted, his voice ragged with shock and fury.

He yanked the stick, throwing his Jastreb into violent evasive maneuvers. The G-forces crushed him into his seat, his breath ragged in his chest. He had flown these valleys before, low and fast, but never with death so close behind.

Behind him, Black One’s F-16 tracked the maneuver. He squeezed off another missile.

The AMRAAM streaked in, closing the distance in a handful of heartbeats.

It slammed into Vukmirović’s engines.

The rear of his Jastreb blossomed in a dirty fireball. Metal screamed as it shredded. Flames licked up the fuselage, the cockpit suddenly turned into a furnace.

“I’m hit! I’m on fire!” he choked.

He fought the controls, trying to coax altitude out of his dying machine. The nose wanted to drop. The jet wanted to roll. Warning buzzers and lights screamed at him.

The cockpit canopy began to glow from the heat, plastic and glass cooking in the inferno. Smoke poured in, forcing him to cough and squint.

Enough.

He grabbed the ejection handle and pulled.

The canopy blew off with a violent jolt, the wind tearing at him. A fraction of a second later, the seat’s rocket motor fired, blasting him clear of the burning jet. The sudden change in forces punched through him, but then he was out, tumbling in the cold air, his parachute jerking open as the F-16 roared past, already turning its nose toward the next set of fleeing targets.

Below, his Jastreb screamed into the valley floor and exploded, another plume of fire among so many.

Black Flight reformed, their radar sweeps picking up the last two Jastrebs as they tried to run south, staying low, hugging the contours of the land. Fuel gauges in both F-16s were dropping toward bingo—the point at which they’d be forced to break off or risk never making it home.

“Approaching bingo fuel,” one of the F-16 pilots reported. “Two bandits still trying to escape. I may have time for one more shot.”

“Roger that,” came the reply.

South of their position, Ranko Vukmirović, still alive in this version of the chase, and his wingman Goran Zarić found their radios filled with silence where their comrades’ voices should have been. The last words they’d heard from their friends were cut short by screams and static.

Hope thinned like breath in winter air.

Then they saw it. A dagger shape cresting the hills behind them, gray against gray, coming on fast.

“Behind us!” Zarić cried.

They broke formation and dove, engines howling, trying to wring every knot of speed from their old jets.

Behind them, the F-16 slid into firing position.

“Fox Two.”

Vukmirović watched the missile streak off the rail and snake toward him, white against the darker background of mountains and sky. He turned hard, muscles straining, trying to give the Sidewinder a harder problem.

It wasn’t enough.

The missile closed in and detonated just off his wing, a flash of light and shrapnel.

The Jastreb shook, his ears rang, but when he looked around, stunned, he realized the fragmentation damage was surprisingly light. Some holes in the skin. Some damaged surfaces. But his jet was still in one piece.

He glanced back over his shoulder, fully expecting to see another missile cutting through the air.

Instead, he saw the F-16 banking away.

“He’s turning away,” he reported, shock and disbelief mixing in his voice.

“Did we make it?” Zarić asked, incredulous.

For the moment, yes.

What they didn’t know was that fuel had made the decision for the American pilot. He was too close to bingo, and he wasn’t about to risk flaming out over hostile territory. He turned for home, the Falcon’s silhouette shrinking into the hazy morning sky.

But the reprieve was short-lived.

NATO command had scrambled two more F-16s.

As Vukmirović and Zarić leveled out, trying to get their bearings, two fresh Falcons came slicing into the fight, their tanks full, their missiles untouched.

“Two incoming! Run!” Vukmirović shouted.

The Jastrebs dove again, trying to disappear into the hills. They skimmed the treetops, branches and ridgelines whipping past close enough to make their hearts clench.

The F-16s shadowed them easily, matching their every move, staying just a step behind and above, like wolves stalking tired prey.

In his Jastreb, feeling the inevitable closing in, Vukmirović made a decision.

“Follow me,” he told Zarić.

He pushed his nose down and aimed his jet straight at a cliff face.

Zarić’s eyes went wide, but he stayed in formation. When your lead does something crazy, you either trust him or you die alone. He chose trust.

“We pull up as late as possible!” Vukmirović said, voice tight. “We use the ground. Maybe we shake them.”

His heart hammered hard enough that he could feel it in his temples. The cliff surged larger in his canopy, the ground rushing up. The valley narrowed, and the rock wall spread across his forward view like a closing door.

Behind them, the F-16 pilots watched, astonished.

“They’re diving straight in,” one of them muttered. “What the hell are they doing?”

Down and down the Jastrebs went, the altimeter unwinding. Trees blurred past below. Snow, rock, dirt—every feature of the cliff screamed toward them.

“Pull up!” Vukmirović shouted at the last possible second, hauling back on the stick with everything he had.

The G-forces slammed him into his seat. Zarić grunted as the weight pressed him down, his vision tunneling, the world narrowing to a ring of gray with a bright pinprick in the center. He held on.

“Come on…” he gasped between clenched teeth.

The Jastreb responded, its nose lifting, the plane starting to arc just above the rising ground.

Almost.

Vukmirović’s jet clipped the earth.

The impact was small in terms of angles and numbers—just a fraction too low, a fraction too late—but in the real world it was catastrophic. The landing gear and underside caught the uneven terrain. The aircraft tore apart, fuel and ordnance cooking off in an instant.

The jet erupted into a rolling ball of fire and metal, bouncing and disintegrating along the rock face.

Zarić, pulling through his own climb, saw the explosion through his canopy.

“No! No!” he screamed, voice cracking.

There was no parachute. No chance.

The F-16s burst through the smoke and flame of the wreck, still on their pursuit vector. Zarić dove again, instinct driving him to hug the ground, to use every trick of terrain he’d ever learned.

It didn’t matter. They were too close now.

“Fox Two,” one of the Falcons called.

The Sidewinder raced across the short distance and detonated against Zarić’s tail. His Jastreb became a flaming comet, out of control.

He yanked the ejection handle. The canopy blasted free. The seat fired.

But he was too low.

The parachute barely had time to open before he and it plunged into the fireball of his own crashing jet.

From the F-16 cockpit, the pilot watched with grim professionalism.

“Splash one. There is another bandit on the radar,” he reported. “Engaging.”

The F-16s turned away from the falling wreckage and chased the remaining contact—a lone J-21 limping over the countryside, scarred and damaged.

It was Zlatan Crnalić.

His tail was wounded. His systems were flickering. His radio was dead. But his engine still turned, and as long as he had thrust, he had hope.

He flew low, trusting instinct and memory more than instruments now, weaving through valleys and over fields, heading toward home.

He was fighting his own cockpit as much as the sky, coaxing the wounded machine to climb enough when he needed it, to level when his damaged tail wanted to pull it sideways. He glanced at his gauges, at the fuel, at the jittering needles on cracked dials.

Then the F-16 roared past.

The sound hit like a physical blow. He felt it in his ribs, in his bones. He snapped his head up to see the Falcon tearing across his flight path before banking hard and sliding in behind him.

Dread filled him, cold and absolute.

He had one plan left.

He pulled on the stick, trying to gain just enough altitude to eject safely before the missile came. He reached down between his knees and wrapped his fingers around the canopy emergency handle.

Come on. Just a little higher.

Behind him, the F-16 pilot lined up his shot, then… paused.

The Jastreb was crippled, struggling. The fight was over. The mission was done. Three of the six Hawks were already gone. The others had fallen or been shot down. The no-fly zone had been enforced. The line had been held.

He eased his jet up and moved alongside, matching Crnalić’s speed instead of taking the shot.

In the damaged Jastreb, Zlatan risked a glance sideways.

For a moment, the war shrank down to two men and two machines, hanging in the same patch of winter sky.

He saw the American pilot, helmeted, masked, visor down. Just a shape in a cockpit.

The F-16 pilot lifted one gloved hand and gave him a crisp salute.

Then he rolled his jet away and climbed, heading for base, leaving the battered Hawk alone over the broken country below.

Zlatan stared after him, his heart hammering, unable to fully process what had just happened. His hands trembled on the controls.

He turned his nose toward home.

Of the six Jastreb pilots who had volunteered for that dangerous mission into NATO’s crosshairs, three never returned.

The incident would go down in history as the Banja Luka incident—the first combat engagement in NATO’s history. On the American side, Captain Robert “Wilbur” Wright was credited with three aerial victories, the highest tally for a U.S. Air Force pilot in a single mission since Korea. Stephen “Yogi” Allen scored one.

For NATO, it was a cleanly executed intercept, a textbook enforcement of a no-fly zone. For the Bosnian Serb air force, it was a brutal lesson in the imbalance of technology and tactics.

For the men in those cockpits, it was something much more complicated.

Later, when he had had time to think about it, time to sleep without jerking awake at the sound of missiles in his dreams, Zlatan Crnalić would say, “I don’t have any bad feelings toward the American pilots… We had our task. They had theirs.”

On that cold morning in February 1994, the sky over Bosnia had been filled with predators and prey, with old jets and new missiles, with rules and violations, with fear and professionalism.

The Jastrebs—the Hawks—had flown low, trusting in courage and luck.

The F-16s—the Falcons—had swooped in from above, fast, precise, lethal.

When the day was over, it said something dark and simple about modern war: that sometimes, if you bring 1960s metal into a 1990s fight, the Falcons eat the Hawks for breakfast.

And if they don’t, it’s only because one man in one cockpit, for one moment, decided that this once, it was enough.