By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Captain Joseph Siberski flies F-15E Strike Eagles for the 336th Fighter Squadron based at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. (Provided to The Enquirer) | ZOOM |

The clean precision and lightning speed of the air war on Baghdad might resemble a video game for some, a pyrotechnic show with an eerily unreal quality.

Brad Ankerstar of Lebanon and Tom Siberski of Loveland know better.

Those are their sons flying over Baghdad.

It doesn't get much more real than that.

Major Steve Ankerstar is an F-117 Stealth Fighter pilot; Capt. Joseph Siberski is a weapons systems operator, flying the second seat in an F-15E Strike Eagle. Both have been flying out of Al-Udeid Air Base.

Wednesday night, when Brad Ankerstar watched the televised pictures of the first flashes from "bunker-buster'' bombs bursting in Baghdad, and realized, based on his own experience as an Air Force officer, now retired, that it was F-117 Stealth Fighters delivering the payload, he put two and two together.

"I know there's only one F-117 unit over there and Steve's in it, so I figured it might well be him,'' Ankerstar said.

He exchanged brief e-mails with his son just before the battle began, but said his son wasn't saying much about what he would be doing and when he would be doing it.

Both Ankerstar and Siberski have a close connection with their airborne sons - Ankerstar was a supply squadron commander in Vietnam.

He retired from the Air Force in 1977 and was his son's ROTC instructor at Lebanon High School; Siberski flew F-105s in the Vietnam era.

Ankerstar says his son, now 33 years old and single, was a "a really good student, a little bit immature and a great big thing at six-foot-five'' when he was at Lebanon High School.

Steve had an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy when he got out of high school, but less-than-perfect vision meant he would not be qualified for pilot's training. He went to Iowa State University to study engineering and continued as a ROTC student.

After college, he went into active duty Air Force as an officer and managed to get a waiver that allowed him to enter flight school, even with the vision problem.

Eleven years later, Steve Ankerstar is flying one of the most sophisticated military planes in the world in combat over Iraq.

"He's flying the premier plane,'' Ankerstar said. "They boast about being able to put a bomb in your wastebasket; it's that precise.

"The elder Ankerstar is a civilian pilot. He was kept from the cockpit of military jets because he is colorblind.

"My son's living my dream,'' Ankerstar said.

Siberski has often visited his son Joseph and his young family at their home base, Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, N.C. When not on deployment, Capt. Siberski lives there with his wife Stephani and their four-year-old son, Joseph.

The Iraqi air force, Siberski said, is "practically non-existent'' and Saddam Hussein's air defenses do not seem to be very effective.

What worries him is the "lucky shot, the guy with the BB. Some guy with a rock might knock down an airplane.''

His 29-year-old son was a ROTC cadet at the University of Cincinnati and went to the military school in Pensacola, Fla., for weapons systems operators, the airmen who operate the fighter's weapons.

Tom Siberski is certain that each night of the air campaign against Iraq, his son will be in the air. "He'll be out there taking out targets,'' Siberski said. "Burning up jet fuel for President Bush.''