The U.S. Air Force’s last serving former prisoner of war retired after taking his final flight June 5.
Lt. Col. Rob Sweet’s friends and family showered him with champagne as he stepped down from his A-10 Warthog at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia for the final time, 30 years after he spent 19 days in an Iraqi prisoner of war camp during the Gulf War.
“You have to find [motivation] for yourself. Find a leader you want to emulate and do that. There’s fundamentals people need to have in order to be a good leader, of course. One thing is to lead by example and from the front. Secondly, a leader should take all the blame and none of the credit,” Sweet, 54, said.
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Sweet’s retirement represented the first time in the history of the branch that there is not a former POW serving, said Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown.
On Feb. 15, 1991, Sweet and his wingman, Capt. Stephen Phillis, flew their A-10s out of King Fahd International Airport in Saudi Arabia. Their mission was to strike Iraqi National Guard tanks stationed near an oil field.
Their target area, however, gave them too much fire, so they had to return to base, according to their orders, but they found a group of targets they could not leave without neutralizing.
“We left and found a pristine array of tanks that had not been hit, which shocked us because by that point everything had been bombed for the past 30 days. We started attacking those [tanks] … I got launched on by a [tank], so we started attacking the site where it came from, and I got hit from behind,” Sweet said in an Air Force press release.
Having lost control of the steering, Sweet knew his aircraft was beyond repair, so he needed to eject, he said.
As he parachuted into enemy territory, Phillis drew fire from the ground forces away. While he was protecting Sweet, his aircraft was shot down, and he died in the crash.
Sweet landed in the midst of 15 Iraqi National Guardsmen who detained him. The survival skills he learned at the Air Force’s Survival, Resistance, and Escape school allowed him to endure the beating, starvation, and torture he experienced in the camp.
Nineteen days later, he was released in a prisoner exchange, upon which he was told of Phillis’s death.
“I was not without psychological problems. I had survivor’s guilt, and it took me a long time to get over that,” Sweet said.
He was later made a squadron commander, which was his most fulfilling duty, he said.
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“Bloom where you’re planted,” Sweet said. “You’re going to have assignments you don’t like, but make the most of them and move on.”
