About 16 or so years ago, I was an A-10 FAC based over there. Just south of the DMZ is the area known as P-518, within the DMZ buffer zone. We were allowed to work inside 518, and south of the buffer zone. So we'd do exercises in that area where I'd have fighter jets pushed to me to work at hitting simulated ground targets in the area. Normal day to day stuff.
One day, another FAC and I were working adjoining sectors about 15 miles apart. Our expected air was from a USN aircraft carrier (I forget which one specifically), and 2 sections of F/A-18s. About 30 minutes after arriving in my AO, a section of USN Hornets checks in with me, we go through the motions of their weapons/fuel lineup, me placing them into the area, giving them the lowdown/9-line/enhanced talk-on, they finding/fixing/IDing the targets, they commencing their attacks with clearance, me adjusting them for subsequent hits, they being done and heading back to the carrier, as I get their notional target damage assessments. No biggie. Just another day.
The other FAC calls me on our interflight freq and asks if my fighters ever showed up. I told him yes, and in fact they were RTB already. Nothing out of the ordinary. He tells me that his never bothered to show. Oh well, probably maintenance broke on the carrier deck and the word just never made it to us out here. It happens. We RTB ourselves, done for the day.
Upon arrival back at base, we're told to immediately report to the Wing building, Intelligence section, for questioning/debriefing. Weird, we figure, both of us trying to figure out what we may have done wrong and trying to concoct a sellable BS cover story if required.
Turns out, my buddy's section of F/A-18s did in fact show up, and tried contacting him on the radio to check in, but no one was there and the frequency sounded unusable and crappy. They hung around in the target area meandering here and there looking for my buddy, while tooling around at 15,000 MSL, trying to match their maps to the rivers/terrain below. After 15 minutes of nothing, they said screw the USAF and headed back to the carrier.
Problem is, nothing on the map matched with anything on the ground, because they had flown to a point about 45 miles north of the DMZ, deep inside of North Korea, and were tooling around inside North Korea trying to contact my buddy and get a fix on anything. The Norks never engaged them for some reason, and they claim to have never heard calls on Guard to return south, nor did they see warning flares being fired by South Korean troops within the DMZ buffer zone. To be fair, I never heard any Guard calls either, that I can remember or paid attention to. I never found out the full story of why this occurred, after my buddy and I had been questioned and found to have not been involved with the situation. But what an interesting situation indeed.
