We took off just as the sun was setting, and, by the time "fight's on" was called, the rugged peaks of the southern Nevada desert were pitch black. Our time came to descend, and I began to ease the old Intruder down. Funny how hard it is to push the stick forward to descend into the dark abyss when you know there's cumulo-granite just a few hundred feet below.

The MO, a veteran of almost 200 hours of NVG time, followed us into the blackness. Not feeling sure he comfortably could fly off us, using only the glow of our exhausts as a visual cue, I left on the switch to the little, white taillight. Approaching the IP, we thought we had it made when the voice of "God" called us dead and told us to egress. Our wingmen pressed on, apparently spared the simulated AMRAAM shot from an unseen F-15C. We turned on our lights and flew to our rendezvous point with our tails between our legs to wait for Dash 2 to join us.

We orbited at 14,000 feet and heard Dash 2 call "off-target." We eventually spotted him as he approached for the rejoin and the trip back. Dash 2 crossed in front of our nose from right to left and started a hard left turn to complete their rendezvous. As we neared the course back to Nellis, we rolled out of the left turn, set 250 knots, and told Dash 2 to pick up a running rendezvous. The XO acknowledged my BN's call, and I observed their lights deep over my left shoulder as they rolled out in trail.

I waited until they were stabilized at about the same tac-wing position they had on the low-level, which was about 1,500 feet aft. I again secured all our lights, except the green strip lights and the white taillight. With things apparently suitcased and ready for the return leg, we turned our attention to checking out with Nellis range control and making our way back for a few cold ones at the blackjack table.

About 15 seconds later, a violent bang brutally interrupted our tranquility, followed by a momentary pitch nose-down and a whoom as the engines surged. My initial thought was that we had smacked the top of one of the peaks. I quickly ruled out that thought when I recalled nothing in the area reached as high as 14,000 feet. In that instant, we came to the horrible conclusion our wingmen had collided with us. As my BN exclaimed over the ICS, "Oh my God, they just hit us!"

I gently rolled on the right wing to see their stricken aircraft passing underneath, ahead, and to the right of our flight path. A dull, orange fiery glow came from the cockpit area as their Intruder began a slow left roll and steepened its dive. My BN called out for the crew to eject, but it fell on deaf ears, because the underside of our fuselage had sliced off most of their cockpit. A few seconds later, the desert floor lit up in a brilliant yellow and orange explosion, as the aircraft hit, going almost straight down at 500 knots, with no apparent ejection attempt.

As the BN got out the Mayday call and started the SAR effort for the other jet, I inventoried the condition of our aircraft. It still was flying good and had no major controllability issues. I scanned the instruments and saw we had lost our combined hydraulics. Some of the lines must have been cut. Fortunately, we still had the flight-hydraulics side to power the flight controls. We took out the PCL and started going through the procedures for lost hydraulics.

A combined-hydraulic failure in the A-6 meant we had to blow down the gear and electrically lower the flaps. We debated moving the flaps at all, since neither of us knew if the wings had been hit. On the other hand, I feared some of our horizontal stabilizer might be damaged, giving us reduced authority in the dirty configuration. We elected to run the flaps down electrically until we felt any degradation in control. Fortunately, they came down just fine. As we slowed to do a controllability check, I needed almost the entire amount of available up trim to hold the jet level, but things still were manageable.

We had no problem finding the field as we turned our attention to our final approach at Nellis. The flashing emergency lights lining either side of the runway made it stick out like a sore thumb, even against the background of the brightly lit Vegas skyline. We put down the hook, and took an uneventful short-field arrestment. Once the aircraft was shut down, I cracked the canopy a couple of inches with the remaining hydraulic pressure. I heard the crash-and-rescue chief standing at my boarding ladder exclaim in a classic Southern drawl, "Sir, you oughtta see what happened to this here airplane. I don't know how you got it back."

Once on the ground, we saw what he was talking about. Half the port stab had been sliced off, and the port aft side of the fuselage had extensive damage, including an indention of the wingmen's refueling probe on our aircraft's skin. A piece of the BN's headrest later was found lodged in our fuselage. The engineers said it was a miracle the tailhook didn't pull out of the fuselage on the trap--it probably would have on a carrier arrestment. Fortunately, the bulkhead, on which the hook mounts, took most of our wingmen's impact. A hit any other place likely would have taken off the tail. As it was, our A-6 sustained strike damage.

Two lives and two aircraft later, what did we learn? Among other things, we relearned some hard lessons about briefing and flying with NVGs, flight-crew coordination, and adherence to SOP.

We spent too much time occupied with the big-picture strike brief. We did not allow time to discuss one of the most important aspects of the mission: how we were going to fly an NVG section without hitting each other. In absence of any other guidance from our wingmen, we assumed they wanted our lighting configuration the same way it had been set before we kill-removed. With no discussion on rendezvous lighting, I just did what made sense at the time. Had we taken 30 more seconds to brief the NVG rendezvous, this midair never would have happened.