Fighter jets keep diaries. They keep them in stencilled paint, just below the cockpit rail, and if you know how to read them they will tell you exactly what kind of year the crews have had. On the Fourth of July, as the Super Hornets of Carrier Air Wing 8 recovered at Naval Air Station Oceana after the America 250 flyover in New York, photographer William Abrams was waiting with a long lens. What he caught, and what The Aviationist published this week, is the war diary of the USS Gerald R. Ford's air wing, written one bomb silhouette at a time.

The jets belong to the squadrons that spent the past year aboard Ford, the US Navy's newest and largest carrier, through the strikes on Iran. Now they are home, and their noses are covered in fresh mission markings: neat rows of weapon symbols recording what each aircraft dropped in combat.

The tallies differ jet by jet, which is exactly what makes them interesting. A grey F/A-18E of VFA-87 shows four AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons; the squadron's colourful CAG bird shows eleven JDAM guided bombs. The two jets photographed from VFA-37 saw the most action of the group: one wears four JSOWs and a remarkable forty-two JDAMs, the other four JSOWs and nineteen JDAMs. JDAMs, in standard and laser-guided flavours, were reportedly among the most heavily used weapons of the air campaign against Iran.

And then there is the puzzle. The F/A-18F flagship of VFA-213, the "Black Lions," carries thirty-one identical markings that nobody outside the squadron has yet decoded. Each appears to show a Mk-80-series bomb casing, the shape used for JDAMs, with a second, unidentifiable symbol painted on top. Thirty-one of anything is a serious combat record. Thirty-one of something mysterious is an invitation to every aviation forum on the internet.

What the Air Wing Actually Did

The markings are the receipts for a deployment that broke records nobody particularly wanted broken. Ford left Norfolk on 24 June 2025 for what was planned as a routine European cruise. It came home 326 days later, on 16 May 2026, after the longest American carrier deployment in more than half a century. In between, the strike group was pulled to the Caribbean for Operation Southern Spear and then to the Middle East for Operation Epic Fury, the campaign against Iran.

The Navy's own numbers sketch the workload: the ship sailed more than 57,000 nautical miles and conducted 23 replenishments at sea, while Carrier Air Wing 8 logged over 5,760 flight hours and 12,200 launches. "It's nearly 80,000 miles sailed," Admiral Daryl Caudle, the Chief of Naval Operations, said at the homecoming. "That's like going around the Earth three times - over 2,500 sorties, 12,000 takeoffs of tactical aircraft, over 200 tons of ordnance dropped." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met the ship at the pier and presented the strike group with the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest award an American military unit can receive, for its work in Epic Fury.

VFA-213 itself was a regular in official imagery throughout the cruise. CENTCOM photographs showed the squadron's two-seat F/A-18Fs in nearly every configuration the jet offers: clean for training, hauling five external tanks as "five wet" tankers to keep the strike packages fed with fuel, and loaded with JDAMs and Laser JDAMs for the strikes themselves. The mission markings are the summary; those photos were the chapters.

From the Memphis Belle to the CAG Bird

Painting your combat record on the side of your aircraft is one of military aviation's oldest habits. Second World War bomber crews stencilled a bomb on the fuselage for every raid survived — the B-17 Memphis Belle's twenty-five became famous enough to carry a war-bond tour — while fighter pilots claimed their victories in tidy rows of enemy flags beneath the canopy. The tradition ran through Korea's MiG kills and Vietnam's, and it never really died; it just adapted to the age of the precision strike, where the tally counts weapons delivered rather than aircraft downed.

Its modern keepers are exactly the aircraft you would expect. A-10 Warthogs and F-15E Strike Eagles routinely come home from deployments wearing elaborate nose art and long ledgers of bombs, missiles and destroyed targets. Navy squadrons tend toward more restraint, with one glorious exception: the CAG bird, the air wing commander's aircraft, which by tradition wears the squadron's most flamboyant colours. When a CAG bird adds combat tallies to its livery, as VFA-213's has, the result is the closest thing modern naval aviation has to a heraldic banner.

Which brings us back to those thirty-one symbols. The Navy has not explained them, and the squadron is under no obligation to. They may denote a specific weapon variant, a particular class of target, or something nobody outside the ready room has guessed. Sooner or later, someone from the Black Lions will tell the story over a beer, and the mystery will resolve into a fact.

Until then, the jets themselves are doing the talking, parked in the Virginia sun with a year of war painted on their noses. Diaries, as we said. And this one had a lot to say.

13News Now covers the Ford strike group's long-awaited homecoming at Norfolk.

Sources: The Aviationist, U.S. Navy, VPM, Stars and Stripes, USNI News, DVIDS