The first eight came in before sunset on 1 July, dropping onto RAF Lakenheath’s runway one after another. The last three arrived in the dark, their names unreadable. Eleven F-15E Strike Eagles of the 48th Fighter Wing, home from the Iran air war — and every one of them came back changed. Painted on their noses: Nessie. Kraken. Yeti. Chupacabra. Cthulhu. Cerberus. Sirenhead. El Jefe.

A squadron of monsters, each surrounded by rows of bomb silhouettes that do the real talking. After months of combat in Operation Epic Fury, the Liberty Wing’s jets came home wearing their war diary on their skin.

A War Diary in Spray Paint

Nose art is one of the US Air Force’s oldest traditions and one of its most tightly rationed. Decades after the painted ladies and sharks’ teeth of World War II, the modern force keeps its jets a disciplined grey — until a combat deployment ends. Since F-15E crews returning from the anti-ISIS campaign revived the custom in 2019, homecoming nose art has become the fighter force’s way of closing a chapter: paint the deployment, fly it home, wash it off.

This batch is the richest yet. The cryptid theme runs the full mythological gamut — a Scottish lake monster on 00-3001, a kraken wrapping the radome of 91-0329, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu on 91-0331 — and the mission tallies underneath record row after row of JDAM drops. Two jets, “Cerberus” and “El Jefe,” carry the silhouettes of AGM-158 JASSM stealth cruise missiles: long-range stand-off shots deep into defended airspace.

What Epic Fury Asked of Them

The 48th deployed in late February as the US air campaign against Iran opened with more than 1,700 targets struck in the first 72 hours. By early April, US forces had flown over 13,000 combat sorties. It was not bloodless for the wing: one of its Strike Eagles, callsign DUDE 44, was shot down over Iran on 3 April — both crew members were rescued. Central Command framed the campaign’s purpose bluntly at the time:

The eleven jets that landed this week are the first wave of the wing’s homecoming — more Strike Eagles and a pair of F-35As are still tracking home through the tanker bridges, according to flight-tracking watchers.

Catch Them While You Can

For the spotters who lined Lakenheath’s fence this week, the monsters are a limited engagement. Nose art traditionally disappears at the first depot visit — photographed obsessively, then scrubbed back to regulation grey. The photos in this story, shot by UK aviation photographer Stewart Jack, are exactly why the tradition matters: for a few weeks, each jet is an individual with a name and a war record, before it goes back to being a tail number.

Sources: The Aviationist; ItaMilRadar; The War Zone; Air & Space Forces Magazine; US Central Command