Twenty-eight years later, Brill is still flying the Air Force's workhorse fighter jet - but in a war much different than the one for which he was originally trained to fight. Brill, who has more time in the Fighting Falcon's cockpit than any pilot in the world, surpassed 6,000 F-16 flight hours today during a combat mission over Iraq.
The 50-year-old fighter pilot, a member of Hill's 419th Fighter Wing, said he may not have made it that long if the world hadn't kept changing - and the Falcon with it.
"Part of why I continue to find this job so challenging is that you can't rest on your laurels for a minute," Brill said from Balad Air Base, in northern Iraq, shortly after surpassing the 6,000-hour mark.
When Brill began flying, much of the focus of his training was on dogfighting, in anticipation of air-to-air battles with Soviet jets over the skies of eastern Europe. The Falcon's capacity to drop ordnance on ground targets was limited to the use of so-called "dumb bombs."
"We expected heavy losses," Brill said. "We knew it was going to be a bloody fight if we ever did that."
The Falcon's weapons are no less deadly today, but the ordnance Brill now delivers is far more accurate. Far less concerned with air-to-air dominance, the Air Force has shifted the Falcon's role to that of a precision bomber. Today, for instance, Brill's orders included surveilling a five-mile stretch of road in northern Iraq for individuals or small groups planting roadside bombs - a task job that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War.
Walter Sams, the 419th's vice commander and a good friend of Brill's, said that there was some confusion about what would become of Falcon pilots after the Soviet Union collapse.
"When the wall fell things did change," Sams said. "For a couple of years we weren't exactly sure what to focus our training on."
The "day of clarity," Sams said, came in the summer of 1990, when U.S. forces were called upon to drive the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. "Then we knew - the focus was no longer on the Soviet Union, it was on the Middle East."
Sams said many fellow Falcon pilots are jealous of the air time accumulated by the man they call "Brillo" - the equivalent of about 250 days in the sky.
"We'd like to know how he's done it," Sams said.
Brill said it's simple. In 28 years as an Air Force pilot, he's never pursued a job that would take him out of the cockpit.
"If I was a teacher, I'd want to be in the classroom," he said. "If I were a cowboy, I'd just as soon be on a horse on the range."
