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A Memoir: Part Nine
"The Pragmatic Volunteer" is a twice weekly series. Check back every Wednesday and Friday for the latest installments!
Part One -- Part Two -- Part Three Part Four -- Part Five -- Part Six Part Seven -- Part Eight
Author's Note: What follows is the poorly thought-out and loosely examined history of the life of a guy who didn’t much matter in the grand scheme. But he mattered. We all matter. And I had a hell of a lot of… fun and such along the way. I intend to chronicle some of the experiences of a 23-year career in the United States Air Force.
In early October, we were advised the Wing would be deploying KC-135 and support personnel for combat operations out of several forward locations. We were sending one intel troop and one communications security (COMSEC) specialist to each of them. We were running out of intel people who were qualified to perform all aspects of the daily flying mission, and I recommended to my boss that I be one of the intel folks deployed. She was hesitant, arguing that I was new to the unit and to the mission. I mean, my last job was teaching people how to do harm in an academic setting. This was the opposite of all of that. The lady was smart. In fact, she was a nuclear physicist (and now holds a Ph.D). I countered that though I was new there, I had been an intel guy for a long time and was familiar with the requirements of supporting flying operations. I don’t know if my ‘I’m good enough, doggone it’ convinced her or if it was the fact that it was either her or me, but I was deploying. We had no one else.
The first place myself and my COMSEC section leader were sent was Rhein-Main Air Base. These folks were assigned to the intel flight because we shared security needs, and we all worked directly with the aircrews on mission support. The flying squadron also ran a piece of their planning activity in my vault, but they were not subordinated to my flight. At Rhein-Main, there were no spaces save an old vault in a condemned building awaiting demolition. The vault was in the basement at one end of the facility. There were several other rooms one walked past to get to the vault. Many windows were out and there was mold and mildew everywhere. It was odoriferous. But the vault was secure enough and had an approved type of door, and we had a modern GAO-approved digital combination lock installed before we started storing classified in there. The things we had to go through during those few days to ensure we adhered to proper security procedures would make a certain failed presidential candidate laugh and email someone for a glass of iced tea. And since the things we had to talk to the crews about were classified, the crews (and on one occasion, several American reporters – that was tricky) had to come to our stinky vault to take their mission briefs. So they all got to experience the love of that nearly-subterranean palace we worked in. Since TSgt COMSEC and I were the lone specialists in our fields, we were busy. We worked the flying schedule. That is, we went in before missions to brief the crews and we went in again to debrief them when they returned. Both of us, every mission. I had managed to acquire each of us rooms to ourselves in the old (also condemned, but not in nearly as bad shape) billeting building we were assigned. This was because we would be napping and moving around at all hours, and other people had more regular schedules. Still wasn’t fun, but at least no other fucker was snoring during my naps. After about ten days, we were sent to Souda Bay on the northwestern portion of Crete. Great! Another exotic island for me! Yeah. Our mission didn’t change, and there were still just the two of us. The things we do for you people. We moved from Frankfurt to Crete on one of our KC-135s. The minimum crew aboard the aircraft is three: A pilot, a copilot, and a boom operator who is also the loadmaster. On this transfer, in addition to moving all the personnel and equipment needed to do the job at Souda, we had receivers scheduled along the route. These were C-17s doing missions in Afghanistan. C-17s need a lot of gas, so we were heavy. Within scant pounds of maximum allowable loadout for flight operations. The boomer was nervous. Between and a couple feet behind the two front crew seats, and with the boomer’s station on the starboard bulkhead, there was a steel ‘jumpseat’ which pops up from the deck and is locked in place to support an observer. On the takeoff from Rhein-Main, I was in the jumpseat and on headset. As we gained speed and approached the end of the pavement, I could sense Boomer’s nervousness, but he remained silent. Finally, as it looked like that red line might get crossed by rubber (which would be a VERY BAD THING), the pilot calmly said “Rotate.” Boomer immediately, and I mean before the pilot had the word all the way out, said “Thank God.” He was nervous. So was I, but he knew to be. I was just freaked out. And the front wheel left the ground and everybody lived ever after. Or at least after. Our receivers had overestimated their fuel needs and only took about half the load we had taken aboard for them. Makes you think, huh? Had they been able to be more accurate, we’d have been able to “rotate” in a normal fashion and Boomer wouldn’t smell so funny. But militarying ain’t easy. I did get a chance to go into the boom pod while Boomer was washing the windshields of those Globemasters. Might as well. There was nothing else to do and the in-flight movie sucked. It was incredible. Getting that close to another big jet in the sky… it is a thing to behold, I promise you. Still think we should have force-fed them that extra gas they made us bring, though. When we got to Crete, we were too heavy to land because we still had all that extra fuel aboard. There are a lot of rules about that shit. You can’t just spray out jet fuel from cruising altitude traversing various countries who allow you in their airspace. That's what makes chemtrails! So the driver asked Crete to allow us to dump the stuff in the Med. That was an unpopular idea with the tower, so we flew in circles around that part of the Sea for an hour and a half. Can’t spill it in the ocean, but it’s alright to burn it. Greeks, man. We. Are. Sparta! I don’t recall how long we were on Crete, but it wasn’t as long as we’d been in Frankfurt. Maybe six or seven days. But we did get a couple moments of down time. We were in a hotel on a small mountain overlooking the bay – yes, I admit: it was a beautiful view. And the calamari was to die for. The things you people do for us. We took taxis down to the nearby town, which was exciting. Like Korean Honey Badgers with deeper tans. By the end of October we were back at Mildenhall. Still running 24/7 ops, of course. We would be for a long while. In the coming days and weeks, I rewrote schedules time and again as our spaces were required to accommodate personnel from the Air National Guard back home who had been called up to help in the massive efforts underway against the Taliban and others who had helped al-Qaida attack our homeland. The unit I remember working with the most was the Tennessee Air National Guard. I had always thought of Guard guys as somehow lesser than we active duty folks, mainly because at Bergstrom there had been an Air Force Reserve unit who used to visit our snack bar and they looked like poor facsimiles of Air Force guys. Uniforms, hair, boots… bro, do you even military? But these guys were professionals, and they helped change my opinion of weekend warriors. For one thing, my entire job was to suit up and serve every day. These guys had jobs and families back home and they had to leave all that behind to serve. That has to be a tough life. Tougher than mine. My views forever shifted. Still, I never could get used to their enlisted guys calling officers by their first names. As it happens, one E-6 was the supervisor of one of the O-5s in their ‘real’ jobs back home. Life is funny. In March 2003 we invaded Saddam’s Iraq for the second time in my career. My unit was again called to action because of our long legs and other assets besides our pretty smiles (which were pretty fucking charming if I do say so). The same month, Tex and I decided we weren’t working out so well. She went back to the Republic, and I lost my mind for a little while. I finally got approved to take a little leave and went back to my hometown. This was the first time I’d ever flown home for leave while stationed overseas. It was therapeutic and sorted me out pretty well. My head cleared and I was back to whatever normal means. Shit happens. And then in remarkably short order, I met a girl. One night in my local (this is what British, or at least English, people call the pub they frequent most in their village), a big, easily-angered but mostly not-too-irritating gym rat whom I knew from the pub decided I was macking on this bird he fancied. I was talking to her and this girl I met, but none of that mattered to Sir Charles Atlas. He was drunk. I was wearing a heavy leather jacket and he grabbed it by the collar, lifted me enough so I couldn’t gain traction, and took me out into the courtyard of the pub. I might have been able to do something, but I had no idea he was mad or why he was doing this. He could sometimes be an alright bloke, and I didn’t want to risk making things worse. He knew where I lived. And thick as he was, he was a hard bastard. You wouldn’t fight him. As we crossed onto the pavement outside the back door, Sir Charles released me back to terra firma and left my back to the big window in the door. The guy knew tactics. Some little dingleberry who decided he was the Gymlord’s personal protector (this happened a lot... Fennies, man), punched me in the back of my head. When I say “punched,” I don’t know what I mean. But it was irritating, nothing more. I stood facing Sir Charles and at that moment, I raised my index finger in the universal ‘gimme a second here’ sign to him. He nodded. As I turned to address this gnat, a very large woman of my acquaintance was grabbing it bodily and flung it into the hedge by the wall. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. And Sir Charles also found it a bit amusing. It broke his rage. So I didn’t get killed and am still here to write this. Lucky you. And luckier me. I also met Bruce Dickinson (the front man for Iron Maiden) during my time at Mildenhall. He was doing a show about human flight on the Discovery Channel and came to our unit to film an episode. The flying squadron, which was in the same Ops Group as my squadron and situated downstairs from my vault, walked him through various aspects of mission planning and I went downstairs just to say hello. So it was that the guy known as “The Air Raid Siren” flew with a unit which had been known as the 100th Bomb Group in WWII. It was part of The Mighty Eighth. One of my guys even brought his guitar for Dickinson to sign. I thought that was a bit much, but allowed it because, well, I wanted to meet the guy too. I get it. I just don’t ask for autographs. When my tour at RAF Mildenhall was up after four years, I still had enough time on my current enlistment that I was required to choose another duty station. I did not wish to leave England so I tried to extend at my current assignment at Mildenhall. My CO decided to disapprove my request and called me into his office to tell me himself. He also told me why. I couldn’t disagree with his logic or his leadership. I was disappointed, but that guy has my enduring respect. Sir, I salute you.
Next in the FINAL installment:
Rex Marries a Girl. Tune in for the drama.
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A Memoir: Part Five
"The Pragmatic Volunteer" is a twice weekly series. Check back every Wednesday and Friday for the latest installments!
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
Author's Note: What follows is the poorly thought-out and loosely examined history of the life of a guy who didn’t much matter in the grand scheme. But he mattered. We all matter. And I had a hell of a lot of… fun and such along the way. I intend to chronicle some of the experiences of a 23-year career in the United States Air Force.
In June, the timetable was sped up by our old friend planet earth. Early that month, the base populace was notified that Mount Pinatubo had been increasing in activity and that ‘measures were being considered’ to mitigate any potential threats to Americans which might emanate from the volcano along with all that molten rock. The next Monday, a base recall was initiated (every military member received a phone call or personal visit) ordering us to pile into whatever heap we could find and get to Subic Bay. Now. With the family. The mountain, she was angry.
We did not have a car. Clark was a very large base, geographically speaking. I had my motorcycle, which I used as my primary transport. If the kids needed to get somewhere or for whatever other reason, we never wanted for a four-wheeler. So I rode. There was never any black ice. Or any ice at all. But this day, I realized the folly of my frugality and fun: I couldn’t move my family, and all the usual suspects were already using their cars. This was the last time I ever didn’t have a car. We called a couple who were friends of ours (both active duty and assigned to my shop) and asked if they could give us a ride. They had a child, and we had two. Their car was a early 80s Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Sweet ride, but we were leaving our houses forever as far as we knew (we were right), and we had seven people in this coupe. So what we mostly took was kids’ snacks and some diapers. Shorts and flip flops and water. Thanks y’all. No way I could ever thank you enough for that sacrifice. I pushed my bike up the steps into the house, said goodbye to my doomed Oscar, and locked the door. The Navy guys at Subic were spectacular in the main. They had to take in an entire air base of people and they stepped up. We arrived at Olongapo late that afternoon and got a spot in some couple’s place off base. The Navy dude was a really strange bird. I’m guessing submariner. So the next day I went to the ‘I’m willing to let people I don’t know sleep on my couch’ list and found a new place. This turned out to be a Chief Petty Officer’s (CPO) family quarters on the base. Quite literally on Easy Street. He even took me downtown Friday evening for a couple beers. I don’t recall your name, Chief, to my eternal shame. But thank you for helping us out. Your black life definitely matters to me. At around midnight that Friday, Pinatubo had had quite enough of the pressure and decided to break out its party piece. We were all asleep indoors, but the sudden disco dancing of the 3-storey building we were in somehow managed to wake the entire shaking house. We were on the ground floor. A bit dicey. Me and Chief stuck our heads out, of course. A man’s gotta know. Early the next morning, I went outdoors and it was still nighttime. But it was like 06:something. Old Sol should have been making his daily appearance by then. The sun never broke through that day. At all. I’ve called it ‘the Saturday the sun didn’t come up’ since I witnessed it. This also represented the last time there was running water or hot food until we got off that island days later. The air never stopped having large quantities of ash in it until we left the following week. It just went from night to dusk to foggy as the days wore on. I saw a man on the roof of his car with a shovel one day. He was hacking at the now-cement-like ‘snow’ on his vehicle. Looked like a guy clearing his walk, but really driving that shovel hard into his own car. Surreal. The gym at the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS) high school on base had been used to shelter as many families as could fit in there. The weight of the ash collapsed the flat roof of the building onto everyone inside. This is not a thing I talk about, but it is always with me. It haunts me. I was familiar with eating MREs. TRIJtM was not. My toddlers had also never had the pleasure of that fine cuisine, but they became accustomed to them. They didn’t like them. No one does. It was the only food available. There are far more difficult things, but this was not fun. We muddled through. The lack of running water was the biggest problem. There was sufficient water to drink thanks mostly to AAFES and NEX being great companies who really ‘go where we go.’ I disparaged AAFES quite a lot in my career, but they were there when it mattered. But there was no bathing. Remember, the air was made of dirt this whole time. So it wasn’t just ‘ew, my pits.’ It was actual dirt. Every fucking where. The Navy came though again in the following days. Luzon no longer had airfields that could be used to launch people-carrying jets (or any airplanes, really) because that ash was everywhere. And by “ash” I mean ‘ash and also rock and various and sundry other shit.’ Pinatubo was a real bitch. So the 7th Fleet (and maybe others, I don’t know... I was busy getting children to eat something worse than peas) steamed toward Subic Bay to pick up a lot of the people there and take us to other islands to grab a flight to somewhere less hostile to human life. We were literally refugees. We took the cruise ship USS Lake Champlain (CG-57, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser) down to Cebu and caught a C-141 Starlifter with a comfort pallet to Guam. I had never seen a comfort pallet in a C-141 before. It just means they put real seats across the deck of the plane. There aren’t stewardesses with drink carts or free peanuts. Not particularly comfortable, but at least we got some sleep. Sidebar: Can you remember your favorite shower ever? And if you can, was it aboard a U.S. cruiser in a tiny aluminum stall? I do remember my favorite shower, and it didn’t even irritate me that I kept banging my elbows on the walls. They only gave us 4 minutes. Best sex you ever had? Fuggedaboudit. This was better than any sex I ever had. And that’s saying something. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I know, I know: You all want me to talk about that one thing the Philippines is known for. OK, I will indulge you this one time: Yes, I did eat balut once. Once. When we arrived at Anderson AFB on Guam (it didn’t tip over and, uh, capsize, thank goodness), we were taken by bus to an old WWII barracks building. It looked condemned, but one doesn’t turn down concrete walls and a hardened shitter. In any case, there weren’t other options. We (TRIJtM with one kid and a backpack, me with the other kid and another backpack) went into the barracks. People were dispersing like ants, trying to get dibs on the best racks (old-school Army doubles) in the open bays. As I hit the top of the ladder (staircase to you land lubbers), there was a door directly in front of me. So I opened it. It was a room designed to sleep two enlisted leaders back in the day. There was one bunked rack next to the window. There were two chairs and a desk. The bays looked like Marielitos during the Cuban refugee crisis; we were Ward and June in our little room with a door. Fortune favors the bold. There was a Class VI / Shoppette in walking distance from that old barracks. The first night was pretty cool. Got the kids some snacks that didn’t come out of a rat-proof armored pouch, had a six pack for me and a bottle of wine for the woman. Life sucked less than it had for a while. The next day, the wing commander at Anderson invoked General Order Number 1. Apparently, a couple of Air Force dudes had a little bitch fight and so… no more alcohol until the refugees were gone. I was livid, and not just because this unknown prick had taken away my mood lubricant. It was just a bad decision for a leader to make. We were all stressed, but this dude was an O-6 who hadn’t dealt with anything beyond a bunch of unexpected arrivals on his little island. He should have known better. Anyway, there were a lot more fights after he turned off the booze. ‘Officer’ doesn’t mean ‘smart.’ Remember that, kids. Anyway, then a bunch of other stuff happened (thanks loggies and finance guys!) and we arrived at Seymour Johnson AFB in Goldsboro, North Carolina. We were assigned on-base quarters immediately due to our status as refugees from Pinatubo. There was a lot of that going around at that moment. Clark and Subic had housed a lot of people. What? No, I don’t know. It was a lot. It’s probably online somewhere. I’d guess somewhere around 20 thousand people when including family members, which indeed you had to do. Let me know. After a couple of months had passed, I was notified that I had a household goods shipment coming from the Philippines. I was sort of expecting an envelope with some dust and maybe a beer bottle cap. Nope. Almost everything had survived inside that house we left. Both aquariums, books, even the TV and my bike. Sadly, Oscar did not make it. Bad ass as he was, in the end he needed the guppies I was no longer there to provide. RIP Oscar. You magnificent bastard. Another thing in that shipment was an 8-foot-long oval Philippine mahogany dining table. The Air Force had loaned me that table when I moved onto the base at Clark (TRIJtM always wanted to live on base, as you might imagine). The house we were assigned had a dining room which was mostly separated from the rest of the place by a wall and which was purpose-built as a ‘formal’ dining room. It was a beautiful table and I loved it. Used to have to cover it with a bed sheet to play poker with the fellas because it reflected the cards. It was truly gorgeous. And they sent it to me because it was in my former house at Clark AB. They didn’t discriminate, just packed everything they found. I worked for 3 months to get the Air Force to take that table back. I regret not keeping it to this day. It ain’t always easy having integrity. But I suspect that table would have had a better life with me. The system I had been assigned to Seymour Johnson to service was called LANTIRN, which acronym stood for “Low-Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared for Night.” The platform carrying this two-pod system at Seymour was the F-15E Strike Eagle, aka the Mudhen. I was assigned to the back shop this time, and never even sat in a Mudhen cockpit. I had also never heard of LANTIRN before. It had recently been deployed for active service and my specific ‘shred-out’ (a single-letter at the end of my specialty code) was for systems other than LANTIRN’s targeting laser (EO, IR, video). Of course, the F-15E has a gun camera, so that and the “IR” in LANTIRN is how I got there. But I worked on LANTIRN almost exclusively, including the targeting pod (though lasers were not my shred-out). Got to Seymour in June 1991. Sometime shortly thereafter, I was informed the Air Force was ending my shred-out for good. Film was a dying medium in aerial reconnaissance. So I went to the place with the big ‘job book.’ Long story short, intel was what was available. So I selected intel. At the beginning of December that year, I was sent back to Denver for advanced training on the LANTIRN system. I was running a crew now, so it would be helpful if I understood our primary system at least as well as my guys did. My boss, a MSgt (maintenance shops usually had enlisted leaders), knew my local interview had gone well (you had to speak with the local flying wing’s intel chief before you got accepted) and that my application for intel would likely be approved. He thought he could get AFPC to convert my shred-out to the one that was sticking around and stop the behemoth from taking my expensive ass away from him. He was wrong. And he was mad as hell. That school was 2 months, Dec – Jan, and it cost our unit around $100K for me to go there and complete it. We knew before I was finished in Denver that I’d soon be gone. And in June, I was. In LANTIRN school, I met a couple guys I ended up spending a lot of my free time with while there. ‘Bo’ was a stout country boy from somewhere in the swamps south of Tallahassee. He was stationed in Alaska and was an avid hunter and a great supporter of the Second Amendment and the companies servicing the needs and desires of people such as himself. I’m implying he had a lot of guns. He even brought a compound bow and hunting arrows with him and stowed them in the closet of his billeting (Visiting Airman’s Quarters, the base hotel) room. Not sure if he thought he might get out to the woods sometime or if he was hunting wabbits in Denver. The other fellow was ‘Bodhi,’ a skinny young blond guy who may not have been from California (I don’t recall), but he should have been. Bohdi was stationed in Arizona, which is where my ‘surfer dude’ thing breaks down. We stayed in Denver over the holidays because one does not take leave while on temporary duty (TDY) to a formal school training evolution. So it was that we found ourselves at the base NCO club on New Year’s Eve 1991. They were doing door prizes, and we won a very large, very whole turkey. VAQ billeting rooms do not have proper cooking facilities, usually just a microwave and a small coffee machine (as we all did in this case). What this facility did have was those open barbecue things on sticks that are planted into a slab of concrete in the ground. As I mentioned, Bo was an outdoorsman. He had also brought a large hunting knife and we all had quality folders we carried everywhere (Gibbs Rule No. 9 wasn’t Gibbs’ idea originally). So we butchered the bird in one of our rooms, then went downstairs to cook it. It had recently snowed, and in my experience when it snows in Denver, it snows a lot and all at once. So we cleared the snow off the grill and built our fire. And then we cooked an entire turkey over an open fire. On New Year’s Day. In Denver. In deep snow. Improvise, adapt, overcome. We also got some cans of vegetation (yams and green beans, as I recall) when we bought the charcoal. We aren’t savages. Not that you’d have known that from watching us feast on that free turkey. A Memoir: Part Four
"The Pragmatic Volunteer" will be a twice weekly series. Check back every Wednesday and Friday for the latest installments!
Author's Note: What follows is the poorly thought-out and loosely examined history of the life of a guy who didn’t much matter in the grand scheme. But he mattered. We all matter. And I had a hell of a lot of… fun and such along the way. I intend to chronicle some of the experiences of a 23-year career in the United States Air Force.
While in the P.I., I was afforded the opportunity to go on a couple interesting business trips. The first was to Osan Air Base in the Republic of Korea (that’s the southern one, aka the good guys). I went there with another guy from my unit, and I was sad when I learned it was him. He outranked me (pay grade E-5, rank Staff Sergeant (SSgt) to which I would gain promotion via the tried-and-true USAF method of sitting for a test that March), and he was useless as tits on a bull on the flightline. He reminded me of Judge Reinhold, but lazier and more of a wanker than Reinhold’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” character. It was January, and for those who never watched M*A*S*H: It gets fucking COLD in South Korea in the winter. At least Judge could be shamed into getting coffee while I was ass-in-the-air in an F-4 cockpit. In an open aircraft shelter. In January. In Korea. Fucker.
We were there for an annual combined (which means U.S. forces working with others nations’ forces, in this case RoK troops) exercise which was then called Exercise TEAM SPIRIT. Don’t ask me what they call it now. The crazy Kims always complain that we’re provoking some sort of war with them because they have delusions of grandeur and think the world cares about their retarded inbred asses because they might figure out how to deliver nukes via ICBM. That might happen. Someday. But I’m betting the pink slip the other way. And so the name of the exercise changes often. But it is still held every year in some form or fashion. Take that, fat boy! As one of only two troops from the PAVE TACK shop (the main reason we kept F-4E at Clark), I had somehow been assigned a rack in a GP Small (a six-man framed tent) which served as sleeping quarters for the Wing Senior Enlisted Advisor, a CMSgt (E-9) whom I had never met before. But since it was immediately across the snow-covered dirt track from the latrines, I wasn’t complaining. Much. I will say the latrines were awful. It was a big tent. Plywood sheets horizontally mounted along either side with large holes cut out at intervals. Under each of these holes was half of a steel 55-gallon drum. There was no running water. You do the math. Another guy, a kid whose specialty I don’t recall, was also assigned that 6-man tent as sleeping quarters. And this dude snored. He’d be asleep and we were pissed at him as if he were doing it TO us. All of us. People are funny. We kept yelling at him, but of course that doesn’t fix snoring. One night early on, we decided to put this cat outside on the snow-covered gravel path in front of the tent. Four of us lifted that noisemaker, still snoring, and deposited his cot in the snow outside. It was snowing at the time. He woke up with the early morning sun in his eyes. He was shivering and he was mad as hell. I went to work. The Chief never woke during all of this. That’s my story, and I guarantee it’s the Chief’s as well. We had one down day (no flying activity) and I was able to go on a tour of the Demilitarized Zone between the DPRK and the RoK. The place is actually called the Joint Security Area (JSA). It is sometimes referred to as Panmunjom, a city just north of the JSA. Running through the middle of the Zone is the Military Demarcation Line, which is marked by a sidewalk. Straddling this sidewalk are several ‘shotgun’ buildings, each with half in either country. The ‘tour guide,’ a squared-away U.S. Army sergeant, took us into one of these buildings and described all the Urinary Olympiads that had taken place over the size of the little flags and the height of their stands on the negotiating table and all sorts of other idiocy. It is ridiculous, but kind of funny. On the other side of that table, one was standing in North Korea. Everyone got a photo standing on the other side. I lost mine somewhere along the way. The other fascinating trip I took was to participate in my first war. Operation DESERT STORM, it was called. Apparently, Saddam Hussein had decided he wanted Kuwait’s oil riches and access to the Persian Gulf more than the Kuwaitis did, and he invaded the little country to take it. The CinC at the time (Bush 41) decided that it was in America’s interests to undo this invasion and ensure the continued sovereignty of Kuwait. I agreed, but my opinion had nothing to do with it. I served at the pleasure of the CinC and of the American people. I did my job in all cases, irrespective of my personal thoughts or opinions on a given mission. We all did (and do). That is what “public servant” actually means. Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990. I had reported that morning for a required training evolution, a Professional Military Education course called Noncommissioned Officer Leadership School. Back then, this was the PME course one had to complete in order to sew on SSgt (E-5), the rank I had recently been selected for due to my mad testing skills. We were standing on line to weigh in (the military loves to weigh people) and CNN was on a television in the room. So I heard the very first report that Saddam had invaded. Since we were on Luzon, which is a fair distance from the Kuwait Theater, we carried on with our day, and indeed, with the entire 5-week course. So anyway, later that year a bunch of us and some of our F-4E were dispatched to Incirlik Air Base in Adana, Turkey to help beat up Saddam when he foolishly decided to defy American insistence that he comply with international law. We were to get there aboard a C-5 Galaxy cargo jet. After a false start (we all boarded, cargo was loaded, plane started its takeoff roll… and had to brake hard because some critical system or other had failed), we finally took off the next day. Our route to Turkey took us northeast to traverse CONUS and Europe en route. We ‘went the long way’ due to the political position of a large nation on the southern route, a position which would have ended our mission had we needed to land there unexpectedly. After a couple stops for gas (did I mention the Pacific Ocean is vast?), we landed at Hickam AFB outside Honolulu, Hawaii. Here, our equipment mysteriously went ‘hard broke,’ meaning it couldn’t fly again until some part or other could be requisitioned, shipped from CONUS, and installed / tested. Sounds good, right? Well, during the 4.5 days we were waiting, we were on ‘Incirlik tent city’ per diem money, but we were in Honolulu. So we weren’t doing tourist things much, though I did go to Waikiki Beach once. We also had to check in a couple times every day, so island hopping was right out. We remained on duty status throughout. We finally made it to Turkey. Incirlik AB was, we were told, in range of Saddam’s SCUD missiles, which at the time he enjoyed firing seemingly randomly at things he didn’t like. SCUD-B is a famously inaccurate weapon, but the Republican Guard (Hussein’s best army guys) did manage to hit some things, mainly in Saudi Arabia. As far as I know, no SCUD ever impacted Incirlik AB in my time there. We got set up, managed to fly one night of missions, and… the war ended. We had a great deal of testing equipment (including huge steel frames for lifting and maneuvering the PAVE TACK pods as we worked on them), tools, travel cases for those huge pods, etcetera, with us. Clark AB was scheduled for closure soon (on this, more in a bit), so the decision was made to transfer a lot of that stuff to other units instead of sending it back to our home station. So, while we spent most of our 40-plus days on Incirlik after the war had ended, we were still kept busy by all the movement and paperwork required to transfer all that stuff. A few things did happen though. Three of we Clark guys took a taxi from our tent city home to the main gate to check out Adana. None of us had ever been to Turkey before and we had some free time, despite my protestations about how busy we were. We got to the gate and the number on the meter was ridiculously large (in the thousands of Turkish lire). We had no idea how much we owed in dollars. We asked the cabbie, a large fellow with a big mustache and a beard and he said “One hundred dollars. One hundred dollars or I kill you all!” After a tic, we realized he was joking – he couldn’t take all of us. Probably. So we each handed him one dollar, he smiled and said “Very good. Have a nice day.” One night early on when we finally had a second, we went to the beer tent. Not an open bar (run by AAFES – yay capitalism), but a pretty sweet deal given the circumstances. Other units had been using Incirlik to prosecute the air war on Iraq regularly (we were fashionably late), and on that first night in the beer tent, a young aviator was talking with his buddies about his previous mission. He described hitting his aim point so precisely that it caused secondary explosions and he was certain he had achieved his mission goal. He said, quite loudly, “Dude, it looked like the fucking SUN came up behind us!” That fellow has from that minute to this been known to me as Captain Van Halen. Dude. On the night the war ended, our second night of flight ops, we were running our checklists making sure the jets were all good to go for their coming missions. We were doing the important things too, like putting love notes on bombs with a Sharpie. Night operations are better in an air war, and most missions over enemy territory were conducted in the early morning hours. An F-16 was on the trim pad, maybe 150 meters away from the jet we were working. That whiny bitch. So some dude in civvies came running at us from out of the darkness, screaming some shit I couldn’t really hear and didn’t care about. I had a big torque wrench in my hand, so I was as good as I was going to get. He was pretty far away from us when he started his target run (rookie), and as he hit the pavement, two Turkish airfield security dudes converged like the proverbial flies on that piece of shit. And there was no ‘show me your hands’ or ‘get on the ground’ like on TV. They tackled this cat. Hard. They were smacking him around as they led him off to the Midnight Express or whatever it is they do. It was beautiful. A little while later, rumblings earlier in the day that we might shut down ops were jelling up. We first noticed jets coming back early and not having deployed their munitions on targets. And in fairly short order, we got word that we were indeed shutting down, at least for the night. We all kind of figured the deal was over. Not that any of us were intel or HQ people, but we were in a war zone. We tried to keep up with that stuff. We flew back to the Philippines via the much shorter southern route earlier denied to us. So I have actually circumnavigated the earth once in my life. Take that, Ferdinand Magellan! A couple months after we got back, the United States’ plan to close Clark AB and Subic Bay Naval Station (in nearby Olongapo City) was finalized, and would effectively end U.S. military presence in the Philippines (at least as far as I knew). According to the papers (Stars and Stripes) and the military television service, this was because Corazon Aquino’s government had demanded a rent increase (we paid to be there – not an occupation force) President Bush’s administration was unwilling to pay. We were retiring a lot of the F-4 fleet anyway, and Cory was a stubborn person. No enmity; she was doing what she thought best for the country she led. I like a gal who will fight for her state. But Subic? This was serious. We were never, ever, ever getting back together. The Air Force Personnel Center (AFPC), headquartered in San Antonio, (the Air Force likes Texas. A lot) sent a bunch of counselors to Clark AB to work with each individual member to figure out where we would all go in this out-of-cycle upheaval. My choices at the time were Misawa AB in northern Japan (on Honshu, the main island) or Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina. I lobbied for Japan, but TRIJtM insisted on Goldsboro. Like me, she didn’t like the cold; unlike me, she only wanted to live in places where the people on TV spoke English. When momma’s happy, everybody’s happy. So Seymour it was. We were to be rotated out before the end of the year. That was the ‘best-laid plan’ in this case… |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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