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A Memoir: Part Eight
"The Pragmatic Volunteer" is 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.
In the office one day, I had just gotten off the phone and my boss, a captain who sat directly across from me (our ‘Air Force anchors’ abutted each other), said “You should work on your people skills.” Ma’am? “You are too gruff. When you answer the phone, you should add ‘Can I help you?’ to the end of your greeting.” My habit was to give my rank, last name, and duty section. So I said to her that since I already told them everything they would need to figure out whether I could help them, I didn’t see a need to ask the question. She shrugged in grudging agreement. I didn’t change my phone-answering habits.
I worked in the Exercises and Plans shop, so coordinating and helping run the annual exercise I spoke of earlier (TEAM SPIRIT) was a large part of what I did for a living. It was at this point called ‘Ulchi Focus Lens’ (though we came up with some other things “UFL” could mean). As the players were arriving from all over the theater, one day a guy I didn’t know approached me and asked if he could stay at my place off base during the event. Negative. Also, how did he know I lived off base? Finally, my place was hot all the time. No AC, and a window unit was not an option because there were security bars in all the windows (a requirement that had to be met for military personnel to be allowed to rent a place). This dude stayed in a big tent. OK, it was on the base and there were other people in it with him. But it had cold AC. I knew this because part of my job had been ensuring all the tents were cool enough for the players to sleep. I mention this because it was just so odd of him to ask. A lot of other stuff happened while I was in Korea, but that’ll stay between me and the wall. After ‘Rex Does Korea,’ my next duty assignment was to an Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) base in northwest Florida. I was assigned to a tenant unit (not a SOC activity) there whose mission was training warfighters and running an exercise called BLUE FLAG, which was the control part of Exercise RED FLAG, the annual ‘poke holes in the sky’ event at Nellis AFB just outside Las Vegas. We also wrote scenarios for RED FLAG and trained up intel folks at the schoolhouse. My old friend Jo was stationed there and made sure she was my sponsor when she saw my name on the incoming personnel roster. A sponsor is the person who helps a member transition to a new base (PDS), answering questions and giving advice on different issues in the local area. Jo mentioned to me in her welcome letter (while I was still at Osan) that “The people speak English down here (after a fashion).” Not sure if she knew I was from around the area, but in any case I don’t have a strong Southern accent. She was not to be my supervisor; her husband was. He was a desk-bound pilot who ran the operations shop. We had many different specialties in that school: Operators, intel folks, an Army shop, and even a couple JAG guys (lawyers). Teaching war is complicated. For the first several months, I didn’t really have any idea what my job was. It was a new activity, and my boss, the pilot, didn’t really seem to know what he wanted me to be doing. Not a slam on him; no one really knew what we were doing. So he had me doing all manner of stuff, not much of it to do with my specialty code (intel). And that was fine, if confusing and a bit frustrating. He did get me to help him with issues when he had questions relating to intel guy stuff (he had an actual job and reported to the squadron CO). The school finally started jelling up and we all figured it out. A new CO had come in, and he called me into his office one day to tell me he wanted me to be his targeting intelligence instructor. We would be teaching in a formal classroom setting, and our students would include officers and enlisted people from all four branches, as well as officers from foreign allies who were sent to us specifically to learn how we did what we did. I will not disparage our allies from the Arabian Peninsula here. But I could. There was a problem, which I mentioned to the boss when he told me what a big part of my job would be: I had never had any formal training on targeting or weaponeering. Turns out he knew this (of course), and he informed me I would be returning to western Texas to learn it so I could teach it. This course was intensive and very enlightening. I learned a new side of my business, and it served me well for the rest of my career. Targeting is a very precise business in the modern world, as is weaponeering. The targeting piece is figuring out what to break in order to achieve a given objective. Weaponeering is the part where we calculate which weapons will best meet requirements and how many of them were needed to give us the best chance of success. There is a lot of math. *pats Algebra on my hip* One day, we took a field trip to a nearby electrical substation. These are a critical part of any nation’s infrastructure, and their design is fairly standard across the world. So we went out there and did a field exercise, learning all the moving parts and what did what. And then we drew up a plan to ensure its destruction to varying levels (to simulate potential mission objectives). That was an interesting day, and the local utility guys were very helpful and cooperative in helping us figure out how to destroy them. And I met a girl. We wrote an exercise scenario for the classes we were teaching. These scenarios usually involve a real place on earth, reconfigured and renamed for our exercise purposes. In this case, we created Redland and Blueland, which were separated by the Alpine Sea. This “sea” we created by erasing the Alps and filling the cavity with saltwater. Intel guys are magic! For the scenario to be used in a formal teaching environment, it required a narrative to accompany the images and charts on the screen. Since I had been a major part of creating the scenario, the CO chose me to record this narration, which me and my boss wrote. This meant quite a few late nights because it needed to be quiet to record it and the place was full of noisy people in the daytime. One day, I was passing Jo in a hallway. She stopped me and told me she liked the scenario, and that I was a great choice as the narrator. I’ve always been a singer, and by now had become pretty adept at public speaking. But if you’re anything like me, the sound of your own voice talking at you is unpleasant. So this was a boost to my ego, even though I hadn’t mentioned to anyone that my voice coming out in the squadron’s theater (our main classroom for the academic side of our mission) bugged me a little. Jo told me my voice was mellifluous. My vocabulary can be described as “adequate;” hers was far superior. But I learned a new word that day. And I was flattered. One Monday following the Thanksgiving break (most units try to work it so that is a 4-day weekend, as indeed this one did), the CO called the entire unit into the theater. He said ‘There are four buses outside, and all of you are going to board them and go take a urinalysis right now. Do not return to your spaces even to get your cover (that’s a hat). Proceed directly to the buses.’ We were all making tryptophan jokes, but he was looking for someone. He found the person. No, it wasn’t me. So I married this girl. My kids were living in my hometown just a 2-hour drive from my duty location, so I had them every other weekend and at other times in what I reckon is a pretty standard custody arrangement. I had become concerned about their treatment by TRIJtM’s new husband. He wasn’t physically abusive, but they had had a couple kids together and he liked his kids more than mine. I suppose this is natural. After all, I liked my kids more than his. I didn’t even know his kids. So I sued for custody. The kids were old enough that what they wanted strongly factored into the judge’s decision. She took them both to her chambers (with a bailiff or someone as chaperone), and reported they both would prefer to live with me instead. And I (and they) won. I had been promoted to E-7 (Master Sergeant, MSgt), and when it was time for me to choose where I would like to go next, I had two overseas options: Hickam AFB, Hawaii and RAF Mildenhall in England. Easy choice, right? Well, no. A colleague of mine who sometimes acted as the unit’s First Sergeant had been assigned to Hickam (which is an ‘overseas’ assignment for those purposes) and told me of a lot of problems her son had had in the public schools there. Nothing against Hawaiians, but kids are mean and I had been a little concerned that my two ‘haoles’ might have issues with the locals. I had also learned a couple things on my previous trip to the area. The Department of Defense runs primary school activities in all foreign countries to ensure American children are taught to American standards and in English. These schools cost the member nothing in tuition, so it’s the same as sending your kids to public schools in CONUS. Well, not the same. DoDDS schools are far superior. Hawaii, since it isn’t actually a foreign country, has no DoDDS schools. So, I chose RAF Mildenhall and was selected for that assignment. It was my first assignment to a flying unit as an intel guy, and I was to be the Superintendent of the Intel Flight. No, I didn’t fix plumbing or otherwise work on people’s apartment buildings. I was the enlisted leader of around 30 people, most of whom (but not all) were intelligence specialists like myself. Our building was new, and the intel vault (a large office space secured in several ways for working with classified information) was still using the old Air Force anchors until we could work out a plan and order new stuff for the spaces. We didn’t have any televisions yet. One day about five weeks after I got to Mildenhall I was working on some annual individual performance reports and other ‘administrivia’ when my boss, sitting at her desk beside me, asked ‘MSgt Rex, what are you doing right now?’ I told her and asked if I should be doing something else. She was looking at CNN’s web site and said an airplane had just hit the World Trade Center in New York. My immediate thought was ‘oh, some Cessna got blown off course in the canyons again.’ The date was 11 September 2001. As you know, it wasn’t a light aircraft. And neither was the next one that hit. And we got very, very busy very, very quickly. When my boss asked me that first question, it was just before 14:00 on that Tuesday. We immediately converted to a 24/7 schedule and I would be writing a new duty schedule to cover the shifts. Manpower was an issue since were manned for a primarily day shift operation. I quickly came up with a skeleton and we sent people home with at least some idea of when they would be working. But someone had to man the phones and other devices throughout that first night. I gathered the troops and asked for one volunteer to stay with me (I obviously wasn’t going anywhere any time soon: This is what senior NCOs do) through the night so we could keep the vault unlocked and to be a second set of eyes for any issues that might pop up. A young lieutenant immediately said he would do it. I liked that kid, and he earned even more of my respect in that moment. We worked a 25-hour shift that day. And we would have kept going until the engines shut down. That’s what we do. As you might imagine, life was drastically altered for American personnel around the world that day. Things I had just been getting accustomed to (because I was still fairly new at that location) changed completely. Force protection measures and duty requirements underwent some incredible changes in a very brief period. These changes would keep coming for a long time afterward, too. The primary mission of RAF Mildenhall is flying air-to-air refueling (AAR) missions in support of command objectives and to help service NATO allies’ fighters and other aircraft. The equipment assigned to this end was the KC-135 Stratotanker, which was then the Air Force’s most numerous aerial-refueling platform. The same airframe as the Boeing 707, this jet had the greatest range (longest legs) in theater and could also haul a great deal of people and stuff along with all that gas.
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A Memoir: Part Seven
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.
Another thing happening in the European theater then was the ‘Bosnia problem.’ The world was changing a lot in the early 90s, and Yugoslavia was changing along with it. Violently. And in the summer of 1994 (and again in early 1995), I was sent to northern Italy to work temporarily at a Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) near the Adriatic coast. If you look at a map, you’ll find this is just to the south across the Adriatic Sea from southern Croatia and from Bosnia. We were definitely ‘in theater.’
A CAOC is designed to be a place where host country and other NATO personnel work through their own issues and coordinate with the other nations’ forces to accomplish the mission. And that works to varying levels, depending on many factors. The U.S. had a small facility (a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or SCIF) on a former parking lot where we could do certain U.S.-only things, and to which only cleared U.S. personnel had unfettered access. I was assigned to this concertina-surrounded steel trailer. It was called “The Box,” and I worked as the Watch NCO when I was on shift. It was a 24/7 operation, as all Watches are. We worked a 3-2-2-3 schedule, alternating between 12-hour shifts on mids and on days. It might sound rough, but we had that 3-plus day break every 10 days. Pretty good deal really, considering the grim nature of our business there. War wears on a person. One function of mids was to brief the American O-6 in charge of the U.S intel function at the CAOC at 06:00 each morning. My direct boss on this deployment was an Air Force captain, ‘Jo,’ who worked at HQ USAFE, and whom I had met a few times (though I had never worked with her) back at home. Jo always attended the morning briefing to the boss because she was our boss and he was her boss. She was an energetic, intelligent person with a rapier wit. She didn’t filter a lot, but her charm and acerbic tongue made her one of my favorite officer-type people. One day we (“we” meaning “I”) were briefing the colonel about the past night’s activities. Shockingly, one of the belligerents had said they wouldn’t do something and then did it. This happened a lot. As I was talking about this, the colonel jokingly said ‘the check is in the mail,’ and I chimed in with ‘I was only holding the joint for a friend.’ Jo said ‘Or the biggest lie ever, which is “I won’t come in your mouth.”’ I somehow managed to finish the briefing without losing all military bearing. But I was laughing inside. And how. Just ‘Jo being Jo,’ as it were. We would meet again. The first time I drove down to Italy (I went on three separate business trips there from Germany, and I always drove), I immediately discovered that I loved the country. It remains one of my favorite places on earth, especially the northern region of Veneto. And Venice is my favorite city in the world. I would move there tomorrow and for the rest of my life. During my 23 years on active duty, I traveled from one place or another to Venezia more than I went home on leave. A lot more. I like Italy. Also that first time I was there, the 1994 World Cup (that’s the soccer thing, kids) was being played. I had become friendly with the night desk clerk at my hotel, and on the night of the final between Italy and Brazil he invited some pals to watch the match in the hotel’s breakfast area. That game (and Italy’s championship hopes) ended in a penalty shoot out, the last kick of which was an errant shot by a well-known Italian player who was a local boy. Some of those guys had met him. This is when I fell in love with the Beautiful Game. The emotion and exuberance of those guys reminded me of watching my Broncos lose all those Super Bowls. My Watch crew decided we would still go out after the match. The Italian guys had lost interest (along with the will to live). It was maybe 21:00 or so, a time when the service industry in Italy (or at least in that city) was usually open for business. The World Cup is a different animal to the Super Bowl or the World Series. Especially when you’re in the country that won. Or the one that lost, as we were. Almost every place we went looking for some food (or at least a drink) was closed. It was the first time I’d ever been in a country that had collectively gone into mourning over a World Cup loss. We finally found one little mom-and-pop osteria that was still selling food and beverages. Otherwise, it was a ghost town. Amazing. I’ve never been in a country when it won the World Cup, but I reckon it’s a bit different then. After I was back at Ramstein following my second (and final) TDY to the CAOC Box, USAF Captain Scott O’Grady (call sign “Zulu”), flying with the “Triple Nickel” out of Aviano AB (also in northern Italy) was shot down on a ‘routine’ night mission over Bosnia. He ejected safely from his F-16, but landed in hostile territory. Zulu put his training to good use and evaded the enemy in a harrowing 6-day ordeal which ended when a USMC Combat Search and Rescue mission extracted him and returned him to friendly territory. The United States military is very good at what it does. A couple months after Zulu’s downing and recovery, I was assigned to a TDY at Aviano, home of Zulu and his wingman on that fateful mission, Captain Robert Wright (call sign Wilbur). Zulu was long gone from there, but Wilbur was still flying and doing his duty. As it happened, I ran up against a quadrennial reenlistment while I was at Aviano. The tradition (at least in the Air Force) is that an enlisted person can ask any officer he or she wishes to render the oath of enlistment to officially symbolize one’s renewed commitment. This invariably takes place before a U.S. flag and the two members are in uniform. Note well: It truly is symbolic. That first oath was the one that mattered. And it always will. I asked Wilbur to reenlist me on that occasion. I genuinely liked the guy, but I would have asked him anyway because he had been Zulu’s wingman. He reported actually seeing O’Grady’s F-16 being hit and breaking in half. He instantly and enthusiastically agreed to come in to the squadron on a day he wasn’t on the flying schedule just to comply with my request. There’s a bit of an honor code to this stuff, but he could have said no. They all could have. No one ever did if they were in town, but I’ll never forget Wilbur doing that for me. #AimHigh, brother. I ran into Wilbur years later at a base exchange. He was an O-6 and had graying hair by then. Responsibility has a way with follicles. We chatted for a moment and went our separate ways again. I miss that life sometimes. The AIS was part of a larger group designed to be a quickly deployable force responsive to the requirements driven by HQ. As such, the squadron was subordinate to an Operations Group. One day, the AIS’ First Sergeant approached my desk and told me to follow him: The CO wanted to see me. Oh. Shit. I was being called on the carpet and had no idea what I’d done. I had some guesses, though. As ever. The commander was a very calm man who was also a very devout Christian and who I never heard say a curse word. He took being a Southern Baptist very seriously. If I had to describe his manner in terms of someone you might know, I’d go with Ben Carson. Lt Col ‘Carson’ knew of me, but we’d never met beyond a handshake after he first became the CO. But the First Sergeant knew me. We’d had some experiences in Italy in the past year and we spoke to each other almost every day. Top knew me, and everybody knew I was not shy about throwing out the odd naughty word (and worse). You could look it up. I can be decidedly NSFW. A feature, not a bug. Lt Col Carson said ‘I know you to be a man who speaks your mind, Rex. The group is standing up a planning function with representatives from every squadron. I want you to be our squadron’s voice at the group.’ This is my second-favorite moment in uniform. Ever. At least while I was actually wearing a uniform at the moment it happened. I walked into his office pretty damn worried, mostly because I am vulgar and he was very much not. As it turned out, he assigned me to represent our entire unit in a newly created function because of my refusal to eat every ounce of bullshit thrown at me. It was a proud moment is what I’m saying. My next assignment was to Osan Air Base in the Republic of Korea. A 12-month solo gig in Korea is something every lifer knows is going to come somewhere along the way and most dreaded it (including me). Toward the end of the Ramstein tour, TRIJtM had taken the kids and moved back home. We needed a minute. I was about 4 months out and didn’t have an assignment yet when they left. There was no animosity; I had been gone a lot and we’d grown apart. I missed the kids. Shit happens. You’ll recall I’d been to Osan once before. But this time, I lived there for 13 months. South Korea is one of those places where you go to make E-5 by arriving as an E-6. This is true across all services and all nations I ever heard of. You go to a place that parties that hard, you might end up demoted. I was an E-6 when I got to Osan AB. That I also left there as an E-6 probably helped influence me to actually believe in a higher power. Hell, I’m lucky I survived. When I arrived at Osan, I just assumed I would be required to live in a shared barracks room with some other fucker who would get on my tits all the time. I knew as an E-6 I would be allowed to have a vehicle. I did not know I was authorized to lease a place off base. So I leased a place off base. I did not drive. Look at your favorite video source online to find out why. Koreans drive like Honey Badger. The place I rented was the top floor of a 2-storey house in the middle of the ville. The old couple I rented from lived below on the ground floor because it was their house and they were smart people. This flat was affordable but it was unbearable in the early evenings in summer. As a consequence , I spent most of the evenings that summer out. Maybe that wasn’t the only reason I spent most nights out, but it influenced it. It was fucking hot in my place. First stop was always a place called Happy House on Aragon Alley. Songtan was mostly ‘juicy bars,’ where women (employed by the bar) would hang out with G.I.s for a few minutes or more, so long as the men were buying these thimbles of orange juice for them. In a surprise twist, ‘juicy girls’ are never drinking alcohol. Happy House didn’t do the ‘juicy girl’ thing. I had actual friends there. It was also a great place from which to ‘watch the parade go by,’ the parade being the corps of juicy girls going to their places of employment on the main drag. One night when I walked into Happy House, there was a fellow sitting at the bar and as he was speaking to the employees, I noticed he had what sounded like a German accent. I struck up a conversation with him and we became fast friends. He worked as a contractor for a company back home and had been sent to the RoK to help an affiliate of theirs there do the precision engineering stuff the Germans are known for and the Koreans… were not, at least not back then. Fritz also had a company car (a Hyundai, but it was nicer than any Hyundai I had ever seen). Riding places with him increased my certainty that my electing not to drive there was wise. Honey Badgers everywhere. Fritz was making a lot of money and he enjoyed spending quite a lot of it on talking to juicy girls. A juice cost around ten dollars (for reference, a beer was under two bucks). I bought exactly two juices for the girls during that tour, and both were for friends who were having slow nights. And it must have been payday in both cases. So I’d go into juicy bars with him and he’d get the girls over (they loved to see him coming because everybody likes getting paid). Juicy girls loved to do what we called ‘going Hangul secure,’ which means if they didn’t want G.I.s to know what they were saying, they’d speak Korean. Fritz and I didn’t care about that, but we had a lot of fun going ‘German secure’ on them when they did that. ‘Ai! Speakie English!’ LOL, ok. You too. I took a few days off and traveled to Jeju-do (Cheju Island), which is situated off the southern tip of the Peninsula. One day I went to see a waterfall the place was known for. The water wasn’t very impressive because it hadn’t been raining much. As I was leaving this feature, I encountered a group of young schoolchildren who were on what I guessed was a field trip to see the thing. Apparently, none of these island children had ever seen a white person before. I was mobbed by all of them. They had to touch me to verify this new thing was actually real. It was charming. There were two adults with them, and the one who appeared to be the teacher gave me a look that said ‘This happens a lot. Sorry, hope you don’t mind.’ I smiled at her. This is the only time I ever recall that happening. I hadn’t much believed it was a real phenomenon. It is. 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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