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A Memoir: Part Three
"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.
My assignment was to Clark Air Base in Angeles City on the northern island of Luzon, the largest single island in the archipelago. Angeles is about an hour north of Manila on the one major (read: paved) road between the two. In a hint of irony, Bergstrom Air Force Base was named for an Army Air Forces captain killed in the Japanese attack at Clark Field on 8 December 1941. Same day as the Pearl Harbor attack you remember from that movie that sucked, but on the other side of the International Dateline. He was the first Austinite fatality of WWII. RIP Captain Bergstrom.
There were no RF-4C stationed at Clark AB, at least not when I arrived there in June 1989. And as things happened, there were never to be any stationed there after that either. There were F-4E multi-role (air superiority and ground attack) and F-4G Wild Weasel variants. F-4E was the first (and only) variant that carried an internal gun, the standard 20mm Vulcan cannon. F-4G was… look up YGBSM on your favorite search engine. Weasels fly into missiles designed to target them. It’s a fascinating history. If you think you’re brave eating that slightly dodgy smoked ham cold cut, think of those guys and add another slice. You know you want to anyway. The G model only had one system in my purview. It carried the standard gun camera most contemporary fighters mounted as standard. The F-4G Wild Weasel platform didn’t sport a gun; the gun camera is just a small 8mm optical device situated to film whatever happens in front of the airplane. Like a police cruiser’s dash camera, but for fighter pilots. One evening I had dropped a dude off on a gun camera job on a G model. Did I mention I was expediting sometimes by now? I was learning to lead people, and I didn’t even understand that was happening, really. Anyway, the gun camera had somehow gotten shorted with the IFF (Information, Friend or Foe) on that jet such that the aerodrome was alerted to a potential threat to the security of the equipment and of the facility. The jet was “interrogating” as I understand it. Thing is, the weight-on-wheels (WoW) switch was not depressed (this is a “dead-man’s switch” which is depressed when the landing gear are retracted), so the jet shouldn’t have been squawking anything at all. When I arrived at the parking spot, my guy was stepping off the crew ladder while being questioned quite vigorously by the sky cops, who were confused as hell. We all were. A brief moment of terror. No one got shot, and the rogue jet plotting a coup was subdued. It took a couple days, but we finally figured it out. F-4s are legendary among maintainers for the ghosts in that particular machine. WoW. The Republic of the Philippines was (and is) a pretty impoverished country. As with every third-world country I ever visited, corruption was a part of everyday life. We rented a house in a neighborhood off base for the first 8 months or so, and we never had a telephone because I was unwilling to pay the local utility official to get a line installed in less than the normal 4 – 8 months (or whatever was deemed proper by the local guys in uniforms). It was a pretty nice stone place, plenty of space and two baths. It also had an 8’ tall cinder block wall surrounding it with broken glass buried in the mortar atop it all around the perimeter to deter boys in shorts and flip flops from breaching and stealing whatever they could find. Not evil people by and large, but very poor. It was a way of life for them, and ‘American’ invariably translates to ‘rich’ in such places. I harbored no particular ill will toward those kids, but I wasn’t going to risk my family on the idea they might just want the television set. Personal firearms were illegal, so only the bad guys had guns. And they didn’t even live next door to Indiana! No idea where they got those guns. There was a live-fire training range on Luzon called Crow Valley. This was the biggest U.S.-operated live-ordnance-capable aerial bombardment range in the western Pacific, and units from around the Basin flew down to ‘train like we fight.’ One night, a couple of our F-4E went out to Crow Valley on a live-fire training mission. The targets set up out there were mostly made up of steel that had originally had other uses, but had been recycled to facilitate the continued proficiency of our aircrews at breaking people’s things. Installed aboard the F-4E was another of my systems, the Airborne Video Tape Recorder (AVTR). Think of this as a blacked-out, cockpit-mounted version of the machine you watched Top Gun on at home. The format of the media was a bit larger than both VHS and Betamax. Even Air Force people can’t be trusted not to pilfer. The job of this device was to record the results of ground-attack missions. Sometimes, these AVTRs would get stuck and refuse to release the cassette inside. OK, what usually happened was the WSO (Weapons System Operator, aka the back seater in an F-4E) forgot to eject the media before the engines powered down, so they’d write it up as a malfunction and we’d go put power on the jet and retrieve the tape. This happened a lot. On the night in question, the crew returned, we recovered the jet, and the WSO had written up the standard ‘blame the machine’ thing for his error. So we dragged the Dash 60, powered the jet up, and retrieved the cassette. Understand: We did all this to correct some young college graduate’s rookie error. The machine was not defective, the operator was. This happened a lot. The flying squadron guys had gone home for the night, so we took the tape back to the shop and watched it. What was on that tape was one of the funniest things I have ever witnessed outside of some ‘crazy humans doing stupid shit’ thing on television. F-4E used a belly-mounted pod system called PAVE TACK to help acquire and define targets with infrared (IR) and then to paint them with laser light to deliver the ordnance to its doomed receivers. AVTR filmed this IR imagery. When the lead jet was on its target run, two warm bodies suddenly dispersed from beneath a target in the frame. They had been attempting to steal the target in order to re-purpose the steel from which it was made. The back seater (WSO) was heard on the intercom saying ‘Oh shit! Abort!’ The driver, cool as the other side of the pillow, replied: ‘Negative. They knew we were coming.’ Then he pickled his ordnance. Note: The ordnance those planes dropped that night were all ‘concrete bombs’ (blue bands). These are training munitions that weigh the same and have the same aerodynamic characteristics as the real thing (yellow bands), but contain no warhead or explosives. But those thieves didn’t know that. We turned the tape in as required when the flying squadron opened next A.M. I don’t know what happened to that tape, but I can guess. Another time, a USAF unit out of the Republic of Korea had come to use the Crow Valley range. Several units from other places also turned up. It was some sort of competition, I suppose. I wasn’t taking notes. I was keeping the TISEO (a wing-mounted video camera on some F-4E, slaved to the radar to help the driver ID other aircraft) and PAVE TACK working. And this took effort: Remember, this is 1989 and the planes we worked on were last built in 1972 (I think). During this competition (and all my time in the P.I.), the main group opposing the United States conducting activities designed to save their country was a communist outfit who called themselves the New Peoples Army. NPA was mostly a raggedy gang of punks who had acquired some BDUs and boots back in the day. But they were ruthless. One night as two American GIs stepped out of their hotel to catch a passing jeepney on MacArthur Boulevard (the main drag through the center of the city, as you might imagine), two NPA maniacs stepped up and shot those guys in the backs of their heads. Stars and Stripes published the image of those two victims lying dead on the street on their front page. That caused a ruckus. This shocking and terrible event prompted the people who make such decisions (among whom I would years later count myself) to designate areas of Angeles City off limits to those under their authority. On the map telling us where we could and could not go, it looked like a fish. ‘Fishville’ is how I referred to it then, and I always will. The Fishville order was effective immediately and it included all TDY (visiting) personnel who were staying in hotels ‘downtown.’ There were a lot of people sleeping in hastily erected tents on base in areas that were normally clear tarmac, that’s all I’m saying. It was a terrible time all around. Such is life in the military. ‘Improvise, adapt, overcome’ is an excellent way to live, but it ain’t easy. A fun aspect of life on an archipelago in the south Pacific is the weather. And by “fun,” I mean “interesting” as used in the Chinese curse ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Hurricanes were a fact of life when I was growing up, so I was familiar with Big Water coming at me really fast. In the Philippines, these same types of storms are called typhoons. Like the Eurofighter product, but less fun when you catch a tailwind. There were two or three of those in my 2-year stint on the island, which is about the number of major hurricanes I can remember in my first 22 years on the Gulf Coast. And there were a great many monsoons. A monsoon is like a powerful thunderstorm but more violent. And more frequent. When it was nice, the Philippine weather was really, really nice. When it was not nice, it could be brutal. Another… interesting thing the archipelago featured was earthquakes. I was accustomed to the planet doing things someone knew was coming. Some hot babe or dodgy old bugger in a suit would tell me to board up my windows or go to Montana, and I reacted accordingly (usually by buying a lot of beer and throwing a hurricane party, but that isn’t the story I’m telling here). Earthquakes just come at you out of nowhere and don’t even give a fella the goddamn common courtesy of a reach around. I was on my way to work one evening for a mid(night) shift (graveyard shift to some), which in this case was 23:00 – 07:00. As I was approaching my shop, I noticed my bike felt a little squirrelly. ‘Gotta check that back tire when I get there,’ thought I. Bike checked out. I went into the facility and a couple guys from swings (the shift I was replacing) had a laser on the bench. This ‘bench’ was a steel test bench bolted to the floor and not at all movable. One doesn’t test and boresight precision targeting lasers on hammocks. As I walked up to the bench to take turnover, I set my hand on the edge of the thing to lean in and get a better look. At that moment, the nearest fluorescent tube light fixture cage released, hitting its hinges so hard that they let go. The metal-framed corrugated plastic crashed to the floor. This happened so perfectly in time that the guys at the bench thought for an instant I had somehow caused that light fixture to fall off the ceiling by touching that monolithic table they were working at. Hell, I did too for a second. They were even yelling at me ‘what did you do?!?!?’ It was freaky. We hadn’t felt the earth move at first. PAVE TACK pods weighed approximately 1,500 pounds each. There were generally two complete pods and loads of parts of others in our building at any one time. This facility was very stout, built on a reinforced concrete slab (probably by General MacArthur himself), and meant to endure both nature and some light love from potential (NPA) fighters who were having a bad day with their AKs. PAVE TACK also wasn’t cheap. And as ever, experienced personnel are the most valuable war fighting asset in any circumstance. It was a solid building. This was the earthquake whose epicenter had been near Baguio City, a well-known resort town somewhere north of Angeles. If memory serves, it was maybe a couple hours by road from Clark AB. A popular tourist hotel in Baguio was destroyed by that quake. It was high season and a lot of people died. Many others were trapped for weeks in the rubble. Some survived, some perished. It is the nature of these things. RIP and God bless.
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A Memoir: Part Two
"The Pragmatic Volunteer" will be a twice weekly series. Check back every Wednesday and Friday for the latest installments!
Previously: A Memoir: Part One
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.
So I was sent to Denver, Colorado for technical training. First time I’d ever liked a place that didn’t have an ocean nearby. One of the first things I learned living that far above sea level was that it really does matter in the realm of physical training. People younger than me were dropping off the sidewalk to puke in the grass (no running path back then at that base – the USAF wasn’t known for the elite-level physical fitness of its troops in those days).
The specialty to which I had been assigned was heavy on electronics and back then, that meant one needed to grasp basic stuff about circuits and theory and drinking beer and partying… wait. Just the first two. As far as you know. The first thing you have to learn when learning electric theory is algebra. It took me a minute to reacquire the whole ‘‘x’ is a number’ thing, but it clicked within the first couple days or so. Algebra is a funny old thing. One never needs it until one actually does. And when one needs it, nothing else will do. I think I’ll name my carry piece “Algebra.” Less than a month after I arrived at tech school, the space shuttle Challenger was scheduled to launch for its tenth mission. Because of the historic nature of that mission (mostly due to Christa McAuliffe being the first educator selected for space flight as part of “Teachers in Space,” a Reagan initiative to bolster public support for the expensive program), our instructor had a television on and tuned to CNN. For anyone too young to remember, CNN was pretty solid and worth paying attention to back then. They were also the only commercial network carrying the entire process live. So it was that I watched the disaster unfold in real time on television. It is the first time I remember crying in the presence of people to whom I wasn’t related. At the beginning of ‘systems school’ (the second phase of the training where we learned about the specific, well, systems we were to be working on in the field), the school’s squadron commander (aka commanding officer or CO) came in for a meet and greet. The major went around the room asking the usual stuff. Name, why did you decide to grace my beloved Air Force with your presence, etcetera. Answers were as you might expect (travel, college money, chicks…). Then he came to me. Again, I told the truth. He lost interest in me very quickly, which suited me just fine. It was also during this training that my education in the odd manners of speaking of my fellow countrymen continued. I was assigned a roommate from Wisconsin, and it actually took me a minute to understand what he was saying when he said the word “bag.” It sounded like ‘baeg.’ Something akin to the sound of the ‘bag’ in “bagel.” Fascinating. As it turned out, a guy from my ‘sister’ flight in BMTS was also a Sconnie and had also been selected for the same career field as me. We became good friends at our first Permanent Duty Station (PDS). I may or may not have called him “Bagel” a lot after a few beverages. A couple weeks after Challenger, my daughter was born. The DoD insurance covered almost all of the medical costs and everything turned out fine. Mission Accomplished. She was born in my hometown because her mother had been too pregnant for air travel by the time I was authorized to have ‘dependents’ living with me. There are actually some strict rules in the Air Force, despite what some of the other services may insist. So I flew down to meet her the following Friday after duty. It was 14 February, and she was beautiful. She still is. At some point before the end of tech school I received the assignment to my first PDS. Bergstrom Air Force Base just outside Austin, Texas. I was newly minted Avionic Sensor Systems Technician, and Bergstrom was home to the largest collection of RF-4C reconnaissance jets stationed in the continental United States (CONUS). The RF-4C was a modified version of the famous fighter from early in the Vietnam era. The F-4 was known to those of us who loved / hated her as ‘The Flying Pig.’ The theory was that if you put big enough engines on it, you can make a brick fly. I was assigned to an Aircraft Maintenance Unit (AMU) and my buddy Bagel to the back shop. Basically, I fixed wires and such on the flightline and helped with other duties to keep those pigs flying and taking pictures. If the problem came down to a box, my job was to pull the box and take it to Bagel and he’d fix it. One of the more mundane and routine tasks on my daily schedule was taking mission film from the Recces, putting it into a plastic film can and delivering it to the “PIs” or Photographic Interpreters. These are intelligence folks who specialize in figuring out exactly what an aerial image shows. Have you ever tried to figure out the height of a building based on shadows and other inputs just from an overhead image? It’s… complicated. Every couple of years back in those days (when most developed countries used manned aerial tactical reconnaissance vehicles – most now don’t), an international competition called the Reconnaissance Air Meet (RAM) was held to determine who was the Best Damn Recce Unit in the World. It was serious business, and we were very busy during the 10 days or so Bergstrom hosted it when I was there. Also found out that Aussies have a summer uniform that includes short trousers. Lucky bastards. On the flightline, we used color codes for the various flying units to differentiate between all of them. My unit, for example, was the 45th AMU. On the radio, the 45th was “Blue,” and my specialty was “Blue Photo.” During RAM ‘86, with many units from all over the world visiting, we had to expand our use of the light spectrum on radio comms. So one unit was known on the radio as “Black Photo.” To keep things fair, we had all been assigned converted conexes to use as storage for film and as darkrooms to do the aforementioned removing film from cameras and putting it into cans. As a home unit, we had our own hardened (and air conditioned) facility, but were required to use the conex so the playing field was level. We also were not allowed to use the darkroom we had built into the back of our ‘bread truck’ for the same reason. That was a ‘local man’ thing, and not everyone was clever enough to have one. These conexes were left unsecured during the flying schedule. They were secured using padlocks and there weren’t enough keys to ensure every crew could have access when they needed it. The USAF team out of Zweibrücken Air Base in what was then West Germany was assigned the “Black” radio call sign. And we were having issues with them stealing our film and other supplies, which they did to such an extent that it caused us problems at times. So we came up with the always-effective ‘put a piece of paper with words on it up on the door’ plan. That ought to keep those jerks out of our stuff. The words written on that piece of paper? “No Black Photo Troops!” It never even occurred to any of us that there might be some type of issue. We knew what we meant. A bit later, our expediter (the guy driving the Blue Photo bread truck and assigning us all various jobs) pulled up at the conex. I was in the truck at that point. Well, Blue Photo expediter, himself a black photo troop (but not a Black Photo troop) saw our sign and he could not stop laughing. Finally, he caught his breath, said ‘Yeah, fuck those assholes!,’ and had us change the sign to “Blue Photo Personnel Only.” Ah, youth. Another particularly memorable flightline moment happened later in my 3-year tour of duty at Bergstrom. The bread truck had pulled up to a jet on which I had been assigned a job. As I moved to gather my tools and equipment, our flightline maintenance ops coordinator (call sign “Alpha”) crackled into life on the radio alerting the Maintenance Operations Center, from which all flightline maintenance was overseen: “MOC, Alpha. We’ve got one on fire.” I looked out the front windows of the truck and saw an F-4 standing still in the air, nose pointing at the sun. Fire was indeed evident, and a second after I looked up, there was a “pop” and some extra flames. A few seconds later, as the ruined equipment was exiting my field of view, I saw two silk canopies descending from the vicinity where it had been. Both aircrew members survived with minor injuries. ‘Minor injuries’ is code for ‘were violently jettisoned out of a flying jet aircraft by rocket-powered seats with enough force to escape the conflagration which drove this drastic decision.’ Did you realize that Martin-Baker Ejection Seats egress an F-4 so quickly that your eye can’t detect it (at least not when you’re marveling at seeing an Air Force jet burn in the sky)? I did not. As it was reported later, the No. 2 engine (that’s the starboard one of the two jet engines), experienced a massive compressor failure on takeoff due to an undetected or ‘within tolerance’ crack in a flywheel in the workings of it. “Massive compressor failure” means the turbine stopped turning all at once, like locking your brakes but you didn’t know it was going to happen. And you’re hundreds of feet in the air. When I first saw the plane, the driver was vertical in a very tight turn in a heroic attempt to get that piece of shit to the ‘safe area’ (safe space?), which was a large area of clear field designed for jets with major problems to ditch if possible. We do that near cities. He never exited that hard bank because the ruined No. 2 had flung bits of metal through one of the internal fuel tanks along the spine of the F-4 (this caused the “pop” and explosion I witnessed), and into the No. 1 engine, ending its useful life. If you know anything about human flight in general and F-4s particularly, you know that this was the point at which one of the crew used one of the ejection handles and they lived to fight another day. We found most of the pieces over the next few days in the wilderness beyond the runway. The jet landed in a self-storage maze near the intersection of Texas 183 and Riverside Drive. It crashed so perfectly inside that you couldn’t see the wreck from any angle accessible from the streets nearby. I drove around it and looked. That jet was ensconced inside the maze of units. You would be surprised how many people who rent such storage facilities remember they keep expensive sports cars and very large jewels in there after the federal government drops a burning jet on their old Elton John records. No civilians were present. No one was seriously injured in the course of the day’s events. My arms did get scratched up from digging through brambles looking for jet pieces. Thanks for asking. Early in this first tour of duty, I broached the idea of having another baby with The Reason I Joined the Military (TRIJtM). She was enthused about it, and so about 9 months later, our son was born. We were young and frisky. And fertile, by any objective measure. I was in the room when this one came along. At the clinic on Bergstrom, so the boy is technically a Texan. Bonus! The reasons we decided to have another child so close to the first (they’re ~1.5 years apart) are manifold (aren’t they always), but mostly it was that I had never planned to serve more than that first 4-year hitch. At a year out I was studying options, had calls in, some good prospects on shrimp boats and possibly the (erstwhile) paper mill back home. And then a thing happened which caught me by surprise: I had a minor ankle injury and was working the dispatch radio when my boss came in and told me I had gotten an assignment to the Philippines. I had heard of such a place, but really had no idea where it was or why my rich uncle would want me to go there. So I talked to some old heads who had been there and did some serious thinking about how hard the work is on shrimp boats. And after a consult with TRIJtM, I reenlisted and we were off to the other side of the world. Woooooo! |
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
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