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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 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 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. |
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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