Over Edicated

SAMs In the DMZ

2012-01-09T09:54:00.000-06:00

ZSU-57-2

It was a few weeks after the Spring 1972 North Vietnamese offensive into the South. It was still unclear whether any of the SA-2s that the cunning NVA had dragged into Quang Tri province were still operational. Our mission for a night sortie was to drill around Quang Tri province and generally provide ECM for whoever was working in the area just after dark. We had been warned that there was a ZSU-57-2 (a tracked, twin-barrel 57mm AAA weapon lurking in the A Shau Valley). Sure enough, it was there. I happened to be looking down into the growing darkness below just as the thing fired. I watched as a huge flock of red cannon balls floated upward toward an unseen AC-130 “Spectre” that was out there hunting the gun. I know it was a Spectre because I saw it return fire at the gun down there in the A Shau.

An hour or so passed and we were generally hanging out in the Hue vicinity. Below we could see lots of flares and fires burning as the ARVN fought back against the NVA. The pilot, a relatively new guy, was puffing on his pipe and watching the show below. Then something caught his attention. We were generally heading north-northeast, and out in the distance he could see two or three bright yellow-white lights. The lights were getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. He was about to ask me what the lights were out in front of us, as if I could actually see them, closed off as the EWO and I were from the rest of the cockpit, when it suddenly dawned on him what he was seeing. “I’ve got SAMs,” he said; almost simultaneously, the EWO called, “I’ve got uplink.” The pilot executed a SAM break to the right. The pilot directed me to make a SAM call on UHF Guard, but not knowing where the SAMs were coming from, I hesitated. First I was unsure of where the SAMs were coming from, and second, I didn’t want to get into a discussion with the pilot about where they were coming from while he was in the middle of executing a SAM break – in the dark. Finally I went out over Guard with a SAM call: “SAM, SAM, vicinity of Hue.” Immediately a Wild Weasel who was been patrolling closer to the DMZ – and was at that moment in a duel with the SAM site – called, “SAM, SAM, DMZ.” That cleared things up.

The pilot was recovering from the first SAM break when two more SAMs came off the launcher. “They’re shooting again,” the pilot reported, and we entered another SAM break to the right. As we recovered from the second SAM break I saw that we were now about 20 miles off shore – and considerably lower than when all the excitement started. I called the pilot and told him we were clearly out of range of any SAMs and to stay wings level if they fired again. Very soon thereafter we saw another SAM come off the launcher, but this time jamming was effective and the SAM went ballistic. That pretty much ended a few adrenalin-filled minutes. We headed for home with Bingo fuel.

In reading the OPREPs the next day, it turned out that the SAM site had been shooting at a flight of F-4s that had been patrolling the DMZ, and one had been downed. In addition, my Frag Shop boss (an F-4 jock) came back from an afternoon strike on North Vietnam extolling the courage of a KC-135 crew that had crossed the DMZ – with boss and his flight in tow – to go rescue another F-4 that had been shot up on the strike mission. He pointed out where the tanker had taken him. It was right across the area where the SAMs had fired the night before.

Armistice Day

2011-11-11T23:03:00.001-06:00

It used to be called Armistice Day when I was a kid. It had been called Armistice Day for a long time, but in 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into a law a change that renamed that day Veterans Day. It was a good thing. Every war has its veterans, and they need to be recognized.

This afternoon I went next door to the neighbor's house on an errand. Their granddaughter was there. The first thing she said to me was, "Happy Veterans Day." Her grandmother, our neighbor, told me that they had learned about Veterans Day in school today. They had only learned about the US Army because when I told her I had been in the Air Force she was completely puzzled. She asked me what I did. I told her that if flew airplanes, just like her grandfather had done. I'm not sure what she made of that; maybe no one had ever told her that Grandpa flew airplanes once.

When I was growing up, the veterans were mainly from World War II. My uncle was a sailor on a fleet oiler; he was based at Ulithi Atoll and survived the submarine attack that happened there by virtue of being someplace else when the attack occurred. As it was, the oiler that was tied up at his normal berthing point was hit and sunk. There were WWII veterans living on both sides of us. One was a fireman and had been in the Battle of the Bulge, among other things. The other was a mechanic and had been a Marine at the invasion of Okinawa. In retrospect, the former Marine had seen some hard times, and his behavior said as much. His wife said that every year around Indepence Day he literally trembled from the sound of the fireworks going off. A number of my high school teachers were veterans of WWII. One wore a hearing aid; another had been of an aircraft carrier that was sunk; one had been a B-25 pilot. Most never commented much about their experiences.

Since I am a veteran myself, I see things in a different light than when I was a kid. I go to some of the reunions that occur fairly regularly. I pick and choose. Some reunions are of little or no interest while others are a chance to meet people I haven't seen in a long, long time. The last reunion I went to was in September 2010 in Savannah, Georgia; the next one on my list will be in Tuscon, Arizona, next October.

Sometimes it's someone else's reunion that catches my attention. I has to have been over twenty years ago now. The survivors of the 306th Bomb Group were having a reunion at Offutt Air Force Base. My wife and I happened to be having dinner in the Officers Club the same night that the 306th veterans were having their farewell banquet. The entertainment included a part of the Strategic Air Command Band called Nightwing. On this special occasion they were doing songs from time of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in England. One of their female vocalists sounded so much like Dame Vera Lynn that it was uncanny. My wife and I knew about Vera Lynn because we had spent three years living in England on my next-to-last assignment in the Air Force. The Brits were fond of reliving their finest hour; Vera Lynn and her songs were a part of that. In any case, the Vera Lynn sound-alike must have created a time machine for all those old guys. It was pretty emotional, we could tell that. More than one of those old veterans got up and left the banquet hall; some would return, only to get up and leave again. I can understand why.

On that assignment in England, we lived at RAF Lakenheath. In WWII it had been occupied by RAF units, as had my base of assignment, RAF Mildenhall. The US Air Force presence at those bases came much later. Both bases were near Cambridge, and quite a few bases that hosted American fliers had been in the area. We learned about one pub in Cambridge, The Eagle, that had been a hangout for American air crews during the war. We learned that there was one room at The Eagle that had the names of countless American airmen written on the ceiling as graffiti. On one of the many visit to Cambridge, I happened to meet an old English gentleman and told him that I wanted to see The Eagle because I had heard of the room with the graffiti. "Ah," he said, "I used to hoist those lads up on my shoulders so they could write their names." He had been in the RAF during the war. He told me how to find The Eagle.

Another landmark for many surviving veterans of WWII is the Madingley American Cemetery. The Madingley American Cemetery is on the road west of Cambridge. It holds the remains of 3812 American military dead. There is a wall that records the names of 5127 airmen and sailors who were missing in action. The bases of RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall used to take turns doing a Memorial Day ceremony at Madingley. I suppose they still do.

So many veterans. So many experiences.

Nineteen Days

2011-10-21T12:00:00.000-05:00

I was a KC-135 navigator on my first assignment out of Undergraduate Navigator Training. I was assigned to Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota. I had been combat ready for about a year and was in the process of gaining experience on a SAC combat crew. At that point in time there was no combat; it was all training, with the exception of an operational mission called Chrome Dome that we had flown out of Alaska in the summer of 1962.

Editor's Note: The routes depicted at the Wikipedia link are from 1966 and do not reflect operation Chrome Dome as is was conducted in 1962.

It was a cold and rainy Monday morning of 22nd October 1962. I was fixing myself a bit of breakfast when my Aircraft Commander (AC) called me and told me I was on telephone alert. Okay. I sat back wondering what I could do while sitting by the phone, when it rang again. It was my AC again. "Pack your bags," he said, "you're going to Spain." Wow! I grabbed all of my flight gear and a shaving kit and ran out the door.

On the way out to the base I wondered what might have caused all this unusual activity. The Chinese and the Indians were having armed clashes over a disputed border. Maybe things were getting out of hand. I pulled into a parking spot at the squadron and checked in with my AC. The Operations Officer immediately ordered my crew and one other out to a KC-135 that was being made ready to fly. All around me other crew members were showing up and were being sent off to the squadron briefing room. The squadron was generating its aircraft to full alert status.

As fast as we could, we loaded our gear and some crew chiefs on the tanker, buttoned up, started engines, and headed for the runway. Clearance for takeoff was immediate, and we were on our way. We flew pretty much a great circle route from Ellsworth direct to Torrejon Air Base, Spain. The other crew was flying the airplane, so we sat in our passenger seats and wondered what was going on. We had been airborne about two hours and we were near Chicago. The navigator of the flight crew told us that the entire SAC force had just been recalled from training sorties. I walked over the aft scanner's window to see if Chicago was still there. It was.

In another couple of hours we were coasting out over the Atlantic and the sun had set. I went up to the jump seat with the intention of relieving the other navigator, if need be. He was as adrenaline charged as I was and refused my offer. I sat in the jump seat and looked out into the darkness as we made our way eastward over the Atlantic. We could see rotating beacons of other aircraft all over the night sky. The ones at or near our altitude must have been mostly SAC aircraft, since the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) had a relatively small number of jet transports at that time. Below us were more rotating beacons out there in the dark. The HF radio traffic made it obvious that the Oceanic Controllers had their hands full talking to a lot of airplanes, all heading east.

It seemed like no time and we were across the Atlantic and coasting in to Portugal. Torrejon Air Base was less than an hour away. As we approached Torrejon, it was evident that the approach controllers there were pretty busy too. We were given a radar controlled descent and vectors to final approach; we could see that we were one in a long chain of aircraft being vectored for Torrejon. On a long final, we could see one aircraft on short final ahead of us, and one turning off the runway at Torrejon. The stream of inbound aircraft seemed endless.

It was still dark when we were marshaled to a parking spot and shut down the engines. The cargo door was opened and a ramp was rolled up; we started to unload our gear. A USAF colonel came up to my AC and introduced himself: "Buckwalter. I'm the wing commander." Now that was a reception party. He told the two ACs to bring their crews to the local command post for a briefing. When we got there, we were allowed to hear a previously recorded shortwave radio broadcast of President Kennedy's speech to the American people in which he told of the missile threat building up in Cuba. If you are old enough, you probably remember seeing that speech on TV. We were then given some basic operating rules regarding our own availability to fly missions. We were on a pretty short string, but not as short as the SAC alert force already at Torrejon. When we taxied in after landing at Torrejon, we saw what looked like acres of B-47s – all surrounded by mountains of concertina wire. We also saw that all of the USAF alert barns at the end of the runway had F-102s cocked and ready. We didn't know it then, but the Spanish had some of their F-86s on alert also.

We were trundled off for a meal and a bed. That evening we would get a detailed mission briefing and begin flying refueling sorties in support of B-52s flying airborne alert under operation Chrome Dome. It was difficult to sleep, so we wandered around the base taking in the activity. It was impressive. Two KC-135s were taking off every hour. MATS transports (C-121s, C-124s, C-133s, and some C-130s) were coming and going. The place was a beehive of activity.

After a short nap and a light supper, we met our evening mission briefer. We were given a detailed look at the route we would be following three times a night for the next three weeks. The plan called for a pair of KC-135s to take off in cell formation. The route took us from Torrejon out to the north and then northwest toward the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula; there we were to meet two B-52s coming from the States. Air refueling them across the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula and giving them 105,000 pounds of fuel each took us to Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Then it was a smart right turn and start a descent into Torrejon to land and do it twice more in our duty cycle. It was pretty simple. There were a few catches though. An airway known as Upper Red Seven (UR7) lay in our path, and we had to observe an altitude restriction of about 18,000 feet while crossing it – unless we could get an unrestricted climb across it. In order to get our heavy birds out to the air refueling point at the air refueling altitude, it helped a lot to have an unrestricted climb approved.

The mission briefing done, we went out to our assigned aircraft and went through the routine for the first mission of the night; we were number two on the first launch of the evening. Everything went pretty well as we went through our paces for the first time. We made our rendezvous with the B-52s and they began their approach to the air refueling position. We were heavy and they were heavy; and then there was usually some turbulence to make things interesting. In pretty short order the CONTACT MADE light illuminated on the air refueling (AR) panel and four AR pumps pushed JP-4 into the bomber at 7,500 pounds per minute. Soon after the B-52s began air refueling we were called by a USAF GCI site. "Troubadour 35, Siesta," came the call on UHF. The lead pilot answered: "Siesta, Troubadour 35, go." Siesta had some information for us. "Troubadour 35 flight, you have a stranger paralleling your track 20 miles to starboard." The co-pilot looked out; sure enough, there was an aircraft out there in the dark with rotating beacons flashing. "Siesta, Troubadour 35. We have the stranger in sight." Although the unknown aircraft paced us for a while longer, by the time we reached the end AR point, it was nowhere to be seen. We turned for Torrejon and the next flight.

The two remaining sorties went without a hitch – and without anymore calls from GCI sites. The sun was above the horizon when we finished our last maintenance debriefing and headed for our rooms for some sleep.

All of this was going on in the first week after President Kennedy had made his famous speech that informed the world of what we were going to do about a Cuba armed with nuclear missiles. There was tension everywhere around Torrejon Air Base. The bachelor officers permanently assigned to Torrejon lived in the same building but in a different wing than we did, and they had a rather large Telefunken console radio that could pick up a broad spectrum of radio signals. The BBC Overseas Service were the frequencies most listened to because they seemed to have the most to say about what was going on. Everybody clustered around that radio when the evening news broadcast was about to begin. It was silence while the BBC radio news reader expounded.

Things were tense, but not grim. We were allowed to go to Madrid when we had a break in the flight schedule. We had to be within one hour’s travel of Torrejon, so Madrid was about as far as we could go; but Madrid was the place to go. They didn’t teach much contemporary history in the late 1950s, when I was in school, so I didn’t really appreciate that Spain was under the control of a dictator. Generalissimo Francisco Franco had ruled Spain for a couple of decades by the end of 1962; he had tight control. The Spanish police, the Guardia Civil, were prominent in and around Madrid. They were all armed with at least a side arm; most were armed with a rifle or machine pistol. Still, the Spaniards seemed to be reasonably well off. The streets of Madrid were filled with traffic ranging from motor-scooters on up to large buses. We rode the local bus from Torrejon to Madrid with the Spanish workers who staffed much of air base. Torrejon was, after all, Spanish territory – even if American dollars had built it. The Spaniards also seemed to have a low regard for Cuba and Castro – especially for Castro. Perhaps it was because the generalissimo had little use for Castro.

In Madrid there was a hotel leased by the US government to serve as temporary accommodations for military people in transit; it was called the Hotel Balboa. The bus from Torrejon would drop us off there; we would pick up the bus there when we returned to Torrejon. It was a beehive of a place with Americans coming and going all the time. I noticed that one of the weekly magazines – I think it was the Saturday Evening Post – was carrying the latest installment of the story "Fail Safe". It was the part where the Vindicator bombers are on their way to their targets. What a remarkable piece of timing, I thought.

We flew and flew and flew for the first ten days of that showdown. Every hour, around the clock, two KC-135s would take off from Torrejon to refuel two B-52s coming from the United States. These were the latest models of the B-52, and they carried an AGM-28 Hound Dog cruise missile under each wing – in addition to whatever they carried in their two bomb bays. After air refueling, the B-52s would fly out over the Mediterranean Sea and cruise its length, more or less. Then they would meet two KC-135s from Morón Air Base, near Seville, Spain, for enough fuel to return to the United States. Simultaneously with what we were doing, more B-52s were flying a route that took them out over the Atlantic and northbound over Baffin Bay and then out over the Arctic Ocean. From there they flew over the arctic ice pack toward Alaska. They too were refueled twice on their long airborne alert routes. That adds up to about 96 B-52s airborne at all times during those first tense days of the showdown.

In Spain, that mysterious stranger that had so boldly paced us the first night we flew was back. Whoever it was, they were flying only at night and they were moving closer and closer to the bomber/tanker pairs as they refueled across the north of Spain. The GCI sites could not identify the stranger, so they scrambled interceptors – both American F-102s and Spanish F-86s. The stranger was wily, though. He could out maneuver the F-102s and outrun the F-86s. Recently, however, he was flying without lights, the better to creep up on a refueling formation. On at least one occasion he did exactly that: he paced an air refueling in progress. The B-52 gunner was aware of his presence, but the stranger was literally flying the B-52’s wing; the gunner couldn’t bring his guns to bear. The pilots could see the dim shape of an airplane, illuminated by the formation’s rotating beacons, flying a kind of roller coaster path above and then below them. It looked like a Soviet Yak-25 interceptor, they said. Again, when American and Spanish interceptors launched, the stranger departed.

We had to conclude that the stranger was not hostile, since, whoever he was, he had ample opportunity to shoot but hadn’t. Still, some unknown aircraft buzzing around out there in the dark, doing who knows what, was unsettling. It seemed, however, that after the Soviets “blinked” and turned back their ships the stranger appeared less and less frequently. My formation did have one more encounter with the mystery bird, though. Our flight of two had finished air refueling and were turning toward Torrejon. I was navigator on the number two aircraft. As we descended into Torrejon, we fell back a few miles from our normal trail position to expedite the approach and landing. As I watched the lead aircraft moving out to about five miles ahead of us, a new target appeared on my radar scope. It came in from the right and took up a position about a quarter mile behind the lead tanker. Excitedly, I told my AC what was happening. He could see only the lights of the lead tanker out there in the dark, but he called the leader and told him what was going on. At that radio transmission the unknown target quickly moved off to the left and out of my radar range. That was the last time we were aware of the stranger’s presence.

There was a lot of speculation about who the mystery aircraft was, but the smart money on the French Air Force. The French were a relatively short distance away, across the Pyrenees Mountains; they had a twin engine jet fighter bomber, called Vautour (Vulture, in English), that could perform well enough to evade interceptors, and it bore an eerie resemblance to the Soviet Yak-25. They probably could see our flights on their surveillance radars; and “Le Grand Charles” probably wanted to know what was going on down there across his border with Spain.

By the end of the second week the pace of flying was beginning to slow since our showdown with the Soviets appeared to heading for a resolution. We flew less frequently and the maintenance crews had a little more time to start some serious repairing on the tankers we had flown so hard. We were told we would be going home in a few days, after some “relief crews” were flown in from the States. Frankly, I would have preferred to remain in Spain; back in the States I would be pulling alert.

On the nineteenth day after our deployment, we loaded up and taxied out for our return to Ellsworth AFB. We had a relief mission of our own: we were to fly down to Morocco to pick up some B-47 crews who had been on alert at North African bases during the crisis. We sat in the number one position waiting for our takeoff clearance, but it was a long time in coming. There was an aircraft on a long final that had priority. So we sat, and we sat. Finally, my AC told me to look at what was landing. There, just gliding over the threshold, was a Ju-52 – the old Iron Annie – a relic from Franco’s flirtation with Hitler. The Ju-52 cleared the runway, and we received our takeoff clearance. As the pilot started to bring up the throttles, the pilot of a C-47 who was just behind us as number two for takeoff, informed us of his presence and asked that we “not check our mags” until after we got on the runway. The pilot assured him that we wouldn’t.

It was a short trip to Nouasseur Air Base, just southeast of Casablanca. We took on enough fuel to get us home and loaded the B-47 crews we were to take back to Hunter AFB near Savannah Georgia. They were glad to be leaving the desert. Again we started engines and taxied out for takeoff. While we sat at the hold line, a B-47 Supervisor Of Flying (SOF) drove up and gave the exterior of our bird the once over. Then he gave us a call: “Frau 80, this is the SOF.” “Go ahead,” the pilot answered. “Ah, your speed brakes are extended,” the SOF warned. The pilot pushed at the speed brake handle, which was already in the retracted position. Then both pilots looked out to see if the speed brakes were indeed flush with the wings. They were. “Uh, which speed brakes are you talking about?” the pilot asked. The SOF responded, “Those long ones on the leading edge of your wings.” Apparently the SOF had never seen leading edge flaps before. “That’s okay, they’re suppose to be extended,” the pilot reassured the SOF. Then we took off for the long haul back to the States.

Back in the days before inertial navigation systems and GPS a lot of navigation was done by celestial: taking observations of the sun, moon and stars with a sextant and turning that into a position on a map. On the KC-135 the boom operator usually did the celestial observations while the navigator converted those observations into estimated positions (nothing was precise when doing celestial navigation), along with doing a host of other things. The boom operator on our crew was none too good in the celestial observation department. On this particular day has was doing even worse than usual, having said adios to Spain the night before with a pitcher, or so, of sangría. A couple of B-47 copilots were standing at the rear of the crew compartment watching the boomer as he took the first series of celestial observations. One of the copilots looked over my shoulder as I plotted the result (which wasn't good). He tapped me on the shoulder and told me he would be doing the sextant work. The boomer was only too glad to relinquish that job.

The Soviets had backed down on the issue of missiles being placed in Cuba, but they were still up for “fun and games” otherwise. Their “trawlers” still spied and did some electronic spoofing. We were asked to check out some strange radar signals as we passed over Bermuda, on our way to Savannah. The air traffic controllers were receiving some unusual radar signals from a spot on the ocean 40 or so miles west of Bermuda; the controllers asked if we would take a look at the spot. A visual inspection revealed nothing, because of clouds, but radar showed a surface ship in the vicinity of the signal source. Meanwhile, a colleague of mine was navigating a B-47 toward a rendezvous with a tanker off the coast of Newfoundland. His radar showed a rendezvous beacon where none should have been – and it appeared to be stationary. Checking through his bombing optics, he saw a Soviet trawler at the same place the radar beacon indicated. He took a photo of the ship through the optics, but his wing bomb/nav people were interested in his experience only as a warning to others.

Even though the media coverage of the crisis wound down fairly quickly after the showdown reached its climax, we remained in a state of alert high. It was some time after Thanksgiving that we finally resumed a normal alert schedule.

Of course, that was just one of several confrontations that would take place at various times and in various places over the course of the Cold War. It was, however, the most serious and dramatic. I read somewhere, long after the Cuban Crisis was mostly a memory, that the Soviets felt intimidated and humiliated by the overwhelming force that the United States had arrayed against them. Nikita Kruschev was ousted by Leonid Brezhnev because of the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Their new leadership, I am told, swore that such a thing would never happen again. The end of the Cuban Crisis was the beginning of the Cold War arms race in earnest.

POST SCRIPT:

I have to wonder how that confrontation would have turned out if it had been our current leadership that was in charge rather than the Kennedy Administration. It had taken JFK three previous encounters in his dealings with the Soviet Union to finally get it right. The Kennedy Administration foreign policy had been weak and indecisive up until October 1962. First there had been the Bay of Pigs fiasco; then came the Vienna Summit; and then the provocative Berlin Wall. Kennedy's actions signalled that he was a pushover; the Soviets saw an opportunity to up the ante by going tit-for-tat. Placing strategic nuclear armed missiles in Cuba would be a counter to the MRBM Thor and Jupiter missiles that ringed the western and southern borders of the Soviet Union. Clearly, the Kennedy Administration saw nuclear-armed MRBMs in Cuba as an existential threat and acted accordingly.

With its "Smart Diplomacy" our current administration has, so far, shown itself to be weak, indecisive, and prone toward appeasement. And then there is the spectacle of cozying up to leftist regimes (North Korea, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Russia) while true democracies (Israel, Columbia, Honduras to name three) have been snubbed and even bullied. There is also the on-going Presidential worldwide apology tour as a case in point. As I see things now I sure wouldn't want to go through something like the Cuban Missile Crisis with the current administration in charge.

Winter Wonder

2011-01-12T15:14:00.000-06:00

It just did hit 0º F this morning. That followed about six inches of snow and some really brisk winds the night before. Once again, the 8-HP snow thrower came in handy.

The dogs aren't used to this kind of weather. Their feet get cold and they lay down in the snow; then I have to run out and pick them up. By now they've learned, again, that you either pee or poop but not both on one outing when it's this cold.

Winter Wonderland my ass.

I want to move to Texas. Maybe between San Antonio and Austin.

Now, if I can just convince Wifey.

Happy Holidays

2010-11-10T14:07:00.004-06:00

All Saints Day, if you are a Roman Catholic, or All Hallows Day for some others occurred November 1st. Halloween (or Hallowe'en), also known as All Hallows' Even is the day before. Even though it is an ancient tradition it is still regarded as a holiday (holy day) in the parts of the world where it is celebrated. Like all of the other seasonal holidays it is full of symbolism; in the case of Halloween it is symbolic of the belief in an afterlife and the remembrance of those who have passed on to that new realm of existence.

All Hallows Day is significant in that it marks the mid-point of Autumn. There are three other mid-season "holidays," or quarter days , that also mark the middle of their respective seasons. For the Winter season it is Candlemass, observed on February 2. Like Hallowe'en, the ancient observation of Mid-Winter is one of darkness and the spirit world, but with the hope of rebirth and reincarnation attached to it. The next quarter day is May Day and is usually celebrated on May 1, at least in the Western World; it definitely is all about fertility and rebirth. The Germanic May Pole dance, carried out by young adults of course, pretty much says it all about the significance of May Day. I have been told that dancing around that pole is not the only partying that goes on. For Summer it is Lammas (at least in Scotland), observed on or around August 2. It is generally the time of first harvest and a time of plenty.

Then, of course there are the seasons themselves that are marked by significant positions of the Sun. The tropical year begins at the winter solstice, also known as Yule or Jul in ancient Germanic culture. The winter solstice marks the moment when the Sun's position in the sky is at its lowest point, as seen from the northern hemisphere. At winter solstice the Sun reaches 23½ degrees south latitude and is seen to be directly overhead at that point. That latitude has a name: The Tropic of Capricorn. The next season, naturally, is Spring, also known as the Vernal Equinox. At the Vernal Equinox and at its counter part six months later, the Autumnal Equinox, the Sun is directly over the Earth's equator.

There is no holiday directly associated with the Vernal Equinox, at least not in the Western World, but on the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical calendar it figures into the calculation for the date of the Easter celebration. In some cases, Easter does fall on the Vernal Equinox. The Summer Solstice marks the highest point in the sky for the Sun; it appears overhead for people living at 23½ degrees north latitude. That latitude has a name too: The Tropic of Cancer. Cancer in this sense refers to the constellation of Cancer the Crab, which is a summer constellation. That implies that Capricorn is a winter constellation, and it once was. However, because of the way Earth spins on its axis Capricorn now appears a few months before the Winter Solstice.

There are celebrations associated with the Summer Solstice in northern climes. Most notably, in places that have a Celtic heritage. There are bonfires, along with a lot of eating and drinking. Other northern cultures also recognize the start of summer, especially in Scandinavia with Walpurgisnacht. It is summer and it is party time -- but you have to keep those bonfires burning to keep the ghosts and spirits at bay. The Autumnal Equinox doesn't have much in the way of celebrations in most of the northern hemisphere -- unless, maybe you are a Druid.

And that brings us around to the start of the tropical year: The Winter Solstice. We all know what happens around that time of year. Lots of partying.

Okay. So what? For we descendants of northern Europeans, how about this: we modern cultures continue to follow traditions that are thousands of years old, but their original significance is lost on most of us. All of these seasonal observations date far back into time, beyond the Dark Ages in fact, to when there were no clocks to regulate the day. The position of the Sun in the sky and the phases of the Moon drove what was coming, what people should be doing, and what was going to happen next. People literally were in tune with nature; they knew from long observation that the Sun changed position in the sky, and, if they lived very far into the northern hemisphere, that there were warm times and cold times. They had to be constantly preparing for those cold times. When to plant, when to harvest, and when to prepare for the cold times was critical to survival. Those times are not that far in our past. The people who pioneered the western United States were constantly driven by the need to prepare for winter, even into the Twenty-First Century.

The phases of the Moon told the ancient people what was happening and what was going to happen next. The seasons were based on the Tropical Year, and each Full Moon had a name associated with its season.

Following the Winter Solstice, the Moon names are:

January -- Moon After Yule
February -- Wolf Moon
March -- Lenten Moon
April -- Egg (or Paschal) Moon
May -- Milk Moon
June -- Flower Moon
July -- Hay Moon
August -- Grain Moon
September -- Fruit Moon
October -- Harvest Moon
November -- Hunters Moon
December -- Moon Before Yule

Sometimes, however, nature played a little trick on those ancient people and threw an extra full Moon into the sequence. When that happened there would be four full Moons in a season rather than the usual three. That extra full Moon always occurred in May, August, November, or February and in the third week of those months (on the 20th, 21st, 22nd, or 23rd). Since that extra full Moon had to be dealt with, it was called the Blue Moon as a way to distinguish it from the traditional Moons.

The full Moon visible on November 2nd, 2009, is the Hunters Moon; the Moon Before Yule occurs December 2nd, and the Moon After Yule occurs on December 31st. That sets up the year 2010 to be a year of the Blue Moon, and it will occur on November 21st, 2010.

It doesn't happen often; just once in a Blue Moon.

Talos versus Barlock

2010-07-21T10:51:00.009-05:00

We EB -66 fliers had to be content to just make life difficult for the enemy; others, for example, the Wild Weasels, could take electronic warfare to the next level and actually reach out and touch someone. Others, I learned back in 1972, could also reach out and touch someone and they didn't have to get eyeball to eyeball with the bad guys the way the Wild Weasels did. This is the story about the US Navy light cruiser USS Oklahoma City, known as The Okie Boat by its crew, and a bit of electronic warfare its crew carried out in February 1972.

I happened to be working the Frag Shop at Korat one day in early February when a Top Secret message came across my desk. It was from the US Navy and I can't remember exactly where it came from. The gist of the message was to warn all flying units in Southeast Asia to stay well away from a particular set of coordinates in North Vietnam. The details of the message have long left my memory, but the general reasoning for the warning was that a Navy surface ship was going to attack a Barlock site with a Talos missile. In addition to the strike coordinates and designating an area to stay away from the message also gave a block of time the following day that would be the strike window.

Some background is in order for continuing with this story. US intelligence sources knew that the North Vietnamese air defense forces were working toward a network that allowed the various components to communicate directly with one another in order to make the job of tracking US aircraft easier and to make attacking US aircraft less predictable. We had been seeing the effects of the network since the previous autumn. On several occasions North Vietnamese SAMs and fighters made coordinated attacks on US aircraft and had downed at least a half dozen. In December of 1971 one of my friends in the 17th Wild Weasel Squadron attacked and destroyed one of the networked Barlock sites near the Gorilla's Head border area between Laos and North Vietnam. It turned out that the crew manning the Barlock site was not North Vietnamese. The networked Barlock sites were a major component to the network because their long range radars could track US aircraft and pass data to SAM sites that could lay in wait for unsuspecting crews that came within their kill rings. Any fixed Barlock sites had been long since destroyed; only mobile sites were able to operate with any degree of safety from US air attack.

So it was that one particularly elusive Barlock crew became the hunted in the electronic warfare scheme of things. The actual story comes from a now retired Naval Reserve officer by the name of Phil Hays. Hays was Nuclear/Special Weapons Officer aboard the USS Oklahoma City in February 1972. He was on watch as Weapons Control Officer on the February night that elusive Barlock site was attacked. Hays's story follows. I have taken the liberty to translate some of the Navy jargon.

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In the spring of 1971 the Oklahoma City executed an underway replenishment to take aboard the new, highly classified, RIM-8H anti-radiation version of the Talos. We conducted a test firing off Okinawa in March, 1971, to train the crew with the Anti-Radiation Missiles (ARMs).

In January 1972 the Oklahoma City steamed to the Gulf of Tonkin to rendezvous with the USS Chicago and do some "radar hunting." The USS Oklahoma City was 7th Fleet flagship, but we were assigned to a cruiser/destroyer squadron for this action. So, although we were carrying The Boss, we were under the command of the squadron commander who was on the USS Chicago. The Okie Boat was a light cruiser with a single end (stern) Talos missile battery. The Chicago was a heavy cruiser with double end Talos missile batteries (bow and stern).

We were sailing off the coast of North Vietnam one night in early February 1972 waiting for a chance to use the new missiles. It happened on my watch—the electronics warfare folks in Combat Information Center (CIC) detected emissions from a BARLOCK surveillance radar and the fun started. The EW watch provided continuous updates to the fire control team, watching for frequency changes that might interfere with the shot.

Of course, everyone wanted to be the first to use the new missiles. The squadron commander gave the first shot to his ship. The Chicago fired one missile and it self-destructed shortly after launch. I was told later that the data link antenna on the missile that maintained communication with the ship had not been lock wired in place, and it had fallen off in the ready service magazine due to vibration before the missile was launched. The Chicago fired a second missile and it failed. I don't know if a cause was ever determined.

Well, we were all a bit frustrated at this point. As I recall, our Captain sent the squadron commander a message asking if he would like us to show them how it should be done. We got the OK, fired one missile, and blew a 30 foot diameter hole where the radar van was sitting. However, at that moment we didn't know if we had hit the target. The Electronics Warfare people in CIC told us the radar signal had disappeared about the same time the missile arrived, but you can bet that if we had missed the radar operators would have noticed and shut down! However, the EW guys did hear a change in the signal just before it went silent. The next day our Weapons Department head, CDR Foreman, showed me aerial recon photos. The radar antennas were scattered all over Southeast Asia, and what remained of the van was lying on its side at the edge of the crater.

This was all classified Top Secret at the time, and our missile crews were told to keep quiet. Of course everyone aboard knew something was going on (missile shots were very noisy). I overheard one sailor say we had fired a nuclear warhead and he had seen the explosion! Such is scuttlebutt!

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The following is an account of activities by the electronic warfare specialist Doug Rasor, then a Radarman Second Class (RD2). Unlike the USAF at the time, Navy EWs were enlisted; Rasor was an E-5.

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I was on the Oklahoma City from Sept '70 - April '72. Turns out, I was on watch that night in the EW shack and was on the receiver that picked up the BARLOCK surveillance radar that the Vietnamese were using. I remember the incident pretty vividly; how long we'd trained to be able to pick up those threat emitters, determine the key characteristics so we could pass on just the kind of info that was used to program the TALOS that night. Some of the measurement gear was NOT part of a standard electronics package. A few OW-division buddies and I collaborated to put together a couple pieces of outboard 'off-the-shelf' test equipment (an audio signal generator and XY scope so we could accurately determine PRR frequencies of incoming signals). It was this set up that allowed us to pass on not one but three of the frequencies that BARLOCK was using that night. It was a Frequency Scanning (FRESCAN) radar to allow it to determine bearing/range AND approximate altitude.

I remember passing parameters on to the fire control folks continuously as the missile was being prepared for launch (Barlock radars were notorious for changing frequencies during operation). I remember feeling/hearing the launch—I continued to monitor the signal as the missile was in-flight. After a minute or so (I didn't have a stopwatch on it) I remember hearing a weird screeching—then the signal went silent. Apparently that was the precise moment of the impact/explosion that killed the radar.

I never saw the recon pictures of the site but heard that the launch was successful.

I got a Navy Achievement medal for the effort. It's a real source of pride for me to this day.

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Rasor had been told by his supervisor that MiGs were expected to be airborne that night and that when the MiGs were airborne the Barlocks would be on the air. The NVAF liked to come out at night when the moon was at or near full. Since they needed to be under radar control to intercept an aircraft and make an attack a moonlit night gave the MiG pilot the ability to see what was going on during the final phase before he launched his Atoll missiles. There was a full moon on 30 January 1972. Phil Hays says they made the Barlock kill in early February. That means the moon was still bright enough for the MiGs to be able to fly in the first few days of February 1972.

From the USAF side, I recall seeing a BDA report, classified Secret, the next day that essentially said that all indications showed the Barlock site destroyed. The US Navy had a better take on the subject. Again Phil Hays:

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We did get a recon flight the next day over the site—don't know if it was Navy or Air Force—but they took a great photo of the hole in the ground. There was no doubt that the missile scored a direct hit! Someday I hope to find some of the official reports and photos from that shot.
I have heard that the USS Chicago and the USS Long Beach also conducted Talos ARM shots against RVN radar sites later in 1972.

Hays continues:

We didn't get to fire at NVN aircraft very often. There were three long range (45-70 miles) Talos kills over NVN. The USS Long Beach bagged two MiGs in 1968, and the USS Chicago got one in May 1972. There were at least two MiGs downed by Terrier missiles at close range over the Gulf. The NVN kept track of our ships and when a Talos ship was off the coast they didn't give us much opportunity to fire at them. As soon as we illuminated them the MiGs dove for the ground. Our biggest problem was our "airdale" admirals. They really didn't want missile ships in the gulf. They believed that airplanes should be engaged by airplanes, and rarely approved a mission for a missile ship.

There was a mining operation in 1972 at Haiphong harbor. In that
operation the Navy planes were to stay below 500 feet all the way in and
back. Anything over 500 feet was fair game for our SAMs. I think that is
when the Chicago bagged her MiG.

*****************

Having been on the receiving end of a SAM launch, I can appreciate the concerns of the airdale admirals about having friendly missiles in the air. The aircrew is busy and really cannot tell whose missile that is burning up the sky in their vicinity. I guess you watch it for a few seconds: if it's racing across the sky it's not locked on to you; if there's no apparent motion and it just keeps getting bigger, you're the target. Hays comments on a Navy flight crew in the vicinity of a Talos missile.

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The Navy flyers really didn't like to be anywhere near a ship that was firing missiles, but there were a few times when missile ships engaged NVN aircraft while our planes were in the area. I heard from a Navy BARCAP pilot who saw a Talos passing overhead at Mach 2.5 and tried to catch it (he didn't know what it was at first). He and his wingman
witnessed the destruction of a MiG by the Talos.

Unlike most SAMs the Talos was powered by a ramjet rather than a rocket motor, although it was sent on its way by a rocket booster that got it into the flight regime where the ramjet operated. That made the missile difficult to see at night because there was no huge rocket motor plume. The Talos was unlike most SAMs in another way: it attacked from above. The missile would climb to 70,000 feet and then dive on its target. That capability was used to attack the Barlock site.

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As I was having my e-mail conversations with Hays, several disjoint facts and events suddenly came together and made sense. The following is informed speculation on my part.

The MiGs had become aggressive in the early months of 1972. There were several night attacks against US aircraft; the one that sticks in my mind is an attack against a B-52 cell that was dropping on Mu Gia Pass in the wee hours of one moonlit morning. The MiG pilot blew his chance and fired his Atoll missiles too early before diving for the treetops. The missiles exploded between two of the B-52s in the cell. That general aggressiveness, coupled with the fact that North Vietnamese air defenses were becoming increasingly networked made things more dicey than usual.

That air defense network could control SA-2s and MiGs and made setting up ambushes an easier thing to do. And then there is a discovery I made just recently from members of the Misty FAC community who did a return to Vietnam in 2000. The North Vietnamese had built a primitive runway between Mu Gia Pass and the DMZ from which MiGs could operate. It was about 8000 feet long and made to look like part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail roadway. The Misty pilots who saw it and paced it off said that no American fighter could have used it – except for a Harrier. It was put into use in 1971 – 1972.

From at least December 1971 a buildup of NVA military hardware had been observed in Route Pack One. The buildup included tanks, heavy artillery, and lots of ammunition. It was pretty clear that another invasion of South Vietnam was being prepared. It is also the case that the Tet New Year occurred on 15 February 1972. It seems pretty clear to me that the North Vietnamese leadership was planning a Tet '72. However, General John Lavelle, 7th Air Force Commander in Saigon, ordered a series of strikes against the buildup in January 1972. The strikes put the NVA timetable off enough so that it could not kick off a Tet offensive. Lavelle's actions got him fired, allegedly because he violated policy about striking targets in North Vietnam.

As we were to learn when the NVA invasion did begin around Easter 1972, they came prepared to give their ground forces some cover from attacking US aircraft. About a week before Easter I recall receiving an intelligence briefing that photo recce sorties had discovered a number of abandoned SA-2 missile sites in North Vietnam. All the equipment associated with those sites seemingly disappeared and could not be accounted for. We found out what happened to all that equipment when the Easter Offensive began: the missing SA-2s had been taken south to give air cover to the invading ground forces.

It appears that the planned air cover also included MiGs being controlled by a mobile and networked Barlock site somewhere in central North Vietnam west of Vinh. The crew of the USS Oklahoma City engaged that Barlock site and essentially took MiG air cover out of the invasion plan. I have to wonder how the Easter invasion would have gone if the NVA had both SAMS and MiGs giving their ground forces cover.

V-E Day

2010-05-07T22:41:00.000-05:00

Even though I was five years old (actually about half way to my sixth birthday) I have a recollection of V-E Day, that is, Victory in Europe Day: The day Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered to allied forces.

May 8th is the sixty-fifth anniversary of V-E Day. Without having known all out war, young people today cannot begin to appreciate the feeling of relief and jubilation at the fact of Nazi Germany's surrender. As best I recall, it was a fairly warm day in May, and when the news broke it was some time in the afternoon of a sunny day. As best I recall, church bells started ringing; the bell in the dome of the county courthouse, maybe ten blocks north of where we lived, started chiming. Normally, the bell was part of the clock housed in the dome and chimed the hour (and maybe the quarter and half hour too). We could hear car horns blaring. The steam whistle in the shop at the railroad repair yards to the northwest of us started tooting. It went on and on.

I suppose my mother, or maybe one of the neighbor women, heard the news on the radio. For some reason they decided to go to the town square, where the courthouse was, to see what was going on. I recall Mom gathering up my brother and me; we caught the bus and rode the several blocks down to the square. The sidewalks and streets were full of people and cars. There was cheering. I recall that the bus doors opened and I got off, expecting Mom and my brother to follow. They didn't and I quickly got back on the bus. I don't recall where we ended up going. Maybe we went to my grandparents' apartment, several blocks to the northwest of the downtown square. I don't remember.

The things I do remember are the joy and general excitement at the news that the war—at least one part of—finally was over.

Spring Has Finally Sprung

2010-04-17T11:05:00.000-05:00

For the past two years, at least, we've been given a unmistakable sign that Spring has truly arrived: Cedar Waxwings. Last year I first noticed a flock of them in our bald cypress picking seeds out of the cones that the tree had produced in abundance the autumn before. Then the apple tree bloomed around mid-April. The Waxwings were back in force and feasted on apple blossoms for days until the fruit set. Then they were gone.

There was no bumper crop from the bald cypress this year, but the apple tree has done its thing again, and the Cedar Waxwings are back. This time I caught them—in good light—with a 300mm zoom lens.

Cedar Waxwings are kind of mysterious. They move in small flocks and you seldom see them unless there is food to eat.

I know next to nothing about these birds, except from what I've seen of them in the Spring the past couple of years. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has interesting facts that fills in my knowledge. They migrate in winter, unlike the American Robins who usually just bunch up in heavy cover in our neighborhood and sit out the winter making do with whatever berries they can find. I saw my first robin in February, when we still had three feet of snow on the ground.

The Authoritarian Gene

2010-03-20T22:46:00.000-05:00

The antics of Congressional Democrats these many recent weeks has driven home an unforgettable lesson: Democrats simply prefer to rule by diktat rather than be representatives of their constituents. Among the many soulless Democrats, Senator Ben Nelson proved that to his constituents when he sold out for the so-called "Cornhusker Kickback," which probably will disappear in Democrat sausage making yet to come. The devious scheming that is going on the in the other house of Congress underscores the authoritarian nature of the Democrat psyche on an almost hourly basis.

Charles Krauthammer recently said something I observed quite some time ago: We Americans are not like the Europeans from whom we are descended, and for a very good reason. The European immigrants, and all the other immigrants to the USA, are the restless ones; the people who wanted a better life and want to take advantage of the uniqueness of the USA. The Europeans who stayed behind were the ones who stoically endured what their masters imposed on them. They are socialist/communist as much by breeding as by culture. We Americans are self-selected to be more independent minded and treasure our individual freedom. Unfortunately, over time the "authoritarian gene" has expressed itself as what we see taking place in Congress right now.

Having been given this close up view of how Democrats view government and the constituency, it is crystal clear that Democrats still are not fit to govern. Democrats probably never will be fit to govern.

Max Meets IT

2010-02-11T10:36:00.004-06:00

The KC-135A was a work horse in Southeast Asia, just as its upgraded version is in the current wars that plague the Middle East.

I don't know about living conditions in the Middle East, but conditions in Southeast Asia were nothing to write home about. Snakes and bugs abounded, and the heat humidity were oppressive. I can remember seeing cabin temperatures of 140° Fahrenheit prior to takeoff. Needless to say, the aircraft were left open as much as possible to dissipate the heat, but it also was an invitation to rats, cats, bats and whatever other fauna that could find its way aboard. It also lead to more than one tanker departing with the over wing hatches still lying on the cargo deck. The aircraft doesn't pressurize very well in that configuration, and installing a hatch in flight, we found out, was an invitation to dropping it – or maybe yourself – out of the aircraft. The following incident began on the takeoff roll departing Takhli RTAFB.

Late in the takeoff roll, Max, the navigator, felt something hit him on top of the head. Since there was storage cabinet just above his head, he thought the cabinet door had popped open, and he reached up to close it. He discovered that it was already closed. For three or four seconds, Max wondered what had hit him on the head; then he felt something doing a many-legged soft shoe number on the top of his head. Instinctively, he swung at IT and knocked IT on a tumbling trajectory toward the boom operator. IT landed in the boomer's lap. Now, the boomer had an unpleasant experience several years earlier at Takhli, when he had to bail out of a burning KB-50. He had to spend some time in the Thai rain forest before being picked up by SAR; he had not been on friendly terms with insect life ever since. IT landed in his lap and leered up at him with two bulging many-lensed eyes. The boomer wanted no part of IT and frantically gave IT a slap shot which sent IT tumbling tail over teacup toward the pilots. IT landed on the control pedestal; in fact, IT landed smack on the rudder trim knob.

IT was the biggest praying mantis anyone either side of the International Dateline had ever seen. Descriptions of IT, given later, left you with the impression of IT being big enough to rip a man's arm off – well, maybe a finger. IT was hunkered down of the rudder trim knob, with those vicious-looking forelegs tucked under its chin, and alternately eyeing each pilot with those huge goggley eyes. The pilots were scrunched in their seats as far away from IT as their lap belts and shoulder harnesses would allow them to scrunch. "Get that damned thing out of here!" the pilot bellowed.

Gingerly, Max reached forward with a gloved hand and grabbed IT from behind. So grabbed, IT could not struggle. Max then unstrapped and took IT up to the sextant port and held IT up to the opening where the sextant normally fits. With a deft flick of the wrist, Max opened the sextant port, and cabin pressure neatly popped IT out into a 300 knot slip stream.

With that bit of excitement behind them, the crew went off to war.

Rocket Ride

2010-02-08T22:17:00.006-06:00

Most of us are never going to get the chance to go into space, much less get near something that is capable of taking us there. Even if you are tight with the Rutan brothers your chances of going to the edge of space are pretty slim. There is, however, an alternative that will at least give you the sensation of going into space. No, it is not a rollercoaster or anything like that. It is located at an amusement park, of sorts: Epcot Center at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

There is a "ride" there called Mission: SPACE. It is a very convincing simulation of a space shuttle launch -- at least the first couple of minutes of the launch. I read a review about the ride before I actually experienced it. The review was written by a shuttle astronaut, and his description of the accuracy of the experience was the most interesting part for me.

There were six of us the day we visited Epcot and we made a beeline for the Mission: SPACE ride. The first thing we saw was a bit confusing: the signs talked about a "spinning" and a "no spinning" option. Wife was leery about things involving spinning since she inherited her mother's tendency for motion sickness. She and our daughter decided they would go the "no spinning" route. Son-in-law, the granddaughters, and I decided to GO FOR IT. Spinning it would be, whatever that was.

I kind of had a notion what "spinning" was going to be just from the astronaut's review of the ride. I was right. After you walk through the inevitable Disney maze just to get to the ride you are confronted with a three-seat cylinder with an instrument panel of sorts you sit in front of. The two granddaughters and I entered a cylinder and pulled the horse collar restraints down over our heads; then the door of the cylinder slid shut. There is a video display in front of you and Gary Sinise is there explaining to you that this is a simulator run and what will happen. So far, so good. A minute or so into the experience your video shows some clamshell doors opening and your space craft starts being erected to a vertical position. You feel a bit of lurching and rumbling, which turns out to be the initial spin-up of the centrifuge you are sitting in. As your eyes tell you that the space craft if now vertical, the centrifuge has you spun up to one transverse 'g,' that is, you feel as if you are lying on your back. On your video monitor you see blue sky and clouds; there is even a sea gull flying overhead. All of this is background to a countdown to launch. The visual and kinetic senses reinforce each other.

At engine start there is more lurching and rumbling; the centrifuge is beginning to spin up to as much as 2.4 g. The video shows you that your solid rocket boosters have fired and you can see that you are rising through the clouds. The g-forces quickly increase. Being an old aviator, I can vouch for the authenticity of the sensation. You are called on to perform some simple tasks such as flipping switches and pushing buttons. It turns out to be a challenge under the force of 2+ transverse 'g's. Your video shows you quickly leaving the atmosphere and heading for the Moon. Once the boost phase is over you are reduced to one-g acceleration; it briefly feels as if you are in micro-gravity. After that it gets a bit hokey, but by the end of the five minute, or so, ride you've gone from standing still on Earth to coming to a screeching halt on Mars.

We did the ride several times and the sensation didn't get old; and Wife did the ride under 'g' forces and didn't get sick. I did notice that some people really do experience motion sickness on the ride: One time we had to walk around a puddle of vomit upon leaving.

The Godfather: Chicago Style

2009-12-17T13:06:00.003-06:00

Even though Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) denies the rumor, the claim that the White House, specifically, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, threatened to put Offutt AFB on the BRAC list (Base Realignment And Closing) is certainly plausible. It also illustrates the profound ignorance of the people now in charge of the Executive Branch.

Consider the importance of Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. It is home to Strategic Command (STRATCOM). StratCom is the heir to many of the responsibilities of Strategic Air Command (SAC) had when is stood down in 1992. In addition, it has other missions and responsibilities world-wide. This is not some run-of-the-mill organization. One of the functions of StratCom is to serve as an alternate command center. The function was carried out on September 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush flew to Offutt AFB to use the command control facilities at the StratCom command center. In addition, the 55th Wing is stationed at Offutt; it has responsibilities world-wide too. While the main contingent of aircraft assigned to Offutt is some version of the RC-135, the E-4B is also present and flown by the 1st Airborne Command Control Squadron (1 ACCS). Not only that, the Navy E-6B Mercury is a regular visitor to Offutt AFB, and for good reason. You can go to the link to see for yourself the mission of that aircraft.

Then there is the physical location of Offutt Air Force Base. Sitting at nearly the mid-continental United States, it is as far away from a potential ICBM or SLBM threat as you can get.

To support all of that activity, the infrastructure at Offutt is, if not unique, a rarity among Air Force bases.

To close Offutt you would need to find a home for the diverse missions that are located there. In addition, you would have to replicate the infrastructure that supports the base. Finally, it is not possible to locate all of those missions to another mid-continent site because there is none.

And then there is the BRAC process itself. BRAC is a creation of Congress. Congress acts on recommendations from the Executive Branch and is the ultimate decider of what is to remain open and what is to be closed. Many bases that were on the 2005 closure list remain open. It is difficult to envision a Congress so reckless as to run up the financial and political costs necessary to close Offutt.

Threatening to close Offutt Air Force Base illustrates either profound ignorance or an excess of chutzpah.

A Day That Will Live in Infamy

2009-12-07T11:47:00.003-06:00

Like the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington Cemetery, the Memorial to the Battleship Arizona is one of those places you should visit if you can. Many years ago I saw it the first time when I was passing through Hickam AFB on my way to duty in the Western Pacific. Back then the US Navy ran the whole show. There was a pilot boat that could take a small number of visitors out to the Memorial. Even though all of us were active military the sailors who took us out stressed that this was a tomb and a solemn place. Reverence was in order.

Nowadays the shore facility is run by the National Park Service and is a quite elaborate pavilion with memorabilia from the USS Arizona, along with several displays and dioramas depicting the scenes of that day, now sixty-eight years ago. Just before you are taken out to the Memorial, now on a much larger boat than I rode out on the first time I saw it, you are shown a fifteen minute video explanation of the events that lead up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and other military bases on Oahu. Then you are taken out to the Memorial.

While the National Park Service runs the on-shore part of the Memorial, the US Navy still owns Pearl Harbor, and it is a Navy operated boat that shuttles visitors to and from the Memorial. They still stress that this is a tomb and a solemn place, but the reverence is not what it once was, especially among the numerous Japanese visitors to the site. The sailors who run the boat shuttle do what they can to maintain decorum, and the tone among visitors is generally subdued and reverent.

The Memorial spans the USS Arizona at about where the bridge once was. There are the remains of the 16" gun turrets at or just above the water line on either side of the Memorial. Looking down into the water on just about any day, you can see globs of bunker oil from the ship still slowly oozing to the surface. It is feared that some day, when the ship has decayed enough, whatever fuel remains inside the ship will spill into Pearl Harbor.

At the far end of the Memorial is a shrine, literally, to the men who died on the Arizona. Their names are carved on white marble slabs that line the far end of the chapel. A low marble railing separates visitors from the slabs themselves, unlike the Vietnam Memorial where visitors can walk up and touch the slabs. In the tradition of Hawaii, there are many leis left as a kind of personal offering to those who are entombed there. If you look carefully at the names on those slabs you can get a glimpse of the scope of the tragedy some families endured that day. Back then it was Navy custom to allow family members to serve on the same ship simultaneously, so you see a list of brothers, and sometimes, fathers and sons, who went down with the USS Arizona.

There is even a tradition, if you will, that the survivors of the Arizona's death that day can be buried with their ship mates when their days are done. Their cremated remains are lowered into the hulk.

In recent years another ship that played a large part in the Pacific War now sits at anchor in Pearl Harbor. It is the USS Missouri. When you look out from the on shore pavilion it is almost as if the Mighty Mo is standing sentry over the Memorial. The Missouri is operated as a museum by a private foundation. Lots of retired US Navy and retired military people from other services volunteer to work there and support the visitor traffic that pass through that ship. Access to it is from Ford Island, and that is US Navy property. There still are sensitive things going on around there, so the Navy is sensitive about people shooting pictures of anything and everything in the area. Still, it's hard to miss something like an attack boat that is headed out to sea.

In 2004 we took our daughter and her family with us on a winter visit to Hawaii. We made sure that visiting the Arizona Memorial was on the list of things to do. The two granddaughters were not yet teenagers, but they took in everything about the Memorial. Looking at the dioramas and models, the youngest granddaughter, especially, had lots of questions. We went through the pavilion, saw the fifteen minute video, went out to the Memorial, and returned to shore. As we were walking off the boat youngest granddaughter told me that she didn't like those nasty Japanese. I told her that all those events took place a long time ago and that things were different now. Then I took her over to where we could see the Memorial and the Mighty Mo together. I told her that in another day or so we were going to take a trip out that big gray ship out there and she was going to see where Imperial Japan surrendered, ending World War II.

The Day the Queen Came to Town

2009-10-20T19:58:00.002-05:00

It was twenty-five years ago. I was on my last assignment of active duty at Offutt AFB, Nebraska. On a day in September, one of the security people from Headquarters Strategic Air Command called a meeting with several of us base support folks; only base security and airfield management were invited. When the meeting started a civilian stood next to the security officer. The civilian turned out to be a member of the Secret Service.

We were informed that Queen Elizabeth II, monarch of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland (at least the six northern counties) would be passing through in a few week's time. Her transportation, a Vickers VC-10 operated by the Royal Air Force, would need refueling. It turned out that the Queen would be coming from Sheridan, Wyoming, where she was visiting her racing manager (horse racing, that is) in Buffalo, Wyoming.

It turns out that Queen Elizabeth was on an unofficial tour of the United States. She was to visit Kentucky and Wyoming because she had horse racing interests in both states. The Wyoming visit was especially significant. Her hosts, Lord and Lady Porchester, were descended from British citizens who had settled in Wyoming in the 19th Century. Lady Porchester, although American born, was a granddaughter of Oliver Wallop, an Englishman and early investor in Wyoming cattle and horse ranching. Lady Porchester's brother was US senator from Wyoming, Malcom Wallop. We didn't know any of those details at that point. All we knew was that the Queen wanted her refueling stop at Offutt AFB to be as low-key as possible.

The VC-10 had to land at Offutt for refueling because the runway at Sheridan, Wyoming, which was as close as the RAF could get the Queen to her Wyoming hosts, was too short for the aircraft to take on sufficient fuel for a non-stop flight to London. The longest runway at Sheridan is 8300 feet, and the airport altitude is 4021 feet above sea level.

Initially, the plan was for the Queen and her party to deplane and wait in the VIP lounge in the Base Operations building at Offutt. To do that and insure adequate security, we were going to have to evacuate everyone who wasn't critical to the Queen's security or the refueling of her aircraft. That included a US Navy personnel office; a SAC airlift operation; a MAC airlift operation; and almost all other base operations folks, other than the on-duty dispatchers. Now the VIP lounge was okay for generals and the odd politician passing through, but this was the Queen of England. General Bennie Davis, who at the time was Commander-in-Chief, Strategic Air Command (CINCSAC), vetoed the VIP lounge as the place where the Queen would while away the hour or so it would take to refuel her aircraft and continue on to London.

General Davis had a point in nixing the VIP lounge idea. There had been a recent flair up of trouble with the IRA; they had bombed several locations in/around London. Besides that, there were Irish sympathizers on both sides of the Atlantic -- even around Omaha, Nebraska. I didn't know that detail at that moment in time, but I would meet some of the more rabid neo-Irishmen just a few years later. I was told that some of them gave active support to NorAid, a front group that funded the IRA. I suppose that the AFOSI (the Air Force equivalent of the Navy's NCIS) briefed General Davis on the local IRA supporters, some of whom were Irish-born. In any case, General Davis intended to host the Queen in the inner sanctum of the SAC Headquarters building, Building 500. In Building 500, she would be safe from anything the IRA might be tempted to try. We still had to evacuate the Base Operations building, however, because it was right on the route the Queen would take to/from Building 500.

After General Davis decreed that the Queen would await her aircraft's refueling at SAC Headquarters, the rest was pretty easy. Without explaining too much of the why, I went around to all the tenants and told them that on 17 October they would have to leave the Base Operations building at a certain time in the afternoon. I just told them it was a security issue. No one seemed to mind that they would get the afternoon off.

As the day approached we were told that we could inform all of the tenants of the Base Operations building the reason why they would be required to leave. They were also told where to stand to get a look at a real live monarch. Everybody was okay with that. There was no sign that the neo-Irish had taken any offense by the revelation that their hated enemy would be on Offutt Air Force Base for an hour or so.

The day of her arrival, we were given a detailed time table of what would happen and when. Having been assigned to RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, England, prior to coming to Offutt, I was passingly familiar with how things worked when the Royals were traveling. Some of the RAF I worked with told me that everything was planned down to the minute. In addition, similar to security for Air Force One, all Royal Flights had the airspace around them for several miles cleared of other aircraft. Now that Queen Elizabeth II was about to land at Offutt I was going to get a demonstration of what they meant. The first item on the time table was that the Queen's VC-10 would land at a specific time. Okay, I thought, let's see how they pull that off.

Prior to the Queen's arrival my Airfield Manager and I were giving the runway and taxiways a once over, just to make sure the everything was in good order. Then we waited. Ten minutes prior to the scheduled VC-10 touchdown time, a VC-10 appeared approaching Offutt's Runway 12, that is, it was approaching from the northwest. As the aircraft passed over mid-field, the pilot executed a tear-drop approach. It was clear that the way they landed exactly at the time planned was to arrive early and do a precise timing maneuver to put them at touchdown when they wanted to be there. Sure enough, the VC-10 flew a tear-drop maneuver and landed within thirty seconds of the planned time.

In addition to the touchdown time there was a precise time for the aircraft to come to a halt, for the exit door to open, for the Queen to depart the aircraft, and on and on. Someone must have spent more than a little time working out a moment-by-moment time table for this stopover of and little more than an hour.

The VC-10 came to a stop at the planned parking spot and began the engine shutdown procedure. I could see that this one bore the name of Captain Albert Ball, VC. Ball had been a Royal Flying Corps war hero during the Great War, as the British call WWI. He died not at the hands of a German pilot but because he flew into a thunder shower and lost control of his S.E.5a.

Sure enough, the exit door opened exactly at the time given, a passenger debarking ramp was rolled up. Exactly at the time given on the time table, Queen Elizabeth II appeared at the exit door and stepped onto the ramp. General and Mrs. Davis waited at the foot of the ramp. The Queen descended the ramp, was greeted by General and Mrs. Davis, presented with a bouquet, and was whisked off to SAC Headquarters.

Since the Queen wanted this stopover to be low key, there was no brass band, and the color guard was the regular SAC security forces in their every day uniform. It turned out, however, that every member of the RAF cadre at Offutt was given the afternoon off for this event; their families were present too. As the Queen's motorcade departed the flight line there was a cheering throng, each waving a Union Jack. There was more to this planned stopover than we knew of. In any case, Queen Elizabeth II of England, and General Bennie Davis had high tea at SAC Headquarters while the worker bees set about putting enough fuel on her VC-10 to get her safely to England.

Refueling that VC-10 turned out to be trickier than everyone thought. A fuel truck was waiting in the wings, so to speak, and rolled up moments after the greeting party left for SAC Headquarters. The refueling equipment was quickly connected to the aircraft and fueling began. It was going much more slowly than expected. The RAF crew refused to let our ground support people anywhere near the fuel panel on the VC-10; they were going to do it their way. At one point the chief of Offutt Transient Maintenance came up to us and briefed us on the slow pace of the RAF crew and their rejection of any assistance in getting the Queen's aircraft refueled. To make matters worse, the RAF crew's fuel management wasn't the best in the world; several times jet fuel vented from the VC-10 wing vents. Great, now fire trucks would have to wash down the fuel spill before the Queen boarded her aircraft.

Time was running out; there was just a few minutes left before the Queen and her escorts would return. We knew that there was no slack in the timing so everything was going to have to go perfectly to get the show back on the road. Finally, the RAF crew was satisfied with the fuel load. The fuel truck quickly packed up and left, and the fire truck moved in to wash down the fuel spill. With just seconds to spare, the fire truck moved off as the Queen and her escorts returned to the aircraft.

Everything else went smoothly, and in short order the Queen had reboarded her VC-10, it was made ready for flight, and taxied to the active runway. The VC-10 made its takeoff roll and soon disappeared heading out in a northeasterly direction.

As a post script, I should mention that as part of the security arrangements, local news reporters, especially TV news, were not allowed on Offutt to cover the visit of Queen Eliazbeth II. That irked them no end; the best they could do was park their trucks on the approach end of Runway 12 to catch some footage of the VC-10 as it made its approach to Offutt. The TV news ran that footage, along with a little verbal lament on the Friday evening news broadcast.

The Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-09T12:07:00.003-05:00

The sages of the Nobel Peace Prize have awarded Barak Obama the Peace Prize for 2009 for, I guess, getting himself elected President of the United States of America. Wonder what prize he will get if he actually succeeds in fulfilling his agenda of change.

I'm waiting for the day when someone rejects the prize because that groups them with the likes of Yasser Arafat, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter.

I'll probably have to wait a long time since narcissism seems to be a criterion for selection.

11 September 2001

2009-09-08T17:10:00.015-05:00

The day started out like any other for me. I got up, had my morning coffee, started my computer, and went about seeing what had happened in the world over night. Just one small problem: I couldn't connect with any of my favorite sites which, eight years ago, included the MSNBC web site. I tried other sites; no luck. I tried any site; still no luck. I kept reloading the MSNBC site and finally got a message that said something to the effect that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. I ran downstairs, turned on the TV, and went to the local NBC channel. Tom Brokaw was in the midst of informing his audience that both towers of the World Trade Center had been struck by large aircraft; the clip of the second aircraft to strike was being run over and over.

Shock. What the hell was going on? As the morning progressed more news came in. The Pentagon had been struck by a large aircraft; United flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania. All aircraft in US airspace were being directed to land; those that had not yet entered US airspace were being diverted to other countries. I heard the term "Air Defense Emergency" being announced. That probably didn't mean much to civilians, but having been in command and control in the Air Force, it meant one thing me: WAR. It was the only time I have ever heard that declared in real life. Again, what the hell was going on? More announcements: President Bush was on Air Force One and had landed at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. Another announcement: Air Force One had departed Barksdale; destination unknown. By that time my wife was up and was watching with the same disbelief that I felt. I finally had enough of the constant reiteration of known events; they were filling time until the next new thing was announced. I went outside into our back yard.

I hadn't been there long when I heard a large aircraft approaching Offutt Air Force Base. I looked out to the north, toward the approach path to Offutt. It was Air Force One on final approach; there was an F-16 flying escort. At some point I heard the F-16 execute a missed approach and then come around and land. So the President was at Offutt. I was now ahead of the TV news people; I came inside to tell my wife. Not long after that the talking head (Brokaw, I think) announced that President Bush had landed at Offutt Air Force Base.

After a little thought,it became clear why the President had landed at Offutt: as an alternate military command center, Offutt had all the secure communications needed for a presidential briefing. President Bush must be in the StratCom underground command post getting a briefing on events that had occurred and what plans there were to do something about it.

Editor's Note: Critics of the Bush Administration would later claim that "Bush was cowering in a bunker" when the country needed him, but that was just another cheap shot by a political party whose reputation for things like that dates back to before the Civil War.

I later confirmed that the President did indeed go to the StratCom command post for a briefing from someone, probably all the key cabinet members, and probably at the National Military Command Center near the Pentagon. Someone at Offutt snapped a picture of Air Force One sitting "hot alert," engines running, hooked up to a ground communications network. I have a copy of that image, along with a short description of the circumstances.

The rest of the day was spent filling more time with announcements as more information came in about United 93, that this was a hijacking by muslims, who some of the hijacker's were, and a myriad of details I have long since forgotten. It was announced that all flights inside the US had safely landed. Outside that was pretty obvious. Even military flights, except for air defense sorties, were grounded. I recall some talking head in/around the New York City area talking in an outdoor setting when the sound of a jet fighter penetrated his commentary. The young man actually ducked and wondered aloud whether "it was one of ours." Did he actually think that a bunch of hijackers who had committed suicide and murder also had their own air force? Even my daughter, who, being an Air Force brat, should have known better, was uneasy by the sound of jet fighters flying around the Detroit area.

We watched along with everyone else as the twin towers collapsed in a huge cloud of dust and debris. After that it seemed like most of the imagery was of the smoking holes where the World Trade Center had stood that morning.

Toward evening we decided to go out and eat; neither one of us felt like cooking. As we drove to a nearby Thai restaurant we were amazed to see cars lined up at all the gas stations waiting to fill up their tanks. What were those people thinking of? Did they think that there would be no gasoline to be had the next day? Did they think were being invaded by screaming muslim hoards? How far did they think a tank of gas was actually going to get them? Where were they going to go anyway? It was an amazing sight.

At the Thai restaurant, the owner had the TV on an international news channel, but it carried the same image of the smoking hole where the twin towers had stood, just like all other news outlets. The Thai owner was in shock; he couldn't believe that such a thing had happened in the United States of America. He and his family were fairly new immigrants and they had come to the US to escape Thailand's economic collapse. I suspect he felt as if his world was coming to an end.

For the next three days, if I recall correctly, all flights in US airspace were grounded, except for air defense flights. There were armed fighters flying over New York City and Washington DC, at least. It was unusually quiet in our neighborhood. The training sorties that Offutt Air Force Base flew most days were grounded too. The airlines were busy inspecting their aircraft, trying to assess the potential for other aborted takeovers and making sure their aircraft were safe to fly. I heard that there was at least some evidence that other flights had been targeted.

Not long after 9-11 I received a rather odd e-mail message from someone who appeared to be in Oregon; he had a name that suggested someone from the Middle East. He had seen an on-line article I had written several years before. He wanted to know if I could teach him how to fly. I forwarded that message to the Omaha office of the FBI. The FBI never acknowledged receipt of that message, but some time later I heard on the evening news that a muslim militant group had been broken up in Oregon.

Rewriting History

2009-07-28T10:01:00.008-05:00

Barak Obama has, once again, shown himself to be devoid of any sense of American history. A few days ago I saw him in an interview proclaiming that victory in Afghanistan would evoke the scene of Emperor Hirohito coming on board the USS Missouri to surrender to General Douglas McArthur at the end of World War II. You can watch a short clip of that interview here.

Obama's claim notwithstanding, Hirohito did not come aboard the USS Missouri that day in September, 1945, and he signed nothing in the presence of McArthur or any other westerner. His emissaries did the signing. This is just one more example of Obama's grasp of history in general and American history in particular. Not many weeks back Obama put words into the mouth of Winston Churchill, claiming that the British did not torture -- even as civilian targets in London were being reduced to rubble. Churchill said nothing of the kind. However, the Colonel Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens, commander of Camp 020, did have such a policy. The story of "Tin Eye" Stephens is an interesting one in its own right and can be read here. Winston Churchill did not dictate, or even adopt, "Tin Eye" Stephens's policy. That was a convenient bit of political fabrication by Barak Obama. The author of the article that inspired Obama's fabrication can be found here. By the way, The Times of London is one of the few British newspapers I'm inclined to trust.

In a larger sense, Obama's weak grasp of history, if that is what it really is, is a reflection of the public education system in the United States. While the Obama administration makes daily headlines by grabbing power and property from the private sector, his plans for public education are more opaque but much more disturbing, if you are paying attention. The public education system has been failing for years; it shows in test scores over a span of thirty years and more. And who hasn't seen a segment out of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking?" If the claims I have read are correct, the show's producer never had to do much culling to get what you saw on TV.

In my own experience, the quality of public school teachers, at least, is declining. I taught in the College of Business Administration at a university for about ten years, starting around 1991. The courses I taught were cross-listed; that means that students with majors other than the business majors could enroll. We weren't doing any mathematical analysis beyond high school algebra -- and we were doing it on a financial calculator. Over the decade I taught those courses I noticed a trend. The engineering majors, actuarial science majors, and some business majors, tended to cluster in the higher levels of achievement for the courses. The majority of the business majors clustered in the middle. The education majors, journalism majors, and psychology majors tended toward the lowest levels of achievement. Since it happened over some ten years I don't think it was a statistical fluke. From what I have seen since, the trend continues. Science teachers that don't know science; history teachers that don't know history; the list goes on.

As I see it, a large problem is that the education system is no longer focused on education; it is for indoctrination. You see that with the doctrine of Political Correctness that appears almost everywhere nowadays, especially in public schools. One proponent of indoctrination over education is Bill Ayers. Yes, it's the very same Bill Ayers who was in a lead position in the domestic terror group the Weathermen. Yes, it's the same terrorists group who planted bombs at various government and university sites, mainly in the early 1970s. Here's a list of some of their mayhem. Sol Stern has the goods on Ayers and his ilk. Stern reports on the activities of Professor Bill Ayers and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) here. My own experience and observations tell me that Sol Stern knows of what he speaks. The insiders in the "education system" are intent on subverting it with their "social justice" agenda. It is indoctrination rather than education and it is being taught in teachers colleges throughout the United States. An example of that flared up last October when it became known that Bill Ayers was invited to speak to the Teachers College at University of Nebraska - Lincoln.

Editor's Note: it used to be called the Teachers College, but now they have inflated their claim to fame by calling it the College of Education and Human Sciences. Yeah, right.

A strong outcry over the speaking invitation to Bill Ayers ensued and the heat just became too intense; the college had to "disinvite" him. The apologists for the college claimed that it was an honest error in judgement to invite Ayers. Much more likely is that the error in judgement was expecting that no one would notice or care who was speaking and what his agenda is. I suspect that the faculty of the "College of Education and Human Sciences" is already largely in the Ayers camp and this was going to be a friendly exchange of ideas. In any case, Ayers did get a final say last November in the Omaha World-Herald; they printed his claims that "it is the duty of scholars to challenge dogma." Unfortunately, a link the the World-Herald piece no longer exists, but you can read a copy of the op-ed piece here. In fact, it is Ayers who is the dogmatist and his dogma is the leftist-communist dogma that many were subjected to for decades and ultimately rejected.

Which brings us back around to the issue of rewriting history. The young are gullible by nature; some never outgrow the tendency. I saw it in myself; I saw it in my children and grandchildren; I saw it when I taught at UNL. Even college students will faithfully write down whatever the professor is saying, almost always without a word of challenge, regardless of whether what the professor is saying is factual or not. It is easy to corrupt the young with a false history that the likes of AERA put forth with their "social justice" agenda and more. Once the real history of America is lost to its citizens it will be easy to corrupt all of society and turn it away from the freedoms we have enjoyed for over two hundred years.

If we don't stop the corruption of the education system in general, and the public education system in particular, it will be too late. When those with a false history grow up and become a majority the battle will pretty much be lost. The revisionists will have won because once people have been indoctrinated with a false history it is hard to undo it. After all, they learned it in school and a president of the United States said it. It must be true.

Apollo 11

2009-07-16T12:09:00.002-05:00

Most people of a certain age recall where they were and what they were doing when especially memorable events took place, for example, the attack on Pearl Harbor, V-E Day, V-J Day, JFK's assassination, the launch of Apollo 11.

The where and what of the Apollo 11 launch remains clear to me because on that day I finished a three month tour of duty in Thailand supporting fighter strikes against North Vietnam. Our flight and ground crew, plus some passengers, departed U-Tapao Royal Thai Air Base, which is south-southeast of Bangkok about 80 miles, as the KC-135 flies. We were headed for Kadena Air Base, Okinawa on the first leg of our trip back to Ramey AFB, Puerto Rico. While we launched in the early morning darkness on 17 July it was still daylight on 16 July at the Kennedy Space Center, where Apollo 11 had already launched. We didn't know that though. When we arrived at Kadena that morning we were able to see replays of the Apollo 11 launch from just a few hours before. We knew that the astronauts were on their way to a moon landing.

Two days later we launched on the second leg of our journey back to Ramey AFB; this time our destination was Hickam AFB, Hawai'i. According to my flight log, it took us ten hours and six minutes to make the flight. It was late on 19 July, Honolulu time, when we landed.

Apollo 11 was in lunar orbit. In the time it had taken us to fly from Thailand to Hawai'i Apollo 11 had flown to the moon.

The next day was a layover day at Hickam for us; it was also the day that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on the moon. It was a Sunday, and not much was going on at Hickam, in fact, everyone who could do so was sitting in front of a TV set someplace. The lounge of the transient aircrew quarters we were assigned to was full; every seat was taken and everyone was glued to the TV set. Since everything was being reported in real time it seemed like it took forever for Armstrong and Aldrin to get in the LEM, make the descent to the lunar surface, and make a successful landing. Then there was another forever until Armstrong stepped out of the LEM and put the first human footprint on the lunar soil. When that happened there was jubilation all around.

The tension was broken when both astronauts stepped onto the lunar surface, but there was still a lot that had to happen before they would safely return to Earth. Unfortunately, after the moment Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface I don't recall a thing.

The Distinguished Senator from Minnesota, Part II

2009-07-15T13:52:00.005-05:00

Senator Al Franken (D) Minnesota, is now addressing Judge Sonia Sotomayor at her confirmation hearing for a seat on the US Supreme Court. What can a profane clown add to the proceedings? Apparently not much more than another windy speech.

Good choice, Minnesotans.

H/T: Theo Spark

Fiery Fourth

2009-07-04T10:29:00.007-05:00

The year must have been around 1953. I had two younger brothers and one younger sister. My father made it a tradition to have a large box of fireworks for the July 4th holiday and celebration. Since he was a local businessman I think he got some of the leftovers from one of the local fireworks vendors. Most years there was a family picnic in the back yard with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins attending the festivities. At twilight the sparklers started sputtering, followed by the fountains, pinwheels, and small star shells. Anything bigger was illegal in Illinois. At some point the big municipal display started going off several block away so our local display was punctuated by the big stuff being supervised and set off courtesy of the local American Legion post.

Twilight brought out the sparklers and a few fusees (a flare on a stick) that were in box of fireworks Dad had brought home. My six-year old sister was bored with the sparklers and wanted to hold a fusee. How she got the fusee I don't know, but it was not a master stroke of parenting to give a six-year old kid a hot, sputtering fusee. What could go wrong? Fusees burn with a bright light (this one happened to be green) and molten combustion products fly off the burning end. They are something you want to be careful with. In any case, my sister was holding a burning fusee and getting dangerously close to the box of fireworks Dad would soon be lighting. Big brother that I was (about age 12) I told little Sis to move away from the box of fireworks. Of course little Sis refused to move. Once or twice more I tried to get her to move away from the fireworks box with her sputtering fusee. At some point she swung the hand holding the fusee away from me and toward the fireworks box. As she swung her hand a glob of molten stuff came off the fusee and arced toward the open fireworks box. I watched, literally in horror, as the molten stuff dropped into the box and landed squarely on the fuse of one of the fireworks. The fuse lit immediately; my only reaction was to run like hell.

In a few seconds the ignited firework began doing its thing; that set off a chain reaction and seconds after that the whole box of fireworks was going off all at once. Everyone, young and old, was trying to clear out of the back yard and get as far away from the fiery shower that was coming out of the fireworks box. There were red and green fireballs flying; a pinwheel went sailing into the air; sparks were flying everywhere; a neighborhood friend who was stand next to me watching the spectacle was hit by a fireball.

After watching for a few stunning seconds, I decided to try to put the fire out. Being twelve I grabbed a pan of water and tried to approach the now fiercely burning box from behind. Fortunately for me, our neighbor was a member of the local fire department and he had a much better plan than I did. He grabbed a garden hose that, fortunately, was still connected to the outdoor tap; even better, the hose had a circular lawn sprinkler attached to it. The fireman turned on the water full force and approached the flaming box from behind the lawn sprinkler's water spray. The fireworks were beginning to burn themselves out, but still burned brightly. The fireman put a quick end to that bit of excitement and doused the box thoroughly until the whole thing was a black sodden mess and no smoke could be seen.

The remainder of the evening was spent recovering from that bit of unplanned excitement, including personal accounts of what people did to save themselves. Little Sis took the brunt of the recriminations for ruining the entire day (at least that's what we kids thought). Fortunately no one was seriously hurt, although a few people were singed by sparks and fireballs. We all were lucky.

For years afterward a July 4th celebration couldn't pass without someone recounting at least once how little Sis had blown up the backyard fireworks box. As best I recall, after that year there were no more backyard fireworks displays at our house.

UPDATE:

A brother remembers.
"I will never forget that evening. I remember being behind the bushes where our yard was separated from Arendt's (where the garage stood) I was on the ground and watching the fireballs flying everywhere. I think the pin wheel you mentioned landed on Tilden's roof down the street, or at least one of them did. Our back yard reminded me of scenes from the Three Stooges movies, I saw later in life. The whole event seemed like it lasted an eternity, but it was probably a couple of minutes in total time. I remember Marvin Steege getting hit with a fireball going horizontal over the ground. Years after that event, I asked Dad where he use to get the fireworks. He told me he bought them at Reid's Sporting Goods there in downtown Bloomington. Dad went in the day before the 4th, and Mr. Reid would give him a deal on them because he did not want to carry them over, for obvious reasons."

...And a cousin remembers too.
"Ahhh yes I remember that day. I was about 5 at the time. I think I was standing there watching watching Martha having fun with the flare, wishing I had one too. If I recall the only thing that didn't get torched was a few spinners that had been set up earlier in the back yard. I watched them as I recall and that was it.

I made the mistake of mentioning this story to Martha at my Mothers funeral. The look she gave me was, well, intense."

The Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme

2009-07-01T10:37:00.008-05:00

The Evil Bernie Madoff got 150 years in prison for running the greatest Ponzi scheme of all time. Actually, it's the second greatest Ponzi scheme of all time. The greatest Ponzi scheme is the Social Security System.

Like all Ponzi schemes Social Security worked pretty well as long as there were a lot of people putting money into the system. All those "contributors," i.e., workers, from CEOs to packing plant employees -- that's 95% of the work force -- have put a Congress-decreed part of their earnings into the system. Most of the money collected goes right back out again in payments to "earlier investors," i.e., people who managed to live until age 65, along with permanently disabled workers, and the survivors of workers who had died. Along the way, politicians promoted the illusion that workers had a pension fund building up in the system, but that was never true.

Fortunately for the politicians the proportion of workers to Social Security recipients was large -- around 40 workers per recipient at the end of WW II. In 2006 that ratio had dropped to 3.3 workers per recipient. Two things happened: advancing medical technology gradually extended life spans, and after the post-war baby boom faded people began having smaller families. The net result is that many fewer workers are having to pay into a system that immediately redistributes their tax payments to a growing number of recipients. Uh-oh.

Of course, Lyndon Johnson wanted to have his shot at a presidential legacy so in 1965 he persuaded Congress to exacerbate the problem by adding Medicare into the Social Security System. Bad idea. Medicare is simply adding to the funding problem. The Ponzi scheme is getting nearer to collapse because the number of people putting money into the system can't keep up with the number of people getting money out of the system. Now that's a legacy.

Some politicians actually have a conscience and have tried to fix -- or propose a fix to -- the funding problem our government-sponsored Ponzi scheme faces: adequate funding. Former Senator Bob Kerrey (D) Nebraska was one. It has been about twelve years ago now, that Kerrey and his RINO compatriot, Chuck Hagel, periodically would come back to Nebraska to pitch his fix for Social Security. Of course, he was only talking about "fixing" the old age benefits, but at least he was on the right track. He wanted to privatize at least a part of Social Security so that workers would have more control over the amount of cash they would have at retirement. It was pretty clear that Kerrey and his aides had at least looked at the problem in proposing partial privatization. Hagel clearly didn't have a clue and was just mouthing politi-speak as a warm up act to Kerrey's ideas. Of course, the idea never took off among Democrats, and when Republicans started proposing privatizing Social Security the Democrats fell on them like a mob of screeching seagulls.

So the problem remains and the Obama administration wants to do more of what Social Security already does: spread the wealth. We already are getting a preview of how well an expanded income redistribution system works: it's running out of funds. Taxation is a dead weight on the economy and smothers economic growth so adding more taxes to pay for more income redistribution is going to be a killer for growth and the jobs growth creates. Most of the "green jobs" we hear about don't really exist, and when they do they are in some other country where specialized knowledge and lower labor costs already exist. Most of the "green jobs" I've heard about are in the administrative bureaucracy, i.e., the unproductive overhead, that will monitor, regulate, and ultimately stifle whatever innovation comes from this move toward a "green economy."

So. Who will take the fall when this, the biggest of all Ponzi schemes collapses? It won't be the politicians, unless voters finally learn the truth about this long-running scam. In truth, the generation now growing up will be taking the fall because, as Margaret Thatcher once said, "The problem with Socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples' money."

The Distinguished Senator from Minnesota

2009-07-01T10:18:00.004-05:00

Caligula sent his horse to the Roman Senate. Minnesota sends Al Franken to the US Senate. A horse's ass or a profane clown, take your pick.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds

The Walk of Life

2009-05-30T12:07:00.024-05:00

About a month ago I spotted the beginnings of a mourning dove nest atop a corner post on the fence that surrounds our backyard. "Typical doves," I thought. Always making nests in really risky places and vulnerable to attack by predators, other birds, and the weather. I went on about my business and a few days later I saw a dove sitting on the nest. She (I assume it was a she) sat tight, even when I came up close to look. Although I didn't keep a close eye on the nest it seemed like she was always there and almost always in the same position on the nest. I wondered whether she ever flew off to find something to eat. One day I got my answer to the eating question. Another dove was there, presumably her mate. He was bringing her food. He also brought additional nesting materials and poked them into the nest structure even as she sat on it.

Over the next couple of weeks she sat there through fair weather and foul, heat and cold, sunshine and rain. I did notice that even though the nesting spot was out in the open, these doves had placed in it such a say that it and their own coloration formed a very good camouflage against the background of the gray fence post and surround slates. Grackles, those thugs, came and went past the nest, but none of them seemed to take notice. Grackles will destroy a nest and eggs and kill nestlings if they get a chance. So will blue jays and squirrels. I saw some squirrels skittering along the fence top, but papa dove (I guess) always placed himself between the squirrel and the nest but never attacked the squirrel like jays and grackles do. And then there are the feral cats in the neighborhood; sewer cats, we call them because they hang out in the storm drains.

I suppose that a couple of weeks into the project the two eggs hatched because the dove seemed to be riding higher in the nest. If you look closely you can see some pinfeathers sticking out from under the nesting dove. Life went on for us. Since the grass was growing like crazy I had to mow weekly. I deliberately tried to stay away from the nest as much as possible, mowing the area around the fence post only after everything else was mowed. The first couple of times the dove left the nest but quickly returned when I finished mowing around the fence post. Then she seemed to get used to it because I could mow right up to the post and she would sit tight. I guess she decided I was just a noisy nuisance and not a mortal danger.More time passed and it was clear that there were a couple of nestlings being tended to. Papa dove would come and go while mama dove just sat on the chicks. We wondered how the chicks were being fed. One afternoon I looked over at the fence post and saw that one of the adult doves was on the nest and one of the chicks had its head in the adult's throat. It looks like the adults bring food in their crops and pass it to the chicks by regurgitation. Pretty safe way to protect your young. An adult is always on the nest protecting the kids while the other is off foraging.

Mama dove was a good parent. The wave of warm weather we were experiencing suddenly changed: it became cool, almost cold, and rainy. But she sat there with the rain showers rolling off her back making sure that her brood stayed covered.

Another week passed. The weather warmed again and the chicks were noticeably larger. Sometimes they would peek out from under mama dove but most of the time she made a determined effort to keep them out of sight. One of our dogs started nosing around the base of the fence post, but I couldn't see any signs of bird droppings on the ground. Maybe she smelled the doves but couldn't locate them.

As we checked in on the doves, now on a daily basis, the size of the chicks changed dramatically. They seemed to get bigger by the hour. They were getting so big that mama dove couldn't keep them covered. Sometimes she would offset herself on the nest and the two chicks would peek out and look around. Both doves were almost always close by now. Still, other birds and predators seemed to be unaware that they were there. It was clear that the chicks had more than just pinfeathers.

As the days passed the chicks were more and more allowed to look around and remain uncovered. They seems as unalarmed by our presence as the adult birds, although there was at least one adult bird around at all times. Then yesterday the more adventurous of the two, I guess, started perching on top of the fence slats with one of the adults. It was clear that it was almost time for them to go out into the world. I looked like they had most of their flight feathers, but they still lacked the long pointed tail of the adults. They were also noticeably smaller than the adults and their feathers didn't have the smooth coloration of the adults.

This morning, when I let the dogs out around 6:30 I looked over at the nesting post. It was empty, except for the nest. The doves clearly are pretty neat about the droppings their young leave. I looks like everything just stayed in the bottom of the nest. Those filthy grackles take every poop sac their young produce and scatter it all over the neighborhood -- mainly on our back deck.

That was the first time I've seen doves successfully raise young. In the past storms or predators have always destroyed the nest, the eggs, or the chicks. This time they managed to get the job done.

UPDATE: Now I have a clue as to where the chicks went. They headed to the deep cover of the shrubbery. The parents are still taking care of them for a while.

The Global New Deal

2009-03-03T12:27:00.001-06:00

I heard a discussion on Fox News Channel a while ago in which British PM Gordon Brown was quoted as calling for a "global New Deal."

I can well understand why Brown would call for such a thing, and it is epitomized in a quote by Margaret Thatcher: "The problem with Socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money." Clearly, the British government is running out of money and it is looking for other pockets to pick. The USA is still relatively productive so that is the direction Brown is looking.

People like Brown, and the people who administer the United Nations, are the best argument there is against a "global governing body."

Formulas for Success

2009-03-02T10:43:00.007-06:00

A blogger at Puffington Host (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds) has finally come right out and admitted that he wanted the US-led war in Iraq to fail -- and it was/is a US-led effort despite the claims from the Left about the war being a unilateral effort. What a surprise! His reason for rooting for the bad guys? Well, the way the Bush administration proceeded is the direct opposite of how he feels that the US should exercise its power. Fancy that. He would have preferred that we had talked Saddam to death rather than doing it the old fashioned way. Ditto for Uday and Qusay and their ilk.

But George Bush chose the direct approach and earned the ire of everyone Left. You know the resultant response: protests and efforts to undermine the war effort. Who can forget Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claiming in April 2007 that the war was lost? The war might well have been lost, had not the Bush administration finally taken serious steps to root out opposition and destroy it. So much for politics and diplomacy. Now, however, it looks like the war in Iraq is won. It would look very bad for the Obama administration, now, to take actions that would alter the expected outcome for Iraq.

On the other hand, the lefty blogger is upset with Rush Limbaugh because Limbaugh is quoted as saying that he wants Obama's economic policies to fail. Well, that's not what Limbaugh said, actually. You can read the transcript of his speech at Fox News.com. Limbaugh didn't so much say he wanted Obama's economic policies to fail, rather, he said he wanted Obama's over arching plans for changing the culture of the United States of America to fail. He wants Obama's social policies to fail because they are, in a word, Socialism. Socialism has been an ongoing failure wherever it has been put in place. Socialism is virtual assurance that almost all citizens will be reduced to the same level of misery. The ruling elite, of course, are excluded from that economic prison sentence.

It's not so much a matter of wishing that Obama's economic policies fail as it is the fact that they are doomed to failure. As a matter of economic fact, the New Deal policies that promoted huge rounds of deficit spending in order to stimulate the economy did little to improve the economic lot of American citizens. FDR, and now Barak Obama, are listening to John Maynard Keynes for economic advice. In defense of the FDR administration, they were listening to the then current thinking of Keynes. A much much wiser and older Keynes admitted after WW II that deficit spending was not the way to go. Rather, tax cuts do more to stimulate an economy than deficits. So, an Obama administration has the benefit of history and the words of an early hero and advocate of Socialism to go on. Rather than read all the way to the last chapter to learn what Keynes had learned from experience, the Obama administration prefers to try a redux the part of Keynsianism that failed.

Keynsianism reloaded is going to fail just as surely as it did the first time around. Karl Marx is quoted as saying: "History repeats itself; the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce." There have been some farcial moment lately, but it remains to be seen how this all plays out.

The Law of Unforeseen Consequences

2008-12-07T10:49:00.010-06:00

Ahn "Joseph" Cao, a naturalized US citizen, beat out William "Freezer Cash" Jefferson for Louisiana's Second Congressional seat. Yesterday all the talking heads from Fox News Channel to the more left-leaning cable news channels were predicting that Jefferson would retain his seat despite being under indictment on bribery charges. Well, surprise, surprise! The pundits were wrong.

Thinking about this for a little bit, it occurs to me that we won the war in Southeast Asia after all. People like Ahn Cao and his family fled South Vietnam when the communist North overran their country. They were among the lucky ones, but there was also a large measure of intelligence, determination, and inspiration involved in their escape. They got out of Vietnam around 1975; they were among the Boat People. They came to the United States of America and prospered. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese left behind, for whatever reason, continue to languish under some altered brand of communism.

We know a local family who also made it out of South Vietnam. The parents run a Vietnamese restaurant they call "Saigon." What else? We have been dining at that restaurant for many years now; it's the only restaurant we return to time after time. We watched the children of that family grow up. The kids worked in the restaurant and did their school homework in one of the booths in their slack moments. One of the sons is a very successful computer whiz who was taken under Bill Gates' wing. He set up a computerized ordering system for the restaurant that allows orders to be sent back to the kitchen and be translated into Vietnamese. Why? Because Mom is the head chef and she still doesn't speak much English. The kids do though and speak English well. They are all intelligent and industrious. They will succeed.

We as a country are lucky to have people like these and all of the others who have immigrated to America. They are the most valuable asset a country can have: human capital. All of the other things that count as capital, e.g., cash, real estate, equipment, credit, are nothing without innovated people with new ideas to bring them into productive use. The late Julian Simon maintained that human capital is the only real resource. I think he was right.

The recent political victories in Louisiana strike me as a significant change in the way the political game is played in that state. Cao offers change just as surely as Obama did; Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's Republican governor, offered the same thing when he was elected. Jindal, Cao, and all the rest of the Asians who have come to the United States have been an injection of new blood, ideas, and hope for this country. Places like Louisiana need that for sure. Change is in the air and it's not just the liberal-left change Obama was preaching when he was running for President of the United States. Change is also, finally, getting rid of the corruption that has riddled Louisiana politics for decades.

Change is good.

Gimme yer Dough

2008-11-17T11:05:00.006-06:00

“Gimme yer dough.” That’s a line I recall from a comedy routine Bill Cosby used to do. Congress, not to be outdone by a respected comic, is thinking along the same lines – at least some of them are.

According to a Wall Street Journal editorial (November 6, 2008, subscription required), Representatives George Miller (D) CA and Jim McDermott (D) WA, think that 401(k)s “are a big failure” and want to replace these private retirement fund options with something akin to what the Social Security Administration now pays to those of us who have made it to age 65 alive. With the Social Security facing a looming funding crisis it comes as no surprise that Miller, McDermott, et al, are interested in finding a new source of funding other than raising taxes. There’s a plausible reason why they want to help out 401(k) owners.

Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system. What comes in almost immediately goes out as payments to Social Security beneficiaries. Never mind what you may have heard about the “Social Security Trust Fund;” it’s all accounting hocus-pocus. There is no cash account; the money is spent almost as soon as it is received. If Miller and McDermott get their way the assets from all of those 401(k) accounts would become available to Congress to spend but payments of some kind to the account owners wouldn’t be made for years or decades into the future. It’s a neat way of putting off the looming Social Security funding crisis for a decade or two. How much cash is in all of those 401(k) accounts? Well, Wharton school puts the 2006 value at something like $2.5 trillion. Of course, in the past few months stock values have dropped around 40%, but just roughing it out there is currently around $1.5 trillion in 401(k) accounts.

Of course, there are some problems with Congress getting its grubby hands on 401(k) accounts. First, there probably isn’t a constitutional way of simply taking them over so it becomes a matter of convincing 401(k) owners that the federal government can do a better job of managing their assets. That’s a tall order, given the long-term rate of return on payments made to the Social Security system. Second, all those 401(k) assets aren’t cash; most holdings are stocks, bonds and money market accounts. Liquidating all those holdings would make current financial market disruptions look like a tiny bit of bother.

No. It appears to me that the real motivation is that Congress would be able to take in a large chunk of cash without having to raise taxes or force the US Treasury into borrowing more. All of this would be done under the promise of making retirement funds more secure. Yeah, right. Remember Ronald Reagan’s most feared words: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

UPDATE: In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal on 18 November 2008, Rep. George Miller denies he has plans to end 401(k)s and replace them with some government-run pension system. Instead, he writes, he is interested in more complete disclosure of the details and costs of 401(k) accounts and removing the unfair tax burden on seniors who may be forced into begin taking withdrawals from their retirement accounts because they have attained a statutory age.

Veterans Day 2008

2008-11-11T11:57:00.004-06:00

It was a glorious fall Monday in late October 1997. Twenty-five years after my last combat tour in Southeast Asia I was finally going to visit “The Wall,” the Vietnam Memorial. Up until that time I really had no desire to see it; I knew at least a dozen names that are there and it would do no good to go and actually look at them. Besides, I live 1200 miles away and there was never a good time to go that far to see things I already knew existed. We finally got an excuse with the wedding of an old Air Force acquaintance’s daughter in Fairfax, Virginia.

So, the Monday after the wedding four of us, my wife and I and the parents of the bride, took the Metro up to the Mall for a look at the Vietnam Memorial. We had other sites on the itinerary: The Holocaust Museum, for one, but I wanted to make sure I went over to the Vietnam Memorial just to see it. After visiting the Holocaust Museum we made our way down the Mall, past the Washington Monument and in the general direction of my objective. First we came upon the Korean War Memorial: the figures of those 19 poncho-clad GIs, forever on patrol, were eerie – even ghostly. Not far away stands the Vietnam Nurses Memorial. The mother of the bride had been an Air Force nurse in the mid-1960s and she wanted to see that small monument to big sacrifices. A row of trees separates it from the black granite slabs that make up the Vietnam Memorial itself. From where we stood you can see the Vietnam Memorial through the line of trees. Scanning the tree line I saw a Yaqui Indian man. He was standing in the tree line and was performing some kind of ceremony with an eagle feather. By the look of him he might have been a Vietnam veteran himself. I don’t know if his ceremony was for the benefit of his tribesmen or for the more than 58,000 names on those black granite slabs. In any case we watched him and in a few minutes he completed his ceremony, packed up his regalia, and went on his way.

We made our way around the tree line and started at the registry that matches all those names with the slabs they are listed on. I went back and forth several times looking up names and then find the slabs and locating the names I was looking for. Most of the names were in small clusters since the men had died in the same actions. I was scanning one particular slab for an elusive name when I noticed a young woman standing thirty or forty feet to my left. She was blonde; she wore a black overcoat over business attire and looked like she might be some office worker on her lunch break. She just stood there facing one of the panels; she held a single red long-stemmed rose and a white envelope. I looked at her for a few seconds and then went back to my task at hand. I finally located the name I was looking for and looked back to where the young woman had been standing. She was gone and now the rose and envelope she had held were lying at the base of the memorial. I walked over to see what she had left. There was the long-stemmed rose and a white greeting card-sized envelope. It was addressed to “Daddy.”

I wonder now, as I wondered then, whether “Daddy” ever had the chance to see his little girl. Clearly, the young woman missed her father and honored his memory with her presence.

I wonder now whether the history of 1973 will repeat itself and we will preemptively leave the Middle East before the job is done. If that happens Karl Marx will once again be proved wrong: history repeating is tragedy the second time around also.