CHAPTER 3
Orders to Air Force Flight School
After graduation from TBS, I was given orders to report to the U.S. Air Force Flight Training at Craig Air Force Base in Selma, Alabama, to start my training on October 25, 1968 with the UPT Class of 69-03. I had a two week leave back home in New Orleans and then recruiting duty in the New Orleans area until I reported to Craig AF Base. I was very excited and could hardly wait to go. Eileen, my new wife, and I enjoyed being home for awhile, but we were both anxious to start our new life.
My Flying Buddies
Anumber of my buddies also received orders to flight school around that time; they were: Fred Bonati — Williams Air Force Base, Arizona; Tom Broderick — U.S. Naval Flight School, Pensacola, Florida; Dave Cummings (after his first tour in Vietnam as an infantry officer)- Naval Flight School, Pensacola, Florida; Pete Barber — Craig Air Force Base, Selma, Alabama; Rick Spitz- Laughlin Air Force Base, Del Rio, Texas.
My friends from college and the New Orleans area who received orders to flight school were my roommate at Southeastern Louisiana College, Jerry LeBlanc USAF — Shepherd AFB, Wichita Falls, Texas; my friend from college, Dan DeBlanc, USMC — US Naval Flight School, Pensacola, Florida; from my neighborhood in New Orleans, Charlie de Gruy, USN, U.S. Naval Academy graduate — Naval Flight School Pensacola, Florida.
From my high school class was Arlan Hanley, USMC Naval Flight School, Pensacola, Florida, and Danny Phillips, Naval Flight Officers’ School, Pensacola, Florida.
Charlie de Gruy had a great career in the Navy; he joined as an enlisted seaman in the Navy Reserve at seventeen years old, went on to Southeastern Louisiana College with a bunch of us from the Lakeview neighborhood in New Orleans, and then received an appointment to the United States Naval Academy.
He flew F-4Js with VF 96 in Vietnam, commanded an F-14 squadron VF-211 and a F-4 training squadron VF-101. He was XO of the USS America CV 66, was a Navy test pilot, and commanded two ships, the USS Austin (LPD4) and USS Saipan (LHA2). He served as a Chief of Staff of Naval Doctrine Command. Charlie retired as a Captain in the United States Navy, just missing by a bit the rank of Admiral.
All of us earned our wings of Silver or Gold and for us Marines who went through Air Force Flight School, we earned our Silver Wings, and then we had to earn our Navy Wings of Gold, so we had both.
The Marine Corps set up a program with the Air Force in 1968 to train about one hundred Marine pilots a year. This lasted for only a few of years as Vietnam was coming to an end. The story I heard was that there wasn’t enough room to train the number of Marine pilots in Pensacola that the Corps needed so they sent the potential jet pilots to Air Force UPT training and most of the other Marines that went to Pensacola ended up in helicopters.
It was a pretty unique experience to be one of only about six Marines on an Air Force Base. Green really stood out.
Of those buddies listed above, all had good careers in the military and most served in combat in Vietnam.
Fred Bonati and I would cross paths again and again, flew to Vietnam on the same flight and were “hootch-mates” for awhile in Da Nang until he was transferred to the air base at Chu Li. We would get together again in El Toro Marine Air Station in California when we returned from Vietnam.
Tom Broderick would end up flying Huey gunships in Nam and crashed one in Da Nang Bay which almost cost him his life. An Army “Skycrane Helicopter” tried to rescue the downed crew when his Huey helicopter went down in the water, but the 125 miles per hour downdraft from the rotor blades of the big helicopter pushed him under the water. Tom was a very good swimmer and was on the college swim team in Wisconsin, but he couldn’t handle the force of the downdraft from the rotor blades. He had one of the other crew members in his arm trying to keep them both afloat but couldn’t hold on any longer and let him slip away. He told me that he had thought it was all over, put his head down, asked God to protect his family and was entering a peaceful end when he felt something hit his helmet. He put his hand up and felt the runner of another helicopter. Someone pulled him into a Huey chopper that had set down into the water, flew him to a medical center on the beach and saved his life, then flew away.
Tom tried to find out who had saved his life, but there were no record of any helicopter flight like that around that area at that time. Tom said he now believes that it was maybe an unauthorized flight by a crew chief or someone who just took the Huey for a joy ride. But he was pretty thankful that they did. He was the only survivor from his flight crew.
Tom had several other brushes with death in his Marine Corps flying career having crashed some other aircraft. Tom’s brother also nearly bought the farm when the aircraft he was flying went into the drink after taking off from an aircraft carrier. He just barely got out of the ditched plane when the huge ship ran over him. He was pretty much given up for lost, but a destroyer doing search and rescue picked him up. I guess it runs in the family.
Rick Spitz is another friend with whom I share a lot of stories. I didn’t know him in TBS; we met in the A6A training squadron VMA (AW) 224 at Cherry Point, North Carolina, and became fast friends and remain close even today. We were roommates in Da Nang, were in the same squadron VMA (AW) 242, went to Jungle Survival School and FAC School together.
Dave Cummings, Fred Bonati, Tom Broderick, Pete Barber and I were squad mates in the 1st Platoon of Mike Company in TBS and we all became pilots.
Dave flew Cobra gunships in Vietnam and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for some very heroic flying. I was told the story that Dave was flying a two seat Cobra gunship and heard the call for an energy extract of a wounded Marine on the side of a mountain. The CH-46’s rescue helicopters couldn’t get in because of the low clouds surrounding the mountain, so Dave went in for the rescue slowly letting his Cobra down the side of the mountain in the fog or clouds. He set the chopper down, got out of his bird, put the wounded Marine in his seat, hung onto the small wing that holds the rocket pod outside the aircraft, as the other pilot flew all three of the Marines off the mountain. I also heard that his CO almost court-martialed him, but then put him up for the DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross).
Rick Spitz and Dave were two of the guys from our Basic School class to receive the DFC.
Pete Barber was in the flight school class ahead of me at Craig AFB and was selected to fly F-4s after graduation from Air Force flight school as was Fred Bonati. All three of us ended up at Cherry Point Marine Air Station in North Carolina.
Forty years later at our reunion, I was so overwhelmed by the experience of meeting these wonderful old friends and Marines again, listening to their stories in informal gatherings after the scheduled events, that all I could think to say when I addressed the group after dinner at the Marine Corps Museum was, “I’m not a hero, but this room is filled with them.” And that was not mere flattering comment; it was the truth and an understatement at that.
It was August of 1967, Basic School was coming to an end and I had my orders to Air Force Flight School at Craig AFB in Selma, Alabama. I was to report for flight training with the UPT (Undergraduate Pilot Training) Class of 69-03. I had a couple of weeks leave at home in New Orleans and then I was assigned recruiting duty for a short time until Flight School Started. I was excited and a little bit nervous about flight school; I didn’t know how I would do. This was a whole new adventure and I had only been in a small airplane once and in an airline plane twice. But I was looking forward to it very much. It was of some comfort to know that I had Eileen with me for moral support. It seemed that every new thing in my life I had to face all alone; little league, high school, college and OCS I had done all on my own. So this was going to be a great experience for both Eileen and me.
Flight School
Ireported to Air Force Flight School at Craig AFB in Selma, Alabama in October of 1967. UPT Class 69-03 started on October 25, 1967 and lasted for fifty-three weeks. Of the sixty-six green flight school enrollees that started training, fifty-one of us would eventually earn our Air Force silver wings on December 3, 1968.
We started our flying lessons in T-41s which was the Air Force’s version of a Cessna 172, and I loved every minute of it. Every take off and every landing I thought was thrilling, some a little more than others. I would come home and tell Eileen everything that we did or learned that day. We were learning new flying terminology and procedures all the time, and we were issued our official aviator’s sun glasses. We were cool or thought we were.
We started out in the classroom and then in the Link Trainers. From there we moved on to our first flying lessons in the T-41 at the municipal satellite field called Selfield with civilian instructors. The sections alternated with one section going to class in the morning and flying in the afternoon and then switching to morning flying and afternoon classes. There were plenty of crazy stories and funny incidents with that many trainees learning the new skills of flying.
Our class was divided up into two sections, “A” and “B” Sections. We had three captains in our class: Captain Mike Nelson, USAF, was student commander of “A” Section, Captain Kevin Sliwinski, USAF, was “B” section’s student commander and Captain Jack Rippy, USMC, who was my Marine counter-part in the section “A.” Mike Nelson and Kevin Sliwinski were already navigators in the Air Force and had all of that experience in aviation going for them.
Each class had two Marines assigned to it, one in each section. Jack Rippy was the Marine in “A” Section and I was in “B” Section. We became great friends, graduated flight school together, went through A6A training together, were in the same A6A squadrons VMA (AW) 224 at Marine Corp Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina and VMA (AW) 242 in Vietnam and again at MCAS El Toro, California, when we returned from Vietnam. Jack was a funny guy and a bit eccentric. He was already a lawyer when he joined the Marine Corps and he was very good at arguing a point no matter how insignificant it was. We had many a crazy story between us.
I completed my first solo flight on November 17, 1967. When you came back after your first solo flight you would cut a piece of your tee shirt off, put your name and the date of your “solo” on it and pin it to the bulletin board in the flight shack. That was quite a day. I was very nervous, as were we all, walking out to the airplane to be all alone flying an airplane for the first time. In the back of your mind was the thought, “What if I freeze up or forget how to fly, or worse, forget how to land?”
Solo Tee Shirts
The physical part of flying, the coordination, came easy to me, probably because I was an athlete my whole life. I later had difficulty in the instrument phase in T-37s.
One of the first things we had to learn was the proper radio procedures and terminology to use while flying, like making position reports while in the traffic pattern. We would fly around in the pattern doing touch and goes and calling our position like “down wind,” “base” and “final.” The guys who were not flying would gather around the radio in the flight shack while waiting for their turn to fly and listen to the other guys making their position calls. I had this very thick New Orleans accent back then saying things like “warta” for water and “French Quarta,” things like that. A lot of guys, if they hadn’t been to New Orleans and heard that “Nu Arlins” accent before, thought that I was from New York or New Jersey. It turned out that listening to me make my position calls was one of their favorite things to do. They just loved to hear me on the radio.
About two years later, while flying a combat mission over Laos and sometime in the middle of the night, I had checked into the 7th Air Force controlling agency radio call sign “Moonbeam.”
I reported into “Moonbeam” with my call sign, “Marine Ringneck 54,” my aircraft type—Alpha 6 and my ordinance on board—22 Delta 2’s (five hundred pound bombs.)
At the same time there was an Air Force F-4 on the same frequency and he came up on the radio and asked if this was Romeo Bravo (phonetic alphabet for R B and in this case Ron Boehm) from Selma, Alabama?
I responded, “Affirmative.”
It was my flight school classmate George Driscoll who recognized my voice two years later, half-way around the world while flying an Air Force F-4 on combat mission over Laos. What a small world.
Another guy in our class with a memorable accent was the tall slender Joe Jackson from Alabama. He claimed he was from East Taboga, or East of Boga, Alabama, or someplace like that. Like I said, he had a pretty thick Alabama accent. I’m not sure there really was a place by that name or it was just Joe’s joke. To say that Joe had a southern drawl would be an understatement for sure.
He would say things like, “You godda get tight”, or “Eassse off” and “Whar ya at.” He kept us laughing all the time. You just couldn’t help loving the guy.
We had three foreign students in our class, a Norwegian, Finn Berg, and two Iranians. One of the Iranians was from an upper class family and the other was just from the military ranks. Finn was a smart guy and very likable who fit in with all of the rest of us and was an excellent student. The Iranians were very different and never fit in with the class. One of the Iranians was terrible at flying and had trouble with the English language. I thought he would either kill himself or someone else before long.
One day while flying in the T-41, he was turning final approach as the tower had cleared another plane onto the runway for takeoff. The tower tried to tell him to wave off and go around, but he kept on coming just as the other aircraft taxied into the runway. We looked out from the flight shack in horror, expecting a collision. The Iranian touched down right behind the other aircraft which was getting ready to take off, and amazingly gave it the power and hopped over the other aircraft and did a touch and go (touch down and take off without stopping). I don’t know how the two aircraft missed each other or how the Iranian pulled off that recovery. It was amazing.
That one Iranian didn’t last much longer after that. Actually, that might have been his last flight. On the other hand, Finn the Norwegian was one of our top pilots. He was at the time a Sergeant in the Norwegian Air Force and was a cool and overall pleasant guy to hang with.
One of our big unexpected events was when a Marine F-8 pilot lost his radio while flying in the weather over our area, found a hole in the clouds and spotted an airfield. He descended through the opening in the clouds and, because it was the weekend, landed at an unmanned satellite field called Vaiden Field that the T-37s and T-38s used to do touch and goes. He used his survival knife to break into the radio shack, turned on the radio and called to find out where he was. I remember being very impressed when I met the pilot and thought to myself, “Wow, he’s a Marine jet pilot and he just landed at our airfield.” It was a little bit of hero worship on my part.
T-37
T-37 Phase
We finished up T-41s at Selfield and moved on to T-37s, a very small two-seat primary jet trainer that made a loud whistling sound. They called it “a three thousand pound dog whistle.” It was so small that to pre-flight the cockpit you just leaned over the canopy rail and reached in. I was really excited to get to fly a jet. This was getting close to being a real pilot and I remember being thrilled when we checked out our new equipment: a G-suit worn like cowboy chaps that inflated under G forces to help keep your blood from pooling in the lower part of your body, helmet and parachute. Wow, that was so cool.
However, my first ride in the T-37 was a blur because everything went so much faster and I had a very tough time with a feeling of claustrophobia. In the T-41, you were in a fairly large and open cockpit and you wore your flight boots, flight suit, hat (called a cover in the Marine Corps) and sunglasses. Now in the T-37 you were in a little, tight cockpit and wore a G-suit, harness, parachute, helmet with visor and oxygen mask. It was so confining that I had to fight that terrible claustrophobic feeling.
I told my wife Eileen that I didn’t know if I could handle it. She told me that I was a Marine and I had handled everything they had given me so far and that I’d come too far to turn back now. I fought it for another flight or two, but as soon as I started to fly the airplane I got so involved with the flying, I didn’t have time to think about anything else and it was never a problem again.
Another early memory regarding the T-37 phase was that of my first time actually flying the aircraft in the traffic pattern; it went so fast that I thought, “There is no way I will be able to enter into the break, throttle back, lower flaps, drop landing gear, and make a radio call all in that short time frame.” But I gradually caught up with the airplane and did it with ease.
The T-37 was fun to fly, and after getting proficient at taking off and landing the bird, we soloed and then came one of my favorite phases of flying, formation flying. The first time we edged up next to another airplane in the middle of the sky I was awed by the sight of flying just a few feet away from another airborne aircraft. In close or Parade Formation your aircraft’s wing-tip is positioned three feet from the lead aircraft’s wing-tip on three planes; horizontally by three feet, vertically by three feet and set in back of the lead’s wing by three feet. To look out and see another aircraft so close and suspended in mid-air seemed magic to me. I loved it and was one of the first in my group to solo in formation flying.
Your whole reference with regards to flying in tight formation with another aircraft is just a reference point on your aircraft lined up with a reference point on the other aircraft. The pilot in the lead aircraft flies and directs the wingman, the wingman just flies that relative position off the lead. It’s great. In a loose formation, you fly your aircraft and maintain a relative distance and position to the lead.
One of our favorite instructor pilots in T-37s was “The Bear,” a Major whose real name I don’t remember, but he was a burly guy with big bushy eyebrows, a good sense of humor and patience. He had a way of making you comfortable while being able to get instruction over to you.
Our flying now was out of Craig AFB with air work in the designated Craig training area and shooting touch and goes at Vaiden Field.
We had a control booth of sorts on the side of the runway where an instructor and students would monitor the traffic pattern; T-37s where on one runway and T-38s were on the other runway in opposite hand patterns. In the duty in the control booth, you would receive the position radio calls from the planes in the pattern and check for the landing gear being down and things like that. The T-37 control booth’s call sign was “Henhouse.” One day I was on duty in the “Henhouse” when a position call came in from an aircraft whose pilot must have been a former Craig student or instructor when he said his call sign and reported, “On initial approach at flight level 800;” that would be 80,000 feet. We figured that he must have been flying a U-2 to be that high.
Eileen and I lived in a little one bedroom house we rented from a wonderfully nice lady named Mrs. Hardin. Our house was in back of Mrs. Hardin’s farm house out in the country and since Mrs. Hardin was an antique dealer she had furnished our little house with antiques. It was great and perfect for Eileen and myself. We would throw parties outside for the squadron and I would go dove and quail hunting in the fields behind the house.
Mrs. Hardin’s son, Buddy Hardin, was a few years older than me and had played football for Bear Bryant at The University of Alabama. The whole family were just very nice people.
I did fairly well in the T-37 phase; flying the aircraft as physical exercise came easy to me. It was the instrument portion that I had difficulty catching on to. I was getting all up tight when I had an instrument hop and I was worried about my status for the first time in my training.
One of the neat things about flying the T-37 was that you got to stall and spin it, then recover from the spin and stall. In most jet aircraft a spin would be game, set and match, game over, but the “Tweet” had straight wings and you could spin it all day long. Once you stalled it and held one rudder pedal down and the stick back to induce a spin, then you began the recovery from a fairly flat spin as the plane rotated and bobbed up and down slightly. That was fun to me as was aerobatics in general, but some guys didn’t like it at all.
T-38
Moving on to the T-38 phase of our training was looked upon with great excitement by myself and the class. The T-38 was a sleek white dart, fast and very maneuverable. The engine tolerances were tight and a piece of paper or some small amount of debris on the runway could FOD ( foreign object damage) the engine. However, it was supersonic and everyone got at least one chance to break the sound barrier, which was cool but anti-climactic. When you went through the barrier you felt a little stick movement and some of the instrument needles jumped slightly but not some great experience. But then again how many people get to go supersonic?
Again, I did fairly well in the flying aspect of the T-38 phase; I was one of the first to solo again and fast in getting the formation flying down, but I struggled in the instrument phase and even busted a check ride. I was uptight and just couldn’t see the big picture. Things changed for the better for me when I was taken under the wing of Major Smithwick. He said that I would only fly with him, and he went about the task of relaxing me and getting the concept and technique of instrument flying over to me.
The breakthrough came to me on a flight with the Major when he told me that the whole idea was to “Take-off, climb to an altitude, turn on course, descend and make turns to line up on final for the airport you are going to and land.”
“Everything else is just a difference in altitude and heading.”
On one flight, he said to me he was just along for the ride, that he had a book to read and that I should take the airplane, do whatever I wanted to do and have fun.
He said to call him when we were on final approach.
That was the turning point for me; I relaxed and realized flying was fun and that I could understand the instrument part of flying OK.
It was kind of ironic because I ended up flying the A-6 Intruder which, along with the Air Force’s F-111, was one of the two most sophisticated all-weather attack instrument aircrafts flying at the time.
I give the Major all the credit of getting me over that big bump in my training. He saw in me what I was having doubts about and was hurting my confidence. He knew what I needed and made sure I got it right. I can’t thank him enough.
My buddy Jack Rippy had a similar situation in that he had a difficult point in his training also and gave credit to his T-38 IP, Bill Sterling, for getting him through.
One of our instructors who got my attention was a Major who had been a “Wild Weasel” pilot in Vietnam before becoming an instructor. These were the guys with big balls whose job was to attack the North Vietnamese missile sites and protect the F-4s and F-105 strike aircraft. That was a deadly and dangerous mission. They had missiles being shot at them and then attacking those same sites that were shooting at them. But they did a great job of protecting the various flights going to attack targets in Laos and North Vietnam.
In Jack’s section, he had a former RF-101 Voodoo reconnaissance aircraft pilot as an instructor. Jack said that there was a contemporary puff flick about the reconnaissance missions called “Alone, Unarmed and Unafraid,” and this guy’s comment was, “Well, two out of three ain’t bad.”
Instrument training, as every instrument pilot will attest to, involved “time under the hood,” which meant that you would be flying with a hood over your eyes so as to keep you from seeing outside the cockpit and therefore flying only by seeing the instruments. You had to constantly cross-check the instruments to keep your course, altitude and airspeed correct. The technique involved moving your eyes from instrument to instrument in a constant scanning motion and not staying on one of them. Vertigo could make the task about twenty times more difficult, because your mind was telling you one thing and the instruments were saying something else. You had to force yourself with all your will power to believe the instruments and not your mind.
You might be flying while leaning over about thirty degrees trying to keep the airplane level. There was a saying in instrument training that, “One peek from under the hood was worth a thousand crosschecks,” and it was true.
Scanning outside the cockpit was very important while flying VFR (visual flight rules); you had to look out for other aircraft. I drove my wife nuts while driving by scanning the area while driving telling her that I was practicing my scan technique. She said, “It would be best to look straight ahead before we got into a crash.” Eileen was very wise for her young self. She was only nineteen when we got married and I was twenty-four. Wow! We were kids, but it wasn’t unusual at that time for people to get married at that age.
One of my funny memories in the T-38 phase was when we were taking off in the late afternoon and landing after dark getting some nighttime flying time and landings. One of the guys in our class thought he was going blind as the sun was setting and it got darker and darker. He was in a bit of a panic thinking he was losing his eye sight and wondering how he was going to be able to land his aircraft when he reached up and lifted his dark visor up and then touched his sun glasses on his face. He hadn’t realized that he was wearing his sun glasses when he put his dark visor down thus rendering himself almost blind when the sun went down. Needless to say, he was very happy to find that he was not going blind, just absent-minded and feeling kind of dumb. But all of us had at least one dumb moment, if not several, in our training experience.
One of my dumb moments was when I was out solo in the flying area practicing aerobatics. On the side of the canopy rail was a yellow caution warning which stated “Caution — Do Not Engage Full Lateral Stick Travel.” So I thought, “Why, it can’t be that bad.” So I decided to try it. I pushed the stick fully to the left and the aircraft did a violent snap roll to the left, my head and helmet bounced off the canopy and the aircraft did at least two, maybe three very rapid aileron rolls before my eyes uncaged and I could see straight. Then I said to myself, “Wow! So that’s why they have that caution sign on the canopy rail, dumb ass!”
I loved formation flying and as in T-37s I did well in that phase of T-38 training. Taking off and landing in formation was great as was flying a few feet away from a beautiful bird like the T-38. If just gave me a wonderful feeling seeing the other bird suspended in mid-air just a few feet away.
One of my instructors was paranoid of close-formation flying and would not let you get into the proper aircraft separation of three feet. He had an iron grip on the stick, but I guess flying with numb-nut students all day and being just three feet away from a mid-air collision, I might have done the same.
Our final instrument check ride was pretty much the end of our flight school training; once you passed that check ride you were home free with a great feeling of elation. After that, we had some more flying but it was just more or less getting flying hours after that. We finished up and Jack Rippy, my Marine class counterpart, and I both got orders to MCAS Cherry Point, North Carolina, for A6A Intruder training.
Our graduation day at Craig AFB was December 3, 1968; we had a short leave and then reported to MCAS Cherry Point in mid-December of 1968.
Lt. Ron Boehm
Capt. Jack Rippy
Cherry Point
As I was checking in at Cherry Point, there was a big commotion with sirens wailing and emergency vehicles running around. An F-4 jet had crashed on takeoff and the pilot and RIO (back seat - Radar Intercept Officer) had ejected. I found out later that day that the pilot was my friend from TBS and flight school Pete Barber who ejected from the aircraft after his RIO and at a low altitude as the aircraft was rolling on its side. The low altitude and the plane’s position didn’t give Pete’s chute time to open and he landed while still in his ejection seat in the fuel pits. He was badly injured but still conscious. It was almost a miracle, but the seat hit back first and saved him. Pete was in the flight school class just before Jack and my flight school class at Craig AFB and was in my squad in The Basic School at Quantico.
Pete’s arm and shoulder were badly broken in the ejection from the F-4. The usual procedure to initiate an ejection from a Navy and Marine jet was to pull the face curtain from the top of the seat down over your face with the secondary ejection handle in the seat between your legs. But we had gone through the Air Force training and their jets had the primary ejection handle on the side of the seats where an arm rest would be with the secondary handle also being between your legs. I don’t know if that had any bearing on his pulling the handle between his legs; maybe this was just the closest handle to grab, but when Pete pulled the eject handle upwards his arm got up into the wind stream after the canopy was blown off and this was the cause for the damage to his arm and shoulder. Had Pete used the face curtain rather than the seat handle his arm may not have been damaged as much. But a fraction of a second probably saved his life and to have survived leaving a jet fighter low to the ground and ejecting on a ninety degree angle without the chute opening is very close to miraculous. I understand that Pete recovered enough to fly again.
Jack and I checked into MAG 24 and were assigned to the A-6 squadron VMA (AW) 224 then TADed (temorary additional duty) to the to the TA-4 training squadron VMAT-103 to get some training and familiarization with Naval Aviation procedures. This program was brand new and we were in the first few groups to make the transition from Air Force to the Marine Corps aviation.
And since we were the first groups of Marines to go through Air Force flight training instead of Naval Flight School in Pensacola, Florida, they had to figure out how to get us up to snuff and transitioned to Marine Corps aviation. We were a bit of an experiment. As Air Force trained pilots, we had just one year of training and were instrument-qualified to fly jets when we received our wings, but our Navy-trained counterparts had a year and a half of training which included carrier landings, gunnery, air to air tactics and bombing training. They were much further along in the training then we were. I felt like I learned to fly combat in Vietnam.
In the TA-4s we got some flying time, got to drop some little blue practice bombs, got some SATS runway experience (arrested landings and catapult take-offs on a landing field,) to simulate carrier flight operations. We were then sent to the A6 training squadron VMAT (AW) 202 to become A6A Intruder pilots or for some guys EA-6 Prowler pilots and BNs. V is for fixed wing, M is for Marine, A for attack, (AW) for all weather.
All weather is what the A-6 was all about. It had the capability of attacking a target in all weather conditions and was one of the most sophisticated aircraft weapon systems flying at the time. I’ll never forget the first time that I sat in the A-6; it was a lot bigger than anything I had flown in before. The cockpit was also much higher off the ground.
Our sister squadrons at Cherry Point were VMA (AW) 332 Moonlighters and VMA(AW) 121 Green Knights.
It was also in my first weeks in VMA (AW) 202 that I met Rick Spitz who was in my Basic School Class but in a different company. Rick or Dick as we called him then would become one of my best friends and that friendship would last for a lifetime. We would later become roommates in Vietnam.
Another friend from Basic School was Fred Bonati, my buddy and squad-mate, who along with Pete Barber from Basic School, ended up at Cherry Point also. They were in the F-4 training squadron VMFAT 101. Fred went through Air Force Pilot Training at Williams AFB in Arizona, Rick went through Laughlin AFB in Del Rio, Texas, and Pete went through Craig AFB with Jack and me in Selma, Alabama.
So out of the 1st Platoon of “M” Company at TBS we had five guys all in the same squad become pilots; Fred Bonati flew F-4s, Pete Barber F-4s, Tom Broderick Huey gunships, Dave Cummings Cobra gunships, and I flew the A6A.
Training in the A-6 was a bit different in that this was the aircraft that we would fly in combat, so I guess I was more conscious of the training. We went through simulator training, had a few flights in the right seat with an instructor and then flew our first flight as a pilot. The A-6 was a great aircraft. It was made by Grumman Aircraft and typical of Grumman aircraft, it was a very sturdy and well-built aircraft. Some called them the “Lead Sled.” It was a great bombing platform and could carry twenty-eight five hundred pound bombs but usually we carried twenty-two, leaving the two bombs off next to the landing gear doors for clearance.
But the most important feature of the A6A was that it was one of the most sophisticated electronic system aircraft at the time. Its main mission was that of an All Weather Attack Aircraft, that could attack a target in just about any weather without visually seeing it. The A-4s, A-7s, F-4s, F-105s had to have a visual on the target to attack them. Only the Air Force’s F-111 had a similar capability as the A-6.
The cockpit was set up with the pilot on the left side and a BN (Bombardier Navigator) on the right side sitting side by side, as opposed to the F-4 where the pilot and RIO sat front and back. Some of our training was to run “road wreckies” on the highways in and around North Carolina where we would lock on to cars or trucks traveling down the highway and run a simulated attack on them.
The A-6 had the capability of seeing with its look down doppler radar and our computer weapon system could locate a vehicle moving at four miles per hour plus, relative to the surroundings. The BN could then lock onto that vehicle and we could drop our bombs with deadly accuracy. This was our primary mission in Vietnam and Laos. But in Nam we were looking for trucks at night in a triple canopy jungle and not on a wide open highway. Oh yeah, and people on the ground were shooting at us.
We had this bombing practice run up to an airfield in New Hampshire where we carried a small blue practice bomb and tried to pick up and bomb a remote controlled tank that they ran up and down the runway. That in itself was OK, but the neat thing was that the mission was always scheduled on Fridays and the squadron would place our lobster order with a local fisherman on the day before and the flight crew would then land at a near-by airport and pick up our lobster order. We would load them in a wing tank that was modified with a little hatch door in which we loaded the lobsters for the flight back to Cherry Point for that evening’s Squadron lobster boil party. That was pretty cool.
The new pilots got to fly in the A-6 weeks before the BNs did. Their training was in a larger aircraft that had several BN consoles set up inside where they ran their systems and practiced their skills. The A-6 trainee pilots would train in the A-6 itself with experienced BNs instructing us in our missions. After a while we finally got to fly with the trainee BNs, “nugget pilot, nugget BN.”
After we completed our A-6 initial training phase and got our rating as A-6 pilots, we were transferred back to VMA (AW) 224 to complete our training and get us ready for Vietnam. It was also at that point that we were given our Navy Wings of Gold. We were supposed to get carrier qualified on the USS Lexington down in Pensacola but the ship was down for repairs and they needed to get us to Vietnam, so we got our gold wings when we were transferred back to 224.
VMA (AW) 224 was the Snoopy Squadron with “Snoopy” as our tail insignia and “Lucy” as our call sign.
My buddy Rick Spitz got to fly with Carl Wadell, a BN, on Carl’s very first mission in the aircraft. It would turn out to be quite an adventure for them, especially for Carl. They were flying a training mission up at about thirty-one thousand feet or so when Rick decided to take off his oxygen mask and eat a peanut butter sandwich and have a sip of his coke. He quickly got hypoxic and then went unconscious. Rick had the aircraft trimmed up pretty good so it was flying straight and level. Carl noticed Rick’s head rolling around and realized what was happening and tried to reach over and put Rick’s oxygen mask on, but without success.
Carl then radioed the Flight Center, “This is Marine Lucy 02, an Alpha 6 at thirty-one thousand feet requesting an immediate descent.”
The controller replied, “Negative, Lucy 02, climb to flight level 330.”
Carl said in a more urgent voice that he was the BN and that the pilot was unconscious.
At which time the controller asked, “Who is flying the aircraft?”
Carl replied in an elevated voice that he was, but that it was his first time in the aircraft and that he was the BN.
The controller said, “Roger, you are cleared to descend.”
There was no control stick on the BN’s side of the aircraft, so Carl was leaning over with his left hand trying to push the stick forward to get the nose of the aircraft down in order to descend below ten thousand feet, whereby Rick would get enough oxygen to recover consciousness. However, when he pushed the nose down and begin to descend, the aircraft would gain speed and level off again. Carl fought with the aircraft for awhile and finally got it down to about eighteen thousand feet when Rick finally came to and asked what was going on.
“You were unconscious,” Carl said and related the whole story.
They landed at the Air Force Base in Kansas City and then continued on with their weekend and flight plan. Rick told Carl that they should keep this to themselves, but when they got back to the squadron in Cherry Point, Carl was worried about Rick’s health and told the CO. The CO called Rick into his office and asked if there was anything that Rick wanted to tell him. Rick said that there was nothing that he wanted to tell the CO. But the CO said that Rick shouldn’t hold it against Carl, but Carl was worried about Rick and had told the skipper what had happened.
The skipper gave Rick a talking to and at our next squadron briefing Rick had to give a talk on hypoxia and the dangers of removing your oxygen mask at altitude. Our squadron’s tail insignia was that of Snoopy on his Dog House, so Rick drew up a poster showing Snoopy on the Dog House with the caption saying, “He who don’t have oxygen mask on will have a breath-taking experience.”
The aircraft that Rick and Carl were in had a prior write-up about difficulty in holding cabin pressure. Rick had flown it down to NAS Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico a week before and had to keep the thermostat up to keep pressure and they were burning up inside because of the heat.
Speaking of NAS Roosevelt Roads, there were a couple of amusing stories that came out of our squadron deployment there. Both involved my buddies, Rick Spitz and Jack Rippy. The Squadron had deployed there in order to get some live bombing practice instead of dropping those little blue bombs in North Carolina. We would fly our missions from Roosevelt Roads airfield to the little Island of Viegues. There was a restricted bombing area on about half of the island, but the island was also inhabited with farms and livestock. Jack was sent out on a night bombing hop to drop napalm on the target. The BN wasn’t very happy with the idea of dropping napalm at night and knew it was a dangerous evolution for guys with so little time in the aircraft, especially since we hadn’t had much visual bombing practice and very little night practice at this point. And dropping napalm at night was something we never did in Vietnam, but we had to get the night bombing in to complete the A6 training syllabus.
The target controller wasn’t being very helpful with the info he was giving so as they were making their target run the BN said, “It looks good to me, drop it and let’s get out of here.” Jack said it was a ten degree dive, in hilly terrain at night—miss the target by a few feet and the canister would clear the ridge line and go way down range—which it did. The controller then knew he had induced the problem and acted all PO’d to cover his own short comings. For the rookies that we were, it was important to get good info for the experienced BN in an unfamiliar situation like that, which it didn’t sound like Jack got.
So the result was that the bomb missed the target, went downrange and napalmed some poor farmer’s goat which the squadron had to replace in order to appease the farmer. Well, we loved to kid Jack about it but considering the circumstances it could have happened to any one of us nuggets.
Jack also got a goat kill in the Naval Gunfire impact zone on San Clemente a few years later after we had come back from Vietnam.
Historical Note: Commander Laird USN was the only pilot who I know of that had a kill in both the Atlantic and Pacific theater in WWII having shot down a Japanese and German plane in the two theaters. Colonel Jack Rippy is the only guy I know of who had a goat kill in both the Atlantic and Pacific theater; Vieques, Puerto Rico 1969 and San Clemente Island, California 1974. “Jack the Goat Killer”—it has a nice ring to it.
In the evening, we would get dressed up to get some night life and go to the gambling casino. There was a dress code, coat and tie, but Rick didn’t get the memo I guess. When we got to the casino they wouldn’t allow Rick in without a coat and tie. But the guy at the door said that they had some coats and ties that Rick could borrow. Well, the jacket was some god-awful color that didn’t match his pants and the tie was even worse. He looked like he had been shopping at the Salvation Army store on an after sale day when everything had been picked over. But he got in, even though we were embarrassed to be with him.
Let me inject here a little background on Rick which will show up time and time again in this book since he is my good buddy and the subject of a number of stories. Rick is a very smart guy who you would never characterize as “lacking in self-confidence.” One of his buddies who he grew up with in Minnesota told us a story about him while on a salmon fishing trip in Alaska: that Rick’s teacher in high school sent a note home with his report card stating that Rick didn’t sufficiently apply himself to his studies or live up to his potential and gave him a grade of “A.” Rick , I guess could make “As” with little effort.
Rick figured that he was smarter than most of the people making the rules (which was true most of the time) and, therefore, it was OK for him to bend the rules, because the rules usually didn’t make sense to him and/or didn’t fit his agenda. And I figured that I wasn’t as smart as him, so I usually went ahead with what he said, even though I would occasionally question the validity of the proposed idea or how much trouble it would get us or him into.
As we were just getting close to finishing our A-6 training and getting ready to be sent over to Vietnam, our buddies and classmates from Basic School who were grunts were returning from their Vietnam tour. On one occasion Rick ask if I wanted to go with him to the “O” Club to see a friend of his, Robert Belsar who had just returned from Nam and was stationed at Camp Lejeune.
Belsar had won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart and had gotten the lower part of one leg shot off. He also had little or no feeling in one of his arms.
We were at the bar drinking when he said to Rick, “Take a look at this,” and put a cigarette out on his forearm. He had very little feeling in his forearm.
We were listening to his stories and drinking a few rounds when he took his prosthesis off with a sock and spit shined shoe on it, placed it on the bar and said, “Bartender, fill this up with beer, it takes 2.3 liters.”
So there we were three Marine 1st Lieutenants drinking out of his wooden (well, fiberglass) leg when a Bird Colonel walks by with his wife, and I said, under the influence of alcohol, “Colonel, you don’t have a hair on your ass if you don’t take a drink out of this combat vet’s wooden leg.”
The Colonel grabbed the leg turned it up, took a swig, put a ten spot on the bar and said, “The next one is on me, carry on gents.”
The Colonel was cool, but his wife just rolled her eyes and kept walking.
Cross Countries
Cross countries were great; they gave us rookie pilots flight time and a lot of experience in flying the aircraft, having to deal with planning our flights, navigating, getting in required syllabus training and dealing with all the unexpected things that came up on a long flight, like a broken aircraft. But the best part of all was you could go pretty much anywhere you wanted, and of course knowing where the best “O” Club parties were and on what night was also important. I think it was Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City on Friday nights that was good and so was NAS Alameda across the bay from San Francisco on Saturday nights.
One of the most memorable cross countries was with Ken Poulsen, my BN of that weekend. We were both nuggets and Ken was from the San Francisco area so we planned a trip to San Francisco and back. It just so happened that that was the same time when the astronauts landed on the moon for the first time.
We took off from MCAS Cherry Point on Friday July 18, 1969 and flew the first leg to NAS Pensacola. That was a fun hop because we flew the whole flight navigating at low level whereby we would hit visual check points according to time and heading and getting that part of our training syllabus out of the way. We dropped off some aircraft parts at NAS Pensacola, refueled and flew to NAS New Orleans on a flight path along the Gulf Coast of Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. We flew along the beach at about one hundred feet above the waves and flew past Biloxi, Gulf Port and Bay St. Louis and on to New Orleans.
The Mississippi Gulf Coast is the same area that one month later would be wiped out by Hurricane Camille which hit that area on August 17, 1969. Camille was the second strongest storm on record to hit the U.S. at that time. I remember thinking at the time that its pressure recorded at Bay St. Louis of 26.84 was the lowest pressure I had ever remembered hearing of. Camille had a storm surge tide of 24.6 feet when it came ashore at Pass Christian, Mississippi. My grandparents had a summer home there when I was a kid and we spent our summer vacations there. Camille just wiped out that area. Then Hurricane Katrina did the same thing thirty-six years later and also devastated New Orleans.
Part of my family was there at NAS New Orleans to meet us when we landed. We taxied onto the ramp and shut down with my family waving. After shutting down we climbed out and I introduced Ken to my family. We stayed the night in New Orleans and went back to the airport the next morning which was Saturday, July 19. After filing our flight plan, we went out to our aircraft, did our pre-flight checks, fired the A-6 up, and taxied out past my waving family.
From New Orleans, we headed to Holloman AFB in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Along the way we did whatever syllabus training that we had to get in, like running “road wreckies” along the highways, low level navigation or instrument approaches.
We would track vehicles on the highway, run a simulated attack on them in which the BN would acquire the target on his radar, lock onto them which sent the attack info to my VDI (Visual Display Indicator) and I would fly the “video-like game” until we got a simulated bomb release. We showed no mercy, we attacked trucks, family cars, or anything moving over four miles per hour.
Coming into Holloman, we flew over the White Sands, home of the White Sands Proving Grounds. They are truly white and are a really great sight to see. We were told that most of the animals that live on the White Sands are white also, which makes good sense.
After landing, we refueled, filed a flight plan, and, upon starting up, found out that we had a problem with some piece of equipment that we couldn’t get working. We called back to our squadron in Cherry Point for help with getting the problem fixed. It took several calls and tries to fix the problem, but we finally got things working and took off for the next leg of our flight.
From Holloman AFB, we headed west again, this time heading for the San Francisco Bay area and Hamilton AFB in San Rafael just across the bay and north of San Francisco. On the way, we headed northwest and flew over the Grand Canyon at a fairly low altitude. It was my first view of the Canyon and it was awesome. We thought about flying down into the Canyon, but we were nuggets, and I guess not salty enough to avoid a flight violation for going into the Canyon so we just saw the sites.
After the Grand Canyon, we continued on our northwest heading and flew over Lake Mead and Hoover Damn. That was a great sight, also and from there, we got down low across the desert again for some low level navigation work. I loved getting right down on the desert floor about fifty feet or lower, hauling ass at about three hundred knots, just blowing and going.
On one leg of our planned flight path, we were following a section of highway and came up on a hill. Just as we topped the hill at about fifty feet above the surface of the highway, we met a truck coming the other way; I pulled up slightly and could see the driver in the cab. I would imagine the driver had to stop and change his underwear after getting the hell scared out him by a low level A-6 coming straight at him at three hundred plus knots. Just the sound would scare the hell out of you. We continued onto Hamilton AFB in San Rafael, California.
After landing, shutting down and taking care of all the post-flight stuff you go through, Ken called a couple friends who came and picked us up and we went on a short tour that evening of the area, including going over the Golden Gate Bridge, which was my first time to see it. For that matter, it was my first time in California. We spent the night in San Francisco and Ken showed me around some.
Sunday July 20, 1969
On Sunday July 20, 1969, we got back to the airport and started to prepare for our flight and file our flight plan when everybody was abuzz about what was happening on television. Someone said, “Come over here and watch; the astronauts are about to land on the moon.” We went over to the TV and watched the Apollo 11 astronauts land on the moon.
After watching this monumental event, we went back to our preparations for our flight to Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City. We filed our flight plan, went out to our aircraft, did our preflight, climbed in and cranked the Intruder up. Soon we had permission to taxi and then cleared to take the runway and takeoff.
As we lined up on the centerline of the runway, I got that thrill that I got every time that I looked down the centerline of runway stripes and moved the throttles forward. Every time, it never failed; every time was a new adventure. We rolled down the runway and lifted off, climbing out into a clear blue sky heading east.
Somewhere over the vast desert in route to Tinker AFB, we ran into some weather; thunder clouds were building and we were trying to circumnavigate them. We asked the flight center for a higher altitude trying to top the clouds. We were up at about thirty-seven thousand feet or so, which was getting close to the limit of the A-6. I got it to forty thousand feet one time, but it took some time to get there and it was barely flying. We were in the clouds and I was manually flying when the stick felt like it was in a bowl of mashed potatoes. I could move it around with little effect on the aircraft. I then looked at the altimeter and the vertical velocity indicator which was showing a descent and realized that we were in a stall. I pushed the stick forward and recovered after losing several thousand feet and I notified Center that we had to make an immediate descent due to weather.
We were getting bounced around pretty good and then we got struck by lightning. That made things even more tense with the weather, stalling out and then getting hit by lightning. We also had our first experience with Saint Elmo’s Fire while in the middle of the thunderstorm. The edge of the wind screen and the leading edge of the wings were aglow with a weird green sparkling light. The whole thing was a bit eerie. Don’t forget that both of us were nuggets with not a whole lot of experience between us.
We finally cleared the weather and the rest of the flight was more or less uneventful. We landed at Tinker AFB and rushed into flight ops to check on what was happening with the astronauts.
At 0239 UTC “Greenwich or Zulu time” Monday, July 21, 1969, and 09:39 PM CDT, Sunday, Neil Armstrong opened the hatch of the Eagle Lander, stepped out on the ladder, and turned on the TV camera in the equipment compartment on the side of the Lander. At 0256 Zulu at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City, Ken and I watched Neil Armstrong descend the ladder, step onto the surface of the moon and say those famous words, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” That was an incredible moment and all of us in the flight ops room were cheering. It was one of those moments that you will always remember where you were and what you were doing, like when we heard about the assassination of President Kennedy or the attacks of 9/11.
We spent the night at Tinker and flew back to Cherry Point the next day. That leg of our cross country excursion was uneventful.
It was great to be back home. I told Eileen all about our flight and asked if she had seen the astronauts land on the moon and what she had done while I was gone. She said with her typical Eileen wit, while rubbing her pregnant belly, that she had been busy making fingers and toes.
While in the process of writing this book I was reminiscing with my long time buddy Fred Bonati about our experiences flying cross country, and he said, “ Hey, Ron did you ever go on cross countries to specific airdromes just to get an airplane fixed, because your group didn’t have the expertise or the parts? We did that a lot, landing at Naval or Air Force fields and downing the airplane so that they had to fix it. Scotty Michelson and I traded a leather flight jacket for center line baggage tanks full of drag chutes at a F-4 airbase in Texas, I think. (VMFA) 251 didn’t have enough chutes to fly until another flight landed. We were celebrated with a party. The airbase had a pile of chutes at the end of the runway about fifteen feet high. We commandeered the van driver that picked them up for repacking, and he went for it. Repacking. That was another joke. We would stuff them back in with a broom handle, while standing on a bucket, during preflight to the amazement of the AF (Air Force) guys hanging around. Sweet!
A lot of laughs, the AF. Like some AF guy dressed in pure white utes (utilities uniform) checking under the plane at Udorn (Thailand) and having a quart of hydraulic fluid leak out and drench him. Or having them say, ‘You’re not really going to take off on those tires, are you sir?’ Or ‘Aren’t all those zuse fasteners supposed to work, sir?’
The AF was just too, too. We used to fly to Ubon for three day R and R’s and switch air crews, and before I got to VN (Vietnam), a Marine F-4 crew was forced by the base commander at Ubon to wash their plane before they could take off. And, from all reports the pilots and RIOs did just that.
Man, Ron, this is bringing all sorts of stuff out of the brain woodwork. How about flight specific planes. In Chu Lai, because of maintenance problems, we had airplanes that could only fly near the base, planes that could only fly VFR, in the daytime, had to be parked outside the revets (revetments) ‘cause the wings wouldn’t fold, and could only carry certain ordinance.
When we got back to El Toro, they drop checked all our planes for missile capability. Turns out we were flying MIG-caps and couldn’t crank off a sidewinder or a sparrow even if we had to. Looked good, though.
War is Hell, Ron.”