Jocko Podcast 360: With Navy Fighter Pilot Tom Kopel

2022-11-23T12:00:05Z

Underground Premium Content: https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Join the conversation on Twitter/Instagram: @jockowillink @echocharles Tom Kopel. Navy Fighter Pilot.

AI summary of episode

This story is so cool for me, because that's like just classic nail aviation, what I always loved about flying with the Navy in the Marine Corps was he's talking about that missile, he was talking about in training, like the book says you can only shoot the missile from the back of an airplane, that's the rule, and that's how it works, and they tell you, and the coolest thing about flying with guys in the Navy, they're like, I don't care what the book says, I'm gonna go try this, see if it works, and this missile, which is on paper and designed to only shoot the back of a jet, because the engines in the back, that's probably heat, these guys figured out I could shoot this thing, we call it four quarter in the nose, and the best part about that is if you launch this at a MiG, I guarantee you, he would do exactly what you described, because nobody else would do that, because the book says you can't do it, so I just like listening to your stories of, I don't care what the book says, I'm gonna try this, see if it works, and that big giant intake probably replicated a MiG-21's big nose, that big giant engine right in the front of the airplane, that's pretty cool thinking, I like that. Not my squadron, no, the ship lost, I don't know, four or five, maybe more, A7s, no A6s, A6 guys, I think, were pretty cagey, A7 drivers, they all tended to be, seemed to me, younger guys, in the wardrobes, sitting there, with the guy, I said, man, I had a hell of a time tonight, I was mixing it up with these guys, they had a 57 millimeter in a cave on the side of a hill, I don't know how they got it up there, but I made it, I came back around and gave them another load of 20 millimeter, I thought, really, I said, you know, you're sitting that far across the wardrobes table, I said, do you realize what the aim point is? Oh, it's the airplane, I said, no, no, no, the aim point's right between your eyes, you're nuts, put a 500 pound bomb into that hole, if you, any good as a bomber, you can do that, put a bomb into his cave, that's the end of that gun, no, it was more fun, I went around a third time, and I said, you're crazy, he's gonna shoot you down, you're gonna feel really stupid, you throw away your weapons, is what you do when you get shot down, you have a responsibility to, in your book, you talk about things that are worth it and things that are not worth it, and I have to tell anybody who's willing to, including my old skipper or somebody like that, I said, I have a favorite switch position down by your left knee in the F4, it's an all, it does all the bombs, doesn't, the missiles, the missiles stay, but the bombs, you have singles pairs, doubles, cluster, all, and then all, flip, all, this is bad here tonight, I don't wanna be here, I'll be back tomorrow, but for tonight, all, see if you can eat this load, there's only six of them for seven, six, what, six, 500 pounders? yeah, that's shit going by from the back, and most of it right there, because they had time to know where you were, and they could hear you in orbit, and now this guy was over here, and suddenly he got silent, that means he's in the dive, so that means he's gonna be over here, and turn their guns around, more over the guy with the auditory, have a dozen paper towel tubes taped together, he can hear you, even if you got your engines at idle, I think, that's my private theory, I don't know if that's true or not, but anyway, that's when they would open up on you, and yes, every night, no question, every night, anytime you were there, they would blast away, and... So there are places in the ship where the air conditioning really did work beautifully, but we got visited by ABC or CBS News or something like that, and they were on Hancock, which was in the Gulf at the same time at that time, and one of these guys said to me, boy, we could see this ship on the horizon, and he said, this ship is nice, Hancock, but next week we're going down to get aboard the big guy. And I said to Jimmy, I said, when, my best friend, I said, so that you can claim we got him with a sparrow, we won't know which, because as soon as that Sidewinder leaves, I'm gonna flip to, because you got the pepper on it, I'm gonna flip to radar and pull the trigger a second time. So, and you look down, and the max low altitude speed on the F-4, indicated airspeed, was I think like 740, and you look at the indicated airspeed, and he's not in burner, we're doing 790, indicated relatively close to the ground, and we're smoking along here, and then you come back, and they know what you've been doing, although it's a combat situation, you're not gonna know what they were complaining, but I have a picture of an F-4 coming aboard with, and it's big dense in all three tanks, because you've been up there, if not at the mark, really close to it, and the dynamic pressure dense the fronts of the tanks, and maybe they don't do that anymore, maybe put some sort of a reinforcement on the front end of the tanks, but those tanks were not reinforcing the noses, and they were all dented from doing stuff like that. You pull back just a little bit, turns off the, just a little bit, so actually before you fly the airplane, they'd want you to get familiar with the cockpit and so forth, and they say to you, realize that this system is there, and if it's quiet, you can hear the micro switches click, and you can't, but you just gotta touch them, and you click it, click it, very faint, but they're in there, and it turns off the roll stab, so here you are your first time out with this thing, and you touch it a little bit, and it turns off the micro stab, the stabilization in pitch, and it does one of these, and because you go the other way, and it keeps it off, and so forth, and then you push it a little bit this way, and it turns that off too, and then you go back, and so forth. But the F-A-18 is a modern airplane, the F-4 was just an airplane that Mr. McDonald said, I want a monster, and I wanted to do this, that, and the other thing, and if you have a problem with it, it won't do that, add a system to do that, and they did, and they kept on doing that, and that's what you got, and you got a hell of an airplane, but my favorite quote about the F-4 was a Marine, and one of the books, as you might suspect, I have airplane books and whatnot, and he said, I flew the F-4 for three years, and it never killed me. And he had a 37 millimeter gun too, in both those airplanes, and you better not shoot the pass too soon, because he's gonna be firing that thing on a head on, no matter which one it is, at you, and you got a piece of bulletproof glass in the front of you, in the older airplanes, the F-4 you did, so it shouldn't hit you in the face, I guess, but he's liable to ruin your radar, which could be a problem, if he gets close to you with that head on, but as soon as you pull that trigger, he's never saw anything like that in his life, and he's been told that the F-4 has to get behind you, so don't worry about it, and that's what I always, and I said, Jimmy, you gonna be able to, and we get that MiG with a sparrow, because that's the, the radar operator's missile, is a sparrow. I think my idea is that, if you took a bunch of paper towel tubes, and put tape around them, and put a microphone behind them, and then you put that on the mount of a gun, where the barrel got overheated and it warped, so we got this gun mount over here, we don't use it, put that auditory search finder thing on the gun, because as soon as I turn it over there, and I can hear it, I got headphones on, and I can hear, there he is, oh, I lost him, no, I got him back again. I said to David, the only, my real claim to fame here, because I'm pretty ordinary actually, was the fact that I was there when Sam Leeds walked around VF 121 and said, we're going to start this thing and maybe you might want to be part of it because we don't want to have any more foreshot down by MiG-17s, not so much 21s, but MiG-17s. and then you do that and climate maintain 1200 feet or 1000 feet or whatever it is and turn left to bus and so on, then you're on the downwind and then they will, you have more planes coming in, coming down from the holding chute if you will and they'll squeeze you in in the middle there or they'll take you way down till one guy is early and one guy's a little, you push over from those altitude at an exact you're supposed to to the second timing from the sack and some guys are a little bit early, guys are a little bit late. One of the few ones, he came in on me trying to suck me into a, what's called a scissors, it's two airplanes who do this, one trying to be slower than the other guy and I rolled over the top on him and went to Burner and I was standing there upside down above him in Burner and he said, I can still in my mind I see him looking up at me and he said to me, I can't believe you're doing this, which is the wrong thing to do. And he said, they were looking for a guy like you at a theater in Baltimore that I am going to, he said. You make yourself present, because you're making all that noise right over here, over the crossroads, and they know, the gunners all know, as the trucks are over there, and they know that, and they know that you know that, because they can hear the fact flying around too. He said, well, most people put in navigator for second and then something like, I don't know, auxiliary aviation or something like that. and then he would go drop a second one, and he said, do you have my two markers, and you'd say, yeah, okay, and he said, now, they are northeast and southwest, so remember they're northeast, they're not north and south, they're northeast and southwest, and what you want is on a triangle pointed to the north, but to the northeast, and sort of, and there's a crossroads there, can you see the crossroads, and sometimes you could on a moonlit night. I think there was one guy who was a lieutenant commander, but anyway, flying with him, flying, I discovered I could fly like a bird, because at that point in your training or in your experience level, you start to get that good at it, and I thought, holy smoke, I'm doing this, this way. So I said, when that big guy sees, maybe the Sidewinder won't guide, maybe it'll miss him by 30 feet, and then the kill radius is only 25 and stuff like that. And the LSO has probably went to the CO and said, hey, you got to talk to this guy because he's going to kill himself. So the other daughter said, I'll take him out and she had not actually said, she said, if you go, I'll buy it my own ticket. Dan Peterson is a little bit removed, a little bit standoffish, sort of guy, not a bad guy or anything like that, but a little bit standoff. Well, like, as Skepper said to me, we want to send somebody over to Thailand, and since you have Air Force experience, would you like to do it? He was a teenager, yeah, and he said, you always, fortunes of war, you figured the other guy's going to, or you can always jump out, you know. Yeah, I had a guy on the podcast named Dean Ladd, who's a Marine in World War II, and he went into a bunch of different islands, but he was talking, he's going into Tarawa, and I'm like, were you nervous going in? That's a shallow, it's especially in a place like that where ground fire, not the Sam's, although I know Sam's are always considered, but AAA, like a 30 degree airplane's a big giant airplane. Guy said to me way back, in Kingsville, I teach you to let it roll off on a wing, let the nose fall, acquire the target, adjust a little bit, and now you're watching the altimeter and so forth. I figured I called a guy one time and he said, I don't have it, but I know who does have it. I went there and it got a Marine, no, Air Force Trooper, big guy, big guy with a sidearm at a little lectern inside the door. What's that ticking, what's that thumping, whatever, the engines don't sound right, you can hear all that even with your helmet on, so I figured, and warning light panels for galore, so I figured, turn it out, the human eye takes, you probably know this, it takes about 30, yeah, half an hour, the same length of time takes the sun to set, so after half an hour, you can see everything on the ground, and the facts talking about that, grove of trees, I said, my credit, I said, you don't know me, but I have, I called those and so and call him and you could call him, I don't have to do that. So at any rate, a year after, maybe 10 months after I lost the election, I get to talk to a guy named Bob Asher, who was a little bit of a character and well-known in Pennsylvania politics, because he took the heat and went to jail for something he didn't do, but probably to protect a Pennsylvania senator or maybe one of the governors, I don't know. He was, the night I talked to him, he was the speaker at a dinner, and he had the place in the palm of his hand, and then you figure, he's probably winding up about now, and he said, you've been such a great audience, I'm gonna sing a song for you, and I thought, oh, the poor man, he's gonna ruin everything. He was, I mean, he had to strap it on, so that was, first time, I felt that way, truly felt that way, fly like the airplanes attached to you, and the other way around, because when he, you wanna say a mile or a mile or a quarter of a beam, what happens if he turns into you? She said, I said, I hope you got more than $5,600 for it. A week later, the local guy that I knew very well was a whole political office called me up and he said, how'd you like to be a register of will? And then four hours later, he came to me in the passenger way and said, we're not going to do this, we got to change. Like I have, I have a part of my fridge where I have one of each kind of opened where I'll just go like take a sip, take maybe two or three sips, you know, just during the day, just to fly by. He ended up getting gut shot in Tarawa, and was lucky, a couple of his Marines disobeyed the order just to keep going, and they grabbed him and threw him back on a ship, so I think that's the common mental state of the young man in combat is I really feel sorry for the other guys that are going to have trouble out here and get wounded and killed. I said, but the thing about Jenny, the thing that people want is something you can do that most people can't. And if you don't fly, you have to be here at six, at 430 in the morning to man up and run the airplanes out and make sure everything on the airplane, systems, engines and whatnot, and the radar works because you're going to have an experienced, good guy in your back seat just for this morning exercise so that when we put two, four airplanes out on the parking ramp, they all work and all the radars work.

Most common words

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jocko podcast number 360 with Dave Burke and me,
[00:00:04] Jocko Willink.
[00:00:05] Good evening, Dave.
[00:00:06] Good evening.
[00:00:08] The secretary of the Navy takes pleasure
[00:00:11] in presenting the Navy Commandation Medal
[00:00:13] to Lieutenant Thomas Coppell for services set forth
[00:00:17] in the following citation.
[00:00:19] For heroic achievement as a pilot of jet aircraft
[00:00:23] while attached to fighter squadron 142,
[00:00:27] embarked in USS Constellation.
[00:00:30] On 14 January, 1970,
[00:00:33] Lieutenant Coppell flew the wing aircraft
[00:00:35] of a two-plane attack mission in Southeast Asia.
[00:00:38] Despite heavy anti-aircraft fire in the area,
[00:00:41] he placed all of his bombs on target,
[00:00:44] resulting in five enemy trucks destroyed
[00:00:46] and many secondary explosions and many enemy casualties.
[00:00:52] His professional determination in spite of
[00:00:54] heavy anti-aircraft fire and adverse weather conditions
[00:00:57] resulted in a substantial damage
[00:01:00] to the enemy's logistics efforts.
[00:01:03] Lieutenant Coppell's superb airmanship, courage,
[00:01:06] and devotion to duty reflected great credit upon himself
[00:01:10] and weren't keeping with the highest traditions
[00:01:13] of the United States Naval Service.
[00:01:16] The combat distinguishing device is authorized
[00:01:20] for the secretary M.F. Weisner,
[00:01:24] Vice Admiral, United States Navy.
[00:01:29] And that is a citation that represents
[00:01:33] the types of missions that were flown
[00:01:35] by Navy fighters day after day,
[00:01:38] night after night, week after week, month after month,
[00:01:42] year after year.
[00:01:44] Those were the type of missions
[00:01:45] that resulted in solid battle damage to the enemy,
[00:01:54] but also resulted in 532 aircraft lost in combat.
[00:02:00] 401 aviators killed, 64 missing, 179 captured,
[00:02:08] who became prisoners of war.
[00:02:11] 75 of those aircraft that were shot down
[00:02:14] were F-4 Phanoms.
[00:02:19] These missions were flown by pilots
[00:02:21] who took incredible risks to get the job done
[00:02:24] and eventually pilots that rewrote the book
[00:02:27] on air to air combat and laid the foundation
[00:02:30] for how fighter pilots are trained to this very day.
[00:02:34] And it's an honor to have one of these pilots
[00:02:36] here with us tonight, that pilot in fact,
[00:02:40] is from the opening award citation, Tom Copel.
[00:02:45] Tom, thanks for coming down.
[00:02:47] Appreciate you coming out here.
[00:02:48] Anyone know we got Dave?
[00:02:51] He used to keep me honest.
[00:02:54] Well, he's always excited.
[00:02:57] The few times I've had some pilots on
[00:02:59] without having Dave on, he's not happy about it.
[00:03:03] So we got him here and I guess let's just kind of
[00:03:08] start from the beginning and how you grew up
[00:03:10] and where you came from.
[00:03:11] So you were born in Queens, is that right?
[00:03:15] Yeah, Jamaica Hospital, huge hospital in Queens,
[00:03:19] but we lived just over the city line in a new development
[00:03:23] that the house was built and my parents moved in
[00:03:27] with a brand new baby.
[00:03:29] And this was 19 what?
[00:03:31] 41.
[00:03:32] So you're pre-war.
[00:03:33] Yeah, and my dad was not drafted because of me.
[00:03:37] He was an insurance underwriter in the financial district
[00:03:42] of insurance district of downtown, downtown Manhattan,
[00:03:48] Nassau Street and those places down there.
[00:03:51] How much?
[00:03:52] And a nice guy, I have to say.
[00:03:54] Well, that's good.
[00:03:54] How much, so you're born in 1941,
[00:04:00] I'm assuming before the war started, before Pearl Harbor?
[00:04:04] I was, yeah, August and Pearl Harbor was in December.
[00:04:07] Okay.
[00:04:08] Yeah.
[00:04:09] So as you're growing up, is there any part of World War II
[00:04:12] that you remember?
[00:04:14] I remember my mother telling me that the war in Japan
[00:04:16] was over, I don't remember her telling me
[00:04:18] that the war in Europe was over.
[00:04:23] On the other hand, since I was four years old
[00:04:26] and I had a brand new sister, they sort of left me alone
[00:04:30] and I would go down to the corner, believe it or not.
[00:04:33] What was then, I guess it probably still is
[00:04:35] Hillside Avenue and I used to see low-boy trucks
[00:04:38] with grown, I assume they were F-6 fighters
[00:04:46] with the wings removed.
[00:04:47] They put the fuselage and the wings on the side.
[00:04:51] I think the engines and propellers were on them
[00:04:54] but obviously they were on their way to South Pacific.
[00:04:57] And ask your mother, what the heck is that?
[00:04:59] And she would say, oh, they're going to war
[00:05:02] and stuff like that.
[00:05:03] So I assume that was 1944.
[00:05:08] I was three years old, sitting on a curb
[00:05:10] and that's the first I remember of any of that
[00:05:13] but they told me that both Grumman and Republic
[00:05:15] were out in the island at that time,
[00:05:18] I guess it was farms.
[00:05:21] Did that leave an impression on you seeing the fighters?
[00:05:24] I mean, first of all, I don't remember anything
[00:05:26] until I was about 17, I think.
[00:05:27] So you remember in 7.3 is pretty impressive.
[00:05:30] But did you think, oh, these are war planes going to war?
[00:05:35] Did that make any sense to you?
[00:05:36] Oh yes, oh yes.
[00:05:38] But I never expected that I would be a guy
[00:05:40] that would fly them or anything like that.
[00:05:44] And the other thing I remember about flying machines
[00:05:47] was not combat or war or anything like that.
[00:05:51] It was the fact that Idlewild that became JFK
[00:05:55] when they expanded it and the airport
[00:05:58] was seeing the DC7Bs coming in from Europe.
[00:06:05] In bad weather, they used the east-west runway
[00:06:08] and streaming fire out of the back of the,
[00:06:12] off the top of the wings and how the heck is that?
[00:06:15] So I finally, in my grown-up days,
[00:06:18] talked to a guy who was a retired naval aviator,
[00:06:21] P3's, so he sent me.
[00:06:24] I said, Dennis, why didn't you want to be a carrier guy?
[00:06:29] Many engines, Tom.
[00:06:30] Oh, sorry about that.
[00:06:32] But at any rate, he was a flight engineer on DC7Bs
[00:06:37] and he said that's because a flight engineer
[00:06:39] goes full rich and flames roaring out the back
[00:06:44] and especially in foggy weather when they were, you know.
[00:06:48] Oh, so that's what you'd be saying.
[00:06:49] Yeah, I wanted to do that.
[00:06:51] That's really hot stuff, you know.
[00:06:53] But, and well, and jumping ahead, I guess,
[00:06:58] but why do I want to go with,
[00:07:01] I wanted, my father said, I graduated from college.
[00:07:04] My dad said, what are you gonna do?
[00:07:05] And I said, I don't know.
[00:07:07] He said, why don't you see one of the services
[00:07:09] will teach you how to fly?
[00:07:10] I said, don't take guys like me.
[00:07:12] He said, they sure do.
[00:07:13] Well, before you get to college, what was growing up like?
[00:07:17] So did you grow up there just outside the city?
[00:07:19] Yeah, and I was just a kid.
[00:07:23] A four-year-old kid down on the corner
[00:07:27] at Hillside Avenue by yourself, which is cool.
[00:07:30] Yeah, but that was a different time, I think,
[00:07:33] or something like, maybe there were as many monsters
[00:07:35] around then as there are now,
[00:07:37] but nobody talked about or acted that way.
[00:07:40] And as soon as I got a bike, you know, it was.
[00:07:43] Then it was really on.
[00:07:44] Yeah.
[00:07:45] I was never there.
[00:07:47] Were you, how'd you do in school?
[00:07:49] Did you like school?
[00:07:49] Terrible.
[00:07:50] I hated school.
[00:07:51] I hated school.
[00:07:53] I was a, my wife loves to tease me
[00:07:56] that I was such a terrible little monster
[00:07:58] that one of the classrooms that I was in in grade school
[00:08:03] had a, it was at the two classrooms
[00:08:06] at the end of the hallway.
[00:08:07] And then a connecting room between the two.
[00:08:09] She put me in the connecting room with a door that opened
[00:08:12] so I could see the blackboard.
[00:08:14] But I was in the room with the door open
[00:08:16] about 10 inches wide.
[00:08:18] And you were just a hyperactive kid?
[00:08:21] I think so.
[00:08:22] And the board with all of that, I could read before.
[00:08:25] I was, I could read when I was four.
[00:08:28] So my, we're always buying me books.
[00:08:31] So stuff like that.
[00:08:34] So you were a smart little board.
[00:08:36] I guess.
[00:08:37] I don't know.
[00:08:38] What about sports?
[00:08:38] Were you into sports at all?
[00:08:40] Yeah.
[00:08:41] Cause I was the biggest kid and played,
[00:08:46] touched football in high school, which got,
[00:08:48] I'm sorry, in grade school, seventh and eighth grade,
[00:08:51] and it gets a little rough.
[00:08:52] At least it did then.
[00:08:54] So, but I never got hurt or anything like that.
[00:08:57] And then when I got to high school,
[00:08:58] I played, played football and played first team.
[00:09:03] What year did you graduate high school?
[00:09:05] 59.
[00:09:07] So you grew up in like the iconic fifties.
[00:09:09] That's right.
[00:09:10] That's right.
[00:09:11] When you see those movies, are you just?
[00:09:13] I think it's awful.
[00:09:14] Why is it awful?
[00:09:15] The clothes that they wear and the nostalgia, the cars,
[00:09:19] we realize I do today are death traps.
[00:09:24] But they bring huge money, these cars and the fifties.
[00:09:27] Which one did you have?
[00:09:28] You must have had one.
[00:09:29] Did you have one?
[00:09:29] I guess maybe not in the city.
[00:09:31] No, it's not the city.
[00:09:33] It was real suburbs.
[00:09:34] Wooden houses on little bitty, little bitty lots.
[00:09:39] So did you have a car?
[00:09:41] No.
[00:09:42] You know what?
[00:09:43] I never owned a car until I was in flying school
[00:09:47] in Big Spring, Texas.
[00:09:51] Never had a need of one.
[00:09:53] Got around.
[00:09:54] Back in the fifties, early sixties,
[00:09:58] you stick out your thumb, you got a ride.
[00:10:01] People were different then, somehow or other.
[00:10:04] I don't really understand how that is.
[00:10:07] But I went all of the eastern half of the United States
[00:10:10] with my thumb.
[00:10:11] I went everywhere.
[00:10:13] And never worried about getting back or anything like that.
[00:10:17] But on one time, the worst time I ever had doing that
[00:10:20] was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Western Pennsylvania.
[00:10:23] I was there for 12 hours.
[00:10:27] What?
[00:10:28] No one would pick me up.
[00:10:29] I have no idea why.
[00:10:30] And maybe I'd look scowly or something.
[00:10:33] I don't know.
[00:10:35] I don't think I would have been a great hitchhiker
[00:10:37] if it comes down to looking scowly.
[00:10:39] How we definitely have some issues.
[00:10:41] So you're growing up in the iconic fifties.
[00:10:43] How do those movies miss the mark, hit the mark?
[00:10:47] I mean, how are they?
[00:10:48] The fifties movies.
[00:10:50] Yeah.
[00:10:51] I don't know.
[00:10:52] Frankly, I don't remember.
[00:10:55] I don't remember what movies you might be talking about.
[00:10:58] What about Elvis?
[00:11:00] You remember?
[00:11:01] I thought it was awful.
[00:11:02] You thought Elvis was awful.
[00:11:03] I personally did.
[00:11:04] I guess my sisters thought otherwise.
[00:11:06] Three younger sisters.
[00:11:08] But I thought that was the dumbest thing I ever heard of.
[00:11:12] So that's what I thought.
[00:11:13] So what were you listening to?
[00:11:16] I have to admit, classical music.
[00:11:18] My minor story.
[00:11:23] My wife, when, before we were married,
[00:11:28] somehow or other I introduced her to the fact
[00:11:31] that I listened mostly to classical music.
[00:11:34] And she went home.
[00:11:35] She tells me now.
[00:11:37] Actually, after we were married,
[00:11:40] said this guy is a little bit weird.
[00:11:42] Suspect for sure.
[00:11:43] This is the classical music.
[00:11:45] I don't know.
[00:11:48] Rimsky-Korsakov-Sherzad that everybody knows.
[00:11:53] I was really intrigued by that.
[00:11:56] So I listened to classical music and still do it today.
[00:11:59] Whatever.
[00:12:00] So the rock and roll thing was not your scene?
[00:12:02] Not until the California, the British invasion
[00:12:06] and California.
[00:12:07] And that was all together different.
[00:12:09] Okay, we'll get there.
[00:12:10] So you graduate from high school, 1959.
[00:12:14] So you lived through the Korean War as well?
[00:12:16] I remember it well.
[00:12:18] I remember being in Boy Scout camp
[00:12:20] when they announced the armistice
[00:12:24] had just been signed that morning or whenever it was.
[00:12:30] That was a big deal.
[00:12:31] Everybody sheared.
[00:12:32] But you still didn't get the impression
[00:12:35] that that was something that you might do one day?
[00:12:36] No, no.
[00:12:37] There was no military tradition in the family at all,
[00:12:41] except for a grand uncle, Maximum Nice Guy,
[00:12:47] who was a graduate of the same college
[00:12:52] as Donald Trump graduated, still exists
[00:12:55] at New York State Military Academy, I think it's called.
[00:13:00] But he graduated in 1936 or something like that.
[00:13:04] And he was part of the last combat cavalry regiment
[00:13:10] in the United States Army.
[00:13:13] And I was disbanded, I think in 1939,
[00:13:17] as the storm clouds were gathering
[00:13:19] and they disbanded that unit.
[00:13:21] But that was officers with real swords
[00:13:25] and two horses each and all the rest
[00:13:28] of everything else about that.
[00:13:30] But that was a combat unit, not a display unit.
[00:13:34] And it was the last one.
[00:13:36] He wound up in Iceland for the duration of the war,
[00:13:39] deriding the whole experience.
[00:13:42] But I only realized in my grown-up days
[00:13:45] that if Hitler had won the Battle of Britain,
[00:13:49] Iceland was next.
[00:13:51] And they probably, no doubt knew that,
[00:13:54] but they all, I went to a reunion with him at one point
[00:13:59] and they all derided their experience there and so forth.
[00:14:02] But they would have been the first to be killed
[00:14:04] and the first super German raid on Iceland
[00:14:10] to flatten the place.
[00:14:11] Yeah, we used to get a similar thing in the SEAL teams
[00:14:14] where you'd get some platoons would be going over
[00:14:16] to Iraq or Afghanistan.
[00:14:19] And some other platoons would be going to like Guam
[00:14:23] or somewhere where there's no war going on.
[00:14:25] And of course, all the guys that are,
[00:14:27] get sent to Guam are just angry
[00:14:30] that they can't be in Iraq or Afghanistan.
[00:14:32] And meanwhile, the guys in Iraq or Afghanistan
[00:14:34] are freezing or sweating to death
[00:14:37] or to get shot at or whatever.
[00:14:38] Yeah, they use real bullets here and stuff like that.
[00:14:41] But that's what, you know,
[00:14:42] that's what people join the SEAL teams for.
[00:14:44] Yeah.
[00:14:45] And apparently the horse cavalry as well.
[00:14:48] Yeah, it was for real.
[00:14:50] Swords and the whole deal with those guys.
[00:14:53] And he was a wonderful man, wonderful man.
[00:14:57] When sisters were born, I got farmed out with him twice
[00:15:01] in the summertime.
[00:15:02] And he worked in Lower New York State Binghamton
[00:15:09] and Elmira, those places around there.
[00:15:11] And he had grand aunts who had a truncated farm there.
[00:15:16] And he farmed me out with them.
[00:15:20] You're just slave labor.
[00:15:21] And I had fun.
[00:15:22] I had kid fun being a kid with cornfields and ponds
[00:15:27] and stuff like that all over the place there.
[00:15:31] And then where'd you end up?
[00:15:32] So where'd you end up going to college?
[00:15:34] I went to Albright College in Reading, PA.
[00:15:39] Commuter for me.
[00:15:41] Very small college at that time,
[00:15:43] 850 students at that time.
[00:15:45] And now it's about 12 or 1300,
[00:15:48] maybe a little bit more than that.
[00:15:51] But wonderful teachers there.
[00:15:54] Absolutely wonderful.
[00:15:55] Especially the man, but one notable woman
[00:15:58] who was a pacifist of all things.
[00:16:01] But she was absolutely a wonderful woman.
[00:16:04] And...
[00:16:05] How come she left such a big impression on you?
[00:16:08] Because she was so straight.
[00:16:10] I'd never met a woman quite like that.
[00:16:12] She was straightforward and thoughtful and aggressive.
[00:16:18] I like a woman who is my wife.
[00:16:21] She tells you what's on her mind immediately.
[00:16:27] And she was that way, I guess.
[00:16:29] And she was a professor there?
[00:16:30] Yeah, she was.
[00:16:31] What was she teaching?
[00:16:32] English, English and speech.
[00:16:34] And she changed with her professional abilities and so forth.
[00:16:43] And I remember sitting there arguing with her silently.
[00:16:48] No, a ten minute lecture about using the atomic bomb
[00:16:54] in Japan, she was opposed to that.
[00:16:56] And I don't think she had read notably or widely enough
[00:17:03] about all that.
[00:17:05] And I had at that point, as opposed to that.
[00:17:09] But still, I thought she was really great.
[00:17:14] Point of view sort of thing.
[00:17:16] What were you studying?
[00:17:18] I was an econ major, not business, economics
[00:17:24] and minor in history.
[00:17:27] And had some fabulous teachers there.
[00:17:32] A guy named Wilbur Gingrich who was a genuinely world famous
[00:17:39] Greek scholar and biblical scholar.
[00:17:43] A couple of other guys that nobody ever heard of,
[00:17:46] but a wonderful man.
[00:17:48] And a crazy guy who loved to teach European
[00:17:56] and Russian history.
[00:17:58] And I took him for Russian.
[00:17:59] Don't take him for God's sakes.
[00:18:01] You've got a D out of that.
[00:18:04] And he'll blither you and you can't write fast enough.
[00:18:07] And his class, his name was,
[00:18:10] Gingrich was the biblical scholar, a Greek scholar.
[00:18:18] Can you believe it?
[00:18:19] His name escapes me.
[00:18:20] But at any rate, Kistler.
[00:18:22] And they said, you'll get a D out of his class
[00:18:26] because you can't write fast enough and stuff like that.
[00:18:29] But he was something, he smoked continuously.
[00:18:35] And always had the window open and the butts went out
[00:18:37] of the window and he'd torch up another one.
[00:18:40] But he was really something.
[00:18:43] What'd you get in the class?
[00:18:44] B, all of six in the class.
[00:18:47] So at some point you got more into school than you were
[00:18:52] when you were in grammar school or whatever.
[00:18:54] Yeah, no, because I had smart people
[00:18:56] who were just smarter than I was.
[00:18:58] And how'd you put it?
[00:19:02] My parents weren't really educated, if you will.
[00:19:04] My mother had a college degree from NYU,
[00:19:07] but I think she skated as much as she could.
[00:19:10] And my dad, they kicked him out of grade school,
[00:19:13] yeah, out of school when he was after 10th grade,
[00:19:18] I think, because he was done.
[00:19:21] They did that at that time in the 20s.
[00:19:24] So both of them wanted me to be educated.
[00:19:28] And so it was interesting to be in the company
[00:19:32] of genuinely educated people.
[00:19:34] And I didn't catch fire at first
[00:19:36] by the time I was a junior.
[00:19:38] I understood that this is really an experience.
[00:19:42] You can get interesting things out of these people.
[00:19:48] By the time I was a senior, I didn't want to leave.
[00:19:51] Because you get to talk as a grown-up
[00:19:54] with these grown-ups who listen to you
[00:19:56] and then tell you things you had never conceived of before
[00:20:00] and stuff like that.
[00:20:01] So I had a good time in college until they kicked me out.
[00:20:06] At what point did you start looking at the military
[00:20:08] as a legitimate option for you?
[00:20:12] Not until I was about to graduate.
[00:20:15] And back in the good old days, my dad worked.
[00:20:19] He was a New Yorker, New Yorker, New Yorker,
[00:20:22] but he got a job in Redding, Pennsylvania.
[00:20:25] And it was a shock to all of us.
[00:20:27] I didn't want to leave the school I was in.
[00:20:28] I was going to Progles.
[00:20:31] So this is back in high school?
[00:20:32] Yeah.
[00:20:34] I was two years into Chamonaut High School in Long Island,
[00:20:37] which is by entrance exams and tuition.
[00:20:41] And I liked it there.
[00:20:43] I was doing a little bit better, a little bit better.
[00:20:45] But I didn't want to leave.
[00:20:47] And he came home and said he'd been offered a job
[00:20:50] in Redding, Pennsylvania.
[00:20:51] Where is that?
[00:20:54] We were New Yorkers, New Yorkers.
[00:20:58] I can do the accent, too.
[00:20:59] And of course, when you get to Pennsylvania,
[00:21:01] the kids make endless fun of you because of your accent
[00:21:05] and stuff.
[00:21:06] But at any rate, where was I in this?
[00:21:09] We're just trying to figure out, at what point did you
[00:21:12] think the military might be an option?
[00:21:13] I could go downtown Redding and go up the fire tower staircase
[00:21:20] and plop in the chair in my dad's office.
[00:21:24] And he said, so what are you going to do?
[00:21:25] You're going to graduate here.
[00:21:27] I said, I don't know.
[00:21:29] He said, have you considered maybe the government would
[00:21:34] teach you how to fly in one of the services?
[00:21:36] And I, they don't take guys like me.
[00:21:38] He said, they surely do.
[00:21:40] 2020s and good shape, nothing wrong with it.
[00:21:46] So I applied to the Navy guy.
[00:21:48] And he was an embarrassment.
[00:21:53] Overweight, feet up on the desk, didn't seem to care about
[00:21:59] anything.
[00:21:59] I filled out all his paperwork.
[00:22:01] And he never got back to me.
[00:22:03] Went to the Air Force guy.
[00:22:04] And he was close to his quota, probably.
[00:22:09] He drove me around.
[00:22:11] You have to go here and fill out these.
[00:22:13] I'll help you fill out the form.
[00:22:16] And the Air Force took me.
[00:22:17] So, but the, when was the question?
[00:22:25] Well, that was the question.
[00:22:26] The question was, how did you first get the idea of how to
[00:22:29] fly?
[00:22:29] My dad said, see if you learn how to fly.
[00:22:31] And he didn't know how to fly.
[00:22:33] So did they have like a contract that made you a pilot?
[00:22:35] Was that part of the enlistment process?
[00:22:39] They only said, we like everything you do.
[00:22:43] Now you have to fill out a preference sheet.
[00:22:49] And you can put whatever you like in there.
[00:22:51] We suggest this list of stuff over here.
[00:22:55] And then you make them one, two, and three choices.
[00:23:00] I said, well, I want to be a pilot.
[00:23:03] Because that's what I'm doing this whole thing for.
[00:23:07] He said, well, most people put in navigator for second and
[00:23:09] then something like, I don't know, auxiliary
[00:23:13] aviation or something like that.
[00:23:15] I said, well, that's not why I'm here.
[00:23:17] So I put pilot, pilot, pilot, one, two, three.
[00:23:20] Funny thing too, the B-52 squadron I was later in, was a
[00:23:24] guy from my college class.
[00:23:26] And I said, Danny, what are you doing here as a navigator?
[00:23:30] He said, well, they told me, put pilot first, navigator
[00:23:33] second.
[00:23:34] I said, you don't wear glasses or anything.
[00:23:37] He said, well, that's what they took me as.
[00:23:40] I said, well, I didn't want to rub it in.
[00:23:42] So I just let it alone.
[00:23:45] So what was your indoctrination to the Air Force then?
[00:23:48] I went to their OCS in San Antonio.
[00:23:53] It's not at Lackland.
[00:23:57] I think they called it the Medina base.
[00:23:59] It's nearby.
[00:24:01] And I went through that.
[00:24:02] That's three months.
[00:24:04] Was it a shock to your system?
[00:24:06] Were you wondering why the hell you did this?
[00:24:08] Well, I was fortunate.
[00:24:09] There were several previous enlisted guys there.
[00:24:15] And I thought, they know the ropes.
[00:24:17] Do whatever they do.
[00:24:19] So that's what I did.
[00:24:22] And then they said, if you play a musical instrument, put
[00:24:26] your name on this list.
[00:24:27] And I said, no, no.
[00:24:28] Guy told me, don't volunteer for anything.
[00:24:31] Before I went in.
[00:24:33] So I found out the guy was running this thing.
[00:24:38] He loves to have live music for any parades that he has.
[00:24:42] And if you can play a musical, get your name on it.
[00:24:44] I did.
[00:24:45] So there were.
[00:24:46] What instrument did you play?
[00:24:47] I played the trumpet and cornet.
[00:24:50] I played baritone.
[00:24:51] I can play alto, or French horn, or any of those.
[00:24:55] But I dropped that for a long time in midlife.
[00:24:58] I'm back into it now.
[00:25:00] Anyway, you got out of everything.
[00:25:04] You straightened up your digs and your bed and whatnot.
[00:25:09] And when the Saturday morning inspection happened,
[00:25:14] we had rehearsal.
[00:25:16] And that was they, if you will, all knew that.
[00:25:21] So this is, what, 1963?
[00:25:23] No, no, 65.
[00:25:26] January 65.
[00:25:27] Because, see, I graduated in August
[00:25:31] because I was having too much fun by that point in college.
[00:25:37] You ought to take that professor's history course.
[00:25:39] He's really interesting.
[00:25:41] And you should take compared to the economic systems,
[00:25:44] because you should do that.
[00:25:45] And I didn't have enough credits.
[00:25:47] I had two.
[00:25:49] If you needed 150, I had 175.
[00:25:53] But you don't have enough in your major or in your minor.
[00:25:56] You took that course and you got good grading.
[00:26:00] And you're right.
[00:26:00] So I wound up graduating in August.
[00:26:03] But how did you get into that?
[00:26:06] So it's 1965.
[00:26:07] So you're starting to hear about Vietnam.
[00:26:09] You guys must be talking about Vietnam.
[00:26:11] No, no.
[00:26:12] Because that happened in January of 1965.
[00:26:21] And summer of 64, I worked through college
[00:26:25] at a small summer stock playhouse
[00:26:28] because I was in the drama club in college.
[00:26:31] And you meet this guy and meet that guy and so forth.
[00:26:35] And all very legitimate, if you will, good people,
[00:26:39] not these sorts of flaky dumb people
[00:26:42] that you might think of when you think of theater sort of people.
[00:26:49] And I had a mentor by this point.
[00:26:50] A guy from New York was old enough to be my father.
[00:26:54] And he said, when you graduate, where are you going to do?
[00:26:58] And I said, well, I don't know.
[00:27:00] This paperwork and the Air Force to Fly and stuff.
[00:27:06] And he said, they were looking for a guy like you
[00:27:10] at a theater in Baltimore that I am going to, he said.
[00:27:14] Should I mention you to them?
[00:27:15] And I said, well, OK.
[00:27:18] So he called me in about a week or so.
[00:27:21] And he said, they want 15 minutes of drama
[00:27:24] and 15 minutes of comedy if you can do that.
[00:27:28] They want to talk to you.
[00:27:31] So I went to a woman in the summer stock company, Grace
[00:27:36] Chapman, wonderful woman.
[00:27:37] And I said, can you help me?
[00:27:39] And she did.
[00:27:40] I said, I want to do it like this.
[00:27:41] And she said, no, no, no.
[00:27:42] We're going to do it this way and so forth.
[00:27:46] So rehearsed it with her.
[00:27:48] Have to memorize everything, of course.
[00:27:51] Did all that and went down to Baltimore, stood up on the stage.
[00:27:56] Lights.
[00:27:58] And they've got what?
[00:27:58] A few people are watching you to judge you?
[00:28:01] The two bosses sitting in the city.
[00:28:03] And they're thinking of giving you some kind of a role?
[00:28:06] No, they had a program there where you actually
[00:28:09] worked as a, in the union deal, the actors union.
[00:28:16] It's called Actors Equity.
[00:28:17] You work as a local jobber and it's called.
[00:28:21] Doing what?
[00:28:22] What's your job?
[00:28:23] Well, they've got you.
[00:28:26] They've got you by the short hairs, as they say.
[00:28:29] And you will get role.
[00:28:34] Maybe the minor, maybe you were just a walk on for this one.
[00:28:37] And maybe something serious.
[00:28:39] I got one very nice role out of it.
[00:28:42] I was the elder son in Galileo by Bertolt Brecht.
[00:28:48] He was a notable European communist.
[00:28:53] But a good director there for that, John Marley, the guy who,
[00:28:59] a lot of people, he was a workhorse, a Hollywood movie actor.
[00:29:07] He was the guy in bed with a horse during the first Godfather
[00:29:12] film.
[00:29:13] That was John Marley and a nice man as well.
[00:29:16] Anyway.
[00:29:18] So wait, so this was in the summertime you were doing this?
[00:29:20] Summer stock in a barn, believe it or not, in Pennsylvania.
[00:29:24] And then Jerry Richards was a New York guy, old enough to be my dad,
[00:29:29] said he was going to this equity company in Baltimore,
[00:29:34] relatively new, called Center Stage.
[00:29:37] It's still active today.
[00:29:39] And was I interested, did you have another thing in mind?
[00:29:42] And I went back and I said to my mother,
[00:29:44] been passing, I was thinking about this.
[00:29:47] She said, do what you have to do, all right?
[00:29:50] So I hitchhiked once again.
[00:29:54] To Baltimore.
[00:29:55] To Baltimore.
[00:29:56] And how long did you stay in Baltimore for?
[00:29:58] Only until I got a big fat envelope in the mail from DoD.
[00:30:04] And it said, we will teach you to fly if you want to.
[00:30:08] And of course, the draft was there.
[00:30:10] And I had already called the draft board and I said,
[00:30:13] where am I?
[00:30:14] And they said, we can't tell you by the law.
[00:30:17] But I'll tell you this, you're close to the front of the drawer.
[00:30:21] I remember that very well.
[00:30:23] I thought, I've got to do something about this.
[00:30:25] I wonder what to do about this.
[00:30:27] And I went to a fellow guy who was in the same position
[00:30:31] I was in the company.
[00:30:33] And I said, I don't know what to do.
[00:30:35] And he said, do what I did.
[00:30:37] Tell them you like boys, not girls.
[00:30:41] I said, that's not true.
[00:30:43] He said, it's not true with me either.
[00:30:45] But it got me right.
[00:30:46] They could go sit on the bench over there.
[00:30:48] And they asked, do you really like boys rather than girls?
[00:30:52] And he said, I just said, that's right.
[00:30:54] I do.
[00:30:55] And that was the end of that.
[00:30:57] And I got off.
[00:30:57] I said, oh, boy.
[00:30:59] That may be good advice some ways.
[00:31:01] But I thought somewhere down the road,
[00:31:03] somebody's going to drag that out 40 years from now.
[00:31:07] And so I didn't want to do that.
[00:31:09] And lo and behold, I get this big fat envelope in my mouth.
[00:31:11] I go to Jerry Richards, my mentor.
[00:31:15] I said, what should I do?
[00:31:15] He said, he was a combat veteran of World War II.
[00:31:20] A dog-faced soldier had funny stories
[00:31:23] to tell about being on a line of March, hot, sweaty,
[00:31:28] and an Italian farmer going by with a wooden tank
[00:31:33] on a little wagon pulled by a horse.
[00:31:37] And the second lieutenant, whoever it was,
[00:31:41] said, stay away from that tank.
[00:31:43] We all knew it was full of wine or grape juice anyway.
[00:31:49] And he said, we got two thirds of the line through there.
[00:31:52] And somebody went, boom, boom, boom.
[00:31:54] And that was it.
[00:31:56] Everything collapsed.
[00:31:57] Anyway, super nice guy.
[00:32:00] And I went to Jerry.
[00:32:01] And I said, what should I do about this?
[00:32:03] And he said, well, you always come back to this,
[00:32:06] but you're never getting another chance to do that.
[00:32:08] So I signed on the dotted line.
[00:32:11] And I went into the Air Force on the 2nd of January, 1975.
[00:32:18] 1965.
[00:32:19] 65.
[00:32:21] Yeah, 65.
[00:32:22] He said, 75.
[00:32:23] That's right.
[00:32:24] 65.
[00:32:24] So yeah, so that early part of Vietnam.
[00:32:26] Because I always think in a way the news kind of worked.
[00:32:30] It was the battle of the I-Dreng Valley in 1965
[00:32:33] where it really hit the news.
[00:32:34] And there was casualties.
[00:32:36] And it seemed like the escalation really kind of started.
[00:32:40] So you get done with the Officer Candidate School.
[00:32:45] And then you get your slot to flight school?
[00:32:47] Right.
[00:32:48] And that was at Webb Air Force Base in West Texas,
[00:32:52] at Big Spring, Texas.
[00:32:56] Pretty much of a barren place, just east of the big, big oil
[00:33:01] fields.
[00:33:02] But there were plenty of oil wells around where I was,
[00:33:05] around Big Spring.
[00:33:06] But the big oil fields around Midland and Odessa, Texas.
[00:33:13] Permium Basin, it's called.
[00:33:17] And there had been at least one crash at Big Spring, Texas.
[00:33:22] They made a very big deal out of it, and rightly so.
[00:33:24] The guy was confused about stars and oil fields.
[00:33:28] Every drilling, not their drilling rig,
[00:33:32] but every pumping deal has its own light bulb on it.
[00:33:36] And he got confused and rolled over.
[00:33:38] To your shame.
[00:33:39] Yeah, so really ashamed.
[00:33:41] But I learned to fly there and then went to the.
[00:33:45] How was flight school?
[00:33:49] It was tough for me at first because I didn't know a wing
[00:33:53] from a tail, an aileron from an elevator, anything.
[00:33:58] And about half those guys had private licenses.
[00:34:02] At least half of them had private licenses.
[00:34:06] And a couple of them had commercial multi-engines.
[00:34:10] They weren't just walking through the thing.
[00:34:13] But I was slow to get going.
[00:34:15] But when I got into the second half, which was the T-38
[00:34:19] at that time, I did very well.
[00:34:22] But it's like a baseball player trying to bring his average
[00:34:29] up the second half of the season.
[00:34:31] So your grade point average was a problem for me.
[00:34:35] And I wound up getting a B-52 assignment.
[00:34:41] My roommates got C-130s, which was a very desirable deal.
[00:34:45] If you didn't want to get shot at,
[00:34:46] it turned out to be very foolish.
[00:34:50] Because in C-130, you got shot at in the Vietnam War.
[00:34:55] And one of my roommates got Air Defense Command F-104,
[00:35:02] which was considered to be creme de la creme,
[00:35:05] until I got assigned to the F-4.
[00:35:10] But first, you had to do your B-52 time.
[00:35:12] Right.
[00:35:12] The G-Model in Rome, New York, wonderful place,
[00:35:15] wonderful people there.
[00:35:17] I liked everything about it except sitting alert.
[00:35:20] Awful.
[00:35:21] So this is now what, 1966 or so?
[00:35:25] Yeah, that's right.
[00:35:26] And you're assigned to the B-52 squadron in Rome, New York.
[00:35:31] Yeah.
[00:35:32] Very heavily decorated squadron from World War II.
[00:35:35] I can't remember the number, 488 or something like that.
[00:35:40] Eighth Air Force.
[00:35:43] I had the first guy they put me with was a guy of shorter stature.
[00:35:49] And I think he had a problem about that.
[00:35:52] And I was six feet tall and whatnot.
[00:35:54] And all the way down to him saying, I said, that's not so.
[00:35:58] He said, it is so.
[00:35:59] And you shut up because I'm a major.
[00:36:01] And you're just a goddamn first lieutenant.
[00:36:04] Whoa, OK.
[00:36:06] But at any rate, he fired me, so to speak, basically.
[00:36:09] He didn't want to fly with me anymore
[00:36:12] because I may have made better landings than he did.
[00:36:16] Because the next guy I got was a family man.
[00:36:18] And we got along like brothers.
[00:36:20] And it was great.
[00:36:21] So the one lead pilot or whatever it was called,
[00:36:24] the lead pilot, the major?
[00:36:25] Yeah.
[00:36:26] He didn't like flying with you.
[00:36:28] Right.
[00:36:29] Well, he didn't like your attitude or something.
[00:36:30] And he didn't like my attitude either.
[00:36:32] So he got rid of you.
[00:36:33] Right.
[00:36:33] But then you just moved to another guy?
[00:36:35] Yeah.
[00:36:35] Well, they gave me another guy.
[00:36:38] You don't have any choice about it.
[00:36:39] But we got along.
[00:36:42] Had fun every day.
[00:36:43] And what's the deal with sitting alert?
[00:36:46] Well, they did it two different ways.
[00:36:51] At Romney Arc, where I was, they had eight airplanes
[00:36:55] on alert at any one time.
[00:36:58] All the airplanes that I was on had two Hound dogs stand off
[00:37:03] missiles with thermonuclear weapons in them.
[00:37:08] The Mark 28 at that time.
[00:37:10] I don't think it's classified anymore.
[00:37:13] But the highest yield on those, single warhead per.
[00:37:20] And there was a pop on there.
[00:37:24] And then four thermonuclear weapons in the Bombay.
[00:37:28] And then four Quail decoy missiles in the Bombay.
[00:37:34] And the targets for the ones I was on, well, I was on a
[00:37:41] mission that was downtown Moscow, believe it or not, and
[00:37:45] land in Turkey.
[00:37:46] I think all of the ones I was on were land in Turkey.
[00:37:49] Because you were out of fuel.
[00:37:50] By then you were fueled south of Iceland.
[00:37:54] And then went in and then turned straight south and landed
[00:38:01] on an abandoned airfield in central Turkey.
[00:38:06] And you were instructed to get fuel by Jerry Can.
[00:38:11] This is silly.
[00:38:12] And we knew it.
[00:38:16] Jerry Can was not enough.
[00:38:18] He had eight J57s and a B52.
[00:38:21] And H model had modified J57s that were fan jet engines.
[00:38:27] But it was silly.
[00:38:28] You'd never forget enough fuel to refuel the thing, to fly
[00:38:33] it anywhere.
[00:38:34] So I mean, was that just because once you flew over Moscow
[00:38:37] and dropped nuclear weapons, it wouldn't really matter where
[00:38:40] you were getting?
[00:38:40] What was the?
[00:38:41] Pretty much.
[00:38:41] Because you're assuming that the world would be a conflagration
[00:38:45] and would be pretty much of a mess.
[00:38:48] But at that point, you would truly a thermonuclear war
[00:38:52] would have finished by that time, I guess.
[00:38:56] And everything would be an awful, awful mess.
[00:39:00] And are you sitting, like are the weapons loaded on the aircraft?
[00:39:05] Just sit there, stage?
[00:39:05] Absolutely.
[00:39:06] Positively with an armed guard on every airplane.
[00:39:10] Walking around underneath every airplane 24 hours a day.
[00:39:14] Was there any events that would heighten your readiness?
[00:39:18] They would have practice alerts that could happen at any time.
[00:39:28] SAC, World Strategic Air Command, worldwide,
[00:39:32] would call an alert.
[00:39:34] And every SAC base on the planet, even in obscure places,
[00:39:39] would do what they were told to do.
[00:39:44] And they basically had three commands.
[00:39:48] One, to man the airplanes and start them at stay in place.
[00:39:53] Second, start the airplanes and taxi down the runway,
[00:39:58] just motivate the flying machines.
[00:40:02] And third would be a real launch.
[00:40:04] Actually, there were two kinds of launches,
[00:40:06] launch to a holding point short of total commitment.
[00:40:13] Or four, total commitment from minute one.
[00:40:18] So obviously, the third and fourth never happened with me.
[00:40:27] The alert was at Rome New York, at Griffiths Air Force Base
[00:40:31] of Orange, is where I was.
[00:40:32] And wonderful people there, too, was seven days.
[00:40:36] You had seven days on.
[00:40:38] And the rules were half your time on alert.
[00:40:41] You had three.
[00:40:43] But it didn't really work out that way,
[00:40:46] because you didn't get away from the base until, in this case,
[00:40:51] Thursday, 12 o'clock or something like that.
[00:40:55] And you lost half the day.
[00:40:57] And then they would schedule you for a flight, maybe,
[00:41:03] Monday night at 8 PM.
[00:41:07] So Monday was sort of gone, because you had to sleep,
[00:41:11] because you were going to fly for 12 hours.
[00:41:14] You took off at 8 PM, you were going to land at 8 o'clock
[00:41:17] Tuesday morning.
[00:41:18] All those missions, those training missions, were eight hours.
[00:41:23] But training missions were sort of fun and interesting.
[00:41:27] I spent a lot of time with my hands in my lap.
[00:41:29] But nevertheless, they were interesting.
[00:41:33] And you went all over the United States,
[00:41:35] all over the United States doing those things.
[00:41:38] And a lot of them were at low level,
[00:41:40] because that's what you would do in the case of a nuclear war.
[00:41:44] Oh, it's a low-level attack?
[00:41:46] Oh, yes.
[00:41:47] The B-52s were all assigned a low altitude.
[00:41:54] Like how low?
[00:41:55] 200 feet.
[00:41:57] That's good, underneath radar?
[00:41:59] Right.
[00:42:00] Yeah.
[00:42:01] As low as you want to go is what I was told.
[00:42:04] I said, this is a poker deck route,
[00:42:07] and it's published at 400 feet.
[00:42:09] How low are we talking about here if we actually do have a war?
[00:42:14] As low as you want to go.
[00:42:17] I said, one point, you have charts that were accurate,
[00:42:22] accurate, and classified, obviously.
[00:42:26] But I said to one of the guys who worked in the vault,
[00:42:31] you had to target study while you were on alert.
[00:42:34] And I said, you show telephone poles here.
[00:42:38] Here I am to co-pilot, looking for the next turn.
[00:42:43] Can I count those telephone poles?
[00:42:45] Yes, you can.
[00:42:46] Whoa, they were all done by U2 or by satellite.
[00:42:50] I think the satellites were just starting at that time.
[00:42:54] So I said, so it would be the 28th telephone pole.
[00:42:59] I can turn left to 030.
[00:43:03] Yep.
[00:43:04] Anyway, so what was the question?
[00:43:08] Where would the heck we're going?
[00:43:09] Well, it's very interesting to hear
[00:43:12] sort of what your status was as a pilot.
[00:43:16] And I actually asked you what level of alert, what's
[00:43:19] the highest level of alert you are?
[00:43:21] Because obviously, you missed the Cuban missile crisis.
[00:43:23] That's right.
[00:43:24] Because I'm sure that would have been a very high alert.
[00:43:27] Right.
[00:43:28] Do you think they got airborne for that?
[00:43:29] I don't think so.
[00:43:30] I don't think so.
[00:43:31] I don't remember ever asking anybody.
[00:43:34] But I don't think that that happened.
[00:43:37] No.
[00:43:37] And that had to be a little bit of a strange weight
[00:43:43] on your shoulders to think about, especially
[00:43:46] with your background, with your English teacher that
[00:43:48] didn't like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
[00:43:51] Right.
[00:43:52] And here you are with a mission tasking
[00:43:54] that if you get this mission, you're
[00:43:56] going to fly and annihilate basically the world.
[00:44:01] Well, I have a little bit of a funny story about it.
[00:44:03] Let's hear about that.
[00:44:05] Turns into a funny story.
[00:44:06] I like that.
[00:44:07] In the G and the H, we had the gunner up front.
[00:44:10] And the guns that were in the tail.
[00:44:12] So these are the G and H models of the B-52.
[00:44:15] Right.
[00:44:16] Up to that, the gunner rode in the tail.
[00:44:18] And if he were to bail out, he would
[00:44:21] jettison his turret, which weighed something like 2,000
[00:44:25] pounds, everything.
[00:44:26] His ammunition and his 50 calibers and everything short
[00:44:32] of the seat.
[00:44:33] He sat on a chemical toilet back there, incidentally.
[00:44:36] But then he would bail out.
[00:44:38] He did not have an ejection seat.
[00:44:41] It was right in front of his toes.
[00:44:42] And he just stepped forward or leaned forward now
[00:44:45] to win with a conventional parachute.
[00:44:48] Anyway, the gunner and the G and the H models up front.
[00:44:54] And the cockpit arrangement is different in the G and the H
[00:44:58] than it was in the earlier, up to the F model, B-52.
[00:45:04] The G's no longer exist.
[00:45:05] They went with the strategic arms limitation treaty.
[00:45:10] And the G's got their pictures of them getting their wings
[00:45:14] cut off that they took airborne pictures of all that.
[00:45:18] So comply with the Russians.
[00:45:21] The Soviets?
[00:45:22] Yeah.
[00:45:23] But at any rate.
[00:45:24] The G and the H internally are the same.
[00:45:26] And the ECM officer and the gunner ride facing backwards.
[00:45:33] And now it was going to.
[00:45:37] Oh, yeah.
[00:45:37] So on your charts, when you do your first day of alert target
[00:45:43] study, it's the same charts every time.
[00:45:47] The gunners, you sit across the table.
[00:45:49] And I said, oh, you have LPBN.
[00:45:55] That means something.
[00:45:56] And E35, that means something across the route of flight.
[00:46:03] And I said, LPBO.
[00:46:06] In the same lettering, stencil, same ink, same everything.
[00:46:12] I said, what's LPBO?
[00:46:14] He said, last point of bailout.
[00:46:18] That's over Finland.
[00:46:20] He said, exactly right.
[00:46:21] I'm not going to anybody's nuclear war.
[00:46:23] I'm leaving.
[00:46:24] I'm over Finland.
[00:46:25] I'm taking the seat pack with me with the.22 rifle,
[00:46:29] the sleeping bag, and everything.
[00:46:31] I'm out of here.
[00:46:34] But it never happened.
[00:46:36] He was an E6 enlisted guy.
[00:46:40] And nice family man and everything else.
[00:46:42] But he said, I'm not going to nuclear war.
[00:46:44] You're nuts.
[00:46:46] So how long did you do this job for?
[00:46:48] A year.
[00:46:49] Well, including the RAG, if you will, in Merced, California,
[00:46:55] a year and a half.
[00:46:56] But then I got the big fat envelope that said,
[00:47:00] here is your interservice transfer.
[00:47:03] If you want to do this, you can do this.
[00:47:05] And that's what you had applied for?
[00:47:06] Right.
[00:47:07] And why did you try and do an interservice transfer
[00:47:10] to the Navy?
[00:47:11] Because I didn't want two sides to that.
[00:47:13] And there's popping your peas again there.
[00:47:17] I didn't want to sit alert anymore.
[00:47:20] I didn't like riding around with my hands in my lap.
[00:47:26] And going way back, I had this idea in the back of my head.
[00:47:31] My first cross country in the T-37 out of Web Air Force Base,
[00:47:36] we stopped somewhere I can't remember.
[00:47:39] And there were two Navy guys there wearing golf shirts
[00:47:43] underneath their flight suits.
[00:47:47] And through the open door, there were two A4s parked out there.
[00:47:51] And they said something like USS Independence or USS,
[00:47:56] who knows, Forest Hall or who knows what.
[00:47:58] I thought, isn't that hot stuff?
[00:48:01] These guys can go to sea with those things and go,
[00:48:05] I don't know, anywhere they want.
[00:48:08] That's hot.
[00:48:09] And then I saw the back of a proceedings magazine.
[00:48:15] Proceedings used to be magazine size.
[00:48:17] Then it became smaller format.
[00:48:21] But it showed an A4 looking over the A4's shoulder,
[00:48:26] like the wingman or something like that.
[00:48:27] Looking over it.
[00:48:28] And he's on short final for our carrier.
[00:48:30] And I thought, that's hot shit.
[00:48:34] So that did it.
[00:48:35] And was it hard to put in that interservice transfer?
[00:48:38] It was pretty straightforward.
[00:48:39] Well, they bounced it back at me.
[00:48:41] So no, the carrier format's wrong.
[00:48:43] It has to be this way and that way.
[00:48:45] I have to do that.
[00:48:46] And I said, fine.
[00:48:48] Well, what do you want us to do?
[00:48:49] I said, well, you tell me it's wrong.
[00:48:51] I did it according to what was in the Publications Library.
[00:48:56] You do it.
[00:48:57] I said, well, I guess we have to.
[00:48:59] And they did.
[00:49:01] Then I signed everything the second time and then the way it went.
[00:49:04] And you got straight into the pilot pipeline?
[00:49:07] Well, no, I was, you know, when you're a military officer,
[00:49:12] you are an officer of the United States.
[00:49:15] You're not an Air Force officer or a Navy officer
[00:49:19] or even an officer of the, there's a land survey
[00:49:24] and mapping service.
[00:49:27] They have military uniforms.
[00:49:29] You are an officer of the United States.
[00:49:33] So it isn't like you change services.
[00:49:37] You change uniforms and you change terminology
[00:49:40] and you change verbiage.
[00:49:43] And the name of your grade changes from first lieutenant
[00:49:49] to lieutenant junior grade.
[00:49:50] But they can put you anywhere they want.
[00:49:55] You can be a seal who's a lieutenant commander
[00:49:58] and they can say, guess what?
[00:50:00] We want you in the embassy in Tunisia
[00:50:04] and it's only going to be six months.
[00:50:06] But you'll be wearing civilian clothes
[00:50:08] and you'll be responsible for us and so on, us and so on.
[00:50:11] And that can do that.
[00:50:12] Because remember, you're appointed by the President
[00:50:15] of the United States.
[00:50:18] You're going to serve in that capacity.
[00:50:21] So that's what happens with an inner service transfer.
[00:50:23] And I was told that when you make the transfer,
[00:50:28] it's basically a long table meeting of senior service
[00:50:36] and I have a doc who wants to come over to the Air Force
[00:50:40] and you have a junior lieutenant who wants to go Navy.
[00:50:45] I'll swap you for those two.
[00:50:47] OK, that's fine.
[00:50:47] Let me do that and so forth and so forth.
[00:50:50] And that's the way it's done.
[00:50:51] But every six months or something like that
[00:50:53] and it probably goes on right now.
[00:50:55] I don't know.
[00:50:56] But you ended up with the pilot slot somehow.
[00:51:00] Yeah, well, I had orders to King's, Corpus Christi.
[00:51:05] And I'm standing in a guy's office, nice guy,
[00:51:09] with the Lieutenant Commander,
[00:51:13] a few of the parking ramp with S-2's,
[00:51:15] Stu's parked behind him, pissed an engine,
[00:51:19] had a submarine airplanes.
[00:51:20] It's a training facility for them.
[00:51:23] And a couple of Lieutenant Commander standing over here
[00:51:26] and me standing right here in front of his desk.
[00:51:30] And he said, what are we going to do with you?
[00:51:31] I said, I don't know.
[00:51:33] I just have these orders.
[00:51:35] He said, you flew jets?
[00:51:36] I said, yeah?
[00:51:38] He said, well, then we'll send you to Kingsville.
[00:51:40] What should we do with him?
[00:51:42] What happens if he can't get aboard?
[00:51:44] I thought, I will get aboard.
[00:51:48] So what's Kingsville?
[00:51:50] Kingsville are two advanced training bases.
[00:51:53] I think there is B-ville still active?
[00:51:55] B-ville's close to Kingsville.
[00:51:57] Yeah, and Kingsville is bigger than ever.
[00:51:59] And Navy advanced.
[00:52:01] At that time, there were F-9s there.
[00:52:04] And I went over to Kingsville and introduced myself
[00:52:07] and dropped my orders on the table, and so to speak.
[00:52:09] And all very nice.
[00:52:11] And looked out the window, and they
[00:52:13] had these ancient airplanes, F-9s, Creme War vintage.
[00:52:18] Oh, boy.
[00:52:20] What ancient equipment here.
[00:52:24] There was more fun to fly than you can imagine.
[00:52:27] You put the power up all the way and leave it there.
[00:52:30] And it was like your brother's MG with a little four-cylinder
[00:52:35] engine in it was so much fun to drive, underpowered.
[00:52:38] Same way.
[00:52:39] Fun, fun, fun to fly.
[00:52:41] It was truly a flying airplane with a wing, airfoil wing,
[00:52:49] and everything else.
[00:52:50] You fly, get into the phantom, and you find, no,
[00:52:52] this is a machine.
[00:52:54] Now, at this point, you're hearing about Vietnam.
[00:52:57] Vietnam's now is 19, what, 1967?
[00:53:00] Yeah.
[00:53:00] So now you know what?
[00:53:03] You're in a pipeline.
[00:53:04] Your goal is to be a fighter pilot.
[00:53:05] You know that that pipeline ends up in Vietnam.
[00:53:08] Yeah.
[00:53:09] So your detailer calls you on a whole phone in the BOQ.
[00:53:14] And I think I was a lieutenant by this point.
[00:53:17] Maybe not.
[00:53:18] Senior lieutenant junior grade anyway.
[00:53:20] I had two rooms and a private bath.
[00:53:24] And you were in Kingsville in those?
[00:53:28] I was.
[00:53:28] Big, solid BOQs there.
[00:53:30] Very nice.
[00:53:32] But when you took a shower, the water was so bad,
[00:53:37] the ground water.
[00:53:39] It smelled like ancient sauerkraut.
[00:53:41] Remember that?
[00:53:43] It was awful.
[00:53:44] At any rate, we were OK.
[00:53:47] So at what point do you get assigned to go to the RAG for F-4?
[00:53:51] Well, your detailer calls you on a whole phone of all things.
[00:53:54] And put Tom Copell on.
[00:53:56] He's in room B-7.
[00:53:59] God comes in.
[00:53:59] Hey, Tommy, you got a phone call.
[00:54:02] It's my detailer again.
[00:54:04] He said, Tom, we really want you in the A-6.
[00:54:06] That's just for you.
[00:54:08] Same as the B-52.
[00:54:09] You have experience with offsets and everything else.
[00:54:12] It's going to be perfect.
[00:54:14] I said, I don't want that, Bob.
[00:54:15] You know that.
[00:54:17] Call me back next.
[00:54:20] A series of phone calls.
[00:54:22] The last one was the same thing.
[00:54:25] Tom, you're perfect for the A-6.
[00:54:27] By now, you probably looked around, talked around about it.
[00:54:30] That's a heck of an airplane.
[00:54:32] Yeah, I know, Bob.
[00:54:33] I still want F-4.
[00:54:36] OK.
[00:54:37] Let me think about it.
[00:54:39] And about a week later, a guy called me and said,
[00:54:42] you have orders up there at Admin.
[00:54:44] Big spring at that time.
[00:54:45] I'm sorry.
[00:54:46] Kingsville at that time was nowhere land.
[00:54:49] And I did not have a car.
[00:54:52] I said, it's up at the other end of the main drag,
[00:54:56] the parallel hangar area.
[00:55:02] Walk, walk, walk, walk, walk.
[00:55:04] I said, well, first of all, I said, Fred, what do my orders
[00:55:07] say?
[00:55:08] I wouldn't look at them.
[00:55:09] It's none of my business.
[00:55:10] Oh, gentlemen, don't read each other's mail.
[00:55:14] So I'll walk up there and hear what I had.
[00:55:16] F-4 to Marar.
[00:55:19] And the F-4, what year did the F-4 come out?
[00:55:21] What year was that?
[00:55:22] I think the first prototype flew in 58.
[00:55:26] Is that right?
[00:55:27] That sounds about right.
[00:55:29] Just real quick.
[00:55:30] All right.
[00:55:31] So you go through all Air Force training.
[00:55:33] You're a B-52 guy.
[00:55:34] And then you CQ in the F-9?
[00:55:37] Yeah.
[00:55:37] What was that like?
[00:55:40] I mean, they're worried that you can't even get aboard, right?
[00:55:42] Yeah.
[00:55:43] Yeah.
[00:55:43] So what was that like?
[00:55:44] Well, I guess my F-C-L-P was OK.
[00:55:48] And when I first time out, F-C-L-P, I think, this is ball.
[00:55:53] I mean, I can do this and so forth.
[00:55:54] And the guy comes back and he says, well, you were this
[00:55:57] and you were this and you were that.
[00:55:58] That's amazing.
[00:55:59] How do you know that?
[00:56:00] And so forth.
[00:56:02] That's LSOs.
[00:56:03] They grade you accurately.
[00:56:07] And their club, Dave knows this.
[00:56:11] I was in LSO.
[00:56:13] Oh, OK.
[00:56:14] It's hard to get into their club.
[00:56:16] And you can't really dispute what they tell you.
[00:56:20] And after every F-C landing, he's in your ready room saying,
[00:56:26] well, you started out high and so forth and so forth.
[00:56:30] So you guys have now both thrown it.
[00:56:31] I was wondering if I missed something,
[00:56:33] but the term get aboard.
[00:56:35] What does this mean?
[00:56:36] Expand on it.
[00:56:38] There are guys, I guess, who just say, you crazy?
[00:56:41] I'm not going to do that.
[00:56:42] I thought I didn't realize you had to do that.
[00:56:45] Or I guess that's what happens.
[00:56:47] Or they're just what used to be called the guys a plumber.
[00:56:51] And he can't do it.
[00:56:54] So get aboard means you actually qualify in the aircraft?
[00:56:56] Yeah, get aboard is just language for can you land on the ship.
[00:57:00] Right.
[00:57:00] And god.
[00:57:01] Most people can.
[00:57:02] I didn't.
[00:57:03] That's what I was missing.
[00:57:04] Yeah.
[00:57:04] And it's hard.
[00:57:05] It's the phrase of, hey, is this guy going to be able to get a board?
[00:57:08] Meaning can he land his plane on the boat?
[00:57:10] Right.
[00:57:10] What happens, I think, every now and then,
[00:57:12] is you got guys to go through the whole pipeline.
[00:57:14] Kerry calls is the last thing you do in training, traditionally.
[00:57:17] And you could be great at all these things.
[00:57:19] But if you can't get aboard, you're no good to the Navy.
[00:57:22] That's right.
[00:57:22] Because we land on boats.
[00:57:24] And so.
[00:57:24] Oh, yeah.
[00:57:25] We're saying you have a P3.
[00:57:27] Yeah, and fighters, exactly.
[00:57:29] So is that what happens?
[00:57:30] You get sent to P3s?
[00:57:31] You get.
[00:57:32] I mean, now you get sent to P3s.
[00:57:34] You go to helicopters.
[00:57:36] If you can't get aboard in a jet,
[00:57:37] they're going to send you to some other non-tactical platform.
[00:57:40] That's true.
[00:57:42] I've been talking about this lately.
[00:57:44] It seems like there are certain skill sets of people.
[00:57:47] Some people just can't get through.
[00:57:49] Like, for instance, when I was going through SEAL training,
[00:57:53] I would say about one out of every 100 guys,
[00:57:57] there's not going to be able to shoot a pistol well.
[00:57:59] And they might actually not make it through the training
[00:58:01] because they can't shoot a pistol.
[00:58:03] They might be an athlete.
[00:58:04] They might be great at everything.
[00:58:05] They might be smart.
[00:58:06] They can't shoot a pistol.
[00:58:07] Close quarters combat.
[00:58:08] There's a bunch of strict little things
[00:58:10] that you have to follow.
[00:58:12] And some people, I think that number is about four
[00:58:14] out of every 100.
[00:58:15] This is in basic SEAL training or SEAL qualification training
[00:58:19] that they're just not going to get it.
[00:58:21] They're just not bad people.
[00:58:23] They do a lot of other things well,
[00:58:25] but they just can't do that thing.
[00:58:26] And it sounds like occasionally someone
[00:58:28] that can fly a plane, someone that can land it on the airfield,
[00:58:31] someone that can do the turns they need to do in the sky,
[00:58:33] someone that understands the dynamics of it,
[00:58:35] but they can't get aboard.
[00:58:37] They can't land on that aircraft carrier.
[00:58:39] And then it doesn't matter.
[00:58:40] That's right.
[00:58:41] No, it does matter because you were a top gun guy,
[00:58:47] but I was an instructor at Meridian at the end of my career.
[00:58:53] And I don't remember exactly how or what
[00:58:57] that the guy said to me.
[00:58:59] And then friendly is collegial way.
[00:59:01] You know, if your students can't cut it,
[00:59:04] it's not their fault.
[00:59:05] It's your fault.
[00:59:07] Because if this guy is not the sort of guy
[00:59:12] we want for a tail hook, we'll find a place for him.
[00:59:16] And he'll be valuable to the Navy.
[00:59:19] So in the Air Force is the other way around.
[00:59:21] It always felt to me like they were trying to get rid of you.
[00:59:25] They were always rotten to you, except for one guy who
[00:59:29] wound up being a, I think I put this in my list of stuff.
[00:59:32] He wound up being a four-star general in NATO and Europe.
[00:59:36] He maybe was personal self-esteem or self-confidence
[00:59:42] or something like that.
[00:59:43] He was very quiet and struck.
[00:59:45] He was in T-38s and at Air Force Advanced.
[00:59:49] Very laid back.
[00:59:50] He'd say, Tom, come on left a little bit more.
[00:59:53] Or, Tom, let me show you.
[00:59:55] And he did.
[00:59:56] And that was his last.
[00:59:57] And they wouldn't talk to me for 10 minutes and stuff
[00:59:59] like that.
[01:00:00] But not because he didn't want to.
[01:00:02] He'd just let you go until you made him a, no, no, no.
[01:00:05] Let me show you something and stuff like that.
[01:00:08] I'd say, but at any rate, they always
[01:00:10] acted like they wanted to get ready or worse.
[01:00:12] And the Navy, the kid doesn't make it.
[01:00:14] He's been qualified by us in 16 different ways.
[01:00:18] If he quits or wants to quit, it's your fault, not his.
[01:00:26] And so we'll find a place for him in Helos.
[01:00:30] And we have two guys there and stuff like that.
[01:00:33] So where the heck were we?
[01:00:37] So then you do get your orders.
[01:00:39] You get your F-4 orders.
[01:00:40] And I guess I kicked this whole tangent off just by the F-4
[01:00:45] at the time was just like the ultimate beast.
[01:00:49] The monster.
[01:00:50] That's what I always called it.
[01:00:52] And then I went to Mirar.
[01:00:56] And I remembered this like it was yesterday.
[01:00:59] Check in, do all that.
[01:01:02] Going to find a place in the BOQ, forget it.
[01:01:05] No chance.
[01:01:07] I had to go find a place to live off base and whatnot.
[01:01:12] But at any rate, VF-121 was the F-4 RAG at that time
[01:01:16] and was the eastward end of the runway there.
[01:01:21] And a couple of steps going through a narrow gate that
[01:01:26] was always open.
[01:01:28] And then F-4, you're looking at the tail,
[01:01:31] up the pipes of this thing.
[01:01:33] And I thought, oh my god, I forgot.
[01:01:35] This is a monster.
[01:01:36] I forgot.
[01:01:37] And they had Marines working on them
[01:01:39] because they were going to Denang or Chulai
[01:01:42] to get shot full of holes and eventually abandoned over there.
[01:01:49] And they took the radars out and put lead noses in them
[01:01:52] at that place.
[01:01:53] And basically went over the whole thing.
[01:01:56] And they had Marines Mechs working on them there.
[01:02:01] But I thought, oh my god, look at that thing.
[01:02:03] And so that's the thing.
[01:02:06] And then I walked to the end of the hangar.
[01:02:08] And two F-4s taken the runway.
[01:02:13] And VF-121 at that time was at that end, the east end,
[01:02:17] of the runway.
[01:02:18] And 99% of the time, the Mirroir took off to the west.
[01:02:23] And two F-4s rolled out on the runway.
[01:02:25] It was night and early morning, low coastal clouds and fog,
[01:02:29] just like here.
[01:02:31] This is at Miramar.
[01:02:32] And they ran up.
[01:02:37] And then they rolled.
[01:02:38] And they firewalled.
[01:02:40] And they went to Burner.
[01:02:42] And then they disappeared into the mist.
[01:02:45] I thought, oh my god, I am in over my head.
[01:02:50] But you learn to do it.
[01:02:51] And get good at it.
[01:02:53] I got pretty good at it.
[01:02:55] Although, you know, there's a thing about LSOs,
[01:02:59] since you're here.
[01:03:00] So the LSO is the grader, basically?
[01:03:03] That's the landing signal officer.
[01:03:05] You grade every landing.
[01:03:06] That's right.
[01:03:07] OK.
[01:03:08] And you have to call Meepo on state for every landing,
[01:03:13] VFR, IFR, anything else.
[01:03:15] And he's the guy when you look up and they say,
[01:03:19] one peak is worth 10,000 scans, scanning your panel,
[01:03:25] instrument flying is something that's hard to understand
[01:03:28] if you haven't done it.
[01:03:30] You cannot make a mistake or you're
[01:03:33] going to be killed and wreck the airplane.
[01:03:35] No mistakes allowed in genuine IFR,
[01:03:39] and especially carrier IFR.
[01:03:42] But he's the guy who says to you, you say, 2400 Clara.
[01:03:49] And he says to you, that means I don't see the Meepo.
[01:03:52] And really, you can't see the deck either.
[01:03:54] And he says to you, you're looking great, babe.
[01:03:58] Keep it coming.
[01:03:59] And you just have to trust what he's saying.
[01:04:02] Because you can't see visually because of fog or whatever?
[01:04:05] Well, one second later, or maybe a half second later,
[01:04:07] you see the deck and then you're aboard.
[01:04:11] He'll say that to you at a half mile.
[01:04:14] The radar controller says, half mile, call a ball
[01:04:17] or execute a wave off.
[01:04:19] And you take a second peak and nothing there.
[01:04:23] You see a white glow from the deck.
[01:04:27] But if you're on centerline and on glide slope,
[01:04:30] you're going to be OK.
[01:04:31] And he's tracking that via radar?
[01:04:33] Or he's because he can't see you either, right?
[01:04:36] Yeah.
[01:04:37] The ship does.
[01:04:37] It's different now, I think.
[01:04:39] But it's essentially sort of the same.
[01:04:41] You have an IFR had a radar reflector on the nose gear.
[01:04:45] And the ship's track while scan radar
[01:04:48] would lock on to that receiver.
[01:04:50] Otherwise, it might lock on to the wing tip.
[01:04:53] And that will keep you on if you're flying accurately.
[01:05:00] Everything will be when you break out.
[01:05:02] You'll be on centerline on glide slope at the center of Neapol.
[01:05:06] And basically, with a fuel in black oil ship,
[01:05:13] Constellation was America before.
[01:05:16] They were both black oil ships.
[01:05:19] They have a stack gas problem.
[01:05:22] But actually, with a nuclear powered carrier,
[01:05:25] you have the bubble that comes around,
[01:05:26] the wind coming around the island.
[01:05:29] I'm told you can feel that too.
[01:05:31] But with a fossil powered ship, you had a lot of bubble.
[01:05:37] So you're hitting turbulence based on the rise of coming
[01:05:39] to land.
[01:05:40] Right there.
[01:05:41] A tenth of a mile from touchdown.
[01:05:43] Yeah.
[01:05:44] One time, I had my mask loose.
[01:05:47] You could smell it.
[01:05:50] My mask wasn't tight enough.
[01:05:51] What was it?
[01:05:51] Do you remember your first carrier landing?
[01:05:53] Yeah, I do.
[01:05:55] How'd it go?
[01:05:57] I thought that was pretty great.
[01:05:59] That's all I remember.
[01:05:59] I remember being on the catapult, though.
[01:06:02] It was a Randolph with hydraulic cats.
[01:06:06] It was one of the only ships left with hydraulic cats.
[01:06:09] They'd all been converted to steam
[01:06:10] when they put the angled deck on them.
[01:06:13] These old Essex and Yorktown class ships,
[01:06:17] they put steam catapults in them.
[01:06:19] But some of them, they put hydraulic cats.
[01:06:21] And Randolph was still a wonderful, clean, well run ship.
[01:06:26] I thought a little.
[01:06:27] I know the captain was very friendly to me,
[01:06:29] because I was an oddball.
[01:06:31] I was coming across Air Force Officer.
[01:06:34] He had been told, come on up on the bridge.
[01:06:37] It was very nice.
[01:06:38] At any rate, sitting there, getting
[01:06:42] ready to get on the hydraulic cats on Randolph,
[01:06:45] I remember thinking to myself, I don't have to be doing this.
[01:06:50] I remember thinking, if I say, I don't want to do this,
[01:06:55] they'll stop right now.
[01:06:57] I must be crazy.
[01:06:59] I did it.
[01:07:00] Boom.
[01:07:01] But.
[01:07:02] Without your first cat launch?
[01:07:03] Yeah.
[01:07:04] And they told you over and over again,
[01:07:07] these are hydraulic cats.
[01:07:09] Bob said, you're a pal and instructor.
[01:07:13] He said, now, make sure you're all the way back.
[01:07:17] Make sure you've got your elbow locked,
[01:07:20] because it's a hell of a bang.
[01:07:23] And you get, on your first 15, 20 feet,
[01:07:27] you get 80% of your acceleration right up front.
[01:07:30] And then you're sort of just trundled down
[01:07:33] the rest of the way.
[01:07:35] So I was ready.
[01:07:36] But all the way back in the seat, head back,
[01:07:39] and elbow locked, I didn't think about my knees.
[01:07:43] When that thing went off, my knees were up here somewhere.
[01:07:48] But the F9, I think the FAA team is the same way.
[01:07:51] You can take the shot, hands off, and then grab the stick
[01:07:57] as soon as you're out over the water.
[01:08:00] So I still had my hand on the pole,
[01:08:03] but I had to get my knees back down.
[01:08:05] So is the hydraulic harder to launch than the steam,
[01:08:09] because the steam is more gradual buildup or something?
[01:08:11] Yeah, the steam is smoother.
[01:08:12] And it's a continuous flow.
[01:08:15] And I guess the new electric cats are that way as well.
[01:08:19] It's supposed to be even better, I guess.
[01:08:21] I don't know how there would be, but I guess there would be.
[01:08:24] Now, this is the time like Dan Peterson,
[01:08:27] you guys are working almost getting in this air to air
[01:08:31] combat, where you're training at a level that really you
[01:08:35] hadn't trained before.
[01:08:36] Or the pilots hadn't been training this way.
[01:08:38] We're going hard against each other all the time.
[01:08:43] Yes and no.
[01:08:44] In that, that was the beginning of the,
[01:08:48] I said in my talking to Dave via email,
[01:08:52] I said my only claim to fame here, being unusual,
[01:08:55] if you will, is the fact that I was there
[01:08:58] when what became Top Gun started.
[01:09:01] I was there.
[01:09:02] Sam Leeds, who's in Dan Peterson's book,
[01:09:06] came into various ready rooms.
[01:09:07] And VF-121 had about three or four of them,
[01:09:10] I can't even remember because they took the whole hanger.
[01:09:13] And they came in there and said, we're going to do that.
[01:09:15] Oh, a lot of F-4s.
[01:09:17] And some F-8s too, were getting shot down by MiG-17s mostly.
[01:09:23] But RA-5Cs were getting shot down by MiG-21s
[01:09:27] because they were MiG-21.
[01:09:30] RA-5C would be cruising at, say, 600 knots, taking pictures,
[01:09:34] or going to his next spot to take pictures.
[01:09:37] And the MiG-21 would come downhill from 30, 35,000
[01:09:42] at 1.2, 1.4, something like that.
[01:09:46] And launch Soviet, what was the B model,
[01:09:51] they had stolen from us, a sidewinder,
[01:09:55] and shoot down the RA-5C.
[01:09:57] That was the big deal.
[01:09:58] Don't let your RA-5C, if you're the escort,
[01:10:01] and I was lots of times, if you're the escort of the RA-5C,
[01:10:05] don't let him get, you have to keep looking back and up there
[01:10:09] and be prepared to turn into him for a head-on with a sparrow.
[01:10:13] But at any rate, what was the question?
[01:10:16] Well, I'm just trying to gather that eventually what I want
[01:10:20] to know is how well prepared you were when you went
[01:10:23] on deployment from a pilot.
[01:10:27] So I was in the SEAL teams.
[01:10:29] We would shoot so many rounds through our guns.
[01:10:32] We would do so many immediate action drills.
[01:10:34] We would do so many drills and so much training
[01:10:39] that by the time we went overseas, I felt really good.
[01:10:42] I felt really good.
[01:10:44] And I'm trying to figure out where you guys would feel
[01:10:49] the first time you get on your first combat mission.
[01:10:52] Well, there's nothing quite like getting shot at the first time.
[01:10:55] You do remember that.
[01:10:57] But I remember the time they had some sort of an exercise
[01:11:00] where we flew down the coast and back up again
[01:11:02] and maybe went up as high as Hanoi and or more
[01:11:07] the seaport that the Haifong went at the mouth of the river
[01:11:11] up there and back and got aboard and came aboard.
[01:11:16] Big exercise.
[01:11:16] I remember looking out over northern part of South Vietnam
[01:11:21] and over into Laos and all that red.
[01:11:23] I thought, holy smoke, that's for real.
[01:11:26] It's only every one and every six.
[01:11:29] But you're not quite ready for that.
[01:11:31] And the first time you actually see it going by,
[01:11:33] it makes you an older man immediately, I think.
[01:11:37] So wherever we are.
[01:11:40] So you're training to get ready to get over there?
[01:11:43] There's no way you're dog fighting?
[01:11:44] Are you?
[01:11:45] Oh, yeah.
[01:11:46] Oh, yes.
[01:11:46] Yeah, one on ones.
[01:11:48] That's what you did in your training.
[01:11:50] You left Miramar and went out over the water.
[01:11:53] And the standard deal was your flight leader,
[01:11:58] you're the wingman.
[01:11:59] He kisses you off.
[01:12:00] You both turn 30 degrees away and you
[01:12:03] proceed until one guy turns in.
[01:12:05] You can turn in immediately or you can wait.
[01:12:08] If you're the younger guy, you wait until the older guy
[01:12:11] finally turns in because he can't see you anymore.
[01:12:14] You can barely see him and you know his eyeballs.
[01:12:19] Not as good as yours.
[01:12:20] But you turn in and make a head on it.
[01:12:22] And then you can see his wings flash.
[01:12:24] And he sees your wings flash and make a head on pass.
[01:12:28] But that's not the way it is in combat.
[01:12:30] When you get into a combat situation, well, statistically,
[01:12:35] it doesn't matter whether it's World War I, Korea,
[01:12:39] or the Vietnam War.
[01:12:41] The guys who got shot down, the guys who didn't see it coming,
[01:12:45] it's like 99% of them.
[01:12:49] One guy got shot down, let's say.
[01:12:51] He said, yeah, he got it on me and he pulled inside
[01:12:55] and he unloaded and he got me.
[01:12:57] But that's the exception.
[01:12:58] And more over 95% of the airplane shot
[01:13:01] then I popped a pee there in Vietnam with AAA,
[01:13:09] not with SAMs.
[01:13:10] Everybody knows SAMs this and SAMs that.
[01:13:12] But no, when you're vulnerable and relatively close
[01:13:16] to the ground, that's when they got you,
[01:13:20] especially when you could see it going by you
[01:13:22] or in the envelope if you will.
[01:13:24] And that's just a matter of chance in a way.
[01:13:26] That's right.
[01:13:27] Well, better tactics.
[01:13:30] There are better tactics and poorer tactics.
[01:13:33] And I think I wrote in, is that my monograph there?
[01:13:38] Guy said to me way back, in Kingsville,
[01:13:43] I teach you to let it roll off on a wing, let the nose fall,
[01:13:47] acquire the target, adjust a little bit,
[01:13:50] and now you're watching the altimeter and so forth.
[01:13:55] I said, this is baloney.
[01:13:56] I want to hit the target.
[01:13:57] I want to put them right in the hole there.
[01:14:00] Pull down, up, invert, pull down.
[01:14:04] Some ROs think you're crazy the first time
[01:14:06] they're in the back when you do this.
[01:14:08] Pull down as steep as possible.
[01:14:12] Well, more than 30 degrees, you betcha.
[01:14:15] How about 60 or 70 degrees?
[01:14:18] The steeper you are, the safer you are, the faster you are,
[01:14:22] the better you are.
[01:14:23] And then I think I wrote in here.
[01:14:25] Is there any compromise when you go to come out of that dive
[01:14:29] and turn the airplane back up towards the sky?
[01:14:32] Not really, because they've been through all that at Pax River.
[01:14:36] Say the flight test in the book, the manual that you have,
[01:14:42] the NATOPS manual, the flight manual for pilots,
[01:14:47] or the tactics manual has all these tables in there.
[01:14:50] And you can say, if I get out and let's say,
[01:14:54] I have 80 degrees angle of dive and I get out at 6,000 feet,
[01:15:01] I'll still be well clear.
[01:15:03] I have 1,500 feet of to clear if I pull 6 and 1 half Gs
[01:15:08] to get out.
[01:15:09] If I pull 7, I'm even better off.
[01:15:12] But you lose power when you do that.
[01:15:14] I'm sorry, you lose airspeed when you do that.
[01:15:17] So you pull the Gs, you're safe.
[01:15:20] A lot of guys would not do that, though.
[01:15:22] But did you train this way before going to Vietnam?
[01:15:25] Did you know that the high angle attack was better?
[01:15:29] No.
[01:15:31] Were you figured out when you got there?
[01:15:33] No, I figured it out in Arizona, going over there
[01:15:37] to those targets that they have.
[01:15:40] I guess in the East Coast, they have them all over the place,
[01:15:42] too, in rural places.
[01:15:44] It's a huge, plowed area, and plowed in a circle.
[01:15:49] And they have two towers, wooden towers,
[01:15:53] and 12 o'clock at 3 o'clock.
[01:15:56] And they talk to each other.
[01:15:58] And they tell you where your hit was on there.
[01:16:01] And a white thing in the center.
[01:16:04] And they tell you, you bomb.
[01:16:07] But a guy told me, if you want to be safe, be steeper, be faster.
[01:16:12] I said, that's for me.
[01:16:14] And then I saw this picture, sort of famous.
[01:16:17] And you've probably seen it of an airplane diving
[01:16:21] on a Japanese aircraft carrier at midway.
[01:16:25] And the guy is 89 degrees.
[01:16:28] That is for me.
[01:16:29] That's why I'm going to do it.
[01:16:31] So roll inverted, pull into your nose down.
[01:16:33] Then you get your dive right there.
[01:16:34] Because your nose wants to come up the faster you go.
[01:16:37] And an airplane, whether it's a Piper Cub or an F-4 or F-18,
[01:16:41] your nose wants to rise as you build air.
[01:16:46] Airspeed is just aerodynamics.
[01:16:48] So get the nose down there right now.
[01:16:50] And then you can do whatever you want.
[01:16:52] F-4, you could pull a powered idle at 500.
[01:16:56] And it would hold five.
[01:16:57] I don't know what they do in F-18s.
[01:17:00] But then anyway, pull a powered idle at 500,
[01:17:02] almost no matter what your dive angle was.
[01:17:06] What does that mean, pull powered idle at 500?
[01:17:09] What does that mean?
[01:17:10] Just pull the throttles all the way back to idle.
[01:17:13] And it would hold 500 knots.
[01:17:15] Got it.
[01:17:16] So you wouldn't increase your speed to some.
[01:17:18] Right.
[01:17:18] I don't know why.
[01:17:20] It's just they discovered it, no doubt,
[01:17:23] after they were actually flying the airplane.
[01:17:26] But if you go 550, it'll hold that.
[01:17:29] So a lot of guys would say 500 is fast enough for me.
[01:17:32] I've got to pull out of this.
[01:17:33] But I said, Blaney, look on the charts.
[01:17:35] You can get out easy.
[01:17:36] They wouldn't do it.
[01:17:37] But I said, steeper is better.
[01:17:39] So I was surprised.
[01:17:41] The guy in the back says, you know, we were 560 knots tonight.
[01:17:45] Yeah, fine.
[01:17:46] Like that.
[01:17:48] I never got any holes.
[01:17:50] I got scared a couple of times.
[01:17:52] Well, yeah.
[01:17:54] Got warned.
[01:17:55] I had a load go off right there that gave me,
[01:18:01] you know, a picture taken with an old style flash bulb.
[01:18:04] It gave me spots in front of my eyes.
[01:18:07] It was that close, but no holes.
[01:18:10] I never did.
[01:18:12] And the guys who came back with a hole about as big as a 45
[01:18:17] caliber bullet in the bottom of the airplane, but not me.
[01:18:22] We had leadership in the squadron I was in that I kept going back
[01:18:30] to reading your book about how this guy, Ruel Gardner,
[01:18:34] the way he operated.
[01:18:35] And he was a former underwater demolition team guy.
[01:18:37] Right.
[01:18:38] And so how did he operate?
[01:18:42] He was very laid back, very quiet about everything.
[01:18:45] And we get after him about sharks, for instance.
[01:18:51] And he said, nah, he says sharks don't bother you.
[01:18:54] But barracudas sometimes do.
[01:18:56] They're curious.
[01:18:58] And they'll come right up to you and wonder what the heck you're
[01:19:00] doing and what you are.
[01:19:02] I didn't get it right.
[01:19:04] That sort of thing.
[01:19:05] And he was the guy who would do the classic Navy routine, if
[01:19:10] you will.
[01:19:11] Tom, can you help me with this?
[01:19:13] As opposed to Tom, get that done.
[01:19:16] Rather, can you help me with this?
[01:19:20] It's funny in leadership terms.
[01:19:24] If you say to a guy, can you help me with this?
[01:19:27] He may not really want to do it.
[01:19:31] But the way you phrase it makes you want to help him.
[01:19:35] If he says, do that or else and you don't want to do it,
[01:19:40] this is you all.
[01:19:41] 100%.
[01:19:42] You know?
[01:19:44] It's your style.
[01:19:47] But it's effective in leadership terms.
[01:19:51] Very effective to use the old Navy way of doing things like
[01:19:56] that.
[01:19:57] I don't know how the Marine Corps operates, but I had a pal who
[01:20:01] got killed in Vietnam who's told me I will be a Marine general.
[01:20:06] He got killed being aggressive, I think, based upon what I heard
[01:20:11] about what happened with him.
[01:20:13] But to that end, I just wondered how the Marine Corps operates
[01:20:22] when the guy doesn't want to really do that.
[01:20:24] But he would if you had just asked him as opposed to saying to
[01:20:29] it or else.
[01:20:30] Well, having worked with all kinds of leaders in the Army,
[01:20:34] Navy, Air Force, and Marines, the good leaders in all those
[01:20:37] organizations are the type that say, hey, I need some help with
[01:20:40] this.
[01:20:40] Hey, what do you think?
[01:20:41] How do you think we should bet?
[01:20:42] I think that's the stuff.
[01:20:43] And across the board, and then you take this into the civilian
[01:20:46] sector as well, the ones that Barch orders and yell at people
[01:20:50] and say, you need to do this right now because I'm ordering you
[01:20:52] to do it.
[01:20:53] They're not ever considered to be good leaders.
[01:20:56] But that's by and large the Air Force style.
[01:21:00] No exaggeration.
[01:21:01] Maybe my experience in the Air Force wasn't broad enough.
[01:21:05] But by and large, that's what they do there.
[01:21:08] What, Barch orders?
[01:21:09] Yeah.
[01:21:09] Yeah, that's unfortunate.
[01:21:11] Maybe the order, having read his autobiography,
[01:21:15] he didn't write it himself really, really.
[01:21:17] But Ferris LeMay talking about the way
[01:21:21] he operated in England in World War II, do it or else.
[01:21:26] Wait a minute.
[01:21:28] Yeah, well, there's a whole thing to talk about there.
[01:21:32] There's this idea of the authoritarian people.
[01:21:35] Certain people have an authoritarian mindset.
[01:21:37] They're attracted to the authoritarian mindset.
[01:21:40] And when they look at the military, when they're
[01:21:42] 10 years old or 17 years old or 20 years old,
[01:21:45] they look at the military.
[01:21:46] And they're very excited about it because they think, oh,
[01:21:49] there's a place where if I have rank,
[01:21:53] people have to respect me.
[01:21:54] They have to listen to me.
[01:21:56] And so the military actually attracts these type of people.
[01:21:59] And most of the time, they kind of become not the best leaders.
[01:22:06] And they usually don't make it very far because they
[01:22:09] piss people off and whatever.
[01:22:11] Occasionally, you'll have someone that
[01:22:13] gets put in the right circumstances.
[01:22:14] And despite the fact that they're a tyrannical leader,
[01:22:17] they're still able to advance.
[01:22:18] And Curtis LeMay is probably a good example of that.
[01:22:21] Here he was in charge of bombing Europe.
[01:22:24] And he puts together a plan.
[01:22:26] It's like, hey, this is what we're doing.
[01:22:27] And it was an extreme situation.
[01:22:30] And it ended up working.
[01:22:31] And then he gets his.
[01:22:33] They made him a hero.
[01:22:34] But in his autobiography, he says that I had no choice
[01:22:37] but to begin to ascertain that we had to do it that way
[01:22:41] or else we wouldn't do it at all.
[01:22:44] So it can happen.
[01:22:46] But like I said, I've worked with Air Force.
[01:22:49] I've worked with Navy.
[01:22:49] I've worked with the Marine Corps.
[01:22:51] I've worked with the Navy.
[01:22:52] And the good leaders and all of them are not tyrannical at all.
[01:22:56] Now, are there situations that you can get into?
[01:22:58] Or it's like, hey, we got it.
[01:22:59] This is what we're doing.
[01:23:00] Occasionally, that happens.
[01:23:03] But it doesn't really happen a lot.
[01:23:05] And yeah.
[01:23:07] Now, I'm also thinking with your old job in the Air Force,
[01:23:11] where you've got there's no room for any error
[01:23:15] because you're dealing with nuclear weapons,
[01:23:17] that probably emphasized that type of leadership more
[01:23:24] than because the other thing about it,
[01:23:26] authoritarian mindset is they don't do well in combat
[01:23:28] situations oftentimes because they
[01:23:30] have a very structured mind.
[01:23:32] They have a very predetermined way of thinking.
[01:23:34] So they get thrown something that they didn't expect
[01:23:36] and they just fall apart.
[01:23:38] You know, the person that's great in garrison,
[01:23:40] that's great at keeping everyone great at doing inspections,
[01:23:44] great at keeping everyone in the proper uniform,
[01:23:47] they get into combat where all of a sudden the enemy gets
[01:23:49] a vote and there's things happening they didn't expect.
[01:23:51] And people are getting shot.
[01:23:52] And a lot of times, those people don't do well
[01:23:56] in combat scenarios.
[01:23:58] Well, there's something about that that
[01:24:01] just occurs to me right now is that on consolation
[01:24:04] for that 10 month, 9 month cruise,
[01:24:07] I never heard of that happening.
[01:24:08] And you had two squadrons of A7s, two squadrons of A4s,
[01:24:12] one squadron of A6s, a detachment of RA5Cs,
[01:24:17] and combat helo squadron from Japan,
[01:24:21] squadron, whatever they were.
[01:24:24] I think there were two armored heavy duty helicopters
[01:24:28] and the guys who stood by the machine gun.
[01:24:31] I never heard of anything like that.
[01:24:33] Anything like what?
[01:24:35] Anybody screwing up or refusing or being unable to
[01:24:39] or anything like that.
[01:24:40] And they were using real bullets and stuff there every night.
[01:24:46] Yeah, well, it's an interesting thing too
[01:24:47] about the Navy in general is that the Navy in its nature
[01:24:54] when from the past, if you were a commander in my fleet
[01:24:59] and I was gonna send you and your ship somewhere,
[01:25:02] I wasn't gonna be able to talk to you again.
[01:25:03] That's right.
[01:25:04] So you-
[01:25:05] Except with flags and only till you go over the run.
[01:25:07] Right, and then it was like up to you.
[01:25:09] And so we had to exercise a decentralized command
[01:25:13] more than anybody else.
[01:25:15] And that really, when you really pull the thread
[01:25:18] on the SEAL teams, that becomes very clear
[01:25:22] that that's one of the reasons why the SEAL teams
[01:25:24] has a reputation for being very adaptable
[01:25:26] and figuring things out.
[01:25:28] Because we wouldn't get support all the time.
[01:25:31] And we had to, just being in the Navy,
[01:25:34] you had to figure things out.
[01:25:36] The other thing is, in the Navy,
[01:25:39] historically, if you're on a ship, you can't surrender.
[01:25:43] You can't surrender.
[01:25:44] You have to just fight until your ship goes down.
[01:25:47] There's no quitting because you'll die.
[01:25:49] So you end up with that attitude embedded as well
[01:25:53] in the mindset.
[01:25:55] But the, and I think there's a lot of that
[01:25:58] with pilots as well, is, hey, look,
[01:26:01] I'm gonna do what makes sense for me and my aircraft
[01:26:06] to make sure that I stay alive.
[01:26:08] And you have to make those decisions for yourself.
[01:26:10] And so it's on you.
[01:26:12] Well, when I was in Thailand, to my shock,
[01:26:17] flying with FACTS, Air Force FACTS,
[01:26:19] I never told them I was a previous Air Force.
[01:26:21] I thought that's too controversial.
[01:26:24] I'm not gonna get into that.
[01:26:26] I just let it go.
[01:26:28] And they see these guys, Air Force guys,
[01:26:31] doing 30 degree dives.
[01:26:33] And I thought, that's crazy.
[01:26:35] You asked to be at least 45, at least, at 60.
[01:26:40] And of course, what I did was as steep as you could get.
[01:26:43] Hell with it, I'm not gonna get shot down here and so forth.
[01:26:46] But 30 degree dives.
[01:26:48] And I think they all did that.
[01:26:50] And they had the same charts that Navy had.
[01:26:54] So, and the Air Force was known for charts,
[01:26:56] but maybe theirs were even better,
[01:26:58] or more complete or larger than what we had.
[01:27:02] But you couldn't hit the ground.
[01:27:04] Yeah, you're gonna dive in 60 degree dive,
[01:27:06] in the middle of the night, are you nuts?
[01:27:09] You can't hit the ground.
[01:27:10] What happens if they got a tower up there?
[01:27:12] Well, you're still, you're gonna be a thousand feet
[01:27:14] clearer than that.
[01:27:15] So, if you use a 6,000 foot release
[01:27:19] and a 550 degree dive, a 550 knot dive
[01:27:25] and 500 knot release, and a 60 or 80 degree dive,
[01:27:29] you're not gonna hit the ground.
[01:27:31] Don't worry about it.
[01:27:32] You won't do it.
[01:27:33] It can't.
[01:27:34] You won't.
[01:27:35] And what do you pull in seven Gs at the bottom
[01:27:37] of that string?
[01:27:38] Six and a half is what we usually did, I think.
[01:27:40] And if you look down, or you're doing it,
[01:27:43] the needle's just doing that just above six.
[01:27:47] You would look down from time to time at that.
[01:27:51] If you're pulling out, you learn nothing else
[01:27:52] to look at anyway.
[01:27:54] Yeah, I think that's a number you're saying
[01:27:55] as I listen to you talk about it.
[01:27:57] It is a little surprising that you wouldn't do
[01:28:00] a steeper dive, especially in that airplane,
[01:28:02] because you're also more accurate.
[01:28:04] You know where your bomb's gonna go.
[01:28:05] And to be quite honest, like six and a half Gs
[01:28:09] is not that hard if you get used to it.
[01:28:10] And if it keeps you from-
[01:28:12] From becoming ordinary.
[01:28:13] Yeah, it's not that big of a deal.
[01:28:14] Any pilot could get used to that.
[01:28:16] I think the biggest problem is people
[01:28:17] don't like doing that stuff at night.
[01:28:19] And that to me is, it's interesting
[01:28:22] that more people didn't have the same logic
[01:28:23] that you had, which is steeper is better.
[01:28:25] And I just do the math.
[01:28:26] I got a minute altitude to recover from.
[01:28:28] And if I pull back on the stick,
[01:28:29] I can survive six and a half Gs, no factor.
[01:28:31] And I'll pull out and I'll be fine.
[01:28:32] Yeah, because of the engineering knowledge
[01:28:34] is right there on the paper.
[01:28:36] You could see it, but-
[01:28:38] A 30 degree dive seems,
[01:28:40] I didn't even know that was even something
[01:28:42] that you were doing.
[01:28:43] That's a shallow, it's especially in a place like that
[01:28:46] where ground fire, not the Sam's,
[01:28:51] although I know Sam's are always considered,
[01:28:52] but AAA, like a 30 degree airplane's a big giant airplane.
[01:28:56] There's just a lot of airplane to see at 30 degrees
[01:28:59] where 60 degrees or 70 degrees,
[01:29:00] there's a very little amount of airplane to see.
[01:29:02] And I would think that's the math game you would be playing
[01:29:04] is a smaller platform, the better.
[01:29:06] I got one better than that.
[01:29:08] I was with this OV10 guy, I'm riding in the back
[01:29:10] with the binoculars and these two F4 showed up
[01:29:13] and they made about three runs from the same direction,
[01:29:17] 30 degree dives, one after the other.
[01:29:20] That's crazy.
[01:29:21] Are you nuts?
[01:29:22] You always come in from over there.
[01:29:25] And one then that you made one dive from over there,
[01:29:28] you over here for your second, we used to drop pairs
[01:29:32] and we have six, 500 pound bombs
[01:29:34] and make three runs with pairs,
[01:29:38] but never from the same direction, never.
[01:29:41] And when the lead goes in over here,
[01:29:44] turn a little around the circle and come in from the other side
[01:29:46] because that means he's got to turn the gun
[01:29:48] all the way around over there.
[01:29:50] Because he was shooting at him.
[01:29:52] The thing is, that's another thing about the first guy in,
[01:29:55] in the movies, John Wayne is the first guy in,
[01:29:58] it's not a big deal, they're still getting the gun turned
[01:30:00] around and he's off the target by the hand.
[01:30:03] It's the second guy.
[01:30:04] Dash four, that's the last guy.
[01:30:05] Dash two, dash three, dash four, the ones that take it.
[01:30:09] That's right.
[01:30:10] So you feel like you were pretty good
[01:30:12] prepared for that deployment.
[01:30:14] You were out bombing, you were doing these steep things,
[01:30:17] getting ready to deploy.
[01:30:18] I was getting better at that
[01:30:21] and I didn't get good at it until we were over there.
[01:30:24] And,
[01:30:25] and,
[01:30:28] you know, they,
[01:30:29] they don't emphasize, they don't talk about the fact
[01:30:33] that there's a lot of flak and you will see it going by.
[01:30:36] They don't tell you that.
[01:30:38] Because maybe they're afraid of somebody saying,
[01:30:41] not for me, I got a bad cold.
[01:30:44] And I think I got a permanent cold
[01:30:46] and maybe I do a lot better in Iceland
[01:30:50] and then doing this.
[01:30:53] So I don't know, but, the other thing about
[01:30:59] that being prepared was the advent.
[01:31:03] I said to David, the only, my real claim to fame here,
[01:31:08] because I'm pretty ordinary actually,
[01:31:10] was the fact that I was there when Sam Leeds walked around
[01:31:14] VF 121 and said, we're going to start this thing
[01:31:17] and maybe you might want to be part of it
[01:31:19] because we don't want to have any more foreshot down
[01:31:23] by MiG-17s, not so much 21s, but MiG-17s.
[01:31:27] What do they call it?
[01:31:28] Was it called the Advanced Gunnery School?
[01:31:30] Do you remember what it was called?
[01:31:30] No, they called it Navy Advanced Fighter Weapon School.
[01:31:34] Okay.
[01:31:35] Or it could, I think initially they said,
[01:31:38] it might be called something like that.
[01:31:40] It was all very loose.
[01:31:42] And I think they had okay for somebody
[01:31:45] on the Admiral's staff in North Island,
[01:31:47] but it was very loose.
[01:31:50] And they said, if you volunteer, you'll fly extra time
[01:31:56] and maybe you don't want to do it
[01:31:57] because it's going to be at six o'clock in the morning.
[01:32:00] And if you don't fly, you have to be here at six,
[01:32:03] at 430 in the morning to man up and run the airplanes out
[01:32:08] and make sure everything on the airplane,
[01:32:11] systems, engines and whatnot, and the radar works
[01:32:15] because you're going to have an experienced,
[01:32:17] good guy in your back seat just for this morning exercise
[01:32:22] so that when we put two, four airplanes out
[01:32:25] on the parking ramp, they all work and all the radars work.
[01:32:29] So be ready for that.
[01:32:31] You will be here at 435 o'clock in the morning
[01:32:35] and you won't fly.
[01:32:37] Ooh, a lot of guys say, forget that.
[01:32:40] So did you do it?
[01:32:41] I did it, yeah.
[01:32:42] And it was, and you will fly ACM,
[01:32:50] air combat maneuver with our instructors and so forth.
[01:32:57] One of my claims to fame is flying with Sam Leeds
[01:33:00] and an A4, they had, at that point,
[01:33:03] they had several generations of A4s
[01:33:06] and they had two seat A4s
[01:33:08] and I think a couple of single seats.
[01:33:09] They had a much bigger engine than them
[01:33:11] and they had, for the instrument rag at Miramar,
[01:33:16] they had a couple with the big engines in them
[01:33:19] and that's when they flew at imitating the MiG-17.
[01:33:24] Don't get close to this guy, he'll eat you alive,
[01:33:27] which is true and that's, Duke Cunningham
[01:33:32] should have been shot down.
[01:33:34] He should have been shot down a couple of times.
[01:33:36] He was very lucky, just lucky.
[01:33:39] But at any rate, doing the wrong thing with Sam Leeds
[01:33:42] isn't my bragging point.
[01:33:45] One of the few ones, he came in on me
[01:33:49] trying to suck me into a, what's called a scissors,
[01:33:52] it's two airplanes who do this,
[01:33:54] one trying to be slower than the other guy
[01:33:57] and I rolled over the top on him and went to Burner
[01:34:00] and I was standing there upside down above him in Burner
[01:34:05] and he said, I can still in my mind I see him
[01:34:09] looking up at me and he said to me,
[01:34:12] I can't believe you're doing this,
[01:34:14] which is the wrong thing to do.
[01:34:16] That would be a last resort with a MiG-17
[01:34:19] because if you screw it up, he's gonna kill you.
[01:34:24] You were a phantom and he was in an A4?
[01:34:26] Yeah.
[01:34:28] But I was standing upside down on my tail
[01:34:31] in Max Burner to do that
[01:34:34] and Sam Leeds was a nice guy.
[01:34:38] Dan Peterson is a little bit removed,
[01:34:41] a little bit standoffish, sort of guy,
[01:34:45] not a bad guy or anything like that,
[01:34:47] but a little bit standoff.
[01:34:48] But Sam Leeds was, how the hell are you a sort of guy?
[01:34:52] At any rate, he said to me, I can't believe you're doing that.
[01:34:57] Aviation and sticking rudder stuff.
[01:35:01] Okay, so now you're deploying to Vietnam.
[01:35:03] Do you just load on the aircraft carrier?
[01:35:04] You're on the USS Constellation?
[01:35:06] No, you're going on mini-cruise
[01:35:08] for Monday through Friday,
[01:35:12] it was supposed to be or it was,
[01:35:15] for a month, for four weeks.
[01:35:20] Well, before they let you near the ship,
[01:35:23] you have to, pure care quality, that's all you do.
[01:35:26] And we went to the East Coast to do that.
[01:35:29] The bunch I was with and it was winter time.
[01:35:34] Poopy suits back in those days, rubber immersion suits.
[01:35:38] Did you ever wear one?
[01:35:39] Absolutely, yeah.
[01:35:41] Good times.
[01:35:43] What is this in case you're ejecting the water?
[01:35:45] The water's below a certain temperature,
[01:35:46] you die super fast, so you got to wear this
[01:35:48] immersion suit in case you eject into the ocean.
[01:35:50] So it's just a big rubber suit that sucks.
[01:35:53] I'm not going to complain about it in front of a seal.
[01:35:55] It's not cool.
[01:35:56] No, it's the water and air temperature,
[01:36:00] less than a certain number.
[01:36:01] And they're not supposed to leak,
[01:36:04] but everybody, power chute rigors and people like that,
[01:36:08] I'm saying, don't worry, they all leak.
[01:36:11] And the other thing is getting into this thing.
[01:36:13] The zipper goes from here to down here somewhere.
[01:36:18] So how do you get your head through there?
[01:36:20] Basically, shoulders up, get somebody to help you
[01:36:24] and pull it up over your head
[01:36:26] and then he lets go and it takes your ears off,
[01:36:28] so to speak, and pulling down because it makes
[01:36:31] a tight seal around your neck and above your neck.
[01:36:36] I guess you have no protection from the seawater either,
[01:36:39] but I don't know.
[01:36:41] And then around the wrists, so your hands
[01:36:44] are going to get ice cold.
[01:36:46] The problem is you, in that, maybe you know this,
[01:36:51] in cold water like that, North Atlantic and whatnot,
[01:36:54] you stop breathing, you can't breathe,
[01:36:57] you're fully conscious, but your diaphragm cools down
[01:37:02] and it won't work for you.
[01:37:04] So you're going to drown because now your swimming ability
[01:37:09] is falling than your diaphragm just will not make,
[01:37:15] get oxygen for you.
[01:37:19] You're done.
[01:37:21] But then my first traps in the F4
[01:37:24] were in a poopy suit off Norfolk in March or February.
[01:37:30] I can't remember, not that it matters.
[01:37:33] And then you board the carrier and you guys sail over?
[01:37:38] Yeah, once you get, they give you, well they did,
[01:37:41] I don't know how they do it now, but in the F4,
[01:37:43] they gave you about four day traps.
[01:37:45] One, your initial, in my case I flew aboard,
[01:37:49] you fly aboard, you walk off, but your initial day trap
[01:37:55] and then next day, maybe two, maybe one,
[01:38:00] and so we're getting you used to the whole idea.
[01:38:03] And after you have about four, five, or six,
[01:38:06] I can't remember what it was.
[01:38:07] Then you get your first night, which is thrilling.
[01:38:13] Nick Far, Nick Soho.
[01:38:16] What's Nick Far?
[01:38:17] German.
[01:38:19] What does it mean?
[01:38:20] Not so.
[01:38:21] Oh, okay.
[01:38:24] He's just being facetious when he's in the industry.
[01:38:26] Yeah, no.
[01:38:28] Burke Burkey.
[01:38:29] Anyway, I got my first night,
[01:38:33] they shot me off the bow of America, CV-A66,
[01:38:38] and I thought, holy smoke, it's being shot into a cave,
[01:38:42] and I can't fly this crazy thing, calm down Tom.
[01:38:45] All right, and you go up and around and get on the downwind.
[01:38:48] Don't look at the ship, they told you.
[01:38:50] Do not look over at the ship,
[01:38:51] it will give you a case of vertigo
[01:38:54] or spatial disorientation.
[01:38:56] Do not look at the ship.
[01:38:58] You just look at your instruments?
[01:38:59] Yeah.
[01:39:00] And it was an overcast night, so high overcast.
[01:39:05] I could see the ship in the corner of my eye over here,
[01:39:09] driving on the downwind, driving on the downwind,
[01:39:12] and I just sat over there and took a look.
[01:39:15] That's what they told you, don't look at the ship?
[01:39:18] Don't look at the ship.
[01:39:19] I did, I can tell you.
[01:39:21] Well, I don't understand, why does it freak you out?
[01:39:23] I have no idea.
[01:39:24] Is that the same thing they told you, Dave?
[01:39:26] Yeah, so it's just a spatial thing, you look out,
[01:39:29] there's no, when he's talking about, there's no horizon.
[01:39:31] You have no sense of where flat or level
[01:39:33] or the sky and the water meet.
[01:39:35] And so if you look over, which we all do,
[01:39:37] because you'll find the downwind,
[01:39:38] if you look to your left, the ship is there,
[01:39:39] you cannot not look.
[01:39:41] Oh, yeah.
[01:39:43] And then you get confused.
[01:39:44] The lights give you disorient you as to,
[01:39:46] when you see lights, lights should either be up or down,
[01:39:49] so it creates disorientation,
[01:39:51] which you can recover from by looking at instruments,
[01:39:53] but don't look at the ship,
[01:39:55] everybody's told the same thing.
[01:39:56] There's no line between the blackness that is the water,
[01:40:00] the blackness that is behind the ship,
[01:40:02] and the blackness that is over the ship.
[01:40:04] The ship is just sort of floating
[01:40:06] in black space somehow or other.
[01:40:09] I'm getting dizzy just thinking about it.
[01:40:12] Do you ever get used to landing on the carrier?
[01:40:15] Well, that's part, this second part of this.
[01:40:17] So I got aboard and went below.
[01:40:20] And there's a Lieutenant Commander,
[01:40:21] a nice guy from Miramar,
[01:40:23] who was there getting re-upped to go to sea.
[01:40:27] And I went to the ward room on Constellation,
[01:40:31] the main ward room was the second deck.
[01:40:34] So I went down there and I got my coffee
[01:40:36] and I got my donut or whatever it was.
[01:40:39] And he said, pretty dark out there.
[01:40:40] And I said, phew, I had no idea.
[01:40:44] I thought I would know, but he said,
[01:40:47] well, you'll get used to it in the daytime.
[01:40:50] It gets to be fun in the daytime, which is true,
[01:40:54] but nobody ever likes it at night, which is true.
[01:40:59] They have confirmed.
[01:41:00] 100%
[01:41:01] Daytime can be fun, nighttime not so much.
[01:41:05] That's right, it's 100% true.
[01:41:06] Full moon is pretty easy?
[01:41:08] No, it's worse because you got shadows
[01:41:11] and you'd make a turn and the moon is there
[01:41:15] and it puts a light across your cockpit
[01:41:18] and it travels across and gives you
[01:41:21] a mild case of special disorientation.
[01:41:24] You don't want that, black is better.
[01:41:26] And then you just on the gauges
[01:41:28] and that's an end of it until the guy says,
[01:41:31] three quarters of a mile, call a ball.
[01:41:33] And assuming you're on centerline,
[01:41:38] on glidescope at that point,
[01:41:40] that basically you just got to wait it out.
[01:41:43] But that's how I got in trouble,
[01:41:45] so which is in those notes.
[01:41:48] Are you looking at my notes?
[01:41:49] Different notes, but it comes from the same thing.
[01:41:52] What got you in trouble?
[01:41:53] I'm interested just.
[01:41:54] Lower your nose in close, come down one wire.
[01:41:57] Not good.
[01:41:58] What happened?
[01:42:00] Well, you bolted and you said.
[01:42:03] What's that mean?
[01:42:04] I'm sorry, no wire, you don't get a wire
[01:42:06] and the lights come on and you're off the angle.
[01:42:09] Oh, okay, you're too high into land.
[01:42:10] Stay too high.
[01:42:11] You miss.
[01:42:12] It can happen, you can be innocent
[01:42:14] and the wires are staggered.
[01:42:16] They're not the same space so that if you have a hook skip,
[01:42:20] you can even hook skip two wires.
[01:42:22] It has happened and off the angle you go and rats.
[01:42:27] What'd you call it?
[01:42:28] What's the verb for it?
[01:42:29] Bolter.
[01:42:30] Bolter?
[01:42:31] B-O-L-T-E-R.
[01:42:32] That means that you miss the wire.
[01:42:33] Yeah, and the L-S-O, he's very helpful.
[01:42:35] You know what he says?
[01:42:37] Bolter bolt, bolter bolt.
[01:42:38] Yeah, thanks a lot.
[01:42:41] And so as soon as you miss, you have to floor.
[01:42:45] Well, when you touch down, you go to full power.
[01:42:48] Oh, that's regardless, okay.
[01:42:50] Yeah, basic engine and from time to time on the F-4 anyway,
[01:42:54] the engines would be slightly misrigged
[01:42:56] and one of them would go to Minn Burner
[01:42:59] and the ship would go ape shit and telling,
[01:43:01] oh no, you've got to do yelling at you,
[01:43:04] come out of a burner and things like that.
[01:43:05] Didn't mean anything.
[01:43:06] So you have the bolter bolter, then what happens?
[01:43:10] Did he say he got you into trouble?
[01:43:11] Yeah, I guess the ship is on the same,
[01:43:13] their radar facility, the CCI, is on the same frequency
[01:43:19] and they hear the L-S-O say bolter bolter
[01:43:22] and they'll say two and two.
[01:43:25] Continue straight ahead to 500 feet, turn left heading
[01:43:29] bus and so which would be a crosswind
[01:43:31] and then you do that and climate maintain 1200 feet
[01:43:35] or 1000 feet or whatever it is and turn left to bus
[01:43:39] and so on, then you're on the downwind
[01:43:41] and then they will, you have more planes coming in,
[01:43:44] coming down from the holding chute if you will
[01:43:47] and they'll squeeze you in in the middle there
[01:43:52] or they'll take you way down till one guy is early
[01:43:55] and one guy's a little, you push over from those altitude
[01:43:58] at an exact you're supposed to to the second timing
[01:44:04] from the sack and some guys are a little bit early,
[01:44:09] guys are a little bit late.
[01:44:10] They can squeeze you in.
[01:44:11] And it squeeze you in, in there
[01:44:13] and then you get aboard the second time, we hope.
[01:44:18] But at any rate, how do you bolter?
[01:44:21] If you hook skip or you're high and laying along.
[01:44:24] So I get in trouble because I boltered
[01:44:26] and I'm not gonna do this two nights in a row
[01:44:31] and it's almost unconscious, lower nose and close.
[01:44:36] What, that's a move that you make to try
[01:44:38] and make sure you're not high?
[01:44:38] And that airplane comes down like a safe
[01:44:42] and they also call a taxi one wire
[01:44:47] in that you land before or you hook does well
[01:44:51] before the one wire and you taxi into the one wire.
[01:44:56] And thank heavens we're aboard
[01:44:58] and that's enough for this for tonight and so forth.
[01:45:01] So out of the next say 10 nights, I got,
[01:45:06] well at the end let's say I got six come down in close.
[01:45:11] So rule Gardner came to me and he said,
[01:45:14] Tom in the passageway too,
[01:45:16] that's another thing laid back in the passageway, Tom.
[01:45:19] I don't want you to fly tomorrow
[01:45:21] and you're not on the schedule because I don't like this.
[01:45:26] And I don't want to make Pamela widow.
[01:45:30] Oh, we had been married about 14 months at that point.
[01:45:37] So he said, I want you to think about it.
[01:45:40] This is not a punishment,
[01:45:41] but I want you to think about lower nose and close.
[01:45:44] And so if I fly that meat bolter touchdown,
[01:45:46] that was an hundred of it, but that's the way he was.
[01:45:51] Leadership again, very laid back.
[01:45:54] I don't want you to fly rather than almost indicating
[01:45:58] if you wanted to fly badly enough,
[01:46:00] go to the schedules of office and Tom
[01:46:02] to put yourself back on the schedule.
[01:46:04] But no, do any of that.
[01:46:06] Just.
[01:46:07] So you bolter bolter one time?
[01:46:11] No, like four out of six the week before
[01:46:15] and that's why he did that.
[01:46:16] God.
[01:46:17] So once it got in your head.
[01:46:19] And it's almost unconscious.
[01:46:21] I think Dave can vouch to that.
[01:46:23] You do it without really thinking about it.
[01:46:26] Yeah.
[01:46:27] You don't say, as soon as I get past the ramp,
[01:46:30] I'm gonna lower the nose.
[01:46:32] It's a bad habit that you don't know why you do it
[01:46:36] and you do it.
[01:46:37] So after you sit down for 24 hours and think,
[01:46:41] that is dangerous, that is stupid
[01:46:43] and you've seen pictures,
[01:46:46] flight deck pictures of lower nose.
[01:46:49] I'm not gonna do that anymore.
[01:46:49] Is it a case of overcompensation, Dave?
[01:46:51] Like subconscious overcompensation that you put,
[01:46:54] you get over the ramp and you crank it down a little bit
[01:46:57] because you want to be early
[01:46:58] because you don't want to be long.
[01:46:59] I think that feeling, the first time you bolter at night
[01:47:02] is a really awful feeling
[01:47:04] because all you want to do is land.
[01:47:06] Like you just, you would trade anything you have
[01:47:08] just to be on that flight deck.
[01:47:09] And so you do all this work.
[01:47:11] Tom was talking about the timing down to the second.
[01:47:13] There's a lot of work to get you to three quarters of a mile.
[01:47:16] It's a lot of work from the stack down
[01:47:18] to the end of the runway or end of the ship.
[01:47:20] And typically when you bolter,
[01:47:22] it's because in the last probably three seconds
[01:47:25] of a however long.
[01:47:26] Or a less than a minute.
[01:47:27] Yeah, or two seconds, you make one little error
[01:47:29] in the last two seconds and it pushes you past the wires
[01:47:32] by five feet.
[01:47:34] And then you're back in the air again
[01:47:35] and you don't want to be there.
[01:47:37] And so I think in your mind, you say, when I get in close,
[01:47:40] the term is called in close to at the ramp.
[01:47:41] It's the last three or four seconds of flying.
[01:47:43] I am not going to add power.
[01:47:45] He mentioned something earlier about something
[01:47:48] called the Burble, which is a real thing.
[01:47:51] And the wind that goes over the flight deck,
[01:47:53] especially in a conventional carrier
[01:47:55] that has to make its own wind,
[01:47:56] meaning it has to run the engines to get speed.
[01:47:58] You have to have 30 knots of wind over the flight deck.
[01:48:01] That Burble, the way the wind goes over the flight deck
[01:48:03] and right at the end of the runway,
[01:48:05] it curves down towards the water,
[01:48:07] will literally pull your airplane down
[01:48:09] just a couple of feet.
[01:48:10] But if you add the Burble,
[01:48:11] three or four feet, it's going to pull you down.
[01:48:13] And that destroys part of your lift as well.
[01:48:16] Absolutely.
[01:48:17] And then that psychological piece of,
[01:48:20] I am not going to go high.
[01:48:22] That six or seven foot difference
[01:48:24] will put your plane in the back of the ship
[01:48:26] and literally blow it up.
[01:48:27] That's the video he's talking about.
[01:48:28] And I think the combination of those two
[01:48:29] creates a really, really dangerous combination
[01:48:33] of the psychology you talked about
[01:48:34] and the actual aerodynamics of it.
[01:48:36] And I would say just a high majority,
[01:48:40] if not almost all of the mishaps around the ship
[01:48:42] aren't really because of mechanical or engine problems,
[01:48:44] it's because of that scenario.
[01:48:46] And the LSO has probably went to the CO
[01:48:48] and said, hey, you got to talk to this guy
[01:48:50] because he's going to kill himself.
[01:48:52] And that's when the skipper,
[01:48:54] and I'm obviously putting words in his mouth
[01:48:56] based on common experience.
[01:48:57] I didn't talk about it specifically,
[01:48:58] but it sounds like I'm hitting close
[01:48:59] to the market that feeling.
[01:49:00] Yes you are.
[01:49:01] Yeah, that's what happens.
[01:49:03] It's all very laid back too, as a matter of fact.
[01:49:05] The LSO, he earlier that night said to you, Tom,
[01:49:11] this is your third bolt of the Lorno's in close
[01:49:15] in a row, this is not good, you got to work on this.
[01:49:19] And then four hours later,
[01:49:21] he came to me in the passenger way and said,
[01:49:23] we're not going to do this, we got to change.
[01:49:27] Dave, how many times did you bolt or bolt her?
[01:49:31] I probably, so on my first cruise,
[01:49:34] I had no bolters on my second cruise, I had one bolter.
[01:49:37] Oh boy.
[01:49:38] In training, when you're talking about CQ,
[01:49:43] night CQ, I bet I had at least one,
[01:49:47] if not two bolters at night.
[01:49:48] What's night CQ?
[01:49:49] No, I'm sorry, night carrier qualifications.
[01:49:52] Got it.
[01:49:53] The night.
[01:49:53] Before you deploy.
[01:49:54] Before you deploy, so the night CQ,
[01:49:57] I had probably a relatively small handful.
[01:50:00] Once you're on cruise and on the way,
[01:50:02] it doesn't happen all that often,
[01:50:03] but the thing that's crazy is probably some
[01:50:06] of the worst flying you'll ever do is off the coast
[01:50:09] of California, because it's overcast at 800 feet
[01:50:11] all the time, even though it's beautiful
[01:50:13] Southern California weather.
[01:50:14] So it's pitch black underneath that overcast,
[01:50:17] even if there is a full moon,
[01:50:18] because there's a big cloud layer there,
[01:50:19] and the Pacific Ocean likes to move around,
[01:50:22] the ship moves around and it sucks, it's awful.
[01:50:26] He flew a much harder plane to get aboard the ship
[01:50:29] than I ever did, so what he did was harder.
[01:50:31] You're talking about, you might have had four of these
[01:50:32] in your career, you had four of them in six flights.
[01:50:35] Nice flight nights.
[01:50:36] Yeah.
[01:50:37] That's enough to freak someone out first.
[01:50:38] Yeah, I don't know.
[01:50:41] The F-4 was an ancient airplane in a manner of speaking,
[01:50:44] and the F-18 is a different breed of cat completely.
[01:50:48] And I was told the F-18 is actually a fun airplane,
[01:50:51] easy airplane to fly, and then you have to work
[01:50:55] to get really good at it, but that's something else.
[01:50:58] The F-4, first time I flew the F-4 with my instructor
[01:51:02] and about cockpit, we went back,
[01:51:04] you take off and go out over the Pacific, off Miramar,
[01:51:08] and headed north, and he said,
[01:51:11] you can level off here at 15,000,
[01:51:13] or more or less, it didn't matter.
[01:51:16] And I tried to level off, and I thought,
[01:51:18] I can't even fly this thing straight and level.
[01:51:21] But the F-4 was designed to be an unstable platform,
[01:51:27] and then they put three axial axis stabilizing
[01:51:32] devices in there, and the early models had a single switch,
[01:51:36] and then they put three separate switches
[01:51:38] for pitch rolling and yaw.
[01:51:41] And a lot of guys, at the end, I would turn the roll off,
[01:51:44] most guys did total roll off, but at any rate,
[01:51:47] it was an unstable airplane, so if you touch the stick
[01:51:49] a little bit, it'll do that, you touch the stick,
[01:51:52] it turns off the stabilizing system.
[01:51:56] When you touch the stick, there are micro switches
[01:51:58] in the base of the physical hand grip,
[01:52:02] and as soon as you touch it a little bit,
[01:52:05] it turns off the roll stab.
[01:52:07] You pull back just a little bit, turns off the,
[01:52:10] just a little bit, so actually before you fly the airplane,
[01:52:15] they'd want you to get familiar with the cockpit
[01:52:17] and so forth, and they say to you,
[01:52:21] realize that this system is there,
[01:52:23] and if it's quiet, you can hear the micro switches click,
[01:52:27] and you can't, but you just gotta touch them,
[01:52:29] and you click it, click it, very faint,
[01:52:32] but they're in there, and it turns off the roll stab,
[01:52:35] so here you are your first time out with this thing,
[01:52:38] and you touch it a little bit, and it turns off the micro stab,
[01:52:41] the stabilization in pitch, and it does one of these,
[01:52:46] and because you go the other way, and it keeps it off,
[01:52:48] and so forth, and then you push it a little bit this way,
[01:52:51] and it turns that off too, and then you go back,
[01:52:54] and so forth.
[01:52:55] And there, it only turns it off for half a second
[01:52:58] or something like that, but if you hit it again,
[01:53:00] it turns about.
[01:53:01] If you over-correct the other side,
[01:53:02] and it's just off.
[01:53:03] So forth, and so forth, and so forth, yeah, so.
[01:53:05] But the F-A-18 is a modern airplane,
[01:53:08] the F-4 was just an airplane that Mr. McDonald said,
[01:53:12] I want a monster, and I wanted to do this,
[01:53:15] that, and the other thing, and if you have a problem
[01:53:19] with it, it won't do that, add a system to do that,
[01:53:22] and they did, and they kept on doing that,
[01:53:25] and that's what you got, and you got a hell of an airplane,
[01:53:28] but my favorite quote about the F-4 was a Marine,
[01:53:32] and one of the books, as you might suspect,
[01:53:35] I have airplane books and whatnot,
[01:53:38] and he said, I flew the F-4 for three years,
[01:53:41] and it never killed me.
[01:53:46] So now you get to Vietnam, what's your mission?
[01:53:50] What are you guys doing?
[01:53:52] Ho Chi Minh Trail, Ho Chi Minh Trail, Ho Chi Minh Trail,
[01:53:54] Latin Bar Cap, it was a bombing pause in the north,
[01:53:59] and the only things were going up there were RA-5Cs
[01:54:04] to look at whatever changes they made,
[01:54:07] probably mostly in the airfields,
[01:54:09] and also looking for SAM sites.
[01:54:13] So you being a first cruise guy,
[01:54:17] you were not gonna fly that escort until you did it.
[01:54:22] I think that's a Navy tradition,
[01:54:25] you can't do it until you do it.
[01:54:27] So for the first three or four months of that cruise,
[01:54:32] I didn't fly any Racky fighter escort up there,
[01:54:39] and then basically what happens is,
[01:54:42] and everybody I think is familiar with this,
[01:54:46] Fred's sick, Tom, can you do this?
[01:54:49] Yeah, I can do that.
[01:54:51] So then you're the escort for the RA-5C,
[01:54:55] and then you're on the regular schedule for that after that.
[01:55:00] But that was the best flying I ever did in my life,
[01:55:02] that keeping with him.
[01:55:04] So what was one of those mission profiles look like?
[01:55:08] Well, launch and point towards North Vietnam, the coast,
[01:55:15] and they were always looking around,
[01:55:19] so half the time they would see you on radar,
[01:55:22] and you have receivers, and they're apparently,
[01:55:26] the F-18 probably has better ones,
[01:55:28] far better ones than we had.
[01:55:30] And you see them, do do do do, looking at you
[01:55:32] as the sweep goes by, and depressurize the cockpit,
[01:55:38] and give yourself a little spacing on the RA-5C,
[01:55:43] and he has promised that he will not go closer
[01:55:47] than 1,000 feet to the undercast.
[01:55:51] He will be above 4,000 feet of the, I'm sorry, the overcast.
[01:55:56] He won't be that close to the undercast.
[01:55:58] He will be 4,000 or 5,000 feet above the undercast.
[01:56:03] He won't go faster, he won't use burner,
[01:56:06] and about four other things,
[01:56:07] and then when you get into it,
[01:56:09] he does everything that he says he wouldn't do,
[01:56:12] because he's shedding in his pants too.
[01:56:14] Because they're looking at you, once you're in there,
[01:56:17] they're looking at you with about three different,
[01:56:20] you can hear the different tones,
[01:56:21] different kinds of radars.
[01:56:23] So what are they doing?
[01:56:24] What's the RA-5C doing?
[01:56:26] Taking pictures.
[01:56:29] And you're just protecting it.
[01:56:30] Right, because the MiG-21s shot down a lot of RA-5Cs,
[01:56:37] and what they would do is they figured
[01:56:40] maybe they're gonna do it today,
[01:56:41] and they put one or two MiG-21s at very high altitude,
[01:56:45] let's say above 35,000,
[01:56:47] because they'd get more speed out of it,
[01:56:49] because the MiG-21 would go 1.8 downhill, easy.
[01:56:54] So they would wait until the RA-5C turned away
[01:56:58] from where their loiter is up here,
[01:57:00] and he's down 2,000 feet taking pictures,
[01:57:04] and then come downhill behind him.
[01:57:07] So your job was to stay away from him,
[01:57:09] and always be looking back there.
[01:57:12] This side too, because you never know,
[01:57:14] but always back here,
[01:57:16] and so stay away from him.
[01:57:18] What people in the
[01:57:23] YouTubes and things like that call Fatch Weave,
[01:57:26] Mr. Commander Fatch invented that in 1944,
[01:57:30] or something like that, and it's absolutely,
[01:57:33] Air Force, they always write with each other,
[01:57:36] and it's just useless and a waste of fuel.
[01:57:39] We always stay one mile, minimum,
[01:57:42] mile and a quarter is a little better,
[01:57:44] so you can come back, and so forth.
[01:57:47] So watch out for MiG-21.
[01:57:51] I wanted to be head on with the MiG-21
[01:57:54] because with the F-4 system,
[01:57:57] well before that, off the coast of California,
[01:58:01] nobody ever told me you could do this,
[01:58:03] but I wondered, against F-8s,
[01:58:05] I put the pepper, 35-mil pepper down the intake of an F-8,
[01:58:10] and guess what happened?
[01:58:11] Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
[01:58:13] Then the Sidewinder Growl, which means it's easy.
[01:58:18] Looking, just looking down the intake.
[01:58:20] So I wanted to do that with the MiG-21,
[01:58:23] but I never got the chance.
[01:58:26] And I said to Jimmy, I said, when, my best friend,
[01:58:31] I said, so that you can claim we got him with a sparrow,
[01:58:37] we won't know which, because as soon as that Sidewinder
[01:58:41] leaves, I'm gonna flip to, because you got the pepper on it,
[01:58:44] I'm gonna flip to radar and pull the trigger a second time.
[01:58:47] So I said, when that big guy sees,
[01:58:50] maybe the Sidewinder won't guide,
[01:58:52] maybe it'll miss him by 30 feet,
[01:58:54] and then the kill radius is only 25 and stuff like that.
[01:58:58] But when he sees that sparrow coming at him,
[01:59:00] that monster sparrow, he's gonna shit in his pants.
[01:59:05] So anyway, how'd it get into this?
[01:59:09] Well, I was just asking what that mission profile was.
[01:59:11] Yeah, so anyway, you follow him around basically
[01:59:15] at high speed, and he always said he wasn't
[01:59:17] gonna use a burner, and he had the same engines
[01:59:20] that you have, and the J79 would put out,
[01:59:23] ordinarily put out a smoke trail.
[01:59:26] We got a mod in the F-4, late in the cruise,
[01:59:29] that would stop that in a fuel additive,
[01:59:32] but they had to put piping in to do that.
[01:59:36] But at any rate, you look over at him,
[01:59:39] and he's not smoking, that means he's a min burner
[01:59:42] to get rid of the smoke, as soon as you did that,
[01:59:44] the smoke went away.
[01:59:45] So, and you look down, and the max low altitude speed
[01:59:50] on the F-4, indicated airspeed, was I think like 740,
[01:59:55] and you look at the indicated airspeed,
[01:59:59] and he's not in burner, we're doing 790,
[02:00:03] indicated relatively close to the ground,
[02:00:09] and we're smoking along here, and then you come back,
[02:00:13] and they know what you've been doing,
[02:00:14] although it's a combat situation,
[02:00:15] you're not gonna know what they were complaining,
[02:00:18] but I have a picture of an F-4 coming aboard with,
[02:00:21] and it's big dense in all three tanks,
[02:00:24] because you've been up there,
[02:00:29] if not at the mark, really close to it,
[02:00:31] and the dynamic pressure dense the fronts of the tanks,
[02:00:35] and maybe they don't do that anymore,
[02:00:37] maybe put some sort of a reinforcement
[02:00:40] on the front end of the tanks,
[02:00:41] but those tanks were not reinforcing the noses,
[02:00:43] and they were all dented from doing stuff like that.
[02:00:48] This story is so cool for me,
[02:00:50] because that's like just classic nail aviation,
[02:00:54] what I always loved about flying with the Navy
[02:00:55] in the Marine Corps was he's talking about that missile,
[02:00:59] he was talking about in training,
[02:01:00] like the book says you can only shoot the missile
[02:01:02] from the back of an airplane, that's the rule,
[02:01:04] and that's how it works, and they tell you,
[02:01:06] and the coolest thing about flying with guys in the Navy,
[02:01:07] they're like, I don't care what the book says,
[02:01:09] I'm gonna go try this, see if it works,
[02:01:10] and this missile, which is on paper and designed
[02:01:13] to only shoot the back of a jet,
[02:01:15] because the engines in the back, that's probably heat,
[02:01:18] these guys figured out I could shoot this thing,
[02:01:19] we call it four quarter in the nose,
[02:01:21] and the best part about that is if you launch this at a MiG,
[02:01:24] I guarantee you, he would do exactly what you described,
[02:01:26] because nobody else would do that,
[02:01:28] because the book says you can't do it,
[02:01:30] so I just like listening to your stories of,
[02:01:32] I don't care what the book says,
[02:01:33] I'm gonna try this, see if it works,
[02:01:34] and that big giant intake probably replicated a MiG-21's
[02:01:38] big nose, that big giant engine right in the front
[02:01:40] of the airplane, that's pretty cool thinking, I like that.
[02:01:43] And he had a 37 millimeter gun too,
[02:01:46] in both those airplanes, and you better not shoot
[02:01:50] the pass too soon, because he's gonna be firing
[02:01:52] that thing on a head on, no matter which one it is,
[02:01:56] at you, and you got a piece of bulletproof glass
[02:01:59] in the front of you, in the older airplanes,
[02:02:01] the F-4 you did, so it shouldn't hit you in the face,
[02:02:05] I guess, but he's liable to ruin your radar,
[02:02:08] which could be a problem, if he gets close to you
[02:02:13] with that head on, but as soon as you pull that trigger,
[02:02:15] he's never saw anything like that in his life,
[02:02:19] and he's been told that the F-4 has to get behind you,
[02:02:22] so don't worry about it, and that's what I always,
[02:02:25] and I said, Jimmy, you gonna be able to,
[02:02:27] and we get that MiG with a sparrow,
[02:02:31] because that's the, the radar operator's missile,
[02:02:36] is a sparrow.
[02:02:38] And so what was it that made those recon missions
[02:02:41] so fun for you, just that you're up there
[02:02:43] hauling ass around?
[02:02:46] Well, this goes back to something I put in that deal,
[02:02:49] and I heard the Chappy James say it the first time,
[02:02:51] and I think it's common, but don't get in the airplane,
[02:02:54] strap it on to you, and Chappy James was quite a guy,
[02:02:58] and I talked to him once, once,
[02:03:02] but you know who he was.
[02:03:04] No, tell me about Chappy.
[02:03:05] He was the black guy who was number two
[02:03:06] to Robin Oles in Thailand, and Robin Oles got all
[02:03:09] of publicity and all this, and Chappy James was
[02:03:13] the quiet guy who kept his place and so forth,
[02:03:16] but they made him a four star general.
[02:03:20] He was, the night I talked to him,
[02:03:24] he was the speaker at a dinner, and he had the place
[02:03:27] in the palm of his hand, and then you figure,
[02:03:31] he's probably winding up about now, and he said,
[02:03:34] you've been such a great audience,
[02:03:35] I'm gonna sing a song for you, and I thought,
[02:03:37] oh, the poor man, he's gonna ruin everything.
[02:03:40] He had it made here, and now he's gonna make
[02:03:42] a fool of himself.
[02:03:43] He sang Old Man River like a metropolitan opera.
[02:03:47] He was really, really something.
[02:03:50] So then he talked with the troops after everything was done.
[02:03:56] He was, I mean, he had to strap it on, so that was,
[02:04:01] first time, I felt that way, truly felt that way,
[02:04:04] fly like the airplanes attached to you,
[02:04:07] and the other way around,
[02:04:11] because when he, you wanna say a mile or a mile
[02:04:15] or a quarter of a beam, what happens if he turns into you?
[02:04:18] Well, you go high, and you come up here this way,
[02:04:21] and watch him, going around the bend,
[02:04:24] and then you can go to the,
[02:04:25] because you're coming down here, you're gonna gain energy,
[02:04:28] so you can go to the outside if you figure
[02:04:30] his next turn will be into you again.
[02:04:33] Well, then you can go up without adding power,
[02:04:36] because as you go,
[02:04:39] no, that's wrong, but if he turns into you,
[02:04:43] you can go high.
[02:04:43] Would you fly with the same guy all the time?
[02:04:46] In the backseat?
[02:04:46] No, the plane that you were covering for.
[02:04:49] No, you didn't even know his name.
[02:04:51] No kidding.
[02:04:52] Yeah, and they were all, because they are,
[02:04:55] they lost a lot of young guys flying the RA5C early in its
[02:05:02] career, they switched to mostly senior guys
[02:05:07] with a lot of hours and a lot of traps.
[02:05:10] They would lose them at the ramp.
[02:05:13] So those guys were, maybe they were all commanders,
[02:05:17] which is too old to be just an airplane driver
[02:05:20] on a carrier, but because of the difficulty
[02:05:25] getting the monster, that monster aboard, heavy,
[02:05:29] their launch weight was a little over 80,000
[02:05:32] on that thing, and the standard launch weight
[02:05:37] that has come to pass more or less is around 60,000.
[02:05:41] So 20,000 pounds heavier off, or getting aboard.
[02:05:46] So they had senior guys doing that.
[02:05:52] I think there was one guy who was a lieutenant commander,
[02:05:55] but anyway, flying with him, flying,
[02:06:00] I discovered I could fly like a bird, because
[02:06:04] at that point in your training or in your experience level,
[02:06:10] you start to get that good at it, and I thought,
[02:06:13] holy smoke, I'm doing this, this way.
[02:06:16] Even though at that point I had 1,000 hours of total flying,
[02:06:21] maybe more than that, flying experience,
[02:06:24] but it was something of a revelation to be able to
[02:06:28] fly where you wanted to go and not be limited
[02:06:33] by what the machine would do, especially with the F-4
[02:06:38] when you had all that power, and especially
[02:06:41] when you're about halfway through your fuel load,
[02:06:43] you have a lot more power, because your weight is gone.
[02:06:48] How long did the fuel last?
[02:06:49] How long did you have?
[02:06:50] Well, the cycle on consolation in combat zone was
[02:06:54] two and a half.
[02:07:00] They called it a two-hour cycle, but you wound up flying
[02:07:03] two and a half hours, because they would launch everybody
[02:07:06] and then they would recover you, so I think they launched
[02:07:09] every two hours, I think that's how it worked.
[02:07:11] You know, I never thought of it quite this way,
[02:07:14] but anyway, my traps on combat zone were always about 2.6.
[02:07:19] Did you guys get gas?
[02:07:24] Only from time to time.
[02:07:26] That's a long time.
[02:07:27] Yeah, and the F-4 fuel gobbler,
[02:07:29] and you were always, always sweating fuel,
[02:07:34] always sweating fuel.
[02:07:36] The cycle time, they measure the cycle time
[02:07:38] when you're talking about on an aircraft carrier,
[02:07:39] in the cycle time is launch to launch,
[02:07:42] so if it's two hours, that means a launch happens,
[02:07:45] and two hours later, the launch happens.
[02:07:47] What's bad about that is if you're on a two-hour cycle,
[02:07:50] when you launch, you'll be the first one to go
[02:07:52] in your Phantom, and then two hours later,
[02:07:55] the next launch goes, you have to wait for all those
[02:07:58] airplanes to get launched before you recover,
[02:08:01] so that two hours is two hours from takeoff to takeoff,
[02:08:04] you have to wait for everybody else on the next launch
[02:08:05] to takeoff before you can land, so that two becomes
[02:08:07] two and a half, and 30 minutes, and actually 30 minutes
[02:08:10] is a lot of time to manage your gas.
[02:08:12] You burn 100 pounds a minute.
[02:08:14] Yeah, that's a lot.
[02:08:14] 100 pounds a minute?
[02:08:16] Yeah, that's 6,000 pounds an hour.
[02:08:19] 6,000 pounds an hour, yeah.
[02:08:22] How about hitting the Ho Chi Minh Trail
[02:08:24] doing those bombing runs?
[02:08:26] Well, you always had a, well, what you do is,
[02:08:30] no, I had your flight later, I was always the one,
[02:08:33] your flight later, would call, I think it was a piston engine
[02:08:40] Lockheed Constellation that was out over the water south,
[02:08:44] and he would ask you what you were and what your ordinance was,
[02:08:48] and he'd come back and say, your fact is gonna be
[02:08:51] camera 2-2, and he is currently at the Lusensow,
[02:08:55] the Lusensow-Tacan, and he will meet you at the Lusensow
[02:09:00] and Lusensow of that Tacan, and which would be somewhere
[02:09:05] in northern Laos, and he'll be there in 12 minutes.
[02:09:12] He's on route right now.
[02:09:14] So you would go there, and excuse me,
[02:09:19] and you'd go there, and we'll wait a couple of minutes
[02:09:23] because if you called him up early, he'd say,
[02:09:25] I'm going as fast as I can, and so, so anyway,
[02:09:31] then he'd call you up and say, I'm in your area now,
[02:09:34] here's what we're gonna do, and he had what they called logs,
[02:09:39] they were pieces of wood that were four inches square
[02:09:43] and about two feet long, and had holes drilled
[02:09:46] longitudinally in there, and they had Willie Pete inside,
[02:09:52] and maybe they had a fuse or something, I don't remember,
[02:09:56] that light that, and he would fly over the spot more or less
[02:09:59] where he wanted you to go, and he would drop it out,
[02:10:02] a trap door that he had in the bottom of the airplane.
[02:10:04] Is this true?
[02:10:05] Yeah, and then he would go drop a second one,
[02:10:09] and he said, do you have my two markers,
[02:10:11] and you'd say, yeah, okay, and he said,
[02:10:13] now, they are northeast and southwest,
[02:10:17] so remember they're northeast, they're not north
[02:10:20] and south, they're northeast and southwest,
[02:10:22] and what you want is on a triangle pointed to the north,
[02:10:29] but to the northeast, and sort of,
[02:10:32] and there's a crossroads there, can you see the crossroads,
[02:10:35] and sometimes you could on a moonlit night.
[02:10:37] He said, okay, now, not the crossroads, but,
[02:10:40] and this is, this is really what they were doing.
[02:10:43] That's what you're doing, yeah.
[02:10:44] And he'd say, I drop another one,
[02:10:46] but we don't want to alert them,
[02:10:48] because the trucks are all parked right now,
[02:10:50] but there's a grove of heavy trees, can you see those?
[02:10:53] No, you can't.
[02:10:54] I would always turn my lights out after you get off the ship,
[02:10:58] and how would you put it, comfortable for a couple of minutes,
[02:11:02] I'd turn everything off, because I had a good,
[02:11:05] best RO in the back, and of course you can hear,
[02:11:10] something's amiss in the airplane.
[02:11:12] What's that ticking, what's that thumping, whatever,
[02:11:15] the engines don't sound right,
[02:11:17] you can hear all that even with your helmet on,
[02:11:20] so I figured, and warning light panels for galore,
[02:11:23] so I figured, turn it out, the human eye takes,
[02:11:28] you probably know this, it takes about 30,
[02:11:30] yeah, half an hour, the same length of time
[02:11:33] takes the sun to set, so after half an hour,
[02:11:37] you can see everything on the ground,
[02:11:39] and the facts talking about that, grove of trees,
[02:11:41] yeah, I can see what you're talking about,
[02:11:43] I can see where those roads are,
[02:11:45] I only started doing that after about two or three months,
[02:11:48] because initially you don't know what you're doing.
[02:11:51] But, turn the lights out,
[02:11:54] and turn the panel lights all the way down,
[02:11:58] because the warning panels,
[02:11:59] any warning lights, low fuel, or anything like that,
[02:12:03] that doesn't turn down, as you might figure.
[02:12:07] So I figured, with a good guy in the back,
[02:12:10] he'll let me know, so then you're right.
[02:12:13] And then you're almost daylight,
[02:12:16] when you eyes get truly acclimated,
[02:12:19] and you see everything on the ground,
[02:12:21] even if it's just the least little moon, but just stars,
[02:12:24] you can see stuff on the ground, so then you're right.
[02:12:27] That's what happens.
[02:12:28] Were you always running nighttime missions?
[02:12:29] 99, 95, 99%
[02:12:33] What would cause a daytime mission?
[02:12:35] New on Yankee Station, the first day,
[02:12:39] maybe day two days, days, but then after that, all nights,
[02:12:44] and you'd be on Yankee Station for 31, 32 days.
[02:12:49] Well, what's Yankee Station, what is it?
[02:12:51] Northern Gulf of Tonkin, Northern Gulf.
[02:12:54] Initially they had a second carrier,
[02:12:56] they called Dixie Station, off of South Vietnam,
[02:12:59] and they stopped that.
[02:13:01] And they would have two carriers up North,
[02:13:05] excuse me, on Yankee Station.
[02:13:09] But anyway, you turn lights out
[02:13:11] and you could see everything at night,
[02:13:13] and the guy says, can you see the trees?
[02:13:16] And Skipper wouldn't be able to see him,
[02:13:18] because he's got older eyeballs than me,
[02:13:22] and he didn't turn his lights out,
[02:13:24] or turn them out completely, that's what I would do.
[02:13:26] And he had good RO too,
[02:13:29] and he stole my good RO.
[02:13:30] When his RO got taken by the Admiral
[02:13:35] to be part of his staff, then he took my RO,
[02:13:39] and then I had a teenager,
[02:13:40] who didn't know what he was doing,
[02:13:43] he was right out of the Naval Academy.
[02:13:45] Anyway, so he'd give you those coordinates,
[02:13:50] and he said, can you see the trees,
[02:13:51] that is just south of where that intersection is?
[02:13:55] And he said, yeah, anywhere in those trees,
[02:13:57] because it's full of trucks there, and so forth.
[02:14:01] Sometimes you'd get there,
[02:14:03] and you'd see headlights, but rarely, rarely.
[02:14:07] And as soon as they really hear you,
[02:14:09] they would run back to the truck and turn the lights off,
[02:14:11] or turn the engines off, I guess, at any rate,
[02:14:15] and then you'd do that.
[02:14:17] But see that thing there that you read early on,
[02:14:20] that was, you know, when Lyndon Johnson
[02:14:24] had his bombing pause in North Vietnam,
[02:14:28] the North Vietnamese took all the guns
[02:14:31] that used to be in North Vietnam,
[02:14:33] and put them over in the Lows
[02:14:34] to guard the Ho Chi Minh Trail over there.
[02:14:38] So, where was I?
[02:14:43] The guns and so forth, and...
[02:14:48] Well, how often were you moving to,
[02:14:50] like you mentioned the anti-aircraft,
[02:14:54] the flak that you're flying by,
[02:14:56] the surface-dairy missiles,
[02:14:57] how often did you run into that?
[02:14:59] Was that every mission?
[02:15:00] Every time, every time.
[02:15:03] But they were cool about that, you see,
[02:15:05] you'd get there.
[02:15:06] Who was cool about that?
[02:15:07] The gunners on the ground.
[02:15:09] The enemy gunners?
[02:15:10] Yeah.
[02:15:11] In what way?
[02:15:12] Well, they'd know you were there,
[02:15:13] because they could hear you.
[02:15:15] And in your orbiting,
[02:15:20] what I would do immediately,
[02:15:21] as soon as we get there,
[02:15:23] I'd separate an altitude,
[02:15:25] I'd go a thousand higher on whoever was,
[02:15:29] usually a rural gardener,
[02:15:30] but I'd go a thousand higher,
[02:15:32] and I'd cut across and turn,
[02:15:34] every naval aviator is a left-hand turn expert.
[02:15:38] They're all turned left.
[02:15:39] In fact, one time I met a guy in Philadelphia
[02:15:42] who had the same dog as I did,
[02:15:43] and I started talking with him,
[02:15:44] and then I saw him a second or a third time.
[02:15:47] He said, what'd you do before you did the ad business?
[02:15:49] He said I was a naval aviator.
[02:15:50] I said, son of a gun, so was I.
[02:15:52] How about that?
[02:15:53] So at any rate, in that office,
[02:15:55] it was street level,
[02:15:57] I had an old IBM computer,
[02:15:59] and I had the Microsoft Flight Simulator
[02:16:04] early on, a version of that on that computer.
[02:16:08] I said, come inside and look at this thing.
[02:16:11] Anyway, I took it off,
[02:16:12] and they'd take off, and I turned right,
[02:16:15] and he said, what the hell kind of a naval aviator are you?
[02:16:17] I turned right.
[02:16:19] And it sims.
[02:16:20] I can't remember, anyway, it doesn't matter.
[02:16:23] Sims, nice guy, nice guy.
[02:16:26] At any rate, I would turn,
[02:16:28] I would orbit to the right,
[02:16:30] and I knew that he was gonna roll in from 1-8.
[02:16:33] I would roll in anywhere at the top of the quadrant
[02:16:39] of the compass rows.
[02:16:42] So what made what the gunners do cool?
[02:16:45] You said the gunners are cool.
[02:16:46] Cool.
[02:16:47] You make yourself present,
[02:16:49] because you're making all that noise right over here,
[02:16:52] over the crossroads,
[02:16:53] and they know, the gunners all know,
[02:16:55] as the trucks are over there,
[02:16:57] and they know that,
[02:16:57] and they know that you know that,
[02:16:59] because they can hear the fact flying around too.
[02:17:02] So they would wait until you roll in, until you commit.
[02:17:06] The problem is, they had to get a handle on you
[02:17:09] when you start down,
[02:17:10] because they also know, I presume that they knew,
[02:17:14] that you're gonna pull a powered idle,
[02:17:15] and your engines get very quiet,
[02:17:17] as soon as you do that.
[02:17:19] So if they didn't have a bead on you, at that point,
[02:17:22] I'm convinced too,
[02:17:24] that they used a simple auditory way to track you.
[02:17:31] I think my idea is that,
[02:17:35] if you took a bunch of paper towel tubes,
[02:17:38] and put tape around them,
[02:17:40] and put a microphone behind them,
[02:17:42] and then you put that on the mount of a gun,
[02:17:47] where the barrel got overheated and it warped,
[02:17:49] so we got this gun mount over here, we don't use it,
[02:17:54] put that auditory search finder thing on the gun,
[02:18:00] because as soon as I turn it over there,
[02:18:02] and I can hear it,
[02:18:02] I got headphones on, and I can hear,
[02:18:04] there he is, oh, I lost him, no, I got him back again.
[02:18:08] But the point here is that,
[02:18:09] the azimuth and elevation on that auditory device,
[02:18:13] if you have a simple system,
[02:18:15] you can all the five guys having 57 millimeter,
[02:18:19] or even 85 millimeter pieces around here,
[02:18:22] they know where you are,
[02:18:23] because they can read what he is tracking you
[02:18:27] in an auditory fashion.
[02:18:29] So they wouldn't open up sometimes,
[02:18:33] until you release,
[02:18:36] pull, and add power, and as soon as you did that,
[02:18:41] yeah, that's shit going by from the back,
[02:18:46] and most of it right there,
[02:18:49] because they had time to know where you were,
[02:18:52] and they could hear you in orbit,
[02:18:54] and now this guy was over here,
[02:18:56] and suddenly he got silent, that means he's in the dive,
[02:19:00] so that means he's gonna be over here,
[02:19:02] and turn their guns around,
[02:19:04] more over the guy with the auditory,
[02:19:08] have a dozen paper towel tubes taped together,
[02:19:11] he can hear you, even if you got your engines at idle,
[02:19:15] I think, that's my private theory,
[02:19:18] I don't know if that's true or not,
[02:19:19] but anyway, that's when they would open up on you,
[02:19:21] and yes, every night, no question, every night,
[02:19:25] anytime you were there, they would blast away,
[02:19:30] and...
[02:19:31] Did you guys lose any aircraft while you were on deployment?
[02:19:34] Not my squadron, no, the ship lost,
[02:19:38] I don't know, four or five, maybe more,
[02:19:41] A7s, no A6s,
[02:19:46] A6 guys, I think, were pretty cagey,
[02:19:49] A7 drivers, they all tended to be, seemed to me,
[02:19:54] younger guys, in the wardrobes, sitting there,
[02:19:56] with the guy, I said,
[02:19:57] man, I had a hell of a time tonight,
[02:19:59] I was mixing it up with these guys,
[02:20:01] they had a 57 millimeter in a cave on the side of a hill,
[02:20:04] I don't know how they got it up there,
[02:20:06] but I made it, I came back around
[02:20:07] and gave them another load of 20 millimeter,
[02:20:10] I thought, really, I said, you know,
[02:20:12] you're sitting that far across the wardrobes table,
[02:20:14] I said, do you realize what the aim point is?
[02:20:17] Oh, it's the airplane, I said, no, no, no,
[02:20:19] the aim point's right between your eyes, you're nuts,
[02:20:22] put a 500 pound bomb into that hole,
[02:20:25] if you, any good as a bomber, you can do that,
[02:20:28] put a bomb into his cave, that's the end of that gun,
[02:20:31] no, it was more fun, I went around a third time,
[02:20:34] and I said, you're crazy, he's gonna shoot you down,
[02:20:37] you're gonna feel really stupid,
[02:20:39] you throw away your weapons,
[02:20:41] is what you do when you get shot down,
[02:20:43] you have a responsibility to, in your book,
[02:20:47] you talk about things that are worth it
[02:20:51] and things that are not worth it,
[02:20:53] and I have to tell anybody who's willing to,
[02:20:55] including my old skipper or somebody like that,
[02:20:58] I said, I have a favorite switch position
[02:21:00] down by your left knee in the F4, it's an all,
[02:21:04] it does all the bombs, doesn't,
[02:21:06] the missiles, the missiles stay, but the bombs,
[02:21:10] you have singles pairs, doubles, cluster,
[02:21:14] all, and then all, flip, all,
[02:21:19] this is bad here tonight, I don't wanna be here,
[02:21:21] I'll be back tomorrow, but for tonight, all,
[02:21:26] see if you can eat this load,
[02:21:27] there's only six of them for seven, six,
[02:21:30] what, six, 500 pounders?
[02:21:31] Yeah, that was our standard bomb load, six, 500 pounders.
[02:21:37] As the deployment went on,
[02:21:39] and you're going out facing this every night,
[02:21:41] night after night, is it every night,
[02:21:43] you flying every night?
[02:21:44] Yeah, and when you were in the Gulf, you flew every night.
[02:21:48] How's this wearing on you mentally?
[02:21:53] Not bad, I think at that age, you're in your late 20s,
[02:21:56] I was in my late 20s, no, not a big deal,
[02:21:59] except that air conditioning on some ships
[02:22:03] was not very good, and Constellation was one of them,
[02:22:06] the flight tag, or the O3 level.
[02:22:08] Who did it to a Navy guy,
[02:22:10] where that air conditioning pisses us off
[02:22:12] all the time on a ship?
[02:22:13] Well, how about you just had good ventilation,
[02:22:15] you know, you have 85 degree air outside,
[02:22:20] put 85 degree air in this room.
[02:22:22] That would be nice.
[02:22:24] You know, and my state room was on the O3 level,
[02:22:29] the O4 level is the flight, yeah.
[02:22:33] So there are places in the ship
[02:22:35] where the air conditioning really did work beautifully,
[02:22:38] but we got visited by ABC or CBS News or something like that,
[02:22:44] and they were on Hancock,
[02:22:45] which was in the Gulf at the same time at that time,
[02:22:48] and one of these guys said to me,
[02:22:50] boy, we could see this ship on the horizon,
[02:22:53] and he said, this ship is nice, Hancock,
[02:22:56] but next week we're going down to get aboard the big guy.
[02:23:01] Air conditioning doesn't work here,
[02:23:02] and the food's not real good.
[02:23:05] Better on a Hancock than everywhere.
[02:23:07] I said, well, fortunes of war, I guess.
[02:23:10] Yeah, I had a guy on the podcast named Dean Ladd,
[02:23:13] who's a Marine in World War II,
[02:23:14] and he went into a bunch of different islands,
[02:23:17] but he was talking, he's going into Tarawa,
[02:23:21] and I'm like, were you nervous going in?
[02:23:23] He said, no, it's the other guys
[02:23:25] that are going to get wounded and killed.
[02:23:27] He ended up getting gut shot in Tarawa,
[02:23:29] and was lucky, a couple of his Marines disobeyed the order
[02:23:32] just to keep going,
[02:23:33] and they grabbed him and threw him back on a ship,
[02:23:35] so I think that's the common mental state
[02:23:39] of the young man in combat is I really feel sorry
[02:23:42] for the other guys that are going to have trouble out here
[02:23:45] and get wounded and killed.
[02:23:46] My favorite professor in college,
[02:23:48] University of Chicago PhD, that's a big deal,
[02:23:51] and Econ was a tail gunner in B-17s in World War II,
[02:23:57] and I used to play chess with him,
[02:23:58] and I said to him, what was it like?
[02:24:01] He said, you always figured the other guy's going to get it.
[02:24:03] That's the same thing I would just say.
[02:24:06] That's a pretty impressive statement for a tail gunner,
[02:24:09] B-17 in World War II.
[02:24:11] He was a teenager, yeah, and he said,
[02:24:14] you always, fortunes of war,
[02:24:16] you figured the other guy's going to,
[02:24:18] or you can always jump out, you know.
[02:24:20] Yeah, that's one.
[02:24:23] That would be the worst of it that you had to bail out.
[02:24:26] Any other highlights from that deployment?
[02:24:30] Well, like, as Skepper said to me,
[02:24:34] we want to send somebody over to Thailand,
[02:24:37] and since you have Air Force experience,
[02:24:40] would you like to do it?
[02:24:42] Well, yeah, why not?
[02:24:43] And this is to be a forward air control or something?
[02:24:45] No, just to make some judgments
[02:24:50] and come back and relate how they do things over there
[02:24:54] and how the facts work and stuff like that.
[02:24:57] So I said, okay, and so they took me over in a cod,
[02:24:59] and we did not get shot at in broad daylight.
[02:25:02] Cod went out in daylight,
[02:25:04] and we didn't get shot at crossing or anything out
[02:25:08] into U-Bahn is where I went,
[02:25:11] where Robin Oles was when he made his five kills
[02:25:16] and stuff like that.
[02:25:18] And initially, hard to get to first base there.
[02:25:22] I said, it was like in the movies.
[02:25:25] The cod pulled out onto the grass,
[02:25:29] and the crewmen opened the back door and they hopped out.
[02:25:31] They had shut down the starboard engine and door slammed.
[02:25:37] Starboard engine started up, taxied away.
[02:25:39] It was standing there with my suitcase on the grass.
[02:25:43] This is just like a goofy movie from France
[02:25:49] and World War II or something anyway.
[02:25:52] So I got a guy, a trooper walking down the tarmac somewhere,
[02:25:57] and I said, where's Base Operations?
[02:26:00] Down the street, but you don't wanna go there.
[02:26:02] Why?
[02:26:03] Because we're not allowed to be here.
[02:26:06] We're guests.
[02:26:07] Oh, where do I go?
[02:26:09] Building 386, it's on the second street over
[02:26:13] and it has 386 on the outside.
[02:26:15] And I'm making this part up,
[02:26:17] but there's a bit in the essence of it.
[02:26:19] That's the operations you want.
[02:26:22] So I didn't have a place to sleep or anything.
[02:26:26] I went there and it got a Marine, no,
[02:26:30] Air Force Trooper, big guy, big guy with a sidearm
[02:26:35] at a little lectern inside the door.
[02:26:39] He said, basically he says, who the hell are you?
[02:26:41] I mean, maybe uniform and whatnot.
[02:26:44] And he said, not without whatever he needed.
[02:26:50] So that night I went to the club
[02:26:52] and I meet a guy, an Air Force major,
[02:26:55] and he said, we can take care of you.
[02:26:57] We'll get past that, don't worry about it.
[02:26:59] And he took care of everything and stuff like that.
[02:27:02] But Air Force operations were officially just a guest
[02:27:07] and they were just don't officially,
[02:27:09] the air force, the tarmac loaded with F-4s and C-130s.
[02:27:13] So I got to fly with a guy who flew the OV-10,
[02:27:17] which is a heck of a fun airplane to fly.
[02:27:20] Man, oh man, I'd swap ends in a second with that thing.
[02:27:24] I mean, this way and that sort of thing.
[02:27:27] Tons of power, two turboprop engines
[02:27:30] and designed for the Marines.
[02:27:32] So you could put one in it, a couple of guys in the back
[02:27:35] and they opened the hatch in the back
[02:27:37] and the Marines can parachute out into middle of nowhere
[02:27:41] and stuff like that.
[02:27:43] And a good panel in the bay made an instrument approach
[02:27:47] with that guy and he said, that's really something
[02:27:50] off that terrible panel back there.
[02:27:51] I said, yeah, well, you make about 100 passes at the ship
[02:27:55] and then at night and it's not a big deal anymore.
[02:27:57] Now, I flew with him maybe twice
[02:28:03] and I flew with the C-130 gunship,
[02:28:06] a C-130 forward air controller,
[02:28:10] only at night for him though,
[02:28:12] because it's a big target, I guess.
[02:28:16] We had flown off of that guy,
[02:28:18] but we didn't know what kind of airplane he had.
[02:28:21] And let's see, the OV-10 and two times with the C-130,
[02:28:26] two times with the C-130, there's only there a week.
[02:28:30] And then back out to the ship,
[02:28:38] C-130, no, C-47 had about eight or 10 Marine troopers
[02:28:48] who were there on R&R at Yubon, Thailand.
[02:28:52] They had been downtown and they all looked at it.
[02:28:55] They were like, oh, they're the big night last night.
[02:29:00] I don't know where they wound up going,
[02:29:01] but they dropped me off at Hway,
[02:29:03] it was right after the battle of Hway,
[02:29:06] they destroyed everything.
[02:29:08] And right next to the runway, Matt runway,
[02:29:12] and when we landed on that, Matt runway,
[02:29:15] they're shooting at us,
[02:29:15] because it goes rattle, rattle, rattle,
[02:29:17] and I thought, oh my God, there's something.
[02:29:20] But that's, it was just a plank runway.
[02:29:24] And then the Army was there.
[02:29:25] And I thought, boy, sandbags and logs and mud,
[02:29:30] and oh, thank heaven, I have no part of the Army.
[02:29:33] And anyway, they sent the cod in there
[02:29:36] and the cod picked me up and took me out to the ship.
[02:29:39] So that was the end of that.
[02:29:41] But that was quite an experience.
[02:29:46] Those C-130 guys, they had call-onness,
[02:29:50] they've sacked their parachutes back over here
[02:29:54] and they have a pile back there.
[02:29:57] Really?
[02:29:58] What do you do if you get hit?
[02:30:00] Because in my mind, you get hit,
[02:30:02] you might take the whole wing off or the end of it
[02:30:05] and then it starts to tumble
[02:30:06] and you're not gonna have time to put on a parachute.
[02:30:10] But they did, I think they lost more C-130s
[02:30:13] than they ever admitted to over there.
[02:30:16] Because the one I was on, the gunship, he's at 3,000 feet
[02:30:21] and the 37 millimeter gets to 3,000 feet.
[02:30:26] And the burst went off in front of the nose
[02:30:28] and I hit the deck behind the naval flight deck
[02:30:31] on that airplane.
[02:30:33] I was on the floor as we flew through the smoke.
[02:30:37] And they said, what was that?
[02:30:40] I said, for heaven's sake, it went off right.
[02:30:41] Yeah, but it falls away, don't worry about it.
[02:30:44] All right?
[02:30:46] But we flew through the smoke.
[02:30:47] I saw the smoke go over the windshield.
[02:30:51] And I got the flight C-130 a little bit,
[02:30:53] just steer it around, not a big deal.
[02:30:56] But anyway, that's what I did in Thailand.
[02:30:58] Then I came back to the ship and I said,
[02:31:00] what about this and what about that?
[02:31:01] And that's when I saw those F-4s making multiple passes
[02:31:06] from the same direction at 30 degrees dive
[02:31:11] and not just the same direction,
[02:31:14] but both airplanes from the same direction.
[02:31:19] Maybe you're losing airplanes and I think I know why.
[02:31:23] No talking them out of it.
[02:31:25] I think if you are encouraged to think
[02:31:28] that 60 degree angle of dive is dangerous, you'll believe it.
[02:31:34] But it's not, it's safer.
[02:31:36] It's a better way to go.
[02:31:37] And when I saw that picture,
[02:31:40] I don't know if I said this now,
[02:31:43] there's a famous picture taken during the Battle of Midway.
[02:31:46] And that guy is virtually 89 degrees
[02:31:50] all above a Japanese carrier.
[02:31:53] So that's the way to do it, I thought.
[02:31:55] And besides, gotta get the barrel all the way up there.
[02:31:57] Maybe he can't do that.
[02:32:01] So you get done with that deployment.
[02:32:05] Head back to the States, now it's what, 1970?
[02:32:10] Yeah.
[02:32:11] And you're coming back to America now,
[02:32:13] now you got the protests and all this stuff going on.
[02:32:17] Where's that, are you seeing that?
[02:32:19] Are you aware of that?
[02:32:20] What's, how's that impacted you?
[02:32:22] Very much so.
[02:32:23] And I think you just get used to it.
[02:32:27] The thing that you wouldn't get used to
[02:32:29] if you were a newly married guy,
[02:32:31] and that was me and a lot of other guys too,
[02:32:35] that they would call up your house and say,
[02:32:37] tell you that, tell your little wife
[02:32:39] that you had been killed that night.
[02:32:42] This is stateside, before you went to sea.
[02:32:46] Very evil, that's evil.
[02:32:49] And then of course we had a couple of bad actions.
[02:32:53] There was a Navy Cod, I think an old one,
[02:32:56] with a bunch of guys on board that crashed on San Clemente
[02:33:01] before we sailed.
[02:33:03] That was very bad and made my wife very squirrely,
[02:33:06] my young wife.
[02:33:08] There's a funny thing, there's a funny one here.
[02:33:11] I went to the East Coast and I flew out to the East Coast
[02:33:15] so then I have to ride back.
[02:33:18] So we're on a DC-4, C-40, 51,
[02:33:24] or God knows what, a four engine,
[02:33:27] unpressurized Navy transport.
[02:33:31] And we get to Houston and the guy says,
[02:33:34] ah, we'll be here overnight because
[02:33:36] we wasn't so on the third engine or something
[02:33:42] that's not right and so be prepared.
[02:33:45] We'll have it, it'll be ready by morning.
[02:33:47] So at any rate, we were supposed to be back
[02:33:50] at Miramar by six p.m. more or less.
[02:33:53] I sent her, called her or something
[02:33:56] from the East Coast from Norfolk.
[02:33:59] So she calls the duty officer
[02:34:01] and the Whitehead sailor who's on duty too,
[02:34:04] he answers the phone and she says, is this Mrs. Coppell?
[02:34:07] Is my husband gonna be there tonight?
[02:34:10] Well, it's his ETA and he says,
[02:34:12] oh no, the airplane went down in Houston.
[02:34:15] Jesus.
[02:34:18] So, now wait, it gets better than that.
[02:34:21] She figured she was a widow.
[02:34:23] What to do about this?
[02:34:26] Next morning, coming up the side of the building
[02:34:29] are two guys with gold braid on their sleeves.
[02:34:32] And she said, well, this is it.
[02:34:36] Steal myself, they're gonna tell me what happened.
[02:34:40] I walk in the door.
[02:34:41] No, anyway, funny story and she still likes
[02:34:46] to tell it to her friends from time to time.
[02:34:50] Oh man.
[02:34:52] So there is, there's this 1970, you come home,
[02:34:55] there's obviously a lot of division in America.
[02:34:58] Right.
[02:34:59] And what do you end up doing when you get back?
[02:35:02] Well, the re-asked Tom if he wants to stay or go
[02:35:08] and I said, my father-in-law offered me a job,
[02:35:12] so I'm gonna go.
[02:35:13] And I had too many dead friends by that point too.
[02:35:17] And I said, I think I'll just get out.
[02:35:20] And I said, well, we're gonna send you to be an ACM
[02:35:22] instructor at Kingsville.
[02:35:24] And I said, I don't wanna go back to Texas.
[02:35:27] I said, I don't like that place.
[02:35:30] He said, well, we could send you to Meridian,
[02:35:32] but it's only basic instruction.
[02:35:35] I said, that's for me.
[02:35:36] Cause a pal had told me that he got plowed back at Meridian
[02:35:41] and it's really nice place, nice people there.
[02:35:44] So I said, let me go to Meridian.
[02:35:46] And so they put me in Meridian and I was an instructor there
[02:35:49] for my last something like 14 months.
[02:35:52] And I had good students and mediocre instructors
[02:35:55] and students and so forth.
[02:35:57] I wonder what happened to the best of them.
[02:35:59] I've never been, I've typed his name into Google.
[02:36:03] No, I don't know.
[02:36:05] I had Marines, bloody old Marines.
[02:36:08] As one guy, I was his instructor and then his pal,
[02:36:12] I flew with him a couple of times.
[02:36:13] They were recon Marines, which is this Navy SEAL level stuff.
[02:36:19] And I foolishly said to one of them,
[02:36:22] this is really foolish, this is naive.
[02:36:25] I said, you get healed into Northern Laos
[02:36:29] and you get dropped off in the jungle
[02:36:33] and you know you're going to be there for at least a week
[02:36:36] with plenty of ammunition.
[02:36:38] Really, what do you do?
[02:36:40] He said, well, we hunt for the North Vietnamese.
[02:36:43] They train up there and they're in the jungle
[02:36:45] and they're easy to find because they smoke so much ganja
[02:36:49] that you can smell them if they're upwind from you.
[02:36:52] Oh really?
[02:36:53] So what do you do then?
[02:36:55] He said, well, you move around so you are in fact downwind
[02:36:58] and then you get close enough to them
[02:37:01] and you set up and with your weapons and whatnot
[02:37:04] and you wait till dawn so they start walking around.
[02:37:10] Yeah, then what do you do?
[02:37:12] Oh, well, we kill them all.
[02:37:14] Oh, excuse me.
[02:37:16] I was a little naive there.
[02:37:18] But these are the anyway.
[02:37:21] And the guy who was my student,
[02:37:26] I wonder what a nice guy, both of them nice guys,
[02:37:32] he would say to me, Tom, we're first name bases
[02:37:35] and we're in captain at that point.
[02:37:37] Tom, Tom, Tom, how do you do a barrel roll attack?
[02:37:41] See that guy over there?
[02:37:42] Make a barrel roll attack on that guy.
[02:37:45] Richard, I'm not supposed to do that.
[02:37:46] You know that.
[02:37:48] Come on.
[02:37:52] Make a big rolling thing on the student flying,
[02:37:57] students never look around.
[02:38:00] He's flying over there.
[02:38:01] Make a big mock.
[02:38:03] Wow, let me try it.
[02:38:05] Go away over here.
[02:38:06] He tried it.
[02:38:07] That's angry.
[02:38:09] Or the other thing with him, you fly in a back cockpit,
[02:38:12] you have him setting, all fighter planes
[02:38:16] or Navy trainers have rear view mirrors.
[02:38:18] If you need rear view mirrors in a fighter plane,
[02:38:22] you're wasting your time.
[02:38:24] You are long gone.
[02:38:28] When I came back or let's say from halfway through the crew,
[02:38:31] you become a nutcase in the cockpit, at least I did.
[02:38:34] I wanna know everything that's on the horizon, 360.
[02:38:38] That's the only way to genuinely be certain
[02:38:42] you're gonna survive this thing and stuff like that.
[02:38:45] So you become a minor nutcase.
[02:38:49] Looking around, looking around.
[02:38:52] And so forth.
[02:38:53] Then to a young guy, I would say,
[02:38:54] how the hell do you fly the airplane
[02:38:56] if you're spending that much time?
[02:38:58] Well, you do.
[02:38:59] You get skilled at it.
[02:39:01] It's just time that you get better and better at doing it.
[02:39:06] But I would have them turn their mirrors
[02:39:08] so I could see this much of their face.
[02:39:10] Everything else is oxygen mask, helmet and oxygen mask.
[02:39:13] But I wanna see this part of that.
[02:39:15] I wanna see where they're looking.
[02:39:16] I don't want you to see you, Mr. Wilson,
[02:39:19] looking at the panel.
[02:39:20] I want you looking outside.
[02:39:22] Mr. Wilson, you're down in the panel again.
[02:39:24] I want you outside to cockpit here.
[02:39:27] Well, Mr. Coppell, I have trouble flying level.
[02:39:29] I said I'd rather see you bumping around
[02:39:32] in a little off altitude than getting shot down later
[02:39:36] because it's that important and so forth.
[02:39:38] So with Rich Freeman, I would like all of them.
[02:39:42] So I'd see him trying to fly level and make,
[02:39:46] Mr. Rich, I want you to make a 30 degree angle turn
[02:39:49] and roll out a two seven, okay.
[02:39:52] And he's doing a little bit of this.
[02:39:54] And he starts to get red in here.
[02:39:57] So Marine getting angry and not good thing.
[02:40:01] He said, Rich, don't get upset.
[02:40:04] Remember I told you, you wanna hold the stick
[02:40:07] with two fingers and trim off the pressure.
[02:40:10] Move it and then trim off the pressure.
[02:40:13] Two fingers, that's all you need.
[02:40:15] I really do it that way.
[02:40:18] Okay, well I tried again.
[02:40:19] Come back three six, okay.
[02:40:21] He comes back and he's getting redder.
[02:40:24] I said, Rich, do you feel that in the airframe?
[02:40:29] Yeah, what is it?
[02:40:30] I said, that's me back here.
[02:40:34] Founding on the pole.
[02:40:35] He's got it in the vice grip with white knuckles
[02:40:38] and his elbow in here.
[02:40:40] Trying to fly this thing a light, Rich,
[02:40:42] it doesn't work that way.
[02:40:45] But anyway.
[02:40:47] You gotta relax, I guess.
[02:40:49] Ah, I don't know.
[02:40:52] I don't know.
[02:40:53] I think when you come back and they're shooting at you
[02:40:58] and you get bored at night in bad weather,
[02:41:01] you're soaking wet and you're tired.
[02:41:05] Do you burn more calories, I think so.
[02:41:08] There was a study done before the Vietnam War
[02:41:12] and they did it with A4s.
[02:41:14] And I bet you David knows about this.
[02:41:17] They asked these A4 guys to,
[02:41:20] oh no, it was during, at the beginning of the Vietnam War,
[02:41:24] that's how it would work.
[02:41:25] They had a recorder that put a pen mark on a disk of paper.
[02:41:34] And then they wired these guys with sweat
[02:41:38] and lung function and heart function and so forth.
[02:41:44] And they found out that just what they figured,
[02:41:46] you go in and feet dry and everything comes up
[02:41:51] and you get in the target area, comes up even higher,
[02:41:54] get off the target area, comes down a little bit,
[02:41:58] get feet wet, comes way down.
[02:42:01] And it was way up here in the target area.
[02:42:04] And then you talk to the ship and it goes up here,
[02:42:08] that much higher.
[02:42:10] Higher than the target area.
[02:42:12] Right, because at the ship everything is right here,
[02:42:17] whereas in the target area it's fortunes of war.
[02:42:24] It's good tactics, but to a certain extent
[02:42:28] it's out of your hands, so you do your best.
[02:42:31] But if you're gonna smack the ramp or do something
[02:42:35] bad like that, it's right there in your hands.
[02:42:41] And that was A4s.
[02:42:43] So yeah, you will burn more calories in your tired guy.
[02:42:50] And then you stand around the right room and smoke cigarettes.
[02:42:54] Really?
[02:42:56] When did you quit smoking?
[02:42:58] Well, right after that I quit smoking.
[02:43:02] And how was your transition into the civilian life?
[02:43:06] Difficult, because you are used to a guy who says that,
[02:43:14] he does that, and civilian world's not that way.
[02:43:19] Guy says, can you loan me 50 bucks until next Wednesday
[02:43:23] in the Navy, he comes looking for you.
[02:43:25] And civilian world, you gotta go looking for him.
[02:43:30] Hey Eddie, give me my 50 bucks.
[02:43:32] Oh, I'll give you half of it, it's all I have, I say.
[02:43:37] Okay, so he was a little bit rocky.
[02:43:40] And I went into business for myself
[02:43:43] because my wife thought that might be a good idea for us.
[02:43:46] And the antique Persian rug business of all things.
[02:43:51] So I wound up making friends with a lot of Persian guys,
[02:43:56] most of them Jews, a couple of them I still know,
[02:43:59] to this day I call them up saying, how the heck are you?
[02:44:02] Couple of Muslim guys, all nice people.
[02:44:07] You had to be, because you were sort of all in that,
[02:44:10] I've been in the Navy, we're all in this mess together.
[02:44:14] So I figured in that business I had it,
[02:44:19] because you have retail customers who talk to you
[02:44:24] and say I've been looking for a lesson so typed,
[02:44:26] you know what that is?
[02:44:27] Oh, yes.
[02:44:29] I need it 18 feet, but no longer than 19.
[02:44:34] And I need it thus and so wide.
[02:44:36] No, I don't want anywhere, but I want more of this color
[02:44:39] and so can you do that?
[02:44:41] You get on, as soon as I leave, you get on a phone call.
[02:44:45] Mohammed and you call Hakim and you call that guy.
[02:44:49] I'm saying, I have what you want
[02:44:51] and he will give it to you on your signature
[02:44:55] if your credit is good.
[02:44:58] I figured I called a guy one time and he said,
[02:45:01] I don't have it, but I know who does have it.
[02:45:04] He's an old Armenian guy and he's really crotchety
[02:45:06] and he shouldn't be in business anymore,
[02:45:08] but he's got some nice choice stuff.
[02:45:12] This is in New York, 28th Street, 31st Street
[02:45:15] in that neighborhood, Feth Avenue.
[02:45:18] And I said, I need this and that and this and that
[02:45:22] and this and that.
[02:45:23] Yes, yes.
[02:45:25] I said, my credit, I said, you don't know me,
[02:45:28] but I have, I called those and so and call him
[02:45:31] and you could call him, I don't have to do that.
[02:45:35] I said, really why?
[02:45:36] I know who you are.
[02:45:38] I could have it on my signature.
[02:45:40] I drove away one time with 80,000 in wholesale value
[02:45:47] in back of my truck and I figured that was a mistake,
[02:45:51] no signature, they know who I am.
[02:45:53] But nice people, a lot of nice people,
[02:45:57] not like what you read in the paper.
[02:45:59] Did you miss the Navy?
[02:46:01] Oh yeah, yeah, a lot of pals and stuff like that,
[02:46:06] but you have to get away from that.
[02:46:08] You can't live in the past.
[02:46:10] You gotta keep going.
[02:46:11] So we had a lot of, I keep saying this,
[02:46:15] but I had a lot of fun doing that too.
[02:46:17] So, and down to my wife, I bought a piece
[02:46:22] for several thousand and I came back
[02:46:27] and maybe two days later and I said,
[02:46:31] where's the, you know, those and so?
[02:46:33] She said, I sold it.
[02:46:34] She said, I said, I hope you got more than $5,600 for it.
[02:46:41] She said, I got 75.
[02:46:43] Is that what one of those rugs cost?
[02:46:48] How much one of those rugs cost?
[02:46:50] It depends on what it is.
[02:46:51] It depends on its age.
[02:46:53] It depends on its condition.
[02:46:55] You have to deal with somebody that you know
[02:46:58] is utterly trustworthy because Henry Kissinger got fleeced
[02:47:03] on a trip to Tehran and he knew it after it was all over.
[02:47:07] Well, what happened to him?
[02:47:08] I don't know exactly what the thing was,
[02:47:10] but he admitted to the fact that all he did was
[02:47:14] take that load of stuff that I bought
[02:47:16] and send it to a dealer somewhere to get rid of it.
[02:47:19] Because it was junk and he paid a bunch of money for it?
[02:47:21] It was very embarrassing, yeah.
[02:47:24] And then you ended up in the bakery business, right?
[02:47:27] Bread making business, that where you're at now?
[02:47:29] Yeah, well, this is Jaco saying
[02:47:33] when you're in the middle of the woods, start walking.
[02:47:36] And the guy says, which direction?
[02:47:38] And Jaco says, doesn't matter.
[02:47:39] Yeah, start walking.
[02:47:40] But I knew how to do that.
[02:47:42] So Pamela said, why don't you make some bread?
[02:47:44] And Pamela's brother is, believe it or not,
[02:47:47] in the exotic mushroom business.
[02:47:50] And they have an outdoor farmers market.
[02:47:53] They were used to common in Pennsylvania on Sunday afternoons.
[02:47:57] And give them to Joe and see if he can sell them.
[02:47:59] He sold them all.
[02:48:01] I'm doing it by hand.
[02:48:05] So same thing again next week and so forth.
[02:48:08] And he comes back and says, Fred says,
[02:48:11] you ought to take a table here.
[02:48:12] Your stuff is good enough.
[02:48:13] I said, holy smoke, but I can only do so much by hand.
[02:48:17] So I had a guy that I did business, drug business, antique
[02:48:22] drug business.
[02:48:23] If you find anything like that, Tom, call me.
[02:48:26] How you do and so forth.
[02:48:27] So I was coming out of buy all the time, whatever you could.
[02:48:31] And so I used to go to a lot of outdoor country auctions, more
[02:48:37] country than anything else.
[02:48:39] And they had rugs from the 30s.
[02:48:42] And I'd drive to Altoona, as I did in this case, with my truck,
[02:48:47] Chevy Van, no windows.
[02:48:49] And I buy the rugs for $1,500 because there's
[02:48:54] certain human psychology, certain price levels in which
[02:48:59] a retail customer, knowing that you could pay more,
[02:49:05] but I won't do that because I don't want surprises
[02:49:08] and stuff like that.
[02:49:09] So you know you're going to get them for $1,500
[02:49:12] if you drive all.
[02:49:12] Because you talk to the auctioneer
[02:49:14] and he tells you more or less what it is.
[02:49:16] And he thinks he knows and stuff like that.
[02:49:18] So he drives to Altoona and you look at it and say, yeah,
[02:49:20] I can get $6,000 for this.
[02:49:23] I won't pay more than, have to pay more than $1,500.
[02:49:26] And you do that.
[02:49:27] So I came back from Altoona that day to this guy's place.
[02:49:30] And he's in a secondhand equipment business,
[02:49:33] secondhand commercial equipment, big ovens and mixers
[02:49:37] and things like that.
[02:49:38] They go on forever.
[02:49:40] And he said, you bake bread once in a while.
[02:49:44] And I didn't buy anything that day.
[02:49:47] And I had money in my pocket, cash in my pocket.
[02:49:51] He sent a couple of nice ovens over here.
[02:49:53] I said, I'm not interested.
[02:49:56] He said, look at them.
[02:49:57] They're diner size.
[02:49:58] They're not the full size.
[02:50:00] You've got to find exactly the right guy.
[02:50:04] Probably a diner, but he already has.
[02:50:08] I'll sell them to you for $900.
[02:50:12] I don't want them.
[02:50:14] He said, I can slide them right onto your truck.
[02:50:16] And he didn't know I had money in my pocket either.
[02:50:20] Yeah, he did.
[02:50:21] Yeah, maybe.
[02:50:24] So finally I said, OK.
[02:50:27] So then I had to install them myself.
[02:50:30] We live in an old Pennsylvania Dutch.
[02:50:32] I call them a Pennsylvania German soft brick drafty.
[02:50:37] And they have matching porches on both sides.
[02:50:39] And this is porches in clothes.
[02:50:41] So I put them on that porch and had heavy.
[02:50:45] You know, they weigh, I don't know, 1,000 a piece, I guess.
[02:50:48] Jacks and everything and blocks and getting it up and sliding
[02:50:52] over and installing both of them.
[02:50:54] But I didn't do very much until my sister-in-law actually
[02:50:58] said, you need to put bread with Joe at the skip-hack.
[02:51:03] Farmers market on Sunday.
[02:51:04] So then one thing led to another led to another.
[02:51:08] And then I went to this nice guy at Kimberton Whole Foods,
[02:51:11] who was at the time he had one store.
[02:51:14] And he was on the floor himself.
[02:51:16] And I said, do you think he can sell these?
[02:51:20] He said, probably not, because a lot of us just bailed out of here.
[02:51:24] But you can put it on their shelves if you want.
[02:51:27] Came back the next day and there was six of them sold.
[02:51:30] I said, can I put more?
[02:51:32] Of course.
[02:51:32] So one thing led to another.
[02:51:34] He has about, maybe he has eight stores now.
[02:51:38] And I'm in four.
[02:51:40] So you're making bread every day?
[02:51:42] I work, no.
[02:51:43] I work Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
[02:51:48] And I deliver on Wednesday what I made on Tuesday night
[02:51:52] and sliced Wednesday morning to deliver that.
[02:51:55] Then I work Thursday and deliver that on Friday.
[02:51:59] And then I'm off Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
[02:52:03] But I got another racket gone.
[02:52:05] What's the other racket?
[02:52:06] When I ran for Congress.
[02:52:09] I don't know if you know I did this.
[02:52:10] I did know that, yeah.
[02:52:11] It was in your notes.
[02:52:12] Yeah.
[02:52:15] I was supposed to lose.
[02:52:16] And it was in the gentlemen's agreement.
[02:52:18] You want a guy who can lose gracefully.
[02:52:21] And I said, that's exactly right.
[02:52:23] But I thought to myself, this guy, this Congressman,
[02:52:28] he drinks a lot.
[02:52:29] And he may get hit by a truck or have the classic too much
[02:52:33] alcohol heart attack or something like that.
[02:52:35] This is the only chance I'll ever get.
[02:52:38] So I did.
[02:52:39] I think I put it in there.
[02:52:41] I did rank 10,000 doorbells.
[02:52:43] I really did.
[02:52:44] It gets to be fun after a while.
[02:52:45] You meet new people.
[02:52:47] And moreover, they ask you questions privately
[02:52:51] that you hadn't quite thought through.
[02:52:53] And after you fumble around with that, you say,
[02:52:55] I won't fumble around with that a second time.
[02:52:58] And it turns out, two days later,
[02:53:00] a guy asks you the same question.
[02:53:02] I don't understand.
[02:53:02] You're ready for it.
[02:53:04] So after that, and he spent 10 times what I spent.
[02:53:08] A US Congressman, I was told, will do anything
[02:53:13] to stay in office.
[02:53:14] Anything.
[02:53:15] So at any rate, he spent 10 times what I had to spend.
[02:53:18] I had the $35,000 to spend.
[02:53:20] He spent $350,000.
[02:53:22] But anyway, and he wouldn't debate me either.
[02:53:27] He finally went to this silly thing on,
[02:53:31] he was in DC because he couldn't quite return, which
[02:53:33] is baloney.
[02:53:35] He was from the county north of where we live.
[02:53:38] But at any rate, it wasn't going to say that.
[02:53:44] Well, it had to do with your racket that you're running,
[02:53:46] your other racket.
[02:53:48] Yeah, well, I was stockbroker at that point.
[02:53:52] Because when I had my subdural hematoma,
[02:53:56] they cut a hole in your head to take a piece out of your head.
[02:54:00] Because it slept and fought about that.
[02:54:02] But when I caught in there, you're John Glenn.
[02:54:06] John Glenn fully recovered and so have I.
[02:54:09] But a lot of people don't.
[02:54:11] I think too, it's a matter of wanting to and deciding
[02:54:17] to recover.
[02:54:18] Because with my case, my right side,
[02:54:21] it was on my left side.
[02:54:22] And it's true, your left side didn't work right.
[02:54:25] And it worked a little bit, but not real well.
[02:54:29] And I couldn't walk right and stuff like that.
[02:54:33] Anyway, so at any rate, how'd you get the registrar?
[02:54:40] I am the Pennsylvania registrar for births and deaths
[02:54:44] in only townships, 06 townships, and for several surrounding
[02:54:49] townships.
[02:54:50] If you die, you need a will.
[02:54:52] And to have a will, you need an executor who distributes.
[02:54:57] But you have to prove it.
[02:54:58] Have somebody prove it.
[02:54:59] This guy is dead, not just gone to South America, and so forth.
[02:55:03] So you make certified copies of his death certificate,
[02:55:10] issued generally by the hospital or the corner.
[02:55:14] And that way, your executor, or man or woman's executor,
[02:55:20] can probate the will and so forth and all that.
[02:55:25] So at any rate, a year after, maybe 10 months
[02:55:29] after I lost the election, I get to talk
[02:55:33] to a guy named Bob Asher, who was a little bit of a character
[02:55:37] and well-known in Pennsylvania politics,
[02:55:39] because he took the heat and went to jail for something
[02:55:42] he didn't do, but probably to protect a Pennsylvania senator
[02:55:48] or maybe one of the governors, I don't know.
[02:55:50] But he took the heat and everybody
[02:55:51] agrees that Bob never did anything.
[02:55:54] But he owns a candy company called Asher Candies.
[02:55:56] It's well-known chocolates in Eastern Pennsylvania.
[02:56:00] And there he was at this affair.
[02:56:02] So I went up to him and I said, Bob, you owe me one.
[02:56:05] He said, get out of here.
[02:56:07] I said, you know who I am?
[02:56:08] Oh, I know who you are.
[02:56:10] I said, I rang 10,000 doorbells.
[02:56:13] Yeah, I heard about that.
[02:56:15] I said, he had to spend $350,000 to beat me.
[02:56:22] Yeah.
[02:56:23] Bob, we both know what that means.
[02:56:26] He would have spent $35,000 against the guy in Fayette
[02:56:29] County, he would have spent $58,000 at the guy in Pittsburgh,
[02:56:34] he would have spent $102,000 in the guy in the Harrisburg race.
[02:56:40] He spent it all to beat me.
[02:56:43] Yeah, so what?
[02:56:45] Bob, you owe me one.
[02:56:48] A week later, the local guy that I knew very well
[02:56:51] was a whole political office called me up and he said,
[02:56:55] how'd you like to be a register of will?
[02:56:58] What in the hell is that?
[02:57:02] So I said, yeah, that's right.
[02:57:04] How much does it pay?
[02:57:06] Well, you won't make much.
[02:57:08] You can make $35,000 doing it.
[02:57:10] You can.
[02:57:12] At any rate, they're trying to get rid of the Pennsylvania
[02:57:15] Register.
[02:57:16] Now I'm just sticking on because I figured right down
[02:57:19] to the last day, so at any rate, that's how that happened.
[02:57:24] So I was a stockbroker and if you start late in life
[02:57:28] to be a stockbroker, you don't have much of an account.
[02:57:31] And stuff, and I got to be a certain age
[02:57:35] and I said to my wife, this is not cutting.
[02:57:37] I got to do something else.
[02:57:38] And right after that, my sister-in-law came to me
[02:57:42] and she was German national.
[02:57:44] You wouldn't know it.
[02:57:45] She has zero accent.
[02:57:46] She said, you sell bread that's good enough to sell in Germany.
[02:57:51] You need to do this.
[02:57:53] I'm still doing it by hand.
[02:57:54] And one thing led to another there.
[02:57:56] So that's what I do now.
[02:57:57] And I'll tell you what, keep shit in shape.
[02:58:01] You're not going to get fat doing this unless you want to.
[02:58:04] I suppose you got to make sure you don't get too much of your own product, though.
[02:58:07] That's true.
[02:58:08] Just like the drug dealers.
[02:58:10] No, no, no.
[02:58:11] I say to people, people in the store say, I don't eat much bread.
[02:58:14] I say, it's not the bread.
[02:58:16] It's what you put on it.
[02:58:18] Too much mayonnaise or too much strawberry jam
[02:58:21] is what you do with it, not the stuff.
[02:58:25] Well, what's the name, so where can people get your bread?
[02:58:29] You got a shipment.
[02:58:30] Oh, I got to.
[02:58:31] I know what I'm not going to be going to the grocery market very often in Pennsylvania.
[02:58:35] The Ole Baker.
[02:58:36] The Ole Baker.
[02:58:37] O-L-E-Y, yeah.
[02:58:39] That's an Indian name for the valley in which we live.
[02:58:42] The Indian name for it was Olinka.
[02:58:45] And that got shortened by the locals at that time way back.
[02:58:50] Benjamin Franklin did not like to come up to that county.
[02:58:54] He said there were too many Germans up there.
[02:58:56] I don't like to go up there.
[02:58:58] He was a good horseman in his middle age.
[02:59:01] We all see Ben Franklin as a big fat old guy.
[02:59:04] Oh, yeah.
[02:59:05] Fat old man.
[02:59:06] But he was an expert, expert horseman.
[02:59:10] People did not like to travel with him.
[02:59:13] I read an account of him going to York, PA, which is west of Harrisburg.
[02:59:20] I didn't like that with him because he would take off over land to basically explore the
[02:59:25] landscape and whatnot.
[02:59:27] And they were all afraid he was going to either fall off or get killed by the locals,
[02:59:32] the Indians.
[02:59:33] So they thought, and then we're going to have to go look for him and find him.
[02:59:38] Some of the folks out there don't like us very much and so forth.
[02:59:42] So people did not like to go traveling with him.
[02:59:44] But he was an expert and overland horseman.
[02:59:48] We all see him as the fat old guy.
[02:59:50] Yeah, that's the image he got stuck with at some point.
[02:59:54] I know you wrap up your bio that you sent to Dave and it says 2022 still having fun.
[03:00:01] Heck yeah.
[03:00:02] So that's pretty awesome.
[03:00:03] I don't know.
[03:00:04] Did we miss anything?
[03:00:07] Get us up to date?
[03:00:08] There's one thing I thought about it on going by now it escapes me.
[03:00:14] Same marriage.
[03:00:15] Marriage is the same woman.
[03:00:16] And just during the political campaign they would ask you, still married to the same woman
[03:00:23] since age 27.
[03:00:26] Wow.
[03:00:27] So you got married a little bit late.
[03:00:29] And it was your daughter that brought you here and then linked us up.
[03:00:32] I think she linked us up on social media.
[03:00:34] Yeah, it was my elder daughter, Genevieve.
[03:00:37] And she wanted to come with me but she is in a job that she doesn't like and she's
[03:00:43] intensely searching.
[03:00:45] So the other daughter said, I'll take him out and she had not actually said, she said,
[03:00:50] if you go, I'll buy it my own ticket.
[03:00:53] Oh good.
[03:00:54] So then I said to you, I will not travel alone.
[03:00:58] I will travel with my wife.
[03:01:00] Okay.
[03:01:02] So then Pamela said, I don't want to go.
[03:01:05] We have an ancient puppy dog here and she's going to die.
[03:01:08] So we ought to euthanize her.
[03:01:10] I can't do that.
[03:01:12] That's the pragmatic solution apparently.
[03:01:16] So younger daughter said, I'll go with him.
[03:01:19] So she is here today in San Diego.
[03:01:23] And elder daughter is angry.
[03:01:27] But I said, Jenny, what you're doing is more important.
[03:01:31] And she's working it.
[03:01:34] She got into the medical world, most specifically into transplants.
[03:01:40] And she said, if Jaco says anything to you, ask him if he is an organ donor.
[03:01:47] And he said, of course he should be.
[03:01:50] Everybody should be.
[03:01:51] I am.
[03:01:52] Yeah.
[03:01:53] I'll tell her that.
[03:01:54] But anyway.
[03:01:55] She's going to know.
[03:01:56] Apparently everyone's going to know now.
[03:01:57] I said, but the thing about Jenny, the thing that people want is something you can do
[03:02:01] that most people can't.
[03:02:03] You can keep six balls in the air at the same time, so to speak.
[03:02:07] That's why these guys in the transplant business love you so much because they could say, oh,
[03:02:12] I don't know about that.
[03:02:14] Ask Jenny.
[03:02:15] And she had the answer.
[03:02:16] Or this computer thing is screwed up and it's off the thing and it won't work.
[03:02:22] And so call Jenny.
[03:02:23] She can do that.
[03:02:24] And she does.
[03:02:25] There you go.
[03:02:26] So the younger daughter, they have their, she and her husband have their own business.
[03:02:30] So it's easily done for them.
[03:02:33] Although they're very serious and they do well.
[03:02:37] That's the whole thing there.
[03:02:39] There's something else.
[03:02:40] Dave, what do you got?
[03:02:43] I got a lot.
[03:02:45] Oh, I know we're kind of running.
[03:02:48] I've been taking a lot of notes.
[03:02:50] Um, it just, I'm remarketing how many similarities there are.
[03:02:56] And I just started writing things down.
[03:02:57] I was stationed at Meridian.
[03:02:59] I was stationed at Kingsville.
[03:03:02] I was in LSO.
[03:03:03] I have about 40 traps in the Connie early in my career.
[03:03:05] How about that?
[03:03:07] Yeah.
[03:03:08] I, uh, I did the spin rides in the T2 and I knew her spin instructor.
[03:03:11] I know that well.
[03:03:12] It's fine.
[03:03:13] It's a great, I said, one of those things.
[03:03:14] I said, it's great carnival ride.
[03:03:16] He's a good carnival ride.
[03:03:17] But so many guys would not do it.
[03:03:18] And I used to say that the student didn't know who I was.
[03:03:21] I'll, I'll be doing your spin hop today.
[03:03:25] You're terrified.
[03:03:26] Well, no, Mr. Copel, but I thought that, I said, wait a minute, wait a minute.
[03:03:29] How many guys have you punched out on spin hops?
[03:03:32] Oh, I don't know.
[03:03:35] No one.
[03:03:36] It's a carnival ride and so forth.
[03:03:41] And Fred didn't want to, I, that gives me, I don't like to do that.
[03:03:44] I'll do them.
[03:03:45] I'll do them for you.
[03:03:46] So I would do a lot of spin hops in Meridian.
[03:03:48] It's a carnival ride.
[03:03:51] Not much instruction goes on that day except for the route.
[03:03:54] All right, Mr. Smith, we established the direction of rotation and we will positively
[03:04:01] neutralize the controls and then apply full opposite rudder.
[03:04:07] And when the rotation stops, we will stick full forward and so forth.
[03:04:14] Yeah, that's all you do.
[03:04:15] And then, okay, fine.
[03:04:17] We got that.
[03:04:18] Now we're going to climb back up.
[03:04:19] You have to do it again.
[03:04:20] Yeah, I'm going to do it again too.
[03:04:24] I remember it well.
[03:04:25] It's one of the best rides ever.
[03:04:29] My time with the Air Force and then you kind of conclude with a couple of things that just
[03:04:33] could help make the connection to living on the O3 level in the state room underneath
[03:04:37] the catapults.
[03:04:38] And then, God forbid, I am on a podcast where I don't have to say something nice about Navy
[03:04:45] Seals, but you work for a frogman and got to see what real good leadership looked like.
[03:04:52] But you know what?
[03:04:53] He, let's talk about leadership just a second.
[03:04:56] He was not well thought of, mostly by the younger guys who are ROs in the fleet squad
[03:05:02] or not was in.
[03:05:03] He never does anything.
[03:05:04] He would talk and they would say not nice things about him.
[03:05:09] I don't think any of the front seat guys said that.
[03:05:11] What a surprise.
[03:05:13] But the back seat guys, they're all young and Lieutenant Junior Grades, all of them
[03:05:20] solid.
[03:05:21] And most of them retired as commanders.
[03:05:22] I don't know what the heck they got them to do to say in the Navy that long, but at
[03:05:27] any rate, they didn't like him because they couldn't understand what he was doing.
[03:05:31] I think the front seat guys all really understood what was going on there.
[03:05:35] Well, I think there's a real strong connection between pilots and Seals.
[03:05:39] I got to learn that firsthand working with Jaco.
[03:05:41] But you did it at a time where you didn't have the machines that we had.
[03:05:47] I mean, you flew an airplane that I guarantee you was infinitely harder than it was for
[03:05:51] me.
[03:05:52] But it occurred to me that the legacy that I got to live under the 35 years of history
[03:05:59] was written about people like you.
[03:06:01] When I got in the Navy, the Marine Corps, how we flew fighters and the way we taught
[03:06:06] people to fly fighters was already embedded.
[03:06:10] And that all started with your generation.
[03:06:12] But that's what I was thinking about in that.
[03:06:15] Dan Patterson and the book.
[03:06:18] That wasn't called Top Gun until maybe, I don't know, three, four, five years later.
[03:06:25] Somebody said Top Gun.
[03:06:26] But the F-4 didn't have a gun.
[03:06:28] And I don't, and all your newspaper guys, they say, I had to have a gun.
[03:06:32] And then finally did the F-4E and had a gun.
[03:06:35] And then finally, no, the missile was a better weapon every time, every time.
[03:06:40] You had to be within 3,000 feet to do anything with a 20-millimeter gun.
[03:06:44] I shot the gun at Kingsville.
[03:06:46] We all did, I was bad at it too.
[03:06:48] I don't know.
[03:06:51] They put your colored paint on your, and then they examined the banner.
[03:06:57] There are no greens on here.
[03:06:59] What happened to you, Tom?
[03:07:00] And embarrassing, you know?
[03:07:03] I'm an older guy.
[03:07:04] I'm supposed to have holes in there.
[03:07:06] But at any rate, I don't, I utterly disagree with that business about if any sort of a
[03:07:13] fire plane had to have a gun, a ball of the lone.
[03:07:16] Now early on, sparrows didn't work because White Hat Sailors would drop them and chuck
[03:07:22] them up into the bottom of the airplane.
[03:07:24] And they didn't test them to make sure this is working and things like that.
[03:07:29] And then the aviators didn't turn the panel on and to see if the missiles, they called
[03:07:33] it toony, that the missiles would tune and things like that.
[03:07:38] And then if one didn't tune, you could flip past that to go to the number two.
[03:07:43] And so forth.
[03:07:44] And fire that one.
[03:07:45] Forget about the first one.
[03:07:46] But then you could do one more thing that came out during Top Gun that nobody, during
[03:07:53] Advanced Fighter Weapons School, if you went to Borsight, tell the guy in back, cock me,
[03:07:59] go to Borsight.
[03:08:01] The antenna goes where the pepper is, through the 35-mil gun sight is looking.
[03:08:07] They're both looking at the same place.
[03:08:09] And that's what I was going to do with the 21.
[03:08:11] Go Borsight, pull the trigger.
[03:08:13] And you get a sparrow, which is a monster missile that weighs 500 pounds.
[03:08:19] A sparrow.
[03:08:20] The ones we had anyway, the E-Models weighed 500 pounds.
[03:08:25] But anyway, it wasn't called Fighter Weapons School back then.
[03:08:30] Oh yeah.
[03:08:31] So the thing you read in Dan Pedersen's book, who remains a nice guy.
[03:08:38] But I would say this to him in a clear way, most of the airplanes shot down in World War
[03:08:44] I, in World War II, in Korean War, in the Vietnam War, never saw the guy that shot them
[03:08:53] down.
[03:08:54] They never saw the missile that shot them down.
[03:08:56] I know, I knew, guys who came out feet wet out of North Vietnam and saw the missile go
[03:09:06] by.
[03:09:07] The B-Model missiles, the missile the Russians had, they stole it from us and shipped it
[03:09:12] through Berlin on commercial freight.
[03:09:16] And it didn't guide that well.
[03:09:18] At least the Russian version of it didn't.
[03:09:20] It had a big seeker head on it and it didn't narrow its sight.
[03:09:25] But I talked with guys who said, I saw the missile go by and I had no idea.
[03:09:31] Holy smoke.
[03:09:35] These guys who got shot down, and I heard this early in the cruise, not until I was
[03:09:42] out there and you get fully realized that they're used real bullets here and stuff.
[03:09:49] Most 95% of the airplanes that got shot down, get shot down and they never saw the guy,
[03:09:58] whatever did it to them.
[03:09:59] They never saw it.
[03:10:01] One time we were in Laos somewhere, it doesn't matter where, waiting for the fact.
[03:10:07] And he's at 14 on the 15.
[03:10:10] He's in a port orbit and I'm in a starboard orbit.
[03:10:14] We're just waiting quietly.
[03:10:17] And here comes an F-4.
[03:10:21] You can tell because it has at the wing roots and the leading edge, it has two flashing white
[03:10:27] lights.
[03:10:28] That's an F-4 and he comes flying by and he gets about where we are.
[03:10:35] That's where there are guns on the ground because that's where there are truck parking
[03:10:38] and that's where the fact is going to meet us.
[03:10:40] And those gunners can hear us up overhead.
[03:10:44] But here comes this guy over the horizon, an F-4.
[03:10:50] That's this guy, probably 57 at least, maybe 85mm and he's still got his lights on bright
[03:10:58] and flash.
[03:11:00] And he disappeared over the horizon, bright and flash.
[03:11:04] Did you get close to him?
[03:11:05] I'm not that close because they were shooting at him but I went close enough.
[03:11:09] I can see that.
[03:11:10] It's an Air Force F-4.
[03:11:12] Not some Navy guy who's lost or something.
[03:11:16] It's Air Force F-4.
[03:11:20] And he never knew it.
[03:11:22] Oblivious to everything with his lights on bright and flash.
[03:11:26] That's a true story.
[03:11:27] So my point here is that Top Gun is, or what they call now Top Gun, is very interesting
[03:11:34] if you go one on one.
[03:11:35] You both start from here, you turn and start with a head on pass and so forth.
[03:11:40] One guy is better than the other and he gets behind the other.
[03:11:43] But that's not what happens.
[03:11:45] What happens is the guy that you were picking your nose for some reason or other and the
[03:11:51] MiG-21 showed up or a MiG-26 or God knows what it is and he shot you down from three
[03:11:56] miles a stern because you were picking your nose.
[03:12:00] You got to be a wild man in that cockpit if you don't want to get shot down.
[03:12:04] You got to know everything that's going on, 360 degrees all the time.
[03:12:09] So you turn into a crazy man and you fly with a new RO.
[03:12:13] He said, you're really nuts.
[03:12:15] I'm still here too.
[03:12:17] That's all I got, man.
[03:12:20] So at any rate, I beg your pardon, I interrupted you.
[03:12:22] Not at all.
[03:12:23] That's probably a great place to wrap it up right there.
[03:12:26] All right.
[03:12:27] That's a great attitude to have.
[03:12:30] Thank you so much for coming out here.
[03:12:32] It was fun.
[03:12:33] Really appreciate it.
[03:12:34] It was very young.
[03:12:35] Thanks for sharing your experiences, lessons learned and of course, most important, thank
[03:12:41] you for your service.
[03:12:42] Oh, bologna.
[03:12:43] So, to your show.
[03:12:44] Thank you for being in the Air Force and your service in the Navy.
[03:12:48] And most of all, thank you for your service to our great nation.
[03:12:51] Amen.
[03:12:52] Thank you, sir.
[03:12:55] And with that, Tom Copel has left the building.
[03:13:01] Pretty awesome to hear from a dude that, as you were telling me before we hit record,
[03:13:09] in the middle of the Vietnam War, just volunteers to go and fly, you know, F4 Phantoms.
[03:13:17] That's the pipeline too.
[03:13:19] So pretty amazing to hear these guys.
[03:13:21] I thought it was actually pretty interesting about the nuclear war stuff too.
[03:13:25] Yeah.
[03:13:26] You know, like, what, what, what are you thinking?
[03:13:30] What you, you know, I was in the SEAL teams and I was like, Hey, we might do a mission.
[03:13:34] In the 90s, like, Hey, we might do a mission Michael, you know, kill a terrorist.
[03:13:39] This dude's like, Hey, we might go and end humanity.
[03:13:42] Yeah.
[03:13:43] You know, that's a, I remember when I first started flying airplanes, what you really
[03:13:48] want to do is you actually want to, you want to do something.
[03:13:51] You want to drop a bomb, you want to get in a fight.
[03:13:53] That's what you want to do.
[03:13:55] And there's a double edge to that.
[03:13:56] Because you know, like, well, I mean, we don't want to go to war.
[03:13:59] It's not a good thing.
[03:14:00] But if you do, you like, you want to get the call.
[03:14:03] The only thing you're ever going to do when you're, you know, strategic air command with
[03:14:07] nuclear weapons at a B 52, you get that call.
[03:14:09] Like that's a different psychology about what your job is.
[03:14:13] You know, and I could see someone like him getting pretty restless doing strip alert
[03:14:17] all day, knowing it's kind of unlikely.
[03:14:21] And if it did work out, like, what are you actually doing there?
[03:14:24] That's not a scenario you want to be in, no matter what.
[03:14:26] So yeah.
[03:14:27] Crazy.
[03:14:28] But anyways, thanks for listening.
[03:14:31] If you want to support the podcast, you want to support yourself, get yourself some jocwafield.com.
[03:14:37] You can get these, these drinks we're drinking right here.
[03:14:41] Get yourself some afterburner orange.
[03:14:43] The tasty flavor.
[03:14:46] Moke going ham on the milk we got.
[03:14:49] We got ready to drink milk now.
[03:14:51] People are kind of going crazy with that stuff.
[03:14:54] I'll tell you what's what I find.
[03:14:57] I look just like every other freaking American, the convenience of just cracking one of those
[03:15:05] open and drinking it.
[03:15:07] Look, how much effort is it for me to get out my, get out my milk, get out my shaker,
[03:15:13] put my mulk in there, shake it, you know, that has to take me at least three minutes.
[03:15:20] Or I got that little ready to drink hitter just ready to, you know, take some.
[03:15:25] The other thing I find about it is you can just do, you can, it's so effortless that
[03:15:29] you can just open one up.
[03:15:30] Like I have, I have a part of my fridge where I have one of each kind of opened where I'll
[03:15:35] just go like take a sip, take maybe two or three sips, you know, just during the day,
[03:15:39] just to fly by.
[03:15:41] So there you go.
[03:15:44] Mulk, all the joint stuff, you know what, you know what it is.
[03:15:48] You can get it, jocwafield.com.
[03:15:50] You can get it at the Wawa, get the drinks at Wawa, get it vitamin shop.
[03:15:54] You'll get some support.
[03:15:55] Origin USA.
[03:15:56] I saw Cam Haynes today posted, Cam is teaching Tulsi Gabbard how to shoot a bow and they're
[03:16:06] wearing origin hunt.
[03:16:08] How legit is that?
[03:16:09] Pretty awesome.
[03:16:10] So check out origin USA.com.
[03:16:12] We're making stuff in America.
[03:16:15] Jeans, jujitsu, geese, boots, t-shirts, rash guards, all 100% made in America.
[03:16:24] So, get some of that.
[03:16:27] We got a store.
[03:16:29] Echo called it Joclostore.
[03:16:31] It's joclostore.com.
[03:16:33] Get t-shirts.
[03:16:34] Where you wearing?
[03:16:35] Oh, that's a legit one.
[03:16:36] So Dave, right now if you're not on YouTube, Dave's wearing the Seawolves t-shirts, 1966
[03:16:41] to 1972.
[03:16:42] The only aviation unit ever commissioned and decommissioned in a combat zone.
[03:16:50] We've had some Seawolves on the podcast.
[03:16:52] There's a t-shirt to represent the Seawolves.
[03:16:56] You can get that at joclostore.com.
[03:16:59] We also got rash guards and hats and beanies and all that kind of stuff.
[03:17:03] The shirt locker.
[03:17:06] Shirt lockers, it's a little opportunity for us to express kind of, let's say some deep
[03:17:17] layers to the podcast.
[03:17:20] And it's a subscription thing, get a shirt a month and they're cool.
[03:17:24] We got this podcast, subscribe to it.
[03:17:25] Jockel Underground.
[03:17:26] We're doing the Underground podcast, which is also a platform that we have that we control.
[03:17:33] Because if you're not in control of a platform, you should be nervous that they could kick
[03:17:39] you off that platform.
[03:17:40] So I was nervous about that.
[03:17:42] Now, look, I'm not trying to get kicked off.
[03:17:43] I don't think I'm gonna get kicked off.
[03:17:45] We're not getting crazy over here.
[03:17:48] But there's certain things I've said that have been demonetized.
[03:17:55] So who knows when they're gonna say, yeah, you can't say that anymore.
[03:17:59] So we have our own platform, jockelunderground.com.
[03:18:01] Check that out, YouTube channel.
[03:18:06] Jockel podcast is the YouTube channel.
[03:18:09] OriginUSA also has a YouTube channel.
[03:18:11] We got psychological warfare.
[03:18:12] We got flip side canvas, Dakota Meyer.
[03:18:15] Got a bunch of books, Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay.
[03:18:21] Final spin.
[03:18:22] The audiobook of Final Spin, Dave and I did like a Q&A from Final Spin.
[03:18:27] So after the book, you can do the Q&A.
[03:18:28] You can listen to that Q&A.
[03:18:30] Pretty cool.
[03:18:32] The background of where it came from.
[03:18:35] I can tell you where it's going.
[03:18:37] That thing's making moves.
[03:18:39] I'll leave it at that for now, because it's hard to get these things done.
[03:18:41] Anyways, I've written a bunch of books, Warrior Kid books.
[03:18:48] Just of I have a gym, Victory MMA and Fitness.
[03:18:51] Just about every day a parent will come up to me and say, thank you for those books.
[03:18:56] That got my kid to focus in school.
[03:18:58] Got my kid here to start training, got my kid to stop eating junk.
[03:19:03] So check out those books for your kids.
[03:19:06] Way of the Warrior Kid series.
[03:19:09] Mikey and the Dragons, Hackworth, About Face, Extreme Ownership, Dicotomy, Leadership,
[03:19:15] all these books.
[03:19:16] You know, I've written them.
[03:19:17] Get them if you want them.
[03:19:18] Ashland Front.
[03:19:19] What's Ashland Front, Dave Burke?
[03:19:20] Ashland Front is our leadership consultancy, where we, you, me, Leif and the whole team
[03:19:27] get to actually in person, live talk about every single leadership principle you've been
[03:19:31] talking about on this podcast and in the book.
[03:19:33] We get to do it with companies and people all the time.
[03:19:37] It's awesome.
[03:19:38] And what about the Academy?
[03:19:39] Oh, the Academy.
[03:19:40] The Extreme Ownership Academy.
[03:19:41] It turns out that meeting people live and in person isn't always the most convenient
[03:19:46] way to do it and bringing people off the line or bringing people into a conference room
[03:19:50] or a classroom every single day is not a great way to train.
[03:19:53] We want to keep people working.
[03:19:54] But the Academy takes basically everything we teach, puts it online so you can get to
[03:19:58] it whenever and however you want to.
[03:20:01] And it's an awesome additional resource.
[03:20:03] It's basically being able to hit that leadership gym every day whenever it's convenient for
[03:20:07] you.
[03:20:08] Yeah.
[03:20:09] Just like Jiu Jitsu, there's moves you got to learn.
[03:20:12] There's moves you've got to learn about leadership.
[03:20:15] And just like Jiu Jitsu, you can't just look at a move and hear it one time and be like,
[03:20:19] oh, I'll throw this, oh, my plot on somebody now.
[03:20:21] This is not going to work.
[03:20:23] You got to fully understand it.
[03:20:25] You got to see it from different angles.
[03:20:26] You got to try it yourself.
[03:20:27] And that's what the Academy is, extremeownership.com.
[03:20:31] If you want to get in on that and if you want to help service members active and retired,
[03:20:36] you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark
[03:20:41] Lee's mom, mom of each.
[03:20:42] She's got a charity organization, does incredible stuff, does incredible stuff, takes service
[03:20:48] members.
[03:20:49] This is one of the things that she does.
[03:20:51] She takes service members who have significant health issues and she gets them treatment.
[03:20:57] It's a multifaceted treatment.
[03:20:59] One of the big treatments is hyperbaric chambers.
[03:21:01] You're going in, ride in the O2.
[03:21:05] She sets this up for like 30 or 45 days, all expenses paid.
[03:21:11] We've seen the results of this is just outstanding.
[03:21:15] So if you want to donate or you want to support that, go to americasmightywarriors.org.
[03:21:20] And also don't forget about Micah Fink, who's taken vets up into the wilderness to heal
[03:21:28] through adversity, which is pretty awesome.
[03:21:32] Use and horses.org.
[03:21:35] And if you want to follow us on Twitter, on Graham, on the Facebook, Dave is at DavidRBerke.
[03:21:43] I'm at Jocker-Willink.
[03:21:44] Watch out for the algorithm.
[03:21:46] Thanks once again to Tom Copel for making the trip out, for sharing those experiences
[03:21:52] and lessons learned from your life.
[03:21:56] Pretty neat to hear this stuff first person.
[03:22:00] Thanks for your service.
[03:22:02] Thanks for coming out.
[03:22:03] And thanks to all our military personnel with special recognition today to those of you
[03:22:10] that help us own the skies, the pilots, the navigators, the air crews, the maintenance
[03:22:15] and mechanics on the ground and the thousands of support people that make our domination
[03:22:21] of the air possible.
[03:22:23] Thank you for what you all do.
[03:22:26] Thanks as well to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers,
[03:22:32] correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders.
[03:22:36] Thanks for what you do here on the home front to keep us safe.
[03:22:42] And I want to close this out with another quote, a quote from Captain David McCamble,
[03:22:51] United States Navy.
[03:22:53] 34 air victories in World War II, the most of any US Navy pilot ever.
[03:23:01] And he said this quote, aggressiveness was a fundamental to success in air to air combat.
[03:23:09] And if you ever caught a fighter pilot in a defensive mood, you had him licked before
[03:23:15] you started shooting.
[03:23:18] End quote.
[03:23:20] So there you go.
[03:23:22] That just doesn't apply to air to air combat.
[03:23:24] It applies to everything.
[03:23:26] That's how you win.
[03:23:28] So get out there, be aggressive, make things happen.
[03:23:33] And of course, keep getting after it.
[03:23:37] And until next time, this is Dave N'Jocko.
[03:23:41] Out.