From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 15 13:45:41 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:45:41 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] Test Message Message-ID: Test Message -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 15 13:48:18 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:48:18 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] Check In Message-ID: <52B0E241BD7D42D3AF6BCCCD69BA4704@SamLaptop> Guys, This list has been inactive for some time but I want to get it going. Please check in! Sam McGowan 464th OMS, 779th TCS, 35th TCS, 29th TAS, 773rd TAS -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 15 14:26:31 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:26:31 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] Convention Message-ID: Those who were there had a really good time at the Convention last week in San Antonio. The weather was great the whole time we were there. I really enjoyed the trip out to Lackland and the visit to the C-5 flight line. Next to the Herk, Fat Albert was my favorite airplane. Talk about comfort! They're not using the $10,000 coffee makers anymore but that airplane was really plush when I was on them. The food at the Kelly O Club was fantastic, especially for the price. Ronda had a really good time too. She hadn't wanted to even go but I taked her into it since she really likes San Antonio. It is a beautiful city with a lot to do and see in walking distance of the hotel. The only thing about the convention that I wish had been done different was to have had the hospitality room in the meeting room where we could have had more people in it at one time. As it was, there were some people I never even saw who were there. Nevertheless, Andy and Hector did a great job putting everything together. By the way, the muesuem at Lackland is looking for basic training pictures, etc. I'm pretty sure I still have mine somewhere and plan to send it to them when I get a round tuit. Sam -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 15 17:47:41 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:47:41 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] Fw: Larry Stauty Message-ID: <7E2A06D89D434F35906F1AD821B4E4C8@SamLaptop> Anybody know either of these two guys and where they might be? ----- Original Message ----- From: moe To: Sam McGowan Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2008 5:44 PM Subject: Re: Larry Stauty Same the last time I say Lary was when we were in Ubon AC130 Gun Ships. When I returned with the New AC130 he was gone. Thanks Moe -------Original Message------- From: Sam McGowan Date: 11/15/2008 14:20:44 To: moe Subject: Re: Larry Stauty Moe, Aren't you signed up on the Email group? Maybe someone on there knows them. You might also try www.topica.com/lists/6315th for Naha. I think Larry Stauty's name has come up but I'm not sure. It sounds familar. I was at Naha in 66-67 but I'm not sure if they were there then or not. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: moe To: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2008 4:35 PM Subject: Larry Stauty Sam has anyone ever had contact with Carl Heny Herst or Larry Stauty. Both FE from Lockborne and CCK and NAHA, Tachi . They were not skin divers. Moe Rounds __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 3615 (20081115) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/gif Size: 1147 bytes Desc: not available URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 15 21:42:52 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:42:52 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] Charlie Shaub and Jon Sanders Message-ID: We've decided to make loadmaster Charlie Shaub, the only loadmaster to win the Air Force Cross, a special member of our organization. We'll be covering what Charlie did in the next newsletter but I wanted to share some other things about him. I knew Charlie casually but we were far from close. I first met him when he was at CCK and I was at Clark in 1969 and we were both rotating to Cam Ranh Bay and lived on Herky Hill. I can't say for sure when we first actually met but I'm sure it was at one of the impromptu cookouts we were always having with purloined steaks brought back by crews. Late one afternoon I was invited over to the CCK crews barracks where they were having a cookout. When I walked up, an officer, Bill Gunkle, greeted me with "this was supposed to be steak but this yahoo doesn't know the difference between steak and hamburger" as he gestured toward a young troop standing sheepishly near by. I didn't know it at the time, but Gunkle told me years later in a telephone conversation that Charlie was his loadmaster and the young troop was a student who had gone in-country with them. They had a load of rations and Charlie told the kid to steal a case of steaks as part of his checkout, but the kid got a case of hamburger instead! Bill also told me in that same conversation that "all good loadmasters come from Tennessee," a statement with which I don't disagree, and told me that Charlie was a Tennessean. I'm not sure that I knew that because even though I talked to him a few times, I'm not sure that Charlie and I ever told each other where we were from. Had we done so, we would have known that we grew up barely 100 miles apart. Charlie hailed from near Portland, a little town north of Nashville and not too far from where my grandfather was born. I next ran into Charlie at Charleston in the NCO Club. We had some mutual friends, including Billy Hoover, who was Charlie's best friend. Another was Al Steed, who was also at CCK with Charlie and who I got to know when we were in the 3rd MAS at Charleston. Billy was also in the 3rd. I'm not sure why Charlie didn't end up with us but it may have been because he didn't have any C-141 time when he came back to Charleston from CCK and at that time MAC required 1,000 hours in the C-141 for all new C-5 crewmembers. Charlie wasn't at Charleston too long that time, even though it was his favorite base. He had been stationed there as a flight attendant on C-121s before he became a loadmaster when the Connies were phased out and replaced by C-130Es. I'm not sure which squadron Charlie was in or how he ended up at CCK. He may have gone to one of the TAC bases when the MAC C-130s all transferred or he may have gone to CCK on orders like a lot of us went to PACAF as Vietnam was heating up. It seems to me that Charlie may have been at CCK in 66 and 67 but I'm not sure. I do know that Charlie was a sad man because his wife Nancy had died of Hodgkins Disease not long before he went overseas. Al Steed told me quite a bit about Charlie several years ago. They had flown together as hot-cuppers on Connies and were roommates in loadmaster school. Al told me that Charlie's wife was South Carolina Congressman and Chairman of the House Armed Service Committee Mendel Rivers' neice, which meant that he had some truly high powered political connections. Al also told me that he had never seen anyone who liked to drink so much, and that he figured that Charlie would eventually drink himself too death. Before he met Nancy he ung out at the RVA Club on Remount Road (I think that's the right street) and I believe that is where he met his wife. I don't think I knew that Charlie had gone back to CCK until I heard about the incident over An Loc. I walked into the NCO Club at Charleston one night and ran into Darrell Parker in the lobby. Darrell was in C-141s and had just come back from a WESTPAC trip where he had run into some of the guys from CCK and heard about An Loc and how that Charlie was on an airplane that been shot up really bad and had been credited with saving it. There was also some sad news because the engineer had been killed, and he was a friend of mine who had been in the 3rd. Back around 2000 after Charlie passed away I talked to his cousin, Linda Pearson, and learned more about him. For one thing, no one ever called Charlie by that name except in the military. Although his given name was Charles, he went by Jack from the time he was a little boy and that was the only name he liked to be called. He had been orpaned very young and raised by his aunts. Charlie loved to read, particularly about the military and military history. She also told me that he was somewhat reclusive, that his favorite thing was to get somewhere alone with a bottle and a book. Charlie died after breaking a hip in a fall at a military nursing home in which he was living near Nashville. Linda told me she thought he simply lost his will to live after the fall and just gave up. He wasn't that old when he died. Jon Sanders was the flight engineer on the airplane that day. I first met Jon on my first C-5 trip after I got to Charleston. Jon was one of the engineers and was on the Lead The Force crew. He had gone into C-141s when the C-130s left Charleston, and had volunteered for the C-5 program. We were out together for about two weeks on that trip and then I'd see him in the club. We probably flew together again but I'm not sure. Jon was supposed to in a frozen assignment in the C-5 but USAF cancelled the freeze for all engineers with C-130 experience who had not been overseas and Jon left the squadron and went to CCK. He hadn't been gone from the squadron too long when we found out he had been killed over An Loc. I hated to hear it and when Bob Laymon told about how the airplane had come into Tan Son Nhut last week and he went to the flight line to see it I thought I was about to go into PTSD for the first time in my life. Dave McAleece was the other loadmaster, and I believe he told me it was actually his crew and that Charlie was in Stan/Eval and went along for the drop. Dave contacted me by Email a number of years ago. He was wounded by shrapnel and quit flying after the mission and crosstrained into photography and has made a career out of it. He lives in California. I wish I had talked to Charlie more when we crossed paths. We would have found that we had a lot in common. I'd like to have talked to him about the books we had both read. Sam McGowan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Fri Nov 21 22:42:52 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:42:52 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago Message-ID: <28F7B5840EBA48DFA64302370C3BB401@SamLaptop> Today is November 21. Forty-four years ago I was a young Airman Second Class loadmaster trainee at Pope AFB, NC. A little over a week earlier I had laid awake late on Saturday night listening to the Grand Old Opry on my transistor radio in my room in the aircrew barracks until the wee hours of the morning. I was in the 779th TCS but lived in an 778th room along with Carl Edison and Charles Zelinski. They were both TDY to France and I had the room to myself. I had barely gone to sleep when the alert siren started going off and the telephone down the hall started ringing. I jumped out of bed and into my flight suit and grabbed my mobility bag and headed for the squadron. I don't remember for sure how we got there, but I imagine a bunch of us jumped into Paul Thompson's Ford. Since it was Sunday morning rather than a weekday, we had a pretty good idea the alert was for real even though we'd been having practice alerts in anticipation of the wing's upcoming ORI for some time. As soon as we got to the squadron we started on the callout list. Since we lived in the barracks onbase we were the first to arrive, along with a few younger officers who lived in the BOQ. I was still in student status and was on a crew made up of students. When I called the engineer assigned to our crew, Don Mayer, he accused me of playing a joke on him! Like a lot of other people, he'd stayed late at the club on Saturday night and was barely asleep when I called. It took a couple of calls before I finally convinced him it was for real. During a practice alert once everyone had assembled the wing command post would eventually call down and cancel the alert and everyone would be released. This time was different. Instead of sending everyone home, crews were sent to the flight line and assigned to airplanes. It had become pretty obvious that the wing was really going somewhere this time and most of us had a pretty good idea where. For several weeks the newspapers had been carrying stories about the hostages held by Simba rebels in the Congo, and we assumed the alert had something to do with that. Once the squadron realized the alert was for real, the senior loadmaster, TSgt Virgil Nelson, went to the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Gibney, and asked that the student loadmasters be assigned to crews to go on the mission. Col. Gibney thought about it but decided it was against regulations since no one knew where the crews were going and we weren't designated as combat ready. The regs were clear that only qualified aircrew members designated as combat ready were allowed on combat missions. (As it turned out, some of the other squadron commanders interpreted the regs differently and some of our buddies in the other squadrons did go out with crews with instructor loadmasters.) Those of us who hadn't gone felt sort of left out as every airplane on the base - literally - departed for parts unknown. The only airplanes that didn't go were the ones in maintenance. The flight line was practically deserted, as was the squadron. After a few days the CTU decided to send out a navigational training mission to Bermuda with one of the airplanes that had been in periodic maintenance. There wasn't a single qualified loadmaster left on the base but someone, I don't remember who, decided that since I was on flying status and a qualified C-130 aircraft mechanic, I got fly as scanner. It was the first time I ever went out by myself as part of a flight crew. The alert was on Sunday morning the week prior to Thanksgiving week. The entire wing had departed on a classified mission and no one knew where they had gone. We thought they had headed for Africa to drop the 82nd, but as it turned out, 464th airplanes were scattered all over the Atlantic and Europe, where they went to replace the Pope rotational squadron at Evreux, France which had actually been assigned to a rescue mission. The Pope rote squadron did fly the mission on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I won't go into the details here. If anyone wants to read about it, go to my home page at www.sammcgowan.com/home.html and click on the Airlift History link and you'll find a link to an account of the mission. We found out either later that day or the following morning that our guys had dropped Belgian troops on the airport at Stanleyville and as the word spread around the base, pandemonium broke out. The only time I had seen such excitement had been one night in the base theater when we were watching the first movie to be made about Vietnam - it was actually made in Vietnam - and a formation of C-123s had dropped ARVN troops to rescue the hero. Talk about proud! There is a web site called Talking Proud but they don't even know what the word really means!. That had to have been the most exciting day in troop carrrier history, at least in the post-World War II period. Our very own guys, our friends and instructors and in my case, my roommates, had flown a heroic mission and had saved the lives of people who had been held hostage simply because of the color of their skins. When the newspapers came out the following day, the excitement turned to a dark mood as a general feeling of hatred toward our brothers in MATS emerged. The New York Times and other papers had carried headlines that read "MATS RESCUES HOSTAGES!" Bullcrap! Those airplanes weren't MATS!! They were TAC C-130Es assigned to the 464th Troop Carrier Wing - OUR WING! MATS played no role whatsoever. And in truth, MATS hadn't. Although the airplanes and crews were TDY to 322nd Air Division which had recently transferred to MATS, they had been sent on a mission for USAFE and once they reached Africa, they came under the control of Strike Command, of which Tactical Air Command was one element. Even the 5th APS loadmasters and combat controllers and 322nd AD command personnel who had gone on the mission had switched to Strike Command control for the mission. We were not just mad, we were incensed! We were so incensed that Charlie Watkins, an engineer in the 776th, called up a the Pentagon and blessed out a general. I'm not sure where Charlie was when he made his call. I don't think he was at Pope but was somewhere out on the road and made his call on the AUTOVON line. On Thanksgiving Day we found out that our guys had done it again that morning while we were still sleeping. They had dropped the Belgians at Paulis and effected another rescue. That was just icing on the cake. A few days later the crews that had gone out started coming back in, and we started hearing stories about things that had happened. One was about a friend ours in OMS named Slackerman who had run afoul of the new line chief TAC had sent down to Pope from Lockbourne to straighten out flight line maintenance. The OMS troops called him Be No, because the first thing he had told him was that "there will be no 3-day passes," "there'll be no more time-off," etc. and etc. "until maintenance is straightened out." I don't remember what Slackerman had done or if he had already lost his stripes or if he lost them for what he did, but he came into the open bay barracks where they all staying at a base somewhere, possibly Lajes, and pissed all over Be No Young! Another story was how the guys who flew the mission hadn't had a bath in days and when a thunderstorm came up, they all stripped off their flight suits and fatigues and ran out naked into the rain with bars of soap for the bath they'd had since they left Ascension Island on the way to Africa. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in the Officers and NCO Clubs at Sewart and Langley to hear the conversations there about what the Pope crews had done. The Sewart and Langley guys were the C-130 vets, but Pope had only had Herks for less than two years. The 464th had kicked off the Vietnam War with their C-123s with assistance from the Sewart C-123 squadron (which transferred to Pope.) Now they had flown a spectacular headline making mission in Africa. Regardless of what folks thought at the other TAC bases - and the MATS bases for that matter - there is only one word to describe the emotion at Pope and it is spelled P-R-O-U-D! Sam McGowan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 22 12:54:20 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:54:20 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] (Airlifters) 44 Years Ago In-Reply-To: <631734565-1463792126-1227372067@boing.topica.com> References: <1129869806-1463792126-1227328992@boing.topica.com> <631734565-1463792126-1227372067@boing.topica.com> Message-ID: <6C855950B96849F6A4D88EC627AB81AC@SamLaptop> Actually John, I did. A long time ago I wrote a full manuscript of my experiences in the Air Force from basic training through the day I drove out of the main gate at Dover. But I thought about it and decided the story really wasn't about me, but was about the mission. I suggested to my friend Bob Dorr that he write a book about the troop carrier mission and he came back and said "why don't you do it?" I had given Bob some information for a book he wrote on the air war against North Vietnam. I got a clearance to go into the Air Force historical records since I spent a lot of time in DC but then I found out that Ray Bowers had written the official history of the tactical airlift mission in SEA and it was about to be published. I put a letter in AIR FORCE magazine asking for C-130 veterans to contribute and heard from a number of people such as John Butterfield, Frank Gawell and Dan Reider (who I finally met in 2005 just before he passed away a few months later.) I soon had enough material that I didn't have to go into the archives, which was probably a good thing since a lot of things were still classified at the time and they would probably have blacked out my notes. One particular treasure was the account about the role the C-130 crews played in the POW release in Hanoi since it had never been made public. I wasn't happy with the title the publisher gave and there are some errors in the finished product, namely in terms of some aircraft numbers. I used a list I found at the USAF Museum and Lars Olausson's material, which was less complete then than it is now. All in all, though, I was pretty pleased with the finished product. I did have one problem though. Presido Press put out a book about the same time by Moe Morrison called C-130, the Hercules and even though it was totally different from mine, it got wider notice. Mine was in B. Dalton but a lot of other bookstores didn't carry it. It sold about 2,500 copies and they're pretty hard to find now, and if you can they can cost a bundle. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: John Reves To: airlifters at topica.com ; Herkybirds ; 464th TCW ; tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 10:40 AM Subject: Re: (Airlifters) 44 Years Ago Qute a yarn, Sam, and very interesting. You should make an account of all your experieces and memories in book form. Meanwhile, happy T day everyone!! John ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: Herkybirds ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 8:42 PM Subject: (Airlifters) 44 Years Ago Today is November 21. Forty-four years ago I was a young Airman Second Class loadmaster trainee at Pope AFB, NC. A little over a week earlier I had laid awake late on Saturday night listening to the Grand Old Opry on my transistor radio in my room in the aircrew barracks until the wee hours of the morning. I was in the 779th TCS but lived in an 778th room along with Carl Edison and Charles Zelinski. They were both TDY to France and I had the room to myself. I had barely gone to sleep when the alert siren started going off and the telephone down the hall started ringing. I jumped out of bed and into my flight suit and grabbed my mobility bag and headed for the squadron. I don't remember for sure how we got there, but I imagine a bunch of us jumped into Paul Thompson's Ford. Since it was Sunday morning rather than a weekday, we had a pretty good idea the alert was for real even though we'd been having practice alerts in anticipation of the wing's upcoming ORI for some time. As soon as we got to the squadron we started on the callout list. Since we lived in the barracks onbase we were the first to arrive, along with a few younger officers who lived in the BOQ. I was still in student status and was on a crew made up of students. When I called the engineer assigned to our crew, Don Mayer, he accused me of playing a joke on him! Like a lot of other people, he'd stayed late at the club on Saturday night and was barely asleep when I called. It took a couple of calls before I finally convinced him it was for real. During a practice alert once everyone had assembled the wing command post would eventually call down and cancel the alert and everyone would be released. This time was different. Instead of sending everyone home, crews were sent to the flight line and assigned to airplanes. It had become pretty obvious that the wing was really going somewhere this time and most of us had a pretty good idea where. For several weeks the newspapers had been carrying stories about the hostages held by Simba rebels in the Congo, and we assumed the alert had something to do with that. Once the squadron realized the alert was for real, the senior loadmaster, TSgt Virgil Nelson, went to the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Gibney, and asked that the student loadmasters be assigned to crews to go on the mission. Col. Gibney thought about it but decided it was against regulations since no one knew where the crews were going and we weren't designated as combat ready. The regs were clear that only qualified aircrew members designated as combat ready were allowed on combat missions. (As it turned out, some of the other squadron commanders interpreted the regs differently and some of our buddies in the other squadrons did go out with crews with instructor loadmasters.) Those of us who hadn't gone felt sort of left out as every airplane on the base - literally - departed for parts unknown. The only airplanes that didn't go were the ones in maintenance. The flight line was practically deserted, as was the squadron. After a few days the CTU decided to send out a navigational training mission to Bermuda with one of the airplanes that had been in periodic maintenance. There wasn't a single qualified loadmaster left on the base but someone, I don't remember who, decided that since I was on flying status and a qualified C-130 aircraft mechanic, I got fly as scanner. It was the first time I ever went out by myself as part of a flight crew. The alert was on Sunday morning the week prior to Thanksgiving week. The entire wing had departed on a classified mission and no one knew where they had gone. We thought they had headed for Africa to drop the 82nd, but as it turned out, 464th airplanes were scattered all over the Atlantic and Europe, where they went to replace the Pope rotational squadron at Evreux, France which had actually been assigned to a rescue mission. The Pope rote squadron did fly the mission on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I won't go into the details here. If anyone wants to read about it, go to my home page at www.sammcgowan.com/home.html and click on the Airlift History link and you'll find a link to an account of the mission. We found out either later that day or the following morning that our guys had dropped Belgian troops on the airport at Stanleyville and as the word spread around the base, pandemonium broke out. The only time I had seen such excitement had been one night in the base theater when we were watching the first movie to be made about Vietnam - it was actually made in Vietnam - and a formation of C-123s had dropped ARVN troops to rescue the hero. Talk about proud! There is a web site called Talking Proud but they don't even know what the word really means!. That had to have been the most exciting day in troop carrrier history, at least in the post-World War II period. Our very own guys, our friends and instructors and in my case, my roommates, had flown a heroic mission and had saved the lives of people who had been held hostage simply because of the color of their skins. When the newspapers came out the following day, the excitement turned to a dark mood as a general feeling of hatred toward our brothers in MATS emerged. The New York Times and other papers had carried headlines that read "MATS RESCUES HOSTAGES!" Bullcrap! Those airplanes weren't MATS!! They were TAC C-130Es assigned to the 464th Troop Carrier Wing - OUR WING! MATS played no role whatsoever. And in truth, MATS hadn't. Although the airplanes and crews were TDY to 322nd Air Division which had recently transferred to MATS, they had been sent on a mission for USAFE and once they reached Africa, they came under the control of Strike Command, of which Tactical Air Command was one element. Even the 5th APS loadmasters and combat controllers and 322nd AD command personnel who had gone on the mission had switched to Strike Command control for the mission. We were not just mad, we were incensed! We were so incensed that Charlie Watkins, an engineer in the 776th, called up a the Pentagon and blessed out a general. I'm not sure where Charlie was when he made his call. I don't think he was at Pope but was somewhere out on the road and made his call on the AUTOVON line. On Thanksgiving Day we found out that our guys had done it again that morning while we were still sleeping. They had dropped the Belgians at Paulis and effected another rescue. That was just icing on the cake. A few days later the crews that had gone out started coming back in, and we started hearing stories about things that had happened. One was about a friend ours in OMS named Slackerman who had run afoul of the new line chief TAC had sent down to Pope from Lockbourne to straighten out flight line maintenance. The OMS troops called him Be No, because the first thing he had told him was that "there will be no 3-day passes," "there'll be no more time-off," etc. and etc. "until maintenance is straightened out." I don't remember what Slackerman had done or if he had already lost his stripes or if he lost them for what he did, but he came into the open bay barracks where they all staying at a base somewhere, possibly Lajes, and pissed all over Be No Young! Another story was how the guys who flew the mission hadn't had a bath in days and when a thunderstorm came up, they all stripped off their flight suits and fatigues and ran out naked into the rain with bars of soap for the bath they'd had since they left Ascension Island on the way to Africa. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in the Officers and NCO Clubs at Sewart and Langley to hear the conversations there about what the Pope crews had done. The Sewart and Langley guys were the C-130 vets, but Pope had only had Herks for less than two years. The 464th had kicked off the Vietnam War with their C-123s with assistance from the Sewart C-123 squadron (which transferred to Pope.) Now they had flown a spectacular headline making mission in Africa. Regardless of what folks thought at the other TAC bases - and the MATS bases for that matter - there is only one word to describe the emotion at Pope and it is spelled P-R-O-U-D! Sam McGowan Use "Reply" to respond to the author of a message, "Reply to All" to send a response to everyone on the list. To unsubscribe from this list, send an Email to airlifters-unsubscribe at topica.comUse "Reply" to respond to the author of a message, "Reply to All" to send a response to everyone on the list. To unsubscribe from this list, send an Email to airlifters-unsubscribe at topica.com--^^--------------------------------------------------------------- This email was sent to: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?b1ddxI.cdx6S7.c2FtbWNn Or send an email to: airlifters-unsubscribe at topica.com For Topica's complete suite of email marketing solutions visit: http://www.topica.com/?p=TEXFOOTER --^^--------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 22 13:08:11 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 13:08:11 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago In-Reply-To: <28F7B5840EBA48DFA64302370C3BB401@SamLaptop> References: <28F7B5840EBA48DFA64302370C3BB401@SamLaptop> Message-ID: <1F76BC50B3414A068FF631C7F3E11E19@SamLaptop> A couple of things have occured to me about those events back in 1964. For one thing, the DRAGON ROUGE mission was flown on November 22, 44 years ago today. One thing I wonder about is if the other TAC C-130 wings were sent out after that alert or if it was just the 464th. As I recall, none of the ones at Pope got as far as Africa. Some may not have even left Lajes and Harmon. There were some MATS C-124s involved in a peripheral role. They took some fuel trucks to Ascension and Kamina. There was also a WC-130 that accompanied the mission at least to Ascension. I can't remember how I came to fly a mission as a scanner before I was qualified as a loadmaster, but I know it was because all of the qualified loadmasters had gone out in the alert. There were a couple of instructor pilots and navigators still there and they put together a navigational training mission from Pope to Bermuda and back. Somehow or other somebody picked me to fly as a scanner since no cargo or passengers were being carried and all I had to do was scan the engine start and make the scanners checks during the flight - and heat up the frozen meals. I can't remember if there were any other training flights with other guys going or not, but it seems to me it was the only mission flown from Pope until the other airplanes and crews started coming back. That particular airplane was in periodic maintenence when the alert was called or it would have been gone too. Sam McGowan ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: Herkybirds ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 10:42 PM Subject: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago Today is November 21. Forty-four years ago I was a young Airman Second Class loadmaster trainee at Pope AFB, NC. A little over a week earlier I had laid awake late on Saturday night listening to the Grand Old Opry on my transistor radio in my room in the aircrew barracks until the wee hours of the morning. I was in the 779th TCS but lived in an 778th room along with Carl Edison and Charles Zelinski. They were both TDY to France and I had the room to myself. I had barely gone to sleep when the alert siren started going off and the telephone down the hall started ringing. I jumped out of bed and into my flight suit and grabbed my mobility bag and headed for the squadron. I don't remember for sure how we got there, but I imagine a bunch of us jumped into Paul Thompson's Ford. Since it was Sunday morning rather than a weekday, we had a pretty good idea the alert was for real even though we'd been having practice alerts in anticipation of the wing's upcoming ORI for some time. As soon as we got to the squadron we started on the callout list. Since we lived in the barracks onbase we were the first to arrive, along with a few younger officers who lived in the BOQ. I was still in student status and was on a crew made up of students. When I called the engineer assigned to our crew, Don Mayer, he accused me of playing a joke on him! Like a lot of other people, he'd stayed late at the club on Saturday night and was barely asleep when I called. It took a couple of calls before I finally convinced him it was for real. During a practice alert once everyone had assembled the wing command post would eventually call down and cancel the alert and everyone would be released. This time was different. Instead of sending everyone home, crews were sent to the flight line and assigned to airplanes. It had become pretty obvious that the wing was really going somewhere this time and most of us had a pretty good idea where. For several weeks the newspapers had been carrying stories about the hostages held by Simba rebels in the Congo, and we assumed the alert had something to do with that. Once the squadron realized the alert was for real, the senior loadmaster, TSgt Virgil Nelson, went to the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Gibney, and asked that the student loadmasters be assigned to crews to go on the mission. Col. Gibney thought about it but decided it was against regulations since no one knew where the crews were going and we weren't designated as combat ready. The regs were clear that only qualified aircrew members designated as combat ready were allowed on combat missions. (As it turned out, some of the other squadron commanders interpreted the regs differently and some of our buddies in the other squadrons did go out with crews with instructor loadmasters.) Those of us who hadn't gone felt sort of left out as every airplane on the base - literally - departed for parts unknown. The only airplanes that didn't go were the ones in maintenance. The flight line was practically deserted, as was the squadron. After a few days the CTU decided to send out a navigational training mission to Bermuda with one of the airplanes that had been in periodic maintenance. There wasn't a single qualified loadmaster left on the base but someone, I don't remember who, decided that since I was on flying status and a qualified C-130 aircraft mechanic, I got fly as scanner. It was the first time I ever went out by myself as part of a flight crew. The alert was on Sunday morning the week prior to Thanksgiving week. The entire wing had departed on a classified mission and no one knew where they had gone. We thought they had headed for Africa to drop the 82nd, but as it turned out, 464th airplanes were scattered all over the Atlantic and Europe, where they went to replace the Pope rotational squadron at Evreux, France which had actually been assigned to a rescue mission. The Pope rote squadron did fly the mission on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I won't go into the details here. If anyone wants to read about it, go to my home page at www.sammcgowan.com/home.html and click on the Airlift History link and you'll find a link to an account of the mission. We found out either later that day or the following morning that our guys had dropped Belgian troops on the airport at Stanleyville and as the word spread around the base, pandemonium broke out. The only time I had seen such excitement had been one night in the base theater when we were watching the first movie to be made about Vietnam - it was actually made in Vietnam - and a formation of C-123s had dropped ARVN troops to rescue the hero. Talk about proud! There is a web site called Talking Proud but they don't even know what the word really means!. That had to have been the most exciting day in troop carrrier history, at least in the post-World War II period. Our very own guys, our friends and instructors and in my case, my roommates, had flown a heroic mission and had saved the lives of people who had been held hostage simply because of the color of their skins. When the newspapers came out the following day, the excitement turned to a dark mood as a general feeling of hatred toward our brothers in MATS emerged. The New York Times and other papers had carried headlines that read "MATS RESCUES HOSTAGES!" Bullcrap! Those airplanes weren't MATS!! They were TAC C-130Es assigned to the 464th Troop Carrier Wing - OUR WING! MATS played no role whatsoever. And in truth, MATS hadn't. Although the airplanes and crews were TDY to 322nd Air Division which had recently transferred to MATS, they had been sent on a mission for USAFE and once they reached Africa, they came under the control of Strike Command, of which Tactical Air Command was one element. Even the 5th APS loadmasters and combat controllers and 322nd AD command personnel who had gone on the mission had switched to Strike Command control for the mission. We were not just mad, we were incensed! We were so incensed that Charlie Watkins, an engineer in the 776th, called up a the Pentagon and blessed out a general. I'm not sure where Charlie was when he made his call. I don't think he was at Pope but was somewhere out on the road and made his call on the AUTOVON line. On Thanksgiving Day we found out that our guys had done it again that morning while we were still sleeping. They had dropped the Belgians at Paulis and effected another rescue. That was just icing on the cake. A few days later the crews that had gone out started coming back in, and we started hearing stories about things that had happened. One was about a friend ours in OMS named Slackerman who had run afoul of the new line chief TAC had sent down to Pope from Lockbourne to straighten out flight line maintenance. The OMS troops called him Be No, because the first thing he had told him was that "there will be no 3-day passes," "there'll be no more time-off," etc. and etc. "until maintenance is straightened out." I don't remember what Slackerman had done or if he had already lost his stripes or if he lost them for what he did, but he came into the open bay barracks where they all staying at a base somewhere, possibly Lajes, and pissed all over Be No Young! Another story was how the guys who flew the mission hadn't had a bath in days and when a thunderstorm came up, they all stripped off their flight suits and fatigues and ran out naked into the rain with bars of soap for the bath they'd had since they left Ascension Island on the way to Africa. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in the Officers and NCO Clubs at Sewart and Langley to hear the conversations there about what the Pope crews had done. The Sewart and Langley guys were the C-130 vets, but Pope had only had Herks for less than two years. The 464th had kicked off the Vietnam War with their C-123s with assistance from the Sewart C-123 squadron (which transferred to Pope.) Now they had flown a spectacular headline making mission in Africa. Regardless of what folks thought at the other TAC bases - and the MATS bases for that matter - there is only one word to describe the emotion at Pope and it is spelled P-R-O-U-D! Sam McGowan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 22 16:16:24 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:16:24 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] Might be Useful Message-ID: <3D41FD5E582E466795A06120ECFC81D1@SamLaptop> This doesn't have anything to do with the military, but it might be useful information, especially to folks along the Gulf Coast and up into the Mid-Atlantic States. This past Tuesday we found the remains of a coral snake in our back yard. It had been sliced in two so I assume I ran over it with the lawnmower when I was mowing the lawn the previous afternoon. (Thank God I didn't step on it and double-Thank God the dogs didn't see it and get bit!) Although I knew we have them around where we live, this was the first one I've ever seen in "the wild" (if you can call my backyard "wild. It does look like it sometimes!) For the past month or so we have had a snake hanging around the front of the house and even though I knew it isn't poisonous, I would prefer it move off somewhere. After finding the coral snake, I decided to call our local version of Charlie Heckman out to take a look at our property (www.texassnakes.com) for an evaluation. What I'm about to tell you cost me a bit but I'll pass it along for free. The first thing I learned is that we have more coral snakes where I live than we do copperheads. That did not make me happy since the coral snake is in the same family with the Cobra, Habu and Mambas, except that they are not aggressive and will try to hide rather than biting. There were some things I already knew I needed to do, such as getting rid of some old tomato stakes and weedeating instead of mulching. The thing I hadn't thought about was replacing the rocks that darn near everybody around here puts in their flower beds for edging. Clint told me to dig a trench and partially bury the stones on end rather than letting them lay flat because the coral snakes will get under them in the summertime. He also advised me that the way snakes get into a house is to come in through the dryer vent and than crawl along the top of the duct and into the insulation. Fortunately, the builders routed our exhaust duct up over the top of the garage and out about ten feet off of the ground, which is too high for a snake to get into. He said we didn't have any openings for snakes to get in through. He did tell me to get some GREAT STUFF and seal the openings around the air conditioner lines (which I did.) Earlier in the week I had put down some cedar mulch in the flower beds around the front porch to discourage our new pet, which is apparently in the racer family. I thought it was a Texas Brown Snake but it is a bit too long. Besides, it reminded me of the black and blue racers we have in Tennessee. Clint says to use cedar mulch rather than pine or hardwood because it is less likely to attract the little brown snakes that coral snakes feed on, along with lizards, frogs and other reptiles. He says the commercial snake repellents sold in garden stores are basically worthless, but he does recommend products made with cedar. Sam McGowan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aceplace at clearwire.net Sat Nov 22 16:22:25 2008 From: aceplace at clearwire.net (Alfred Bowman) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:22:25 -0800 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago In-Reply-To: <1F76BC50B3414A068FF631C7F3E11E19@SamLaptop> References: <28F7B5840EBA48DFA64302370C3BB401@SamLaptop> <1F76BC50B3414A068FF631C7F3E11E19@SamLaptop> Message-ID: <6df935250811221422g59f5ecd2yb1cf56dbfcb882ee@mail.gmail.com> This was an interesting time altogether. Vietnam was heating up. MAC, which tried to snatch the Dragon Rouge glory, was flat on it's butt, not a lot going for it. MAC was a good year away from any substantial C-141 capability, C-5 was an arguement for the future, the borrowed C-130Es were enroute to TAC, and the Shakies were more than worn and tired. Allbert Gore, Sr was hollering about our involvement in SEA and thus ensuring that a pissed off LBJ would soon announce the immediate closure of Sewart AFB. I was bouncing back and forth from Locheed Ontario CA and Sewart for the Fulton Recovery Test Program, and beginning to feel pretty useless. HQ USAF had directed "minimum contact" between those of us in the program and our colleagues back home at Dyess, Sewart, and an assotment of SAC bases. So I had little to do with the happeneings in the Congo. Actually, there were Sewart crews involved - rote troops in Evreux, and Col Art Rush, 314th Commander was running a good part of the mission. For those who don't know, the Evreux rote squadrons were a Whiz Kids McNamara idea. By rotating TAC Squadrons into Evreux, the costs of housing, schools, medical facilities, and other dependent based operations could be reduced. As to Evreux : The base was a dump. Housing for the rote crews was just a small notch better than open bay barracks. Flying elsewhere was the saving grace. The rotation was contiuous. Squadrons did not arrive in 16 ship formations. Thus, at any given moment, two or even three stateside wings could have crews at Evreux. And some of the support beyond the flight crews worked the same way. Anyway, the point is that other wings and units were indeed involved in Dragon Rouge. Everyone was rightfully proud of what they had done. It was a righteous mission. And, oh yeah, those Belgique Troopers were really cool dudes. If they had not done the job they were sent to do (Job # ! - Secure the airfield), the whole story would have been way different and not something I would comment on with still a great deal of pride; even if I did miss the main show. That was all of us at our best. Ace On 11/22/08, Sam McGowan wrote: > > A couple of things have occured to me about those events back in 1964. > For one thing, the DRAGON ROUGE mission was flown on November 22, 44 years > ago today. One thing I wonder about is if the other TAC C-130 wings were > sent out after that alert or if it was just the 464th. As I recall, none of > the ones at Pope got as far as Africa. Some may not have even left Lajes and > Harmon. There were some MATS C-124s involved in a peripheral role. They took > some fuel trucks to Ascension and Kamina. There was also a WC-130 that > accompanied the mission at least to Ascension. > > I can't remember how I came to fly a mission as a scanner before I was > qualified as a loadmaster, but I know it was because all of the qualified > loadmasters had gone out in the alert. There were a couple of instructor > pilots and navigators still there and they put together a navigational > training mission from Pope to Bermuda and back. Somehow or other somebody > picked me to fly as a scanner since no cargo or passengers were being > carried and all I had to do was scan the engine start and make the scanners > checks during the flight - and heat up the frozen meals. I can't remember if > there were any other training flights with other guys going or not, but it > seems to me it was the only mission flown from Pope until the other > airplanes and crews started coming back. That particular airplane was in > periodic maintenence when the alert was called or it would have been gone > too. > > Sam McGowan > > ----- Original Message ----- > *From:* Sam McGowan > *To:* Herkybirds ; Airlifters; 464th > TCW <464thTCW at topica.com> ; tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org > *Sent:* Friday, November 21, 2008 10:42 PM > *Subject:* [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago > > > Today is November 21. Forty-four years ago I was a young Airman Second > Class loadmaster trainee at Pope AFB, NC. A little over a week earlier I had > laid awake late on Saturday night listening to the Grand Old Opry on my > transistor radio in my room in the aircrew barracks until the wee hours of > the morning. I was in the 779th TCS but lived in an 778th room along with > Carl Edison and Charles Zelinski. They were both TDY to France and I had the > room to myself. > > I had barely gone to sleep when the alert siren started going off and the > telephone down the hall started ringing. I jumped out of bed and into my > flight suit and grabbed my mobility bag and headed for the squadron. I don't > remember for sure how we got there, but I imagine a bunch of us jumped into > Paul Thompson's Ford. Since it was Sunday morning rather than a weekday, we > had a pretty good idea the alert was for real even though we'd been having > practice alerts in anticipation of the wing's upcoming ORI for some time. > > As soon as we got to the squadron we started on the callout list. Since we > lived in the barracks onbase we were the first to arrive, along with a few > younger officers who lived in the BOQ. I was still in student status and was > on a crew made up of students. When I called the engineer assigned to our > crew, Don Mayer, he accused me of playing a joke on him! Like a lot of other > people, he'd stayed late at the club on Saturday night and was barely asleep > when I called. It took a couple of calls before I finally convinced him it > was for real. > > During a practice alert once everyone had assembled the wing command post > would eventually call down and cancel the alert and everyone would be > released. This time was different. Instead of sending everyone home, crews > were sent to the flight line and assigned to airplanes. It had become pretty > obvious that the wing was really going somewhere this time and most of us > had a pretty good idea where. For several weeks the newspapers had been > carrying stories about the hostages held by Simba rebels in the Congo, and > we assumed the alert had something to do with that. > > Once the squadron realized the alert was for real, the senior loadmaster, > TSgt Virgil Nelson, went to the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Gibney, and > asked that the student loadmasters be assigned to crews to go on the > mission. Col. Gibney thought about it but decided it was against regulations > since no one knew where the crews were going and we weren't designated as > combat ready. The regs were clear that only qualified aircrew members > designated as combat ready were allowed on combat missions. (As it turned > out, some of the other squadron commanders interpreted the regs differently > and some of our buddies in the other squadrons did go out with crews with > instructor loadmasters.) > > Those of us who hadn't gone felt sort of left out as every airplane on the > base - literally - departed for parts unknown. The only airplanes that > didn't go were the ones in maintenance. The flight line was practically > deserted, as was the squadron. After a few days the CTU decided to send out > a navigational training mission to Bermuda with one of the airplanes that > had been in periodic maintenance. There wasn't a single qualified loadmaster > left on the base but someone, I don't remember who, decided that since I was > on flying status and a qualified C-130 aircraft mechanic, I got fly as > scanner. It was the first time I ever went out by myself as part of a flight > crew. > > The alert was on Sunday morning the week prior to Thanksgiving week. The > entire wing had departed on a classified mission and no one knew where they > had gone. We thought they had headed for Africa to drop the 82nd, but as it > turned out, 464th airplanes were scattered all over the Atlantic and Europe, > where they went to replace the Pope rotational squadron at Evreux, France > which had actually been assigned to a rescue mission. > > The Pope rote squadron did fly the mission on the Tuesday before > Thanksgiving. I won't go into the details here. If anyone wants to read > about it, go to my home page at www.sammcgowan.com/home.html and click on > the Airlift History link and you'll find a link to an account of the > mission. > > We found out either later that day or the following morning that our guys > had dropped Belgian troops on the airport at Stanleyville and as the word > spread around the base, pandemonium broke out. The only time I had seen such > excitement had been one night in the base theater when we were watching the > first movie to be made about Vietnam - it was actually made in Vietnam - and > a formation of C-123s had dropped ARVN troops to rescue the hero. Talk about > proud! There is a web site called Talking Proud but they don't even know > what the word really means!. That had to have been the most exciting day in > troop carrrier history, at least in the post-World War II period. Our very > own guys, our friends and instructors and in my case, my roommates, had > flown a heroic mission and had saved the lives of people who had been held > hostage simply because of the color of their skins. > > When the newspapers came out the following day, the excitement turned to a > dark mood as a general feeling of hatred toward our brothers in MATS > emerged. The New York Times and other papers had carried headlines that read > "MATS RESCUES HOSTAGES!" Bullcrap! Those airplanes weren't MATS!! They were > TAC C-130Es assigned to the 464th Troop Carrier Wing - OUR WING! MATS played > no role whatsoever. And in truth, MATS hadn't. Although the airplanes and > crews were TDY to 322nd Air Division which had recently transferred to MATS, > they had been sent on a mission for USAFE and once they reached Africa, they > came under the control of Strike Command, of which Tactical Air Command was > one element. Even the 5th APS loadmasters and combat controllers and 322nd > AD command personnel who had gone on the mission had switched to Strike > Command control for the mission. We were not just mad, we were incensed! We > were so incensed that Charlie Watkins, an engineer in the 776th, called up a > the Pentagon and blessed out a general. I'm not sure where Charlie was when > he made his call. I don't think he was at Pope but was somewhere out on the > road and made his call on the AUTOVON line. > > On Thanksgiving Day we found out that our guys had done it again that > morning while we were still sleeping. They had dropped the Belgians at > Paulis and effected another rescue. That was just icing on the cake. > > A few days later the crews that had gone out started coming back in, and we > started hearing stories about things that had happened. One was about a > friend ours in OMS named Slackerman who had run afoul of the new line chief > TAC had sent down to Pope from Lockbourne to straighten out flight line > maintenance. The OMS troops called him Be No, because the first thing he had > told him was that "there will be no 3-day passes," "there'll be no more > time-off," etc. and etc. "until maintenance is straightened out." I don't > remember what Slackerman had done or if he had already lost his stripes or > if he lost them for what he did, but he came into the open bay barracks > where they all staying at a base somewhere, possibly Lajes, and pissed all > over Be No Young! Another story was how the guys who flew the mission hadn't > had a bath in days and when a thunderstorm came up, they all stripped off > their flight suits and fatigues and ran out naked into the rain with bars of > soap for the bath they'd had since they left Ascension Island on the way to > Africa. > > I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in the Officers and NCO Clubs at > Sewart and Langley to hear the conversations there about what the Pope crews > had done. The Sewart and Langley guys were the C-130 vets, but Pope had only > had Herks for less than two years. The 464th had kicked off the Vietnam War > with their C-123s with assistance from the Sewart C-123 squadron (which > transferred to Pope.) Now they had flown a spectacular headline making > mission in Africa. > > Regardless of what folks thought at the other TAC bases - and the MATS > bases for that matter - there is only one word to describe the emotion at > Pope and it is spelled P-R-O-U-D! > > Sam McGowan > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Tctaamembers mailing list > Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org > http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org > > > _______________________________________________ > Tctaamembers mailing list > Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org > http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 22 17:02:39 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:02:39 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago In-Reply-To: <6df935250811221422g59f5ecd2yb1cf56dbfcb882ee@mail.gmail.com> References: <28F7B5840EBA48DFA64302370C3BB401@SamLaptop><1F76BC50B3414A068FF631C7F3E11E19@SamLaptop> <6df935250811221422g59f5ecd2yb1cf56dbfcb882ee@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <8D69EC5D577645B299E04527FBA530F3@SamLaptop> Ace, The rote squadron at Evreux was from Pope. We had replaced Sewart several months earlier. Lockbourne had a squadron of A-models on rotation there too but they didn't have the range for the mission. Sewart had started a rotation to Clark or Naha a few weeks earlier after the Gulf of Tonkin episode. Langley had a squadron at Clark. Either Sewart or Langley had a rotation to the Canal Zone and Pope had a mission in the Congo as well as the squadron in France. Lt. Col. Lindsey from the 777th was the squadron commander and Col. Burgress Gradwell from 322nd Air Division was the mission commander. Col. Clayton Isaccson was the Strike Command commander in Stanleyville and was in charge of the LEO force. If Col. Rush was involved, it was probably with the planning in the Pentagon or at Langley. TAC or somebody came up with a plan to make a massive drop of the 82nd at Stanleyville complete with a B-52 pounding but it was ruled out. The RED DRAGON/DRAGON ROUGE plan was planned by USAFE and the Belgians. Huey Long's crew flew the lead airplane with Col. Gradwell aboard. All of the crews were from the 777th and 778th except for one crew which was from the 776th that was at the end of their rotation. Col. Issacson came over in a TALKING BIRD airplane and that crew may have been from the 314th but I think they were also from the 464th. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: Alfred Bowman To: TCTAA Members Email Group Cc: Troop Carrier (Topica) ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; Herkybirds Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 4:22 PM Subject: Re: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago This was an interesting time altogether. Vietnam was heating up. MAC, which tried to snatch the Dragon Rouge glory, was flat on it's butt, not a lot going for it. MAC was a good year away from any substantial C-141 capability, C-5 was an arguement for the future, the borrowed C-130Es were enroute to TAC, and the Shakies were more than worn and tired. Allbert Gore, Sr was hollering about our involvement in SEA and thus ensuring that a pissed off LBJ would soon announce the immediate closure of Sewart AFB. I was bouncing back and forth from Locheed Ontario CA and Sewart for the Fulton Recovery Test Program, and beginning to feel pretty useless. HQ USAF had directed "minimum contact" between those of us in the program and our colleagues back home at Dyess, Sewart, and an assotment of SAC bases. So I had little to do with the happeneings in the Congo. Actually, there were Sewart crews involved - rote troops in Evreux, and Col Art Rush, 314th Commander was running a good part of the mission. For those who don't know, the Evreux rote squadrons were a Whiz Kids McNamara idea. By rotating TAC Squadrons into Evreux, the costs of housing, schools, medical facilities, and other dependent based operations could be reduced. As to Evreux : The base was a dump. Housing for the rote crews was just a small notch better than open bay barracks. Flying elsewhere was the saving grace. The rotation was contiuous. Squadrons did not arrive in 16 ship formations. Thus, at any given moment, two or even three stateside wings could have crews at Evreux. And some of the support beyond the flight crews worked the same way. Anyway, the point is that other wings and units were indeed involved in Dragon Rouge. Everyone was rightfully proud of what they had done. It was a righteous mission. And, oh yeah, those Belgique Troopers were really cool dudes. If they had not done the job they were sent to do (Job # ! - Secure the airfield), the whole story would have been way different and not something I would comment on with still a great deal of pride; even if I did miss the main show. That was all of us at our best. Ace On 11/22/08, Sam McGowan wrote: A couple of things have occured to me about those events back in 1964. For one thing, the DRAGON ROUGE mission was flown on November 22, 44 years ago today. One thing I wonder about is if the other TAC C-130 wings were sent out after that alert or if it was just the 464th. As I recall, none of the ones at Pope got as far as Africa. Some may not have even left Lajes and Harmon. There were some MATS C-124s involved in a peripheral role. They took some fuel trucks to Ascension and Kamina. There was also a WC-130 that accompanied the mission at least to Ascension. I can't remember how I came to fly a mission as a scanner before I was qualified as a loadmaster, but I know it was because all of the qualified loadmasters had gone out in the alert. There were a couple of instructor pilots and navigators still there and they put together a navigational training mission from Pope to Bermuda and back. Somehow or other somebody picked me to fly as a scanner since no cargo or passengers were being carried and all I had to do was scan the engine start and make the scanners checks during the flight - and heat up the frozen meals. I can't remember if there were any other training flights with other guys going or not, but it seems to me it was the only mission flown from Pope until the other airplanes and crews started coming back. That particular airplane was in periodic maintenence when the alert was called or it would have been gone too. Sam McGowan ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: Herkybirds ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 10:42 PM Subject: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago Today is November 21. Forty-four years ago I was a young Airman Second Class loadmaster trainee at Pope AFB, NC. A little over a week earlier I had laid awake late on Saturday night listening to the Grand Old Opry on my transistor radio in my room in the aircrew barracks until the wee hours of the morning. I was in the 779th TCS but lived in an 778th room along with Carl Edison and Charles Zelinski. They were both TDY to France and I had the room to myself. I had barely gone to sleep when the alert siren started going off and the telephone down the hall started ringing. I jumped out of bed and into my flight suit and grabbed my mobility bag and headed for the squadron. I don't remember for sure how we got there, but I imagine a bunch of us jumped into Paul Thompson's Ford. Since it was Sunday morning rather than a weekday, we had a pretty good idea the alert was for real even though we'd been having practice alerts in anticipation of the wing's upcoming ORI for some time. As soon as we got to the squadron we started on the callout list. Since we lived in the barracks onbase we were the first to arrive, along with a few younger officers who lived in the BOQ. I was still in student status and was on a crew made up of students. When I called the engineer assigned to our crew, Don Mayer, he accused me of playing a joke on him! Like a lot of other people, he'd stayed late at the club on Saturday night and was barely asleep when I called. It took a couple of calls before I finally convinced him it was for real. During a practice alert once everyone had assembled the wing command post would eventually call down and cancel the alert and everyone would be released. This time was different. Instead of sending everyone home, crews were sent to the flight line and assigned to airplanes. It had become pretty obvious that the wing was really going somewhere this time and most of us had a pretty good idea where. For several weeks the newspapers had been carrying stories about the hostages held by Simba rebels in the Congo, and we assumed the alert had something to do with that. Once the squadron realized the alert was for real, the senior loadmaster, TSgt Virgil Nelson, went to the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Gibney, and asked that the student loadmasters be assigned to crews to go on the mission. Col. Gibney thought about it but decided it was against regulations since no one knew where the crews were going and we weren't designated as combat ready. The regs were clear that only qualified aircrew members designated as combat ready were allowed on combat missions. (As it turned out, some of the other squadron commanders interpreted the regs differently and some of our buddies in the other squadrons did go out with crews with instructor loadmasters.) Those of us who hadn't gone felt sort of left out as every airplane on the base - literally - departed for parts unknown. The only airplanes that didn't go were the ones in maintenance. The flight line was practically deserted, as was the squadron. After a few days the CTU decided to send out a navigational training mission to Bermuda with one of the airplanes that had been in periodic maintenance. There wasn't a single qualified loadmaster left on the base but someone, I don't remember who, decided that since I was on flying status and a qualified C-130 aircraft mechanic, I got fly as scanner. It was the first time I ever went out by myself as part of a flight crew. The alert was on Sunday morning the week prior to Thanksgiving week. The entire wing had departed on a classified mission and no one knew where they had gone. We thought they had headed for Africa to drop the 82nd, but as it turned out, 464th airplanes were scattered all over the Atlantic and Europe, where they went to replace the Pope rotational squadron at Evreux, France which had actually been assigned to a rescue mission. The Pope rote squadron did fly the mission on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I won't go into the details here. If anyone wants to read about it, go to my home page at www.sammcgowan.com/home.html and click on the Airlift History link and you'll find a link to an account of the mission. We found out either later that day or the following morning that our guys had dropped Belgian troops on the airport at Stanleyville and as the word spread around the base, pandemonium broke out. The only time I had seen such excitement had been one night in the base theater when we were watching the first movie to be made about Vietnam - it was actually made in Vietnam - and a formation of C-123s had dropped ARVN troops to rescue the hero. Talk about proud! There is a web site called Talking Proud but they don't even know what the word really means!. That had to have been the most exciting day in troop carrrier history, at least in the post-World War II period. Our very own guys, our friends and instructors and in my case, my roommates, had flown a heroic mission and had saved the lives of people who had been held hostage simply because of the color of their skins. When the newspapers came out the following day, the excitement turned to a dark mood as a general feeling of hatred toward our brothers in MATS emerged. The New York Times and other papers had carried headlines that read "MATS RESCUES HOSTAGES!" Bullcrap! Those airplanes weren't MATS!! They were TAC C-130Es assigned to the 464th Troop Carrier Wing - OUR WING! MATS played no role whatsoever. And in truth, MATS hadn't. Although the airplanes and crews were TDY to 322nd Air Division which had recently transferred to MATS, they had been sent on a mission for USAFE and once they reached Africa, they came under the control of Strike Command, of which Tactical Air Command was one element. Even the 5th APS loadmasters and combat controllers and 322nd AD command personnel who had gone on the mission had switched to Strike Command control for the mission. We were not just mad, we were incensed! We were so incensed that Charlie Watkins, an engineer in the 776th, called up a the Pentagon and blessed out a general. I'm not sure where Charlie was when he made his call. I don't think he was at Pope but was somewhere out on the road and made his call on the AUTOVON line. On Thanksgiving Day we found out that our guys had done it again that morning while we were still sleeping. They had dropped the Belgians at Paulis and effected another rescue. That was just icing on the cake. A few days later the crews that had gone out started coming back in, and we started hearing stories about things that had happened. One was about a friend ours in OMS named Slackerman who had run afoul of the new line chief TAC had sent down to Pope from Lockbourne to straighten out flight line maintenance. The OMS troops called him Be No, because the first thing he had told him was that "there will be no 3-day passes," "there'll be no more time-off," etc. and etc. "until maintenance is straightened out." I don't remember what Slackerman had done or if he had already lost his stripes or if he lost them for what he did, but he came into the open bay barracks where they all staying at a base somewhere, possibly Lajes, and pissed all over Be No Young! Another story was how the guys who flew the mission hadn't had a bath in days and when a thunderstorm came up, they all stripped off their flight suits and fatigues and ran out naked into the rain with bars of soap for the bath they'd had since they left Ascension Island on the way to Africa. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in the Officers and NCO Clubs at Sewart and Langley to hear the conversations there about what the Pope crews had done. The Sewart and Langley guys were the C-130 vets, but Pope had only had Herks for less than two years. The 464th had kicked off the Vietnam War with their C-123s with assistance from the Sewart C-123 squadron (which transferred to Pope.) Now they had flown a spectacular headline making mission in Africa. Regardless of what folks thought at the other TAC bases - and the MATS bases for that matter - there is only one word to describe the emotion at Pope and it is spelled P-R-O-U-D! Sam McGowan -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 22 17:11:21 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:11:21 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] (C-130 Vets) 44 Years Ago In-Reply-To: <2144738435-1463747838-1227394978@boing.topica.com> References: <28F7B5840EBA48DFA64302370C3BB401@SamLaptop><1F76BC50B3414A068FF631C7F3E11E19@SamLaptop> <6df935250811221422g59f5ecd2yb1cf56dbfcb882ee@mail.gmail.com> <2144738435-1463747838-1227394978@boing.topica.com> Message-ID: http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/odom/odom.asp If anyone is interested, here is a fairly recent study on the Congo Rescue done by an Army officer at the Command and Staff College. Incidentally, my brother-in-law is a student there now. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: TCTAA Members Email Group Cc: Herkybirds ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 5:02 PM Subject: RE: (C-130 Vets) [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago Ace, The rote squadron at Evreux was from Pope. We had replaced Sewart several months earlier. Lockbourne had a squadron of A-models on rotation there too but they didn't have the range for the mission. Sewart had started a rotation to Clark or Naha a few weeks earlier after the Gulf of Tonkin episode. Langley had a squadron at Clark. Either Sewart or Langley had a rotation to the Canal Zone and Pope had a mission in the Congo as well as the squadron in France. Lt. Col. Lindsey from the 777th was the squadron commander and Col. Burgress Gradwell from 322nd Air Division was the mission commander. Col. Clayton Isaccson was the Strike Command commander in Stanleyville and was in charge of the LEO force. If Col. Rush was involved, it was probably with the planning in the Pentagon or at Langley. TAC or somebody came up with a plan to make a massive drop of the 82nd at Stanleyville complete with a B-52 pounding but it was ruled out. The RED DRAGON/DRAGON ROUGE plan was planned by USAFE and the Belgians. Huey Long's crew flew the lead airplane with Col. Gradwell aboard. All of the crews were from the 777th and 778th except for one crew which was from the 776th that was at the end of their rotation. Col. Issacson came over in a TALKING BIRD airplane and that crew may have been from the 314th but I think they were also from the 464th. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: Alfred Bowman To: TCTAA Members Email Group Cc: Troop Carrier (Topica) ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; Herkybirds Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 4:22 PM Subject: Re: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago This was an interesting time altogether. Vietnam was heating up. MAC, which tried to snatch the Dragon Rouge glory, was flat on it's butt, not a lot going for it. MAC was a good year away from any substantial C-141 capability, C-5 was an arguement for the future, the borrowed C-130Es were enroute to TAC, and the Shakies were more than worn and tired. Allbert Gore, Sr was hollering about our involvement in SEA and thus ensuring that a pissed off LBJ would soon announce the immediate closure of Sewart AFB. I was bouncing back and forth from Locheed Ontario CA and Sewart for the Fulton Recovery Test Program, and beginning to feel pretty useless. HQ USAF had directed "minimum contact" between those of us in the program and our colleagues back home at Dyess, Sewart, and an assotment of SAC bases. So I had little to do with the happeneings in the Congo. Actually, there were Sewart crews involved - rote troops in Evreux, and Col Art Rush, 314th Commander was running a good part of the mission. For those who don't know, the Evreux rote squadrons were a Whiz Kids McNamara idea. By rotating TAC Squadrons into Evreux, the costs of housing, schools, medical facilities, and other dependent based operations could be reduced. As to Evreux : The base was a dump. Housing for the rote crews was just a small notch better than open bay barracks. Flying elsewhere was the saving grace. The rotation was contiuous. Squadrons did not arrive in 16 ship formations. Thus, at any given moment, two or even three stateside wings could have crews at Evreux. And some of the support beyond the flight crews worked the same way. Anyway, the point is that other wings and units were indeed involved in Dragon Rouge. Everyone was rightfully proud of what they had done. It was a righteous mission. And, oh yeah, those Belgique Troopers were really cool dudes. If they had not done the job they were sent to do (Job # ! - Secure the airfield), the whole story would have been way different and not something I would comment on with still a great deal of pride; even if I did miss the main show. That was all of us at our best. Ace On 11/22/08, Sam McGowan wrote: A couple of things have occured to me about those events back in 1964. For one thing, the DRAGON ROUGE mission was flown on November 22, 44 years ago today. One thing I wonder about is if the other TAC C-130 wings were sent out after that alert or if it was just the 464th. As I recall, none of the ones at Pope got as far as Africa. Some may not have even left Lajes and Harmon. There were some MATS C-124s involved in a peripheral role. They took some fuel trucks to Ascension and Kamina. There was also a WC-130 that accompanied the mission at least to Ascension. I can't remember how I came to fly a mission as a scanner before I was qualified as a loadmaster, but I know it was because all of the qualified loadmasters had gone out in the alert. There were a couple of instructor pilots and navigators still there and they put together a navigational training mission from Pope to Bermuda and back. Somehow or other somebody picked me to fly as a scanner since no cargo or passengers were being carried and all I had to do was scan the engine start and make the scanners checks during the flight - and heat up the frozen meals. I can't remember if there were any other training flights with other guys going or not, but it seems to me it was the only mission flown from Pope until the other airplanes and crews started coming back. That particular airplane was in periodic maintenence when the alert was called or it would have been gone too. Sam McGowan ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: Herkybirds ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 10:42 PM Subject: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago Today is November 21. Forty-four years ago I was a young Airman Second Class loadmaster trainee at Pope AFB, NC. A little over a week earlier I had laid awake late on Saturday night listening to the Grand Old Opry on my transistor radio in my room in the aircrew barracks until the wee hours of the morning. I was in the 779th TCS but lived in an 778th room along with Carl Edison and Charles Zelinski. They were both TDY to France and I had the room to myself. I had barely gone to sleep when the alert siren started going off and the telephone down the hall started ringing. I jumped out of bed and into my flight suit and grabbed my mobility bag and headed for the squadron. I don't remember for sure how we got there, but I imagine a bunch of us jumped into Paul Thompson's Ford. Since it was Sunday morning rather than a weekday, we had a pretty good idea the alert was for real even though we'd been having practice alerts in anticipation of the wing's upcoming ORI for some time. As soon as we got to the squadron we started on the callout list. Since we lived in the barracks onbase we were the first to arrive, along with a few younger officers who lived in the BOQ. I was still in student status and was on a crew made up of students. When I called the engineer assigned to our crew, Don Mayer, he accused me of playing a joke on him! Like a lot of other people, he'd stayed late at the club on Saturday night and was barely asleep when I called. It took a couple of calls before I finally convinced him it was for real. During a practice alert once everyone had assembled the wing command post would eventually call down and cancel the alert and everyone would be released. This time was different. Instead of sending everyone home, crews were sent to the flight line and assigned to airplanes. It had become pretty obvious that the wing was really going somewhere this time and most of us had a pretty good idea where. For several weeks the newspapers had been carrying stories about the hostages held by Simba rebels in the Congo, and we assumed the alert had something to do with that. Once the squadron realized the alert was for real, the senior loadmaster, TSgt Virgil Nelson, went to the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Gibney, and asked that the student loadmasters be assigned to crews to go on the mission. Col. Gibney thought about it but decided it was against regulations since no one knew where the crews were going and we weren't designated as combat ready. The regs were clear that only qualified aircrew members designated as combat ready were allowed on combat missions. (As it turned out, some of the other squadron commanders interpreted the regs differently and some of our buddies in the other squadrons did go out with crews with instructor loadmasters.) Those of us who hadn't gone felt sort of left out as every airplane on the base - literally - departed for parts unknown. The only airplanes that didn't go were the ones in maintenance. The flight line was practically deserted, as was the squadron. After a few days the CTU decided to send out a navigational training mission to Bermuda with one of the airplanes that had been in periodic maintenance. There wasn't a single qualified loadmaster left on the base but someone, I don't remember who, decided that since I was on flying status and a qualified C-130 aircraft mechanic, I got fly as scanner. It was the first time I ever went out by myself as part of a flight crew. The alert was on Sunday morning the week prior to Thanksgiving week. The entire wing had departed on a classified mission and no one knew where they had gone. We thought they had headed for Africa to drop the 82nd, but as it turned out, 464th airplanes were scattered all over the Atlantic and Europe, where they went to replace the Pope rotational squadron at Evreux, France which had actually been assigned to a rescue mission. The Pope rote squadron did fly the mission on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I won't go into the details here. If anyone wants to read about it, go to my home page at www.sammcgowan.com/home.html and click on the Airlift History link and you'll find a link to an account of the mission. We found out either later that day or the following morning that our guys had dropped Belgian troops on the airport at Stanleyville and as the word spread around the base, pandemonium broke out. The only time I had seen such excitement had been one night in the base theater when we were watching the first movie to be made about Vietnam - it was actually made in Vietnam - and a formation of C-123s had dropped ARVN troops to rescue the hero. Talk about proud! There is a web site called Talking Proud but they don't even know what the word really means!. That had to have been the most exciting day in troop carrrier history, at least in the post-World War II period. Our very own guys, our friends and instructors and in my case, my roommates, had flown a heroic mission and had saved the lives of people who had been held hostage simply because of the color of their skins. When the newspapers came out the following day, the excitement turned to a dark mood as a general feeling of hatred toward our brothers in MATS emerged. The New York Times and other papers had carried headlines that read "MATS RESCUES HOSTAGES!" Bullcrap! Those airplanes weren't MATS!! They were TAC C-130Es assigned to the 464th Troop Carrier Wing - OUR WING! MATS played no role whatsoever. And in truth, MATS hadn't. Although the airplanes and crews were TDY to 322nd Air Division which had recently transferred to MATS, they had been sent on a mission for USAFE and once they reached Africa, they came under the control of Strike Command, of which Tactical Air Command was one element. Even the 5th APS loadmasters and combat controllers and 322nd AD command personnel who had gone on the mission had switched to Strike Command control for the mission. We were not just mad, we were incensed! We were so incensed that Charlie Watkins, an engineer in the 776th, called up a the Pentagon and blessed out a general. I'm not sure where Charlie was when he made his call. I don't think he was at Pope but was somewhere out on the road and made his call on the AUTOVON line. On Thanksgiving Day we found out that our guys had done it again that morning while we were still sleeping. They had dropped the Belgians at Paulis and effected another rescue. That was just icing on the cake. A few days later the crews that had gone out started coming back in, and we started hearing stories about things that had happened. One was about a friend ours in OMS named Slackerman who had run afoul of the new line chief TAC had sent down to Pope from Lockbourne to straighten out flight line maintenance. The OMS troops called him Be No, because the first thing he had told him was that "there will be no 3-day passes," "there'll be no more time-off," etc. and etc. "until maintenance is straightened out." I don't remember what Slackerman had done or if he had already lost his stripes or if he lost them for what he did, but he came into the open bay barracks where they all staying at a base somewhere, possibly Lajes, and pissed all over Be No Young! Another story was how the guys who flew the mission hadn't had a bath in days and when a thunderstorm came up, they all stripped off their flight suits and fatigues and ran out naked into the rain with bars of soap for the bath they'd had since they left Ascension Island on the way to Africa. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in the Officers and NCO Clubs at Sewart and Langley to hear the conversations there about what the Pope crews had done. The Sewart and Langley guys were the C-130 vets, but Pope had only had Herks for less than two years. The 464th had kicked off the Vietnam War with their C-123s with assistance from the Sewart C-123 squadron (which transferred to Pope.) Now they had flown a spectacular headline making mission in Africa. Regardless of what folks thought at the other TAC bases - and the MATS bases for that matter - there is only one word to describe the emotion at Pope and it is spelled P-R-O-U-D! Sam McGowan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org --^^--------------------------------------------------------------- This email was sent to: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84A8G.bMkkp5.c2FtbWNn Or send an email to: herkybirds-unsubscribe at topica.com For Topica's complete suite of email marketing solutions visit: http://www.topica.com/?p=TEXFOOTER --^^--------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 22 17:23:21 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:23:21 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] (C-130 Vets) 44 Years Ago In-Reply-To: References: <28F7B5840EBA48DFA64302370C3BB401@SamLaptop><1F76BC50B3414A068FF631C7F3E11E19@SamLaptop><6df935250811221422g59f5ecd2yb1cf56dbfcb882ee@mail.gmail.com><2144738435-1463747838-1227394978@boing.topica.com> Message-ID: <4CD7ED1A52B8406299B1FAE0B8FBE822@SamLaptop> Folks, I stand corrected. Thanksgiving was on November 26 in 1964 and the Stanleyville mission was flown on the 24th. Paulis was on Thanksgiving Day, the 26th. The alert at Pope was on Sunday, November 15 the week before. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: Herkybirds at topica.com ; TCTAA Members Email Group Cc: Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; Herkybirds Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 5:11 PM Subject: Re: [TCTAAmembers] (C-130 Vets) 44 Years Ago http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/odom/odom.asp If anyone is interested, here is a fairly recent study on the Congo Rescue done by an Army officer at the Command and Staff College. Incidentally, my brother-in-law is a student there now. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: TCTAA Members Email Group Cc: Herkybirds ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 5:02 PM Subject: RE: (C-130 Vets) [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago Ace, The rote squadron at Evreux was from Pope. We had replaced Sewart several months earlier. Lockbourne had a squadron of A-models on rotation there too but they didn't have the range for the mission. Sewart had started a rotation to Clark or Naha a few weeks earlier after the Gulf of Tonkin episode. Langley had a squadron at Clark. Either Sewart or Langley had a rotation to the Canal Zone and Pope had a mission in the Congo as well as the squadron in France. Lt. Col. Lindsey from the 777th was the squadron commander and Col. Burgress Gradwell from 322nd Air Division was the mission commander. Col. Clayton Isaccson was the Strike Command commander in Stanleyville and was in charge of the LEO force. If Col. Rush was involved, it was probably with the planning in the Pentagon or at Langley. TAC or somebody came up with a plan to make a massive drop of the 82nd at Stanleyville complete with a B-52 pounding but it was ruled out. The RED DRAGON/DRAGON ROUGE plan was planned by USAFE and the Belgians. Huey Long's crew flew the lead airplane with Col. Gradwell aboard. All of the crews were from the 777th and 778th except for one crew which was from the 776th that was at the end of their rotation. Col. Issacson came over in a TALKING BIRD airplane and that crew may have been from the 314th but I think they were also from the 464th. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: Alfred Bowman To: TCTAA Members Email Group Cc: Troop Carrier (Topica) ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; Herkybirds Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 4:22 PM Subject: Re: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago This was an interesting time altogether. Vietnam was heating up. MAC, which tried to snatch the Dragon Rouge glory, was flat on it's butt, not a lot going for it. MAC was a good year away from any substantial C-141 capability, C-5 was an arguement for the future, the borrowed C-130Es were enroute to TAC, and the Shakies were more than worn and tired. Allbert Gore, Sr was hollering about our involvement in SEA and thus ensuring that a pissed off LBJ would soon announce the immediate closure of Sewart AFB. I was bouncing back and forth from Locheed Ontario CA and Sewart for the Fulton Recovery Test Program, and beginning to feel pretty useless. HQ USAF had directed "minimum contact" between those of us in the program and our colleagues back home at Dyess, Sewart, and an assotment of SAC bases. So I had little to do with the happeneings in the Congo. Actually, there were Sewart crews involved - rote troops in Evreux, and Col Art Rush, 314th Commander was running a good part of the mission. For those who don't know, the Evreux rote squadrons were a Whiz Kids McNamara idea. By rotating TAC Squadrons into Evreux, the costs of housing, schools, medical facilities, and other dependent based operations could be reduced. As to Evreux : The base was a dump. Housing for the rote crews was just a small notch better than open bay barracks. Flying elsewhere was the saving grace. The rotation was contiuous. Squadrons did not arrive in 16 ship formations. Thus, at any given moment, two or even three stateside wings could have crews at Evreux. And some of the support beyond the flight crews worked the same way. Anyway, the point is that other wings and units were indeed involved in Dragon Rouge. Everyone was rightfully proud of what they had done. It was a righteous mission. And, oh yeah, those Belgique Troopers were really cool dudes. If they had not done the job they were sent to do (Job # ! - Secure the airfield), the whole story would have been way different and not something I would comment on with still a great deal of pride; even if I did miss the main show. That was all of us at our best. Ace On 11/22/08, Sam McGowan wrote: A couple of things have occured to me about those events back in 1964. For one thing, the DRAGON ROUGE mission was flown on November 22, 44 years ago today. One thing I wonder about is if the other TAC C-130 wings were sent out after that alert or if it was just the 464th. As I recall, none of the ones at Pope got as far as Africa. Some may not have even left Lajes and Harmon. There were some MATS C-124s involved in a peripheral role. They took some fuel trucks to Ascension and Kamina. There was also a WC-130 that accompanied the mission at least to Ascension. I can't remember how I came to fly a mission as a scanner before I was qualified as a loadmaster, but I know it was because all of the qualified loadmasters had gone out in the alert. There were a couple of instructor pilots and navigators still there and they put together a navigational training mission from Pope to Bermuda and back. Somehow or other somebody picked me to fly as a scanner since no cargo or passengers were being carried and all I had to do was scan the engine start and make the scanners checks during the flight - and heat up the frozen meals. I can't remember if there were any other training flights with other guys going or not, but it seems to me it was the only mission flown from Pope until the other airplanes and crews started coming back. That particular airplane was in periodic maintenence when the alert was called or it would have been gone too. Sam McGowan ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: Herkybirds ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 10:42 PM Subject: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago Today is November 21. Forty-four years ago I was a young Airman Second Class loadmaster trainee at Pope AFB, NC. A little over a week earlier I had laid awake late on Saturday night listening to the Grand Old Opry on my transistor radio in my room in the aircrew barracks until the wee hours of the morning. I was in the 779th TCS but lived in an 778th room along with Carl Edison and Charles Zelinski. They were both TDY to France and I had the room to myself. I had barely gone to sleep when the alert siren started going off and the telephone down the hall started ringing. I jumped out of bed and into my flight suit and grabbed my mobility bag and headed for the squadron. I don't remember for sure how we got there, but I imagine a bunch of us jumped into Paul Thompson's Ford. Since it was Sunday morning rather than a weekday, we had a pretty good idea the alert was for real even though we'd been having practice alerts in anticipation of the wing's upcoming ORI for some time. As soon as we got to the squadron we started on the callout list. Since we lived in the barracks onbase we were the first to arrive, along with a few younger officers who lived in the BOQ. I was still in student status and was on a crew made up of students. When I called the engineer assigned to our crew, Don Mayer, he accused me of playing a joke on him! Like a lot of other people, he'd stayed late at the club on Saturday night and was barely asleep when I called. It took a couple of calls before I finally convinced him it was for real. During a practice alert once everyone had assembled the wing command post would eventually call down and cancel the alert and everyone would be released. This time was different. Instead of sending everyone home, crews were sent to the flight line and assigned to airplanes. It had become pretty obvious that the wing was really going somewhere this time and most of us had a pretty good idea where. For several weeks the newspapers had been carrying stories about the hostages held by Simba rebels in the Congo, and we assumed the alert had something to do with that. Once the squadron realized the alert was for real, the senior loadmaster, TSgt Virgil Nelson, went to the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Gibney, and asked that the student loadmasters be assigned to crews to go on the mission. Col. Gibney thought about it but decided it was against regulations since no one knew where the crews were going and we weren't designated as combat ready. The regs were clear that only qualified aircrew members designated as combat ready were allowed on combat missions. (As it turned out, some of the other squadron commanders interpreted the regs differently and some of our buddies in the other squadrons did go out with crews with instructor loadmasters.) Those of us who hadn't gone felt sort of left out as every airplane on the base - literally - departed for parts unknown. The only airplanes that didn't go were the ones in maintenance. The flight line was practically deserted, as was the squadron. After a few days the CTU decided to send out a navigational training mission to Bermuda with one of the airplanes that had been in periodic maintenance. There wasn't a single qualified loadmaster left on the base but someone, I don't remember who, decided that since I was on flying status and a qualified C-130 aircraft mechanic, I got fly as scanner. It was the first time I ever went out by myself as part of a flight crew. The alert was on Sunday morning the week prior to Thanksgiving week. The entire wing had departed on a classified mission and no one knew where they had gone. We thought they had headed for Africa to drop the 82nd, but as it turned out, 464th airplanes were scattered all over the Atlantic and Europe, where they went to replace the Pope rotational squadron at Evreux, France which had actually been assigned to a rescue mission. The Pope rote squadron did fly the mission on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I won't go into the details here. If anyone wants to read about it, go to my home page at www.sammcgowan.com/home.html and click on the Airlift History link and you'll find a link to an account of the mission. We found out either later that day or the following morning that our guys had dropped Belgian troops on the airport at Stanleyville and as the word spread around the base, pandemonium broke out. The only time I had seen such excitement had been one night in the base theater when we were watching the first movie to be made about Vietnam - it was actually made in Vietnam - and a formation of C-123s had dropped ARVN troops to rescue the hero. Talk about proud! There is a web site called Talking Proud but they don't even know what the word really means!. That had to have been the most exciting day in troop carrrier history, at least in the post-World War II period. Our very own guys, our friends and instructors and in my case, my roommates, had flown a heroic mission and had saved the lives of people who had been held hostage simply because of the color of their skins. When the newspapers came out the following day, the excitement turned to a dark mood as a general feeling of hatred toward our brothers in MATS emerged. The New York Times and other papers had carried headlines that read "MATS RESCUES HOSTAGES!" Bullcrap! Those airplanes weren't MATS!! They were TAC C-130Es assigned to the 464th Troop Carrier Wing - OUR WING! MATS played no role whatsoever. And in truth, MATS hadn't. Although the airplanes and crews were TDY to 322nd Air Division which had recently transferred to MATS, they had been sent on a mission for USAFE and once they reached Africa, they came under the control of Strike Command, of which Tactical Air Command was one element. Even the 5th APS loadmasters and combat controllers and 322nd AD command personnel who had gone on the mission had switched to Strike Command control for the mission. We were not just mad, we were incensed! We were so incensed that Charlie Watkins, an engineer in the 776th, called up a the Pentagon and blessed out a general. I'm not sure where Charlie was when he made his call. I don't think he was at Pope but was somewhere out on the road and made his call on the AUTOVON line. On Thanksgiving Day we found out that our guys had done it again that morning while we were still sleeping. They had dropped the Belgians at Paulis and effected another rescue. That was just icing on the cake. A few days later the crews that had gone out started coming back in, and we started hearing stories about things that had happened. One was about a friend ours in OMS named Slackerman who had run afoul of the new line chief TAC had sent down to Pope from Lockbourne to straighten out flight line maintenance. The OMS troops called him Be No, because the first thing he had told him was that "there will be no 3-day passes," "there'll be no more time-off," etc. and etc. "until maintenance is straightened out." I don't remember what Slackerman had done or if he had already lost his stripes or if he lost them for what he did, but he came into the open bay barracks where they all staying at a base somewhere, possibly Lajes, and pissed all over Be No Young! Another story was how the guys who flew the mission hadn't had a bath in days and when a thunderstorm came up, they all stripped off their flight suits and fatigues and ran out naked into the rain with bars of soap for the bath they'd had since they left Ascension Island on the way to Africa. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in the Officers and NCO Clubs at Sewart and Langley to hear the conversations there about what the Pope crews had done. The Sewart and Langley guys were the C-130 vets, but Pope had only had Herks for less than two years. The 464th had kicked off the Vietnam War with their C-123s with assistance from the Sewart C-123 squadron (which transferred to Pope.) Now they had flown a spectacular headline making mission in Africa. Regardless of what folks thought at the other TAC bases - and the MATS bases for that matter - there is only one word to describe the emotion at Pope and it is spelled P-R-O-U-D! Sam McGowan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org --^^--------------------------------------------------------------- This email was sent to: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84A8G.bMkkp5.c2FtbWNn Or send an email to: herkybirds-unsubscribe at topica.com For Topica's complete suite of email marketing solutions visit: http://www.topica.com/?p=TEXFOOTER --^^--------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From DickSell at aol.com Sat Nov 22 18:36:08 2008 From: DickSell at aol.com (DickSell at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:36:08 EST Subject: [TCTAAmembers] Tctaamembers Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8 Message-ID: Sam and members: My two cents worth. Sam, I've told you this before, I think. I was on Lt. Gerry Kailing's crew (C/P Dick Sell, Nav Hugh Dupree, F/E Roy Thompson, L/M Jim Tomlinson) of the 776th TCS out of Pope, on rote duty at Evreaux in October/November 1964. I was the only one on the crew with a TS clearance. I was called into the Wing Commander's office one day at Evreaux and asked what happened to some aerial photos we had taken on a secret reconnaissance mission we'd flown over Stanleyville (under rebel control) in August when we were on the initial deployment of JTF-LEO in Aug '64. We had flown a fast trip from Leo (what was it, maybe 500 miles?), over the clouds back to Stanleyville, ducked under the clouds and did two high speed passes over the airfield and the town, then went back to Leo. We had a mysterious guy in the cockpit with an Army uniform and Major's insignia on, but no other identification. He had a large aerial camera, and loaned me a 35mm SLR camera. We both snapped as many photos as we could of the Stanleyville area before we left the area. Back at Leopoldville, he took the cameras and disappeared. So I related all this to the Wing Commander, and he said don't tell anyone because it was TS. I couldn't even tell Kailing. And I never heard anything more, until later we heard about Dragon Rouge. V/R, STANLEYVILLE, CONGO Richard (Dick) Sell Scottsdale, AZ In a message dated 11/22/2008 4:23:52 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, tctaamembers-request at troopcarrier.org writes: Send Tctaamembers mailing list submissions to tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to tctaamembers-request at troopcarrier.org You can reach the person managing the list at tctaamembers-owner at troopcarrier.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Tctaamembers digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: (C-130 Vets) 44 Years Ago (Sam McGowan) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:23:21 -0600 From: "Sam McGowan" Subject: Re: [TCTAAmembers] (C-130 Vets) 44 Years Ago To: "TCTAA Members Email Group" Cc: Airlifters , 464th TCW <464thTCW at topica.com>, Herkybirds Message-ID: <4CD7ED1A52B8406299B1FAE0B8FBE822 at SamLaptop> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Folks, I stand corrected. Thanksgiving was on November 26 in 1964 and the Stanleyville mission was flown on the 24th. Paulis was on Thanksgiving Day, the 26th. The alert at Pope was on Sunday, November 15 the week before. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: Herkybirds at topica.com ; TCTAA Members Email Group Cc: Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; Herkybirds Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 5:11 PM Subject: Re: [TCTAAmembers] (C-130 Vets) 44 Years Ago http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/odom/odom.asp If anyone is interested, here is a fairly recent study on the Congo Rescue done by an Army officer at the Command and Staff College. Incidentally, my brother-in-law is a student there now. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: TCTAA Members Email Group Cc: Herkybirds ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 5:02 PM Subject: RE: (C-130 Vets) [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago Ace, The rote squadron at Evreux was from Pope. We had replaced Sewart several months earlier. Lockbourne had a squadron of A-models on rotation there too but they didn't have the range for the mission. Sewart had started a rotation to Clark or Naha a few weeks earlier after the Gulf of Tonkin episode. Langley had a squadron at Clark. Either Sewart or Langley had a rotation to the Canal Zone and Pope had a mission in the Congo as well as the squadron in France. Lt. Col. Lindsey from the 777th was the squadron commander and Col. Burgress Gradwell from 322nd Air Division was the mission commander. Col. Clayton Isaccson was the Strike Command commander in Stanleyville and was in charge of the LEO force. If Col. Rush was involved, it was probably with the planning in the Pentagon or at Langley. TAC or somebody came up with a plan to make a massive drop of the 82nd at Stanleyville complete with a B-52 pounding but it was ruled out. The RED DRAGON/DRAGON ROUGE plan was planned by USAFE and the Belgians. Huey Long's crew flew the lead airplane with Col. Gradwell aboard. All of the crews were from the 777th and 778th except for one crew which was from the 776th that was at the end of their rotation. Col. Issacson came over in a TALKING BIRD airplane and that crew may have been from the 314th but I think they were also from the 464th. Sam ----- Original Message ----- From: Alfred Bowman To: TCTAA Members Email Group Cc: Troop Carrier (Topica) ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; Herkybirds Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2008 4:22 PM Subject: Re: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago This was an interesting time altogether. Vietnam was heating up. MAC, which tried to snatch the Dragon Rouge glory, was flat on it's butt, not a lot going for it. MAC was a good year away from any substantial C-141 capability, C-5 was an arguement for the future, the borrowed C-130Es were enroute to TAC, and the Shakies were more than worn and tired. Allbert Gore, Sr was hollering about our involvement in SEA and thus ensuring that a pissed off LBJ would soon announce the immediate closure of Sewart AFB. I was bouncing back and forth from Locheed Ontario CA and Sewart for the Fulton Recovery Test Program, and beginning to feel pretty useless. HQ USAF had directed "minimum contact" between those of us in the program and our colleagues back home at Dyess, Sewart, and an assotment of SAC bases. So I had little to do with the happeneings in the Congo. Actually, there were Sewart crews involved - rote troops in Evreux, and Col Art Rush, 314th Commander was running a good part of the mission. For those who don't know, the Evreux rote squadrons were a Whiz Kids McNamara idea. By rotating TAC Squadrons into Evreux, the costs of housing, schools, medical facilities, and other dependent based operations could be reduced. As to Evreux : The base was a dump. Housing for the rote crews was just a small notch better than open bay barracks. Flying elsewhere was the saving grace. The rotation was contiuous. Squadrons did not arrive in 16 ship formations. Thus, at any given moment, two or even three stateside wings could have crews at Evreux. And some of the support beyond the flight crews worked the same way. Anyway, the point is that other wings and units were indeed involved in Dragon Rouge. Everyone was rightfully proud of what they had done. It was a righteous mission. And, oh yeah, those Belgique Troopers were really cool dudes. If they had not done the job they were sent to do (Job # ! - Secure the airfield), the whole story would have been way different and not something I would comment on with still a great deal of pride; even if I did miss the main show. That was all of us at our best. Ace On 11/22/08, Sam McGowan wrote: A couple of things have occured to me about those events back in 1964. For one thing, the DRAGON ROUGE mission was flown on November 22, 44 years ago today. One thing I wonder about is if the other TAC C-130 wings were sent out after that alert or if it was just the 464th. As I recall, none of the ones at Pope got as far as Africa. Some may not have even left Lajes and Harmon. There were some MATS C-124s involved in a peripheral role. They took some fuel trucks to Ascension and Kamina. There was also a WC-130 that accompanied the mission at least to Ascension. I can't remember how I came to fly a mission as a scanner before I was qualified as a loadmaster, but I know it was because all of the qualified loadmasters had gone out in the alert. There were a couple of instructor pilots and navigators still there and they put together a navigational training mission from Pope to Bermuda and back. Somehow or other somebody picked me to fly as a scanner since no cargo or passengers were being carried and all I had to do was scan the engine start and make the scanners checks during the flight - and heat up the frozen meals. I can't remember if there were any other training flights with other guys going or not, but it seems to me it was the only mission flown from Pope until the other airplanes and crews started coming back. That particular airplane was in periodic maintenence when the alert was called or it would have been gone too. Sam McGowan ----- Original Message ----- From: Sam McGowan To: Herkybirds ; Airlifters ; 464th TCW ; tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org Sent: Friday, November 21, 2008 10:42 PM Subject: [TCTAAmembers] 44 Years Ago Today is November 21. Forty-four years ago I was a young Airman Second Class loadmaster trainee at Pope AFB, NC. A little over a week earlier I had laid awake late on Saturday night listening to the Grand Old Opry on my transistor radio in my room in the aircrew barracks until the wee hours of the morning. I was in the 779th TCS but lived in an 778th room along with Carl Edison and Charles Zelinski. They were both TDY to France and I had the room to myself. I had barely gone to sleep when the alert siren started going off and the telephone down the hall started ringing. I jumped out of bed and into my flight suit and grabbed my mobility bag and headed for the squadron. I don't remember for sure how we got there, but I imagine a bunch of us jumped into Paul Thompson's Ford. Since it was Sunday morning rather than a weekday, we had a pretty good idea the alert was for real even though we'd been having practice alerts in anticipation of the wing's upcoming ORI for some time. As soon as we got to the squadron we started on the callout list. Since we lived in the barracks onbase we were the first to arrive, along with a few younger officers who lived in the BOQ. I was still in student status and was on a crew made up of students. When I called the engineer assigned to our crew, Don Mayer, he accused me of playing a joke on him! Like a lot of other people, he'd stayed late at the club on Saturday night and was barely asleep when I called. It took a couple of calls before I finally convinced him it was for real. During a practice alert once everyone had assembled the wing command post would eventually call down and cancel the alert and everyone would be released. This time was different. Instead of sending everyone home, crews were sent to the flight line and assigned to airplanes. It had become pretty obvious that the wing was really going somewhere this time and most of us had a pretty good idea where. For several weeks the newspapers had been carrying stories about the hostages held by Simba rebels in the Congo, and we assumed the alert had something to do with that. Once the squadron realized the alert was for real, the senior loadmaster, TSgt Virgil Nelson, went to the squadron commander, Lt. Col. Gibney, and asked that the student loadmasters be assigned to crews to go on the mission. Col. Gibney thought about it but decided it was against regulations since no one knew where the crews were going and we weren't designated as combat ready. The regs were clear that only qualified aircrew members designated as combat ready were allowed on combat missions. (As it turned out, some of the other squadron commanders interpreted the regs differently and some of our buddies in the other squadrons did go out with crews with instructor loadmasters.) Those of us who hadn't gone felt sort of left out as every airplane on the base - literally - departed for parts unknown. The only airplanes that didn't go were the ones in maintenance. The flight line was practically deserted, as was the squadron. After a few days the CTU decided to send out a navigational training mission to Bermuda with one of the airplanes that had been in periodic maintenance. There wasn't a single qualified loadmaster left on the base but someone, I don't remember who, decided that since I was on flying status and a qualified C-130 aircraft mechanic, I got fly as scanner. It was the first time I ever went out by myself as part of a flight crew. The alert was on Sunday morning the week prior to Thanksgiving week. The entire wing had departed on a classified mission and no one knew where they had gone. We thought they had headed for Africa to drop the 82nd, but as it turned out, 464th airplanes were scattered all over the Atlantic and Europe, where they went to replace the Pope rotational squadron at Evreux, France which had actually been assigned to a rescue mission. The Pope rote squadron did fly the mission on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I won't go into the details here. If anyone wants to read about it, go to my home page at www.sammcgowan.com/home.html and click on the Airlift History link and you'll find a link to an account of the mission. We found out either later that day or the following morning that our guys had dropped Belgian troops on the airport at Stanleyville and as the word spread around the base, pandemonium broke out. The only time I had seen such excitement had been one night in the base theater when we were watching the first movie to be made about Vietnam - it was actually made in Vietnam - and a formation of C-123s had dropped ARVN troops to rescue the hero. Talk about proud! There is a web site called Talking Proud but they don't even know what the word really means!. That had to have been the most exciting day in troop carrrier history, at least in the post-World War II period. Our very own guys, our friends and instructors and in my case, my roommates, had flown a heroic mission and had saved the lives of people who had been held hostage simply because of the color of their skins. When the newspapers came out the following day, the excitement turned to a dark mood as a general feeling of hatred toward our brothers in MATS emerged. The New York Times and other papers had carried headlines that read "MATS RESCUES HOSTAGES!" Bullcrap! Those airplanes weren't MATS!! They were TAC C-130Es assigned to the 464th Troop Carrier Wing - OUR WING! MATS played no role whatsoever. And in truth, MATS hadn't. Although the airplanes and crews were TDY to 322nd Air Division which had recently transferred to MATS, they had been sent on a mission for USAFE and once they reached Africa, they came under the control of Strike Command, of which Tactical Air Command was one element. Even the 5th APS loadmasters and combat controllers and 322nd AD command personnel who had gone on the mission had switched to Strike Command control for the mission. We were not just mad, we were incensed! We were so incensed that Charlie Watkins, an engineer in the 776th, called up a the Pentagon and blessed out a general. I'm not sure where Charlie was when he made his call. I don't think he was at Pope but was somewhere out on the road and made his call on the AUTOVON line. On Thanksgiving Day we found out that our guys had done it again that morning while we were still sleeping. They had dropped the Belgians at Paulis and effected another rescue. That was just icing on the cake. A few days later the crews that had gone out started coming back in, and we started hearing stories about things that had happened. One was about a friend ours in OMS named Slackerman who had run afoul of the new line chief TAC had sent down to Pope from Lockbourne to straighten out flight line maintenance. The OMS troops called him Be No, because the first thing he had told him was that "there will be no 3-day passes," "there'll be no more time-off," etc. and etc. "until maintenance is straightened out." I don't remember what Slackerman had done or if he had already lost his stripes or if he lost them for what he did, but he came into the open bay barracks where they all staying at a base somewhere, possibly Lajes, and pissed all over Be No Young! Another story was how the guys who flew the mission hadn't had a bath in days and when a thunderstorm came up, they all stripped off their flight suits and fatigues and ran out naked into the rain with bars of soap for the bath they'd had since they left Ascension Island on the way to Africa. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall in the Officers and NCO Clubs at Sewart and Langley to hear the conversations there about what the Pope crews had done. The Sewart and Langley guys were the C-130 vets, but Pope had only had Herks for less than two years. The 464th had kicked off the Vietnam War with their C-123s with assistance from the Sewart C-123 squadron (which transferred to Pope.) Now they had flown a spectacular headline making mission in Africa. Regardless of what folks thought at the other TAC bases - and the MATS bases for that matter - there is only one word to describe the emotion at Pope and it is spelled P-R-O-U-D! Sam McGowan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org --^^--------------------------------------------------------------- This email was sent to: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84A8G.bMkkp5.c2FtbWNn Or send an email to: herkybirds-unsubscribe at topica.com For Topica's complete suite of email marketing solutions visit: http://www.topica.com/?p=TEXFOOTER --^^--------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Tctaamembers mailing list Tctaamembers at troopcarrier.org http://troopcarrier.org/mailman/listinfo/tctaamembers_troopcarrier.org End of Tctaamembers Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8 ****************************************** **************One site has it all. Your email accounts, your social networks, and the things you love. Try the new AOL.com today!(http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212962939x1200825291/aol?redir=http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp %26icid=aolcom40vanity%26ncid=emlcntaolcom00000001) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 30495 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 18250 bytes Desc: not available URL: From sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org Sat Nov 22 21:22:40 2008 From: sammcgowan at troopcarrier.org (Sam McGowan) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2008 21:22:40 -0600 Subject: [TCTAAmembers] Tctaamembers Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That is an interesting account Dick and you did tell me about it before. You're in contact with Tomlinson aren't you? I've not heard from him in awhile but the last I heard he was living in East Tennessee. Thanks for that photo of 801. I remember that airplane well from Pope. Where was it taken? I'd like to get a list of all of the airplanes on DRAGON ROUGE. Act