"Hang on to your memories, they're all that's left you." Simon and Garfunkel advised my generation. I have come to believe that we are the living memory of our times. When we are gone they are gone. We are all that is left of that time.
It is the profound intensity of these experiences that can consume a part of you to distraction or madness. Thankfully I was able to find the balance between the past and present. I can mention so many of my generation that are still haunted to this day. This very night the terror is on them as I sit up (11:58pm) and write this. It will be on them as they try to have a life in the midst of daylight tomorrow. And not just my generation.
Anyone who has not experienced these things has no idea of the price of their freedom. The tales you are told were bought at a price more dear than you can imagine. And though my cost was at a bargain compared to so many others, I find myself thankful that I am part of the brotherhood.
I understand the Ubon had the highest pilot loss rate of any base in the theater. Perhaps that is incorrect. It is a stat. from the now mothballed Aussie site 'RAAF UBON'. Does anyone have stats an this?
According to this site they arrived in '63 to an old Jap concrete runway, lived in tents and policed the runway for vipers before the aircraft landed. They left in '68 and were legend as a hell raising bunch when I got there in '69. Us 'Yanks' got there a bit later and were envied for our wood floored air conditioned tents. By '69 we were living in concrete block barracks, eating in 24 hr. a day air-conditioned chow halls, catered to by house boys for cleaning the barracks and our clothes and polishing our shoes. No air-conditioning there though! We weren't soft!
It is strange now to think how commonplace it all became to us. An unusual event that took on the commonplace was when the VC blew-up our fuel dump and we had to store JP-4 aviation fuel in huge bladders perpendicular along side the main thoroughfare near the repair shops. They laid like so many gigantic black sausages engorged with tens of thousands of gallons of potential liquid hell had they been detonated by mortar or saboteur.
You adjust your perception of the commonplace relative to what is going on around you. So you stopped smoking around that area.
It was THE most exciting time of our lives! It was the most Terrifying time of our lives! It was exciting to be a part of such an enterprise. I loved the smell of JP4 exhausting out the ass end of an F-4 and feeling my insides vibrate as the pilot engaged the afterburner to initiate take off. WOW!!!
http://www.aviationexplorer.com/f-4_phantom_afterburner_takeoff.htm
Having been dragooned into the Augmentee Guard detail when I arrived on station, I spent many nights dealing with the terror of guarding the base perimeter without an idea what was going on else where on the base. Only that I was where I was and no one would pass as long as I lived. It sounds corny in the context of the present but I was fully committed to kill or be killed. We guards were what stood between the aircraft and personnel on the base and those little bastards out there in the dark. I can't hope to convey the terror of that proposition or its long echos. I so vividly recall walking the flight line to fix aircraft and accepting as the natural course of my surroundings the canisters of napalm hanging from the bomb racks of aircraft, gobs of napalm had oozed from around the fill caps from the JP4 fuel reacting with the jelling agent. What I remember was the smell wasn't very pleasant! Every where you looked bombs filled trailers or hung from racks on the aircraft, along with rocket pods, 20mm. cannons, air to air missles, oozing napalm canisters. The effect is nearly unimaginable until you actually not just see it but live it, touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it. These were our instruments of war and we gave them life, our life! We were War. It was such a high!
Remember,this was all done in temperatures in the high nineties or low hundreds.(Part of the year it cooled to the eighties!) Now that is oxymoronic! Low Hundreds! " It was hot. Damn hot. It was so damn hot ..." [ And there laid those black rubber sausages full of JP4 that was trucked in from the ports in southern Thailand and pumped into them.] So hot the aircraft skins raised burns on you from touching them, as though you'd touched a just finished egg frypan. It was like being on the set of a gigantic movie production. Only it wasn't a movie! It was a production though. We were producing WAR!
And with every contraption and contrivance the minds of the time could concieve. I ran some of the first setups for Paveway laser guided bombs and 'TV' bombs. Now you watch them being deployed on your nightly news broadcast. But in 1969 Ubon, this stuff was straight from the 'Skunk Works' and we were the operational test base. It was really neat to be working on this stuff! Our operations in Cambodia and Laos needed some precision bomb deployment.(Oops! Ignore that man at the key board. We were never in Cambodia. Laos??? Laos who ... Where? Absurd!) AS I WAS SAYING....
The accounts I've heard of the tv bombs gliding in to the mouths of caves and moments later the top or side of the hill erupting are just the sort of thing we now watch on the nightly news!
Now you see it! Now you don't!!!
One of the most unnerving events, though, took place when the ejection seat night duty airman was less than diligent in setting a rocket seat pak. That night, preoccupied with going to the movie, he carelessly reset the rocket pack in the cockpit and launched himself through the inch thick plexiglass canopy piroueted high over the aircraft and struck the horizontal stabilizer on the way down.. IT was a tragic death that heightened our sense of mortality. Each of us sat on those 14G rocket seat packs every time we got into a cockpit, we depended on those guys to have them safed with flagged lockout pins. No one else was ever launched while I was there. But we always got in the cockpit with a bit more apprehension after that event. We lived with an acute awareness of the imminent potential danger we were in as we moved about the flight line and worked on the various aircraft, and just lived our daily lives.
As I recall there were 4 Squadrons of F4D s; plus C130 Gunships; the occasional Air America C-47 and misc other Company planes; C-123's, two engine precursor of the C-130 used as 105 Howlitzer, gatling gun and 40mm cannon platforms, not to forget the 10,000lb pallet bombs pushed out the back to clear LZ's ; (Why did we need LZ's in Laos?--We were Not in Laos!--- Okay, Then why did we need LZ's in Laos?---AAHH.. Urban Renewal! yeah! Urban Renewal!); various choppers; WW2 prop planes for ground support tasks, OV10 'Birddog' observation planes and stray aircraft from all over the theater, 6,000 military personnel.... and Ubon was an R&R base for Vietnam personnel........and it all went on at once;24hrs a day, 7days a week; the carousing, the aircraft launching, aircraft returning, aircraft guarding, aircraft being repaired, rearmed, and relaunched and the drinking and the carousing and occasionally sleep. O' What a time...... what a time.......
........ A Non-stop Full Tilt Boogey!!!!!!!!!!!WOW.
It is the profound intensity of these experiences that can consume a part of you to distraction or madness. Thankfully I was able to find the balance between the past and present. I can mention so many of my generation that are still haunted to this day. This very night the terror is on them as I sit up (11:58pm) and write this. It will be on them as they try to have a life in the midst of daylight tomorrow. And not just my generation.
Anyone who has not experienced these things has no idea of the price of their freedom. The tales you are told were bought at a price more dear than you can imagine. And though my cost was at a bargain compared to so many others, I find myself thankful that I am part of the brotherhood.
I understand the Ubon had the highest pilot loss rate of any base in the theater. Perhaps that is incorrect. It is a stat. from the now mothballed Aussie site 'RAAF UBON'. Does anyone have stats an this?
According to this site they arrived in '63 to an old Jap concrete runway, lived in tents and policed the runway for vipers before the aircraft landed. They left in '68 and were legend as a hell raising bunch when I got there in '69. Us 'Yanks' got there a bit later and were envied for our wood floored air conditioned tents. By '69 we were living in concrete block barracks, eating in 24 hr. a day air-conditioned chow halls, catered to by house boys for cleaning the barracks and our clothes and polishing our shoes. No air-conditioning there though! We weren't soft!
It is strange now to think how commonplace it all became to us. An unusual event that took on the commonplace was when the VC blew-up our fuel dump and we had to store JP-4 aviation fuel in huge bladders perpendicular along side the main thoroughfare near the repair shops. They laid like so many gigantic black sausages engorged with tens of thousands of gallons of potential liquid hell had they been detonated by mortar or saboteur.
You adjust your perception of the commonplace relative to what is going on around you. So you stopped smoking around that area.
It was THE most exciting time of our lives! It was the most Terrifying time of our lives! It was exciting to be a part of such an enterprise. I loved the smell of JP4 exhausting out the ass end of an F-4 and feeling my insides vibrate as the pilot engaged the afterburner to initiate take off. WOW!!!
http://www.aviationexplorer.com/f-4_phantom_afterburner_takeoff.htm
Having been dragooned into the Augmentee Guard detail when I arrived on station, I spent many nights dealing with the terror of guarding the base perimeter without an idea what was going on else where on the base. Only that I was where I was and no one would pass as long as I lived. It sounds corny in the context of the present but I was fully committed to kill or be killed. We guards were what stood between the aircraft and personnel on the base and those little bastards out there in the dark. I can't hope to convey the terror of that proposition or its long echos. I so vividly recall walking the flight line to fix aircraft and accepting as the natural course of my surroundings the canisters of napalm hanging from the bomb racks of aircraft, gobs of napalm had oozed from around the fill caps from the JP4 fuel reacting with the jelling agent. What I remember was the smell wasn't very pleasant! Every where you looked bombs filled trailers or hung from racks on the aircraft, along with rocket pods, 20mm. cannons, air to air missles, oozing napalm canisters. The effect is nearly unimaginable until you actually not just see it but live it, touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it. These were our instruments of war and we gave them life, our life! We were War. It was such a high!
Remember,this was all done in temperatures in the high nineties or low hundreds.(Part of the year it cooled to the eighties!) Now that is oxymoronic! Low Hundreds! " It was hot. Damn hot. It was so damn hot ..." [ And there laid those black rubber sausages full of JP4 that was trucked in from the ports in southern Thailand and pumped into them.] So hot the aircraft skins raised burns on you from touching them, as though you'd touched a just finished egg frypan. It was like being on the set of a gigantic movie production. Only it wasn't a movie! It was a production though. We were producing WAR!
And with every contraption and contrivance the minds of the time could concieve. I ran some of the first setups for Paveway laser guided bombs and 'TV' bombs. Now you watch them being deployed on your nightly news broadcast. But in 1969 Ubon, this stuff was straight from the 'Skunk Works' and we were the operational test base. It was really neat to be working on this stuff! Our operations in Cambodia and Laos needed some precision bomb deployment.(Oops! Ignore that man at the key board. We were never in Cambodia. Laos??? Laos who ... Where? Absurd!) AS I WAS SAYING....
The accounts I've heard of the tv bombs gliding in to the mouths of caves and moments later the top or side of the hill erupting are just the sort of thing we now watch on the nightly news!
Now you see it! Now you don't!!!
One of the most unnerving events, though, took place when the ejection seat night duty airman was less than diligent in setting a rocket seat pak. That night, preoccupied with going to the movie, he carelessly reset the rocket pack in the cockpit and launched himself through the inch thick plexiglass canopy piroueted high over the aircraft and struck the horizontal stabilizer on the way down.. IT was a tragic death that heightened our sense of mortality. Each of us sat on those 14G rocket seat packs every time we got into a cockpit, we depended on those guys to have them safed with flagged lockout pins. No one else was ever launched while I was there. But we always got in the cockpit with a bit more apprehension after that event. We lived with an acute awareness of the imminent potential danger we were in as we moved about the flight line and worked on the various aircraft, and just lived our daily lives.
As I recall there were 4 Squadrons of F4D s; plus C130 Gunships; the occasional Air America C-47 and misc other Company planes; C-123's, two engine precursor of the C-130 used as 105 Howlitzer, gatling gun and 40mm cannon platforms, not to forget the 10,000lb pallet bombs pushed out the back to clear LZ's ; (Why did we need LZ's in Laos?--We were Not in Laos!--- Okay, Then why did we need LZ's in Laos?---AAHH.. Urban Renewal! yeah! Urban Renewal!); various choppers; WW2 prop planes for ground support tasks, OV10 'Birddog' observation planes and stray aircraft from all over the theater, 6,000 military personnel.... and Ubon was an R&R base for Vietnam personnel........and it all went on at once;24hrs a day, 7days a week; the carousing, the aircraft launching, aircraft returning, aircraft guarding, aircraft being repaired, rearmed, and relaunched and the drinking and the carousing and occasionally sleep. O' What a time...... what a time.......
........ A Non-stop Full Tilt Boogey!!!!!!!!!!!WOW.
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