Draft Notes

Drill Sergeant Isaacs

SSG Grady and Basic Training Prep School


JRTC Poteau OK and AL Dying

Day to day life in Nairyah during Desert Shield

Talk about the desolation in the desert

Adventures with Soju.  Bob and Yong-su and the picnic along the rice paddy canal.


The Seven Club and ricochet alley in Anjong-Ri

Culture Shock and depression and how it affected me in Korea.

JRTC and Getting shot down, the Dead tent, Ending up in Degree Completion

Dolores & Don talk about growing up and both idolizing them for their capabilities and despising them for their limitations and personal faults.

Jim write, sit on it, rewrite, and review this (Don't write it fast)

Grandpa, great to us, cold & demanding to mom, Dad had to perform at a young age and pressure to provide in hard times


LTC Sapeienza

One Mans Guide to overcoming obstacles in everyday life

Orange Pterodactyls 1st class to start in UH-1s as a trainer

Generic Gray the Econo Flight Brother can you spare a dime?

Light Blue
Royal Blue
Dark Blue
Red
Purple
Orange
Maroon
Gray
Green
Brown
Yellow

Shell AHP

Hanchey AHP

Longstreet

Tabernacle

Hooper

Stinson

Runkel

TAC-X

High Bluff

Allen

Louisville (LOUISville pronounced like St Louis) 

Motor Officer
Supply Officer
Arms Room officer

Practice Alert and Crew Rest.


The club scene
Suicide Alley

Nick Grasso

Pam Guido

Pam (other todd)

Captain Cantey & CW2 Schroeder

Germany

Major Roland Haun

CW3 Roy Murdoch

1LT

The Road to Fort Rucker

Our tour in Alaska ended more than a year early when I was selected for the Initial Entry Rotary Wing Aviator Course (IERW) at Fort Rucker, Alabama. I received orders to report 21 April 1987 and with travel time and leave in route, we left Alaska the last week of March. We had been given horror stories about how difficult it was to clear post housing and stories of up to six FINAL inspections before soldiers were allowed to leave. Sometimes these delays took a week or more. These people didn’t know my wife, Anna. When it comes to cleaning, she is the queen of clean. At our appointed time, the housing inspector came and when through our quarters with a precision I had never seen before. In the end, he found three items that needed attention:
• Carbon buildup on one of the electric stove coils
• Dust in the drawer tracks for the stove drawer
• Black scuff marks on the risers on the basement steps
We spent a whole five minutes addressing these (deficiencies) and then were allowed to clear quarters much to the amazement of all our neighbors. (As an additional note, we NEVER failed any final inspection clearing any quarters or apartment we rented, ever.)

Clearing quarters was the last of all the tasks we’d had to complete to clear post and move on to our next assignment. Here are a few of the clearance items we had to finish to leave Alaska:
• The NCO Club (prove you don’t owe anything)
• The cable company (show where bill was paid and equipment returned)
• Central Issue Facility (You turned in all equipment and or paid for missing equipment)
• Housing (Obviously)
• The Bank/Credit union
• The Post Exchange (prove you don’t owe anything)
• The POST Library
• The Hospital/Medical clinics (Hand carry your medical records)
• Transportation (Ship you household goods)
With housing completed, I could sign out on leave and the next morning we loading up the truck and we were southbound toward the lower forty-eight states.

The trip to Alaska had taken just over two weeks and we made stops along the way. We had similar plans for the return trip although have the route was different on our return. Roughly, then route was the same from Anchorage through Dawson Creek via the ALCAN highway. (Anchorage, Delta Junction, Beaver Creek, Whitehorse, Muncho Lake, Fort Nelson to Dawson Creek) From Dawson, we wound head east to Edmonton and then on to the Dakotas and eventually back to Louisville, KY to visit family before arriving at Fort Rucker, Alabama.

The first part of the trip was uneventful with stop in Whitehorse for a late lunch and dinner at a little place caller the Lower Laird River Lodge near the border of the Yukon Territory and British Columbia. We had debated staying at the lodge or trying to make it to Summit Lake and chose to keep going after dinner. At this point, things didn’t go so well. The road was plowed and so was the ditch at roughly a thirty-degree angle, but the road was still snow covered and the edge of the road was hard to define in the darkness. About twelve miles down the road, I drifted just a tad too close to the edge of the road and then next thing I know that thirty-degree graded bank is pulling the truck off the road and we plowed into a snowbank. The truck was undamaged, and for the most part we were only lightly banged up, but we were in a pickle as we couldn’t run the engine with the front end of the truck buried in 5 feet of snow. With no traffic on the road and no one answering the CB radio, and the temperature a balmy negative 20 Fahrenheit, I made the decision to run back to the lodge and get some help. I bundled up the best I could and headed out to the lodge at a 6 mile a minute pace.

While I was using my Alaska Physical Training experience to practical use, my wife Anna, sons David and Kevin and a tuxedo cat named Sigmund Freud stayed in the cab of the truck and tried to stay warm. Good fortune was with us as about 20 minutes after I left, a semi-tractor trailer carrying Canadian mail stopped to check on them. The driver was by himself and didn’t have any equipment to pull the truck out, but he did ask if there was anything he could so and Anna asked him to give me a lift to the lodge. He caught up to me six miles later and saved me another hour or so running in the midnight air in northern British Columbia. He dropped me at the lodge we’d left about an hour earlier and I went inside and asked for assistance. I have to admit, I was overcome with the instantaneous response. We went outside and disconnected the damage travel trailer that was currently hitched to the wrecker and the owner of the lodge, his friend and I all piled in and down the road we flew at 70+ miles an hour. The wrecker had straight headers and I could barely here myself think but then I was too terrified to do much thinking at the speeds this guy was driving on ice at night. I just held on for dear life.

While I had been getting my lift, and getting the wrecker, God was smiling upon us again. Another semi-tractor trailer, this time US Mail, had stopped and checked out our truck to see if Anna needed help. They were team drivers and they had chains and pulled out 1977 F150 super-cab out of the snowbank with ease. One of the drivers was a former Army para-medic and offered medical assistance which my wife declined (She hurt her knee when we climbed out of the truck to access the damage.) The US Mail truck apparently passed us while I was in the lodge getting help or I missed it passing up while in the wrecker (All I remember was hoping I lived through the rescue.) and when we arrived at the crash site we were quite dumbfounded to find the truck up on the road, and the engine idling to keep them all warm. Anna quickly brought us up to date on this miraculous happenstance and we collectively decided it would be a smart idea just to go back to the lodge and call it a night. I carefully turned the truck around in the road and even more carefully drove the twelve miles back to the lodge.

The Lower Laird River Lodge was a very “Rustic” place. Rustic for northern British Columbia. All wood paneling and bench seating in the dining area and no central heat. We paid $40 Canadian ($33 USD) for a room barely large enough for a full-size bed and a couple pieces of furniture. There were about 20 quilts stacked upon the dresser and just enough room at the end of the bed for the cat carrier and the boys to roll out their sleeping bags. There was a community bathroom down the hall that was heated and had running water. So we all cycled through the bathroom and snuggled in for the night in a room that was barely above freezing.

We arose for breakfast and prepared to check out. There was a bit of disagreement as the owner staunchly rejected any payment for the midnight run in the wrecker saying it is just what people do up there. They couldn’t argue when we gave them a 100% tip on breakfast for four (The owner was also the cook and his wife was the waitress.) I also bought a bumper sticker from their little shop that said: “I drove the Alaska Highway. Yes, Damn it, Both ways!” We went outside and check the damage to the truck (Just a broken piece of plastic in the grille) and we headed south toward Fort Nelson and “Civilization”. From the lodge to the next trapping of civilization was a gas station at Muncho Lake where I had planned to get gas anyway.  I was concerned because after the incident, the fuel mileage had become tremendously worse and I wasn’t sure we were going to make it. My one misgiving about that truck was a relatively small 20-gallon fuel tank. We arrived at the gas station with maybe a gallon to spare and while I was topping off the tank I investigated what was going on with the fuel.

It turned out that when I drove into the snow bank, I had crammed the air intake scoop to the air cleaner full of ice and snow. It took me about 15 minutes with a screwdriver I was using as an ice pick to get the scoop cleaned out and the fuel mileage returned to normal. We stopped for lunch in Fort Nelson and continued on our way to Dawson Creek. The majority of the drive, there was no broadcast radio to receive and about seventy miles out of Dawson Creek Anna tuned in a radio station as we had pretty much exhausted out tape collection in the cab. It was fun listening to it as the Disc Jockeys were doing a remote broadcast from a dance club (doing a remote in a remote area???) and it was breaking up the monotony of the drive. There was a Holiday Inn listed in our travel book from AAA and we’d decided that we would reward ourselves with a nice warm room with running water and heat after our experience the night before. Much to our chagrin, when I turned into the parking lot, the place was packed, I had to scrounge for a parking place down the side of the hotel. Anna stayed with the kids while I went inside to investigate.

As it turned out, the night club that the remote was transmitting from was in the hotel and it was a popular night spot. I went to the desk and asked if they had a room available and the clerk very apologetically said yes, but only the Executive Suite and it was $50 Canadian a night. I explained that I’d just paid $40 Canadian for an unheated room the night before and a 2-room suite with a Jacuzzi was just fine with us. The bathroom was a sybaritic delight and I felt fully warm for the first time in 3 days. We filled and drained the Jacuzzi at least three times that evening. To say the least, it was a wonderful evening of just relaxation and rest after having covered 2500 kilometers in the 48-hours.

The next planned stop on the trek was a stopover in Edmonton Alberta where we had planned to spend an entire day roaming around the West Edmonton Mall. We arrived early in the day as it was a mere 585 Kilometer drive and we found a nice motor court to stay in that evening. With plans to be up and out to the mall when it opened, we snuggled down for another relaxing evening. I awoke at six AM answering the call of nature and as I relieved myself I noticed that everything was strangely quiet. Our room was at the back of the motor court but we could still hear traffic when we had gone to bed and I couldn’t hear any from the bathroom. I finished my business and then I peeked out the window to see what was going on and was astounded to see that there was over six inches of snow on the ground and it was still coming down so heavily I could even see the road in front of the motor court. I quickly turned on the television and woke Anna in the process. It was soon evident that a blizzard was sweeping toward the southwest and that we would be in a race to get home ahead of it. Snow accumulations were predicted in feet and we didn’t want to be there to see if the predictions were correct.

We set a world record packing up a cat, two kids, all our luggage we’d brought in and we were checked out and on the road in about fifteen minutes. It was slow going for about forty miles or so as I was making about 40 miles an hour when we suddenly drove out of the snow and hit dry pavement. I routed us to the south east to try and stay as far ahead of the front as possible, we passed Moose Jaw and Regina Saskatchewan and crossed the border into North Dakota where we woke some poor innkeeper at 2 AM in Minot after an 800-mile trek. We were up and out again early in the morning fearing that the front would again catch up with us and the only real stop I can remember along the way is a McDonalds that was located on an elevated platform over the Interstate 294, Hinsdale Tollway Oasis in Chicago.

Once we left Chicago is was the home stretch down Interstate 65 through Gary, Lafayette, Indianapolis, Columbus to Louisville, Kentucky where we finally arrived at my wife’s childhood home in Valley Station. Not to be outdone by all the events of this trip our tuxedo cat, Sigmund Freud, decided that after 4400 miles of riding lose in the cab of the truck he felt the need to climb through the steering wheel of the truck while I was in the middle of a ninety degree turn a quarter mile from our destination. We managed an emergency cat extraction before I veered off the road and Anna held the now extremely distressed cat the last quarter mile to her parents’ home. We were greeted by Anna’s mother who had been quite distraught as there had been reports of families trapped and perished in the blizzard we’d managed to avoid. We hadn’t called because long distance calling was still extremely expensive and international calls were even worse. We were mission complete for this phase and it was time to rest with family and friends for the next few days before we continued our adventure to Fort Rucker, Alabama.

My Arrival in Germany, after getting my Bachelor's Degree

I completed my course work in by Bachelor’s Degree at Austin Peay State University (APSU) in March of 1995. During my last semester, I had been in contact with my assignments branch and I had asked for re-assignment to Korea as that was the general trend in overseas assignments for Chinook pilots at Fort Campbell, so of course, I was given orders to Germany. To paraphrase one of my favorite authors (Robert Heinlein) “The military is run by three departments; The Practical Joke Department, The Surprise Party Department and the Fairy Godmother Department (Run by a GS-5 usually out on sick leave).”

The Practical Joke Department was in rare form not only sending me to Germany but sending a fellow pilot (CW2 Kurt Haldeman) who had almost the exact same qualifications as I did to Korea. Kurt wanted to return to Germany and I wanted to return to Korea. We even discussed a swap with our assignments branch to no avail, so we were sent to opposite ends of the globe. To make matters worse, medial issues with my family meant that they had to stay behind initially while I went ahead to Germany and they would arrive later once everything was coordinated with the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP).

My report date was 20 April 1995 which meant that I’d miss graduation at APSU, not that it had really mattered, but it would have been nice for the wife and family to see. Instead, I arrived in Germany and had the wonderful experience of getting from the Rhein-Main Terminal to Wurzburg and then on to Giebelstadt where my unit was located. Flugplatz Giebelstadt has a historical significance as it was the Messerschmitt 262 (ME-262) jet fighter base for the Germans in World War II. Now it was home to the 5-159 Aviation Regiment and my unit Alpha Company (Big Windy).

As usual, my first day in Germany is nothing but a vague blur as Jet Lag was kicking my butt. I remember getting shown around by my platoon leader to the personnel center in Kitzingen and the main housing area where I would eventually live in Wurzburg at Leighton Barracks. Leighton was the division headquarters for the 1st Infantry and had the Post Exchange, Commissary and important things like Burger King and Popeye’s fried chicken. My day ended at the Gesthof der Lutz in Giebelstadt. This would me my home for the next 16 days.

The Lutz was an interesting place. Hotel, Restaurant, Meat Market and Bowling Alley. I was in a room on the second floor and it was tiny by western standards (3 by 4 meters or so) with an on-suite bathroom. I learned that the owner (Very nice lady) spoke almost no English so conversation was limited with and most the staff. My Platoon Leader and guide (1st Lieutenant ???) suggested I try the Spelunkin Steak “Cave Steak” as it was the signature meal of the Inn. Top Sirloin with caramelized onion, mushrooms, bacon and Hollandaise sauce (Rump steak mit onions, champions, uberbacon und Hollandaise sauce). I must admit, it is still one of my favorite German meals.

I spent the next day in processing at the unit and at Kitzingen. Most of my time at Kitzingen I spent working with a German national named Gunter. Gunter had been married to an American and hated being back in Germany since his divorce (I never got any real details other than he was pretty bitter about the situation.) But Gunter liked Americans and he liked me which made the trial of in processing a bit more tolerable. The evening ended with me getting dropped off at the Lutz. Somewhere during the first two days I was there I must have mentioned to my Lieutenant that I liked to bike ride because he had mentioned that he and two friends were going to Garmish Saturday morning and would I like to come along? Foolishly, I agreed to go.

6 AM Saturday April 22nd the morning (my 16th wedding anniversary) came way too early and the Lieutenant had to rouse me out of my sack as I was sleeping fairly soundly. I quickly dressed and we were out the door and into his BMW and off to his friend’s house. There we met up with two other Lieutenants and their bikes. I began to sense that I was out of my league when I noted that the 3 bikes they had were Cannondales that cost more than I earned in two months, these guys were serious bike riders and I was a piker. But I had been riding a fair amount and I figured that I was in decent shape and I could keep up. With over ten grand of bicycles loaded (2 on the roof carrier and one in the trunk, we piled in and off to Garmish we sped down Autobahn 7. Giebelstadt to Garmish is 350 kilometers (210 miles) and we arrived in less than two hours (yes, we were going 120+ mph most the way due to now speed limit on most of the Autobahn.)

About halfway to our destination it occurred to me that Garmish is in the German Alps and that I was not only going mountain biking with a bunch of semi-pro mountain bikers, I was doing so in some serious mountains. As the Alps came into view my apprehension began to increase and for good reason, these were some serious mountains. Garmish sits in a bowl along the Loisach river surrounded by some of the most beautiful mountains I have ever dreaded riding in. We went to the recreation center where I rented a bike (Much nicer than mine) and we went out on our day’s journey. I kept up fairly well most the morning and then they decided to do this trail climb up a hill that I made a little more than halfway up before determining that I was spent. I told them to go the rest of the way and hoped that I’d be rested enough when they made it back down about 30 minutes later. We finished the ride around three thirty in the afternoon and then had dinner at a restaurant they liked before the race back to Giebelstadt and then up to Wurzburg for the “Fest”.

“Fest” is short for Festival and the Germans have a lot of them. This reminded me of a county fair until we got to the Bier tent. Turns out that biers are served in two liter mugs and Pils is the local beer of choice. (Pils = Pilsner). With Jet Lag, biking to exhaustion and a couple liters of bier later, I was pretty well polluted before I was returned to my room at the inn in Giebelstadt sometime before midnight. When I awoke Sunday morning I had parts of my body hurting that I didn’t even know existed but other than that I was in pretty decent shape as I didn’t drink that much bier as I’m not fond of Pilsner.

I managed to make it down to the restaurant that morning and had coffee and brats for breakfast. The cups were small but the hostess kept them full and there were deli meats and other items so it was pretty nice. I learned later that the coffee was expresso and the 4 cups in the morning would keep me up till about 2AM. I didn’t put that piece of the puzzle together for about a week, so I spent a fair amount of time bouncing off the wall until I had that epiphany.

My biggest challenge during my initial arrival was just getting around. I soon made friends at the unit and that was helpful. CW2 Jose Millares was one who helped me out a lot. He was married to a German National (Doris) and they were very helpful in my getting around and getting myself organized in what for me was a very disorganized place. In all my other remote postings, you could get around on foot or there was public transport provided by the military. There were shuttles between Giebelstadt, Leighton and Kitzingen but usually they were not organized in the order I needed to travel, usually leaving marooned at one location for 4 hours waiting for a return trip. Having friends with a vehicle made things easier.

I think the biggest surprise was the speed that I got housing, and that they let me sign for it before my family arrived. I’d been told it was about a 4 month wait and I expected to be placed in bachelor officer quarters (BAQ) only to learn the BAQ waiting list was 8 months. Then seemingly out of nowhere I was assigned an apartment on the 3rd floor of building 400 at Leighton Barracks. The building had two stairwells and each had six apartments. The most amusing thing was my assignment as stairwell coordinator. Normally, the senior officer in the building and the stairwell he lives in. The senior officer of the other stairwell (this building had 2) is normally the coordinator of the other.

In our case, the Building coordinator was a Captain and the senior officer in his stairwell. The senior officer of the building was a Colonel in my stairwell who was usually deployed so the job was given to the Captain. I was the junior officer in my side of the building and somehow the job landed in my lap. (The Captain told me that I was the only one he’d met who he thought would actually “DO THE JOB” and I believe he was right.) I was undisturbed with this assignment as I’d had a similar tasking in Alaska where I was the housing inspector for two housing areas on Fort Richardson. I knew how to enforce the rules and ask for the Captain’s assistance if I got any flack over my junior rank from senior officers. All in all, it wasn’t much of an issue and I never ran into a problem I couldn’t resolve myself.

Temporary furniture was delivered the day I signed for my quarters and I was even able to connect my little TV to the cable connection and I learned that I already had cable TV with was a bonus I didn’t expect (I’ll talk about that later in another post.) The apartment was on the third floor which was a minor hassle but overall a bonus. The best thing was we had a laundry room in the basement so I could wash my clothes. Once in processing was complete, most of my life was routine and the hardest thing I encountered was the coordination of travel for my family. Finally, in July 1995, I received orders for dependent travel and I flew back to the states to bring the family over for a European adventure.

The "Rock Haul" aka using a Chinook as an aerial dump truck in Korea

While I was stationed in South Korea in the spring of 1990, one of the most memorable missions I have ever flown was a “Rock Haul”. The loads were literally cargo nets of bagged gravel, roughly 20,000 lbs. per load, in a pair of cargo nets. The more interesting part of this story though, is where and why this mission was flown.

The northern border of South Korea roughly along the 38th parallel is the demilitarized zone or DMZ. On each side of the border between the Koreas, roughly 2 kilometers away is a second border fence creating a buffer zone between the countries. Extending south of these southern border fence is a No-Fly zone that was established to prevent accidental overflight of the border with North Korea. There are specific corridors, each 1.5 kilometers wide established in the no-fly zone, to allow for specific mission needs in the area. You have to be certified to fly these zones by an already corridor qualified pilot and all flights in the No-Fly Zone had to be completed between 10 AM and 4 PM and never continue after dark. All of this information was part of the regional training for a US Army pilot in South Korea in 1990 (It may have changed since I left, I don’t know.) The “Rock Haul” was a mission exception to even those restrictions.

The South Koreans were building an observation post (OP) 400 meters south of the southern border fence on top of a mountain ridge that was 7500 ft. Mean Sea Level (MSL). This OP was in the vicinity of the Peace Dam on the Bukhan River. The Peace Dam was built to stave off possible catastrophic flooding should the upstream Imnam Dam in North Korea. South Korea found the Imnam Dam worrisome because if it ever failed it could be disastrous for areas of South Korea downstream. This OP was being built at a point where the Imnam Dam could be observed. This construction was why hauling gravel to the top of the mountain was requested. Due to the remote location and the lack of road infrastructure, a single load of gravel via truck to the site required a 24 hour or more journey in a dump truck. This made the cost of using a Chinook ($7500.00 per hour was the price I was quoted, the Koreans were providing the fuel) economically feasible.

The mission came down to our unit and I was assigned as co-pilot for the mission. Our orders were pretty simple. We were to pick up a South Korean border qualified pilot to ride in our jump seat (Between and behind the pilots) and verify our navigation. (Flight out of the specific parameters of our flight plan could result in our being shot down by South Korean air defense.) He also guided us to a pickup zone near the quarry where South Korean army troops prepared and hooked up the loads. From there we flew 15 kilometers to the top of the ridge and set down our loads on the ridge landing zone (LZ) then returned to the pickup zone for the next load. Every fourth trip we did a pinnacle landing (Rear wheels only on the ridge, front of aircraft at a hover) and recovered the slings used in the previous loads. Refueling and lunch were provided at a South Korean base in the No-Fly Zone about 20 kilometers south of the area we were working.

Pre-flight and our mission brief were completed and we took off from Camp Humphreys just after 9 AM so that we would arrive at the corridor at 10 AM. We landed at the corridor airfield and picked up our passenger and headed to the pickup zone (PZ). The PZ was a large field near the river and I assume there was a quarry nearby although I never saw it. When we arrived, there were two loads already rigged each with two Republic of Korean Army (ROK) privates as hookup men standing on each load and a ROK Army sergeant with a bamboo cane supervising them.

We came to a 10-foot hover about 50 feet behind the loads and we started moving forward. My flight engineer was in the hole calling us forward to hook up the load: “Forward forty, forward thirty, forward twenty, forward ten, Forward hook is hooked, Aft hook is hooked, hookup men are clear.” In real time, this took say thirty seconds or so and we commented that these hookup men were pretty aggressive. (Aggressive = Good) The flight engineer mentioned that one soldier was holding the clevis for the load and it appeared that the soldier supporting him was throwing him at the hook. It appeared they didn’t want to make their sergeant angry and he his demeanor appear "unfriendly" from the cockpit.

With the loads hooked, we brought the helicopter up and the slings came tight, the loads came off the ground at 98% torque and we estimated the loads at slightly over 20,000 lbs. We completed the before takeoff checks and nosed the bird over a bit and accelerated through effective translational lift (ETL) to where we were flying in undisturbed air and began our climb up the mountain. Max climb airspeed was 70 knots and we were climbing over 1500 feet per minute so it took four to five minutes to climb to altitude. We then we turned north heading toward the DMZ. About 400 meters south of the fence we turned west and made our approach to the pinnacle.

Pinnacle approaches with a heavy load are tricky as you have to come to an out of ground effect (OGE) hover then set the load on a very precise spot. You couldn't dither around too long either because you could get into a vortex ring state (where you lose lift due to your own downdraft recirculating and creating an increasingly fast downward airflow to the point where you don’t have enough power available to counteract the flow.) and that is when bad things happen. I tried hard to avoid bad things while flying as they tend to be very unforgiving.

With care and precision, but not wasting any time either, I made the approach and came to a hover over the ridge. We relied on the Flight Engineer (FE) over the intercom because from our location 30 feet forward, all I could see looking down was the side of the mountain about 300 feet below. Once the load was on the ground, I released the slings and nosed the helo over and headed down the mountain and toward the PZ. Descending the mountain was also done at 70 knots but you could descend much faster than we climbed and I was nearly in an auto-rotation as we were descending over 2000 feet per minute.

When we arrived at the PZ the next load was already in position, rigged and our ROK hookup men were again leaning forward wanting to get up hooked up as fast as humanly possible. Their sergeant still had a scowl on his face. The second load was exactly like the first, except we came to a hover again at 98% torque. Since we’d burnt off 900 lbs. of fuel the first trip the meant the second load was about 21,000 lbs. These guys were good, they even accounted for our fuel burn on the trip.

I took turns with the Pilot-in Command (CW4 Bob Johnson) and we made four circuits up and down the mountain before we had to go for fuel. We flew to the ROK airfield in the corridor about 15 kilometers to the south and shutdown while they were fueled the bird. Our guide (Captain Park) took us to the mess hall couple hundred yards away and we had a quick lunch. Our enlisted crew showed up a few minutes later after refuel was complete and we enjoyed a nice meal with our ROK comrades, then it was back to work.

During each approach to the pinnacle, we were painted by North Korean radar and we could see the end of the Imnam Dam in the valley north of the DMZ. This was the most nerve wracking point in the mission because we all had heard stories of North Korea incursions in the DMZ and stories of border skirmishes with both ground troops and aircraft. (My Godfather told me of taking fire at a South Korean observation point in the 1970s and calling in a F4 to bomb the location that was engaging them.) This was the closest I’d ever been to real hostile forces and I was uneasy at best about the proximity of the enemy. Lucky for us, nothing happened, but I didn’t relax until we’d exited the No-Fly zone

We continued with the cycle of four loads up the mountain then back haul the nets and slings until about 3:30 PM. After that last load was placed on the DZ, we hovered over to the pinnacle and landed to recover the slings and nets and they rapidly unloaded the last two nets while I hovered on the pinnacle. Apparently, there the ROK soldiers on the pinnacle had a twin to the PZ ROK sergeant. they took maybe a minute to drag empty the nets and drag them on to the aircraft. We took the express elevator back down the mountain one last time, returned the slings and our guide at the ROK airfield in the corridor before flying out of the No-Fly Zone at about 3:50 PM, mission complete. The flight back to Camp Humphreys was uneventful.

In a little less than six hours we made 14 trips up and down that mountain and carried 331,000 lbs. of cargo. Not a bad day’s work. Not bad at all.

How I went from being a Pilot to a Computer Technician

I guess one of the most asked questions I receive is: “If you were a pilot in the Army, how did you end up a computer technician?” Well, it is kinda a roundabout story in itself so I suppose I should put it on paper. In one of my previous stories I mentioned how I first became interested in computers while on medical hold in flight school (1987). Once I graduated, I was assigned to Korea (1989) and I had little access to a computer there so I busied myself with other interests (like making extra money) during my Korea tour.

From Korea I was assigned to Fort Campbell, KY (1990) and very shortly afterward we deployed to Saudi Arabia and King Fahd International Airport for Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. As with many things in the Army, Desert Shield was a hurry up and wait situation.  The US Army scrambled to get assets into Saudi Arabia and then we waited, and waited, and waited for our engagement with the enemy. One of the directives aviation units had was the conservation of “blade time” (Helicopters have limits on how long they can be flown before major maintenance is performed. In a normal situation, you have all the aircraft in a unit setup so that there is a planned timing of these services spaced out over the year so that only one or two will be out of service for maintenance at one time. We intentionally flew aircraft with the most available time the absolute minimum required and flew ones with little time left into their maintenance window so we could quickly finish the servicing and add that additional 200 hours to the amount of time we were “banking”.) This lead to a lot of downtime for the pilots as we were only flying the minimum needed to maintain our currency.

When you are not flying, you find other things to do and one of them was a friendly Friday night poker game. We didn’t have beer or bacon, but we had cards and we a table of sorts, a shelter half makes a nice table cover and we have plenty of players. During one of these games, I met the assistant S4 (Battalion Supply Officer) CW2 Bill Flynn. Aside from his regular job, scrounging for supplies, Bill was also the Battalion Automation Officer. Bill liked to play cards, and he liked to talk and he especially liked to talk about computers. There not being a large group of computer savvy types in the unit, I was often one to share computer conversations with Bill. I didn’t know a lot, but I wanted to learn and Bill had no problem talking about computers or himself, so we talked quite a bit when we could. Bill seemed to think I was pretty good for a novice and I guess I made an impression upon him about my interest in computing.

I didn’t think much more about our conversations when Desert Shield transitioned to Desert Storm and we got down to business with kicking Iraqi ass. Soon, the war was over, we recovered back to King Fahd and then back to the states April 6, 1991 and immediately went on a 30-day block leave. When we returned from block leave, I helped recover our aircraft from Jacksonville, FL and things slowly started to return to normal. As is usually the case, normality didn’t last very long. Sometime in May, 1991 I received a call at the flight line to come to see the Battalion Commander. This was unexpected to say the least, I tried my best to stay off the radar of everyone and just be a good soldier. What I learned was that CW2 Flynn had been assigned as the Brigade Automation Officer and he had nominated me as his replacement at the Battalion level. I met Bill at Battalion and he explained how I have been nominated and he assured me that anything I didn’t know, I could call him and he would walk me through the issue. At the time, I didn’t even own a computer, but I said I’d give it a try.

There were about 20 or so computers in the Battalion at the time, Mostly Zenith 286 desktops with 12 in monochrome green cathode ray tube (CRT) displays and Okidata dot matrix tractor feed printers. We also had some Xenith 8086 portables. We had one modern computer (a 386) and it was the only system running Windows 3.1, the rest were DOS 3.3. The next day I got three calls to fix computers, and with a few quick calls to Bill I managed to get all three systems working again. Thus, my legacy began.

Bill left the Army in 1992 and started a computer shop (Magic Brain Computers) and that next spring I was able to buy a 386sx from Bill with my tax return and get my first computer. I was becoming good at fixing systems and I was upgrading my personal system with parts left over from upgrading systems for other people. By October 1993 I had a 486DX/66 and I was accepted into the Degree Completion program to spend 18 months getting my Bachelor’s Degree. While on degree completion, I had a lot of downtime when classes were out and Bill’s computer business was thriving so well he needed help. I wanted to learn more and extra cash was always nice so I talked Bill into putting me to work as his bench tech. I did part time work for Bill the rest of my time in Degree completion and ended up with a pretty nice 486DX4/100 system by the time I was done with my degree.

Another thing I did with my spare time was to become a Volunteer Income Tax assistant. The JAG office at Fort Campbell was sponsoring a Tax Assistance office and all you have to do was attend a free IRS seminar on taxes to work there. I figured it was a good way to learn about doing taxes and I could electronically file my taxes for free as a bonus. I can still remember the in briefing for the Tax Office by the JAG Captain running the program. He made the fatal mistake of saying how the software they were using was idiot proof and I took him to the side later and told him that he greatly underestimated the creativity of idiots. Sure enough, on the first day 7 of the 8 computers they were using (Zenith 286s) went down for one reason or another and I was able to resurrect all but 1 that day, then other took some parts a day or two later and they were all back on line. I was getting better at this computer tech stuff.

While getting ready for my next assignment, I sent a letter to my sponsor (CW3 Roy Murdock) in Germany at my next assignment (A/5/159 AVN, Big Windy) and I included my email address on the letterhead (Email was still kinda new and trendy) and on his reply, he let me know that since I was computer savvy enough to have email I would be the automation officer when I arrived (Yay! I was thrilled, NOT!).

In my 18-month hiatus during degree completion, computing had exploded in the army and especially in army aviation. My new unit had 20+ computers at company level and most every major function was computerized in one manner or another. I was now managing army email accounts and working on Windows based systems along with a few Xenith 286 DOS relics that were still some use. I also continued working as an IRS Tax assistant in Germany and I was actually much busier with taxes as there were a lot more issues to work through being assigned overseas and soldiers were much less likely to file their own taxes there.

Next came my back injury and grounding. I was pretty much useless to my unit except as automation officer and that didn’t keep me that busy as I’d been pretty proactive in keeping the systems up to date and maintained. Our Battalion S2 was the automation officer and he was swamped with work so I asked my commander if I could go work a casual assignment with the battalion while waiting for my medical retirement to go though. He agreed and soon I was a busy beaver getting the rest of the battalion’s computers in shape. I was also working as Battalion Tax assistant (I’d done it the year before at Leighton Barracks) and I apparently impressed the Battalion Executive Officer (XO) when I did his taxes and the next thing I know, I’m working as the Assistant Personnel Officer reviewing Officer Evaluation Reports (OERs) for the XO. I worked all these positions until my release in August of 1995 when we returned to the states and Clarksville, TN.

After we found a place to live in Clarksville, it was time to return to the civilian workforce. The wife sent me out in search for work the first Monday after we moved into our rental. I went out to the Miracle Mile of HWY 41A in the north end of Clarksville and started checking out the computer shops for work. I think it was the fourth place I stopped in with my resume that I seemed to get a bite. The manager of the store said they needed people by the owner was at the main store in Hopkinsville, KY (15 miles north) and he called the owner up. I was schedule for an interview at 1 PM, and by 2 PM I was hired, starting in the Hopkinsville Store the next morning. One interesting note, my new employer was blind.

This was my first civilian employment since I’d entered active duty in 1984 and it was pretty daunting to me. My starting pay was $6.00 / hour base pay but I also got a 50% commission on non-warranty computer repairs. That and my temporary disability retirement list (TDRL) pay was enough for us to do fairly well. The TDRL pay and more especially the medical benefits made this job workable and I needed a place to start in my new career in computer repair. During the next two months, we continued through some very rapid changes including the purchase of our first home October 30, 1997. During our early marriage before the Army and while on active duty, buying a house had never been a practical idea. Before the military, I just didn’t have the money and spent several years renting a house from my grandmother at a below market rate in lieu of me helping her out.

Things were looking pretty decent in my new life. Our kids were excelling in school, we were homeowners and I was doing well in my new career having gotten my CompTIA A+ certification (The first certified tech at the store) brought with it a $2.00 / hour raise. I had also become the manager of the shops second store in Oak Grove, KY across the gate from Fort Campbell through a bizarre series of events where I’d been sent to the other store to train under the manager there only to have him abruptly quit a week later leaving me holding the bag so to speak. I worked as the defacto store manager for several weeks before the owner finally decided I was indeed the manager and with my new title also came another $1.00 per hour raise. Then I got my notice from the Army that they had re-evaluated my disability and determined that I qualified for a reduction in my disability rating from 30% to 20% and I would be receiving a disability discharge and lose my TDRL retirement and benefits. While the discharge did come with severance pay losing our medical benefits was quite a blow. I did travel to Fort Sam Houston and I appealed to decision of the Medical Review board, but to no avail. I turned to the Veteran’s Administration (VA) for a disability evaluation and I was lucky to get an initial 30% rating (Later raised to 70%) and this resolved some of our issues, mostly income, and at least medical coverage for myself.

Working in a small computer shop with less than 20 employees was big change form over a decade in the Army. In many ways, it was nice, almost like family, but on the other side of the coin, family can also be quite a burden. I began to realize this when my pay began to be an issue with the owner’s wife, the majority stockholder and bookkeeper. It seemed that every time I started to make about $500 a week, the way my pay was computed changed. At first, it was the elimination of commission and working as an hourly employee only. This turned out to be a minor thing as I was working 50+ hours a week and since most of it was commission work, I never exceed a 40-hour week hourly and thus no overtime. Moving to a straight hourly pay, I started getting 10 plus hours overtime every week and that made up for most of my commission loss. A few months later, after more personnel changes and remodeling of the main store, I was put on a no overtime restriction. This too wasn’t so bad as I was making $11.50 an hour now and still getting a decent paycheck. That along with my VA pay was workable.

I was able to do some interesting things while managing the second store, one was hire a reliable assistant manager whom I’d worked with in the military. Leo had been a technical inspector in one of my units and he had retired from the army and was like me looking for a place he could hone his computer skills. It didn’t take long for us to work out a schedule and I ran the days and he ran the evenings. The I ended up with an interesting offer the spring of 1999. A tech temp labor company whom I’d interviewed with a couple times was looking for some techs for a six-week stint with a major corporation, fifteen dollars an hour forty hours a week. I worked out with Leo to cover my days and I closed the store and made some nice extra cash while I was at it. The temp job went so well, I was offered another two weeks in Dallas doing the same work. So, I took a long overdue vacation and was given a nice hotel and rental car in Dallas for two weeks along with two of the other techs who had done the Nashville portion with me. Leo like me had been registered with the tech temp company and not long after my trip he was offered a job in Nashville and he went on to his IT career. Not much later, a decision was made to close the Oak Grove store and I moved back to the main store. Then came the final straw that made me look for a new employer.

We had two other techs at the company (Jeremy and Kevin) that were salary, single and both pretty good guys. I was told that my hours were being cut to 32 a week by my boss. These guys, both knowing I had a wife and three kids, went to the boss and told him, hay put us back hourly and give Don his 40 hours. The boss took their suggestions put them on the clock again, then hired two, part time techs instead. At this point I could see that I needed to find another source of work. Fate seemed to favor me at this point as I saw on the news where a major corporation was hiring and how to apply via their website. I was almost an hour late for work that day as I feverishly worked to write a resume and file may application on-line. To my great surprise, I got an interview and then to my great dismay I noted that so had about 500 other techs in the Nashville area. Managers from the main office of this company had come in to town for a weekend frenzy of interviews 7 AM to 7 PM Friday Saturday and Sunday. The pre-interview testing had occurred a couple weeks prior and now I was facing the dreaded interview. While working with the Tech Temp company, I’d interviewed for a few positions, and I kept blowing the interviews. Either too bold, or not enough experience one thing after another. It seemed like a moving target that I couldn’t zero in upon. I’m finally in the room with the interviewer and we start going through the process. The first four questions are pretty easy to handle. Talking about how I would deal with this situation or that and I had examples from my current job where I could relate what I would/had done. The final question caught me a bit off guard; “Why do you like to work with the public?” I replied; “I don’t.” and the interviewer nearly fell out of his chair. I then alluded that while I didn’t enjoy interacting with the public, I was willing to do it for the job and that I was pretty good at doing it. I even was bold enough to ask after the interview was over, if I had done well, as I hadn’t been to lucky with interviews lately. He said I did fine.

Just after the fourth of July, I received a call with a job offer starting August second. Full pay and benefits from day one, medical, 401k retirement, life insurance and even stock options. That week at work was fun. We’d had Monday off for the 4th of July holiday and Tuesday I gave three weeks’ notice that I was leaving. Wednesday, the only person with more seniority gave two weeks’ notice and Thursday, the guy hired the same day I started Jeremy, gave a weeks’ notice. The top three techs all were leaving before August first, it was an awesome scene. I even had the pleasure of letting the majority owner know that while her husband didn’t think I could get any better pay somewhere else, I was getting a two dollar an hour raise, four weeks training and full benefits.

Life with a large corporation hasn’t been all bells and whistles, but it has done me well for over seventeen years now. We managed to graduate three sons from the same high school (I told them that after I left the military, they’d be able to stay at the same school through graduation.) That was a promise we kept. They also all graduated from the University of Tennessee and are all gainfully employed. Recently, I relocated to Texas for job opportunities in the corporation and those are looking pretty positive too. Thus, ends the tale of how I became a tech.

Blackhawk recovery. My Last mission at Fort Campbell

My last mission while assigned to A Company, 7th Battalion, 101st Aviation was a recovery mission of a UH-60 Blackhawk Medevac helicopter that had struck power transmission lines at the north edge of the Fort Knox military reservation along the Salt River. The UH-60 had been flying a Night Vision Goggle (NVG) training mission with they struck 2 power lines. One was cut by the wire strike protection device above the windscreen and a second wire was cut by one of the main rotor blades. After the wire contact, the pilot on the controls successfully landed the aircraft under a second set of power lines in a field just off the Ft. Knox reservation.

The landing site was on the north side of the Salt river at the end of Katherine Station Road. I believe the pilot of the UH-60 received a broken wing award for safely landing that aircraft when I’m sure just about every warning light in the cockpit was illuminated. Even with filters, that many warning lights illuminating in the cockpit had to affect his goggle performance. Our job on the mission was to recover the aircraft back to Godman Army Airfield on Fort Knox.

The incident had occurred more than 24 hours prior to our mission assignment as the Army Safety Center accident investigation team had cleared the site before we arrived, this allowed us to remove the aircraft from the crash site. Our aviation support maintenance unit 8th Battalion 101 Aviation, had personnel on site to rig the UH-60 for recovery with a sling. All I had to do was fly to the site and coordinate with them to recover the aircraft.

It was August 1993, (I left the unit shortly afterward to my next assignment as a student at Austin Peay State University) and I was pretty sure that this would be my last mission as Predator 20 (Our commander had changed our call-sign to this aggressive name because he felt the old one was Wimpy, go figure). This mission was both exciting for me and also a bit sad.

We arrived and landed at the site without incident. It was a clear and calm day, with temperatures in the 70’s and almost no wind. Just about as good as you could hope for on this kind of mission. After we shutdown I located the maintenance team leader and we discussed how I wanted to execute the recovery. The big question was: "Leave the main rotor blades on the Blackhawk or take them off?" If we moved the aircraft with blades on we were limited to 40 knots airspeed. Blades  off we could fly 90 knots. Since Godman Army Airfield on Ft, Knox was only 10 miles or so away, I opted for blades on to save time.

Then came the silly question: “Do you want to pick it up where it is at?” Since it was resting underneath a set of high voltage transmission power lines, I said: "No". I suggested they move it about 100 yards away from the power lines where I could safely hook up to it. They dutifully hooked up a tow bar and towed it to the spot I wanted to use as a pickup zone (PZ).

While waiting for the UH-60 to be moved, they used a Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT) tanker to refuel my Chinook (It was on site to defuel the Blackhawk anyway) and my crew and I ate our lunch while the Blackhawk was prepared as an external load. The Blackhawk was rigged with a recovery sling. The sling looped around the 4 main rotor blade roots and a fifth leg looped around the tail section forward of the tail rotor. The main section of the sling was roughly 100 foot and all together the rigging was about 130 feet long.

Once rigged and inspected by my Flight Engineer, the sling was laid out ninety degrees from the Blackhawk to the south of the aircraft and we approached for pickup from the east. The sling was long enough that we could land over the clevis and the Flight Engineer then merely reached down through the hook access in the floor, grabbed the clevis and put it on the center hook. No external hookup man at a hover was required.

We completed the before takeoff checks and slowly brought the Chinook to a hover, then continued up to about 100 feet. I was explaining to my co-pilot that with a heavy load and a long sling, you really didn’t have to worry much about being perfectly centered over the load. As tension was applied to the sling, the aircraft was automatically centered over the load. We chose the westward facing approach for all the correct reasons; the wind was from the west (Less than 5 mph) there was a nice tree line that would give us a nice hover reference for an out of ground effect hover and we wanted to go that way anyway, so less turns were involved.

Picking up a heavy load with a long sling had other considerations that you normally do not deal with, the main one was that you were already in an out of ground effect (OOGE) hover. An out of ground effect hover was when you were at a hover that was higher than half the diameter of your rotor system, (30 feet in a Chinook). When you hovered in ground effect, you had the benefit of the ground giving you extra lift by additional resistance to the downward air flow.

You had to be especially careful when hovering OOGE because you could get in a situation called “Settling with Power” or more correctly called a “Vortex Ring State”. When you hovered OOGE, your rotor down flow could re-circulate causing a down draft and if the downward air speed exceeds 300 feet per minute. You could quickly get into a situation where this downdraft could exceed your power available to counteract it and cause a crash. Because of this, you didn’t loiter in an OOGE hover.

We quickly did a before takeoff check and slowly I nosed the helicopter over and we accelerated to about 40 knots. We climbed to where the load was about 500 feet above the nearest obstacle (The forest) and turned south just before West Point, KY. We flew parallel but not over Highway 31W southward toward Fort Knox and I radioed the tower at Godman Army Airfield (GAAF) that we were on final visual approach with an external load and wanted to go to the maintenance ramp to set down the load.

We were cleared for landing runway 180 and then cleared to the maintenance ramp adjacent to the hangar to set down the crippled Blackhawk. We spent about a minute hovering over the pad while the Blackhawk slowly spun in a circle, my Flight Engineer wanted to set it down properly oriented on the pad facing south and I indulged him. Once down, we hovered to the right and released the clevis over the grass and we were cleared for immediate takeoff to the southeast. There was a no-fly area around the gold vault south of the airfield that we avoided then we made our return flight to Fort Campbell, mission complete.

Life in Korea continued aka:Tales of a geographical bachelor with limited funds.

One of the decisions my wife and I made when I was assigned to an unaccompanied tour to Korea was how we were going to manage our money. Since she was at home with the kids and the majority of our expenses, I got an allowance of $300 a month while the family deserved the rest. This was a mutually devised plan between my wife and I and it worked well for us. She was running a household with three children and I was a geographical bachelor. My housing was free and all I really needed was food and incidentals. If I wanted more, all I had to do was be a bit creative.

There were lots of ways to make easy cash and one of them was doing tasks other people disliked to do. In aviation, you use a lot of maps of the training area and to use these in a cockpit, you have to manage them. The best map management method I ever found was called the Australian Fold. You took the maps, a razor, a ruler, some rubber cement and a lot of patience trimming, folding and glueing maps together in sequential order. In Korea, our operations area covered 53 - 1:50,000 scale maps. These could be made into an Australian fold map book in about 3 hours (if you did it a lot) and I did it a lot, $50 a pop. I think 13 people gave up $50 for maps. To me it was easy money, time was something I had a lot of and an evening after chow in the pilot lounge putting a map book was a no brainer.

My other main source of side income in Korea was covering Staff Duty Officer. You came up for Battalion Staff Duty Officer (SDO) on the duty roster about once every 45 days. Most of the time when tasked with weekday SDO, people didn’t mind the duty much because they got the next day off. Friday and Saturday nights were different. People want to go out and be social, and depending on the night, and the tasked person's desire to do something else, I could get $50 sometimes $100 to cover a weekend SDO.

The Battalion SDO was someone to call for anything related to the battalion after normal duty hours. Rarely, did anything of any substance occur while you were on Staff Duty and for me nothing of any consequence ever happened. The biggest thing I had to deal with was a alarm going off at a secure building. I had the Staff Duty Non-Commissioned Officer (SDNCO, a sergeant) call the point of contact for that building and that person went out and reset the alarm, yawn. SDO duty was just long unending nights of perpetual boredom, but it was profitable boredom.

About Twice a year, you got the honor of Post Staff Duty Officer for Camp Humphreys. For the most part, it was the same as Battalion Staff Duty with one major exception, you had to count the prisoners. Camp Humphreys was the location of the I Corps stockade. At the beginning of your shift, you had to go to the Stockade and verify the prisoner count. Entering the stockade alone was a challenge, as you had to present your ID (which they kept while you were inside) and searched you for contraband before you could enter the building. Hearing that door close and lock behind you was a sobering sound.

The task itself was pretty simple, the Military Police (MP) Officer on duty provided you with the head count sheet, then you walked through and counted while he escorted you. The night I was there, there were six females, all in single cells, and 68 males mostly in dormitories. The prisoners all knew the drill and they all knew the needed to cooperate and get on with their routine. The whole process took less than thirty minutes, although it seemed a lot longer. Once we were finished, I was escorted back to the reception area and I was given back my ID and I left. I never wanted to return there unless I had post staff duty again.

Between money my wife sent me from home and my cash enterprises, I had enough money in Korea to meet my needs and still enjoyed myself as well as I could. One of the things I did to keep myself busy was join a bowling league. There was a small bowling alley on post, seems like it was 8 lanes but it could have been 4, I’m no longer sure. It was big enough and we bowled on Tuesday nights or something (American Bowling Congress and all) and it was fun, at least until I hurt my back.

All of my back-injury incidents have emerged from the most trivial of incidents. In this case, I leaned over a row of seats to high five a teammate coming out of the pit after a strike. It didn’t even seem to be anything major at the time, just a tiny “tweak” in the small of my back. I finished bowling, then as I started the quarter mile or so walk back to the Bachelor Officer Quarters (BOQ). It was at that point that I started to have some severe problems. I’d only gone a couple of hundred yards before I stopped and squat to relieve the pain. This went on every couple hundred feet until I made it back to my room. That night was just a blur of pain, and by 6 AM the next morning I was at sick call and seeing the Mr. Glenn Farris (CW2) the flight surgeon.

I was grounded (Big surprise, I could barely walk, much less fly) and he gave Flexeril and 72-hours quarters. I recall was waking up every eight hours, going to the bathroom, taking my next dose of pain medication and going back to bed for the next two and a half days. The next morning I went back to the flight surgeon and was put back on normal duty status but I was still grounded from flight duties. I was still hurting, just not as severely and I could walk and move with minimal discomfort. A few days later, I went to the gym to work out and I was using the hip abductor exercise machine, while adjusting the tension, I pulled hard on the lever and felt/heard a loud “pop” in my lower back and the pain was gone.

I was medically cleared to fly a couple days later and I didn’t have another back episode until several years later after I was at Fort Campbell. Boredom seemed to trigger me to exercise more during my year in Korea. I was not and never had been any kind of athlete and exercised under duress. But working out was something to do in my free time and that exercise kept me out of hack with the unit about my weight. Meeting my weight had been an issue my entire career and Korea was no different.

Like most pilots, I saw the flight surgeon fairly often for one thing or another and pilots were encouraged to have a good relationship with the flight surgeon (So we would actually go see one and not fret so much about getting grounded for something silly.) I became friends with Glenn and one day I sought him out because my shoulder was bothering me. (I think I strained it lifting something heavy while helping inventory the aviation parts stock) and for whatever reason it was bothering me.

Glenn started examining me and asking questions, and he started pressing around on my right shoulder. As I was talking about something he found the “Sweet Spot” and literally took me to my knees. Damn that hurt! From there he quickly diagnosed me with bursitis and gave me his “Cortisone Cocktail” (a combination of Xylocaine, Lidocaine and Cortisone) injection to remove the discomfort. It seemed to work pretty well and he never to repeat the procedure.

Glenn also introduced me to the local Friday Night poker party. Admission was a bottle of booze and the buy-in was $20. The booze was easy, as a fifth of liquor was about $3.50 the $20 for the buy in was a bit tougher and was part of the reason I had money making enterprises. (I didn’t make money at poker, but I found I could usually make $20 last most the night. Once it was gone, I was done playing poker as I was limited in funds and I didn’t like losing all that much anyway.

I fared better at the slot machines in the Officer’s Club. I limited myself to nickel slots and only one roll of nickels (two dollars a day.) I would play the entire roll and anything in the tray over two dollars went back into my pocket and I continued with that process until I either won another two dollars or I ran out of nickels and stopped playing that day. I think overall, I came out slightly ahead as I won $25 on a single play at least twice during my tour.

One of the nicest things about Camp Humphreys was it had a CH-47D flight simulator on post. During my in-processing, I had been introduced to the simulator supervisor MW4 Sandor Kelemen (aka the Raving Hungarian) Sandor (Pronounced SHANDOOR) was quite an imposing man and when we walked in his office he was on the phone giving some poor soul hell (hence his nickname) and once off the phone he quickly apologized to us about his rancor. It didn’t take us long to develop a friendship that we maintained for decades.

During the CH-47D grounding, I saw Sandor a lot as I had to maintain my currency in the simulator. I never got the opportunity to fly with him in an actual aircraft as our one mission (a fire bucket mission in an CH-47C) was called off as we were running up the aircraft. I’d often stop by and visit Sandor as we always had good conversations.

One of my first missions as a CH-47C qualified pilot resulted in my first entry of FlightFax published by the U. S. Army Safety Center. While flying a mission to a field site in a riverbed (Almost all our Korea field sites were a riverbed or a rice patty in winter) I was flying with CW2 Mark Marinelli as my Pilot-in-Command when we blew over a cinder block wall and small flagpole placing a load in the riverbed next to a school. It was published in FlightFax (Military publication of aircraft incidents) November 1989 as a Class C incident. “C-Series” – As aircraft approached a confined area with external load, it’s rotor wash blew down a small flagpole and damaged a cinder block wall around a tennis court.
Mark also had the prestige of being one of my TAC officers while I was in the Warrant Officer Entry Course (WOEC) a couple years earlier. It is a small world some days.

Finishing flight school and my assignment to Korea

The military assignment process is best described by a quote from the book "Glory Road" by Robert Heinlein:

"Regardless of Table of Organization (T. O.), all military bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department and a Fairy Godmother department. The first two process most matters as the third is very small, the Fairy Godmother Department is one elderly female GS-5 clerk usually out on sick leave."

When we were nearing the end of our training as Warrant Officer Candidates in flight school (The first week of September 1988) and it was pretty much assured that we would all graduate. One of the final administrative tasks was posting our aircraft assignments. The 40 Warrant Officer Candidates in my platoon were allocated aircraft for advanced training based on; "The needs of the Army". We could list our preference, but if the Army didn’t allocate that aircraft to your graduating class, well, sorry. Since I was the Admin Officer of our class, I was slightly more informed of who got what because I was keeping track of the class rankings. Tradition held that candidates who were in the top ten percent of the class ranking were given their pick of available aircraft. That meant the top four candidates were allowed to choose their aircraft assignment from the list, the rest were assigned by our flight school cadre.

My Class (Class 88-09) was assigned the following advanced aircraft allocation:

AH-64 (Apache) – 6

CH-47D (Chinook) – 3

UH-60 (Blackhawk) – 2

AH-1 (Cobra) – 12

The remaining 17 WOCs were either assigned to UH1s or OH58s. The top four took aircraft in this order:

1. Apache
2. Chinook (Jim Herzog)
3. Blackhawk
4. Blackhawk (Paul Guido)

After the top four made their picks, then aircraft were assigned by class standing. the next five in the class ranking were assigned AH64 Apaches. At this point, the “Fairy Godmother Department" smiled upon me. For whatever reason, at this point, the cadre decided to look and see who the next person was with CH47 as their top choice and wouldn’t you know it #11 Donald P. Kempf. So the next group of assignments looked like this:

10. Cobra (Todd Pryby)
11. Chinook (Donald Kempf)
12.-22. AH-1 Cobra

Then they looked at who had CH47 as top choice in the remaining group and #25 Kim Young was the final selection of the "Fairy Godmother Department".

My biggest concern (Getting assigned a combat aircraft) had been narrowly avoided. About this time, the “Surprise Party Department" came along with duty station assignments and after my advanced aircraft transition I was assigned to the 1st AG Replacement Detachment Regiment 40 APO SF 96301 (Korea) with a final assignment to Bravo Company, 2-501st Aviation Regiment (Innkeepers) Camp Humphreys, South Korea. They embellished this surprise with my reporting date of May 29, 1989 (Memorial Day) which also assured my departure from Korea on May 29, 1990 (the day after Memorial Day).

Flight School graduation was November 2, 1988 and my CH-47D Advanced Qualification Course (AQC) class 89-5 didn’t start until February 9, 1989 which left me over 90 days assigned to Delta Company, 4th Aviation Training Battalion (ATB) as a “casual officer” where I flew NOE covership (Prima) for other training pilots. The “Practical Joke Department" tasking was Christmas Day 1988.

All casual officers were listed on the Duty Roster (DA Form 6) for the daily Staff Duty Officer (SDO) for the battalion. On weekdays, the SDO started at 5PM until relieved in the morning usually about 7 AM. On weekends and holidays, it was a 7 AM to 7 AM tour. I’d been in the military a while and I’d expected the duty roster to be managed by regulation, one of which was that once the roster was posted, you couldn’t submit for leave on any day you were assigned duty.

I was happy as the roster showed that I didn't have holiday duty and this allowed me to bank some leave time. This was a bad tactical decision on my part because as soon as the roster was posted, roughly 40 people who did not have a leave already submitted, requested leave for Christmas. The "Practical Joke Department" intervened and suddenly I ended up stuck with Staff Duty on Christmas Day. You live and learn.

Once I completed my CH47 AQC, I moved my family back to my boyhood home in Sellersburg, Indiana where my Father and Step-Mother (Jackie) had an upholstery shop. Jackie had been an upholsterer for decades and she was the fastest person I’d ever seen with a sewing machine.

Her speed and skill were tested the Saturday night before I left for Korea when we recovered 57 stools for a hospital in Louisville KY. The stools had to be recovered overnight so that they could be disinfected before 6 AM when they would be needed in the hospital. Jackie had a partner, Clifford, who picked up the stools about 20 at a time and transported them to the shop. My Father, my wife and I disassembled the stools, Jackie would use the old cover as a pattern, cut and sewed the new cover and then we stretched and stapled the new Naugahyde covers in place.

As we completed the first batch of stools, Clifford brought in the next in and the process restarted. My wife spent a lot of her time keeping the coffee and sandwiches flowing and I learned the hard way that stretching Naugahyde all night made your hands and fingers quite sore. Clifford left to return the last 17 stools about 4:30 AM. I can remember sitting on the plane to Korea with my fingers stiff and sore until they finally uncurled somewhere across the Pacific Ocean.

I flew from Louisville, KY to Oakland, CA, where I was loaded on to the World Airways Civil Reserve Air Fleet 747 "Freedom Bird" and flew a roundabout route to Korea by way of Anchorage, AK, Yakota Air Base, Japan to Osan Air Base in South Korea. From there I was bussed to U. S. Army Garrison at Yongsan, Seoul South Korea for in processing. I spent two days in processing then I was bussed again back past Osan to Camp Humphreys, my duty station. The bus to Yongsan had been an Army bus, the trip to Camp Humphreys was another story.

This was a Korean regular service passenger bus and I was again feeling very isolated as I was the only non-Korean on the bus. The trip took over two hours to drive 60 miles and a good part of the trip was the bus stopping (it seemed every corner) to let someone on or off. Passengers weren’t limited to people either as there was at least one laying hen was among us. This bus was similar in design to a greyhound and was designed for longer distance travel. (I later become familiar with the local city type buses that we used to go from town to town in the area.) On this bus, having a seat was the norm, the city buses not so much. Finally, after seeing much more of the local countryside than I really wanted to see, I was dropped off at Camp Humphreys.

Camp Humphreys was a fairly small installation by US Standards but was larger than most U. S. Army bases simple due to the airfield on the installation. The actual garrison portion of the base was quite small and you could easily walk across it in ten minutes. It was also a haphazard mix of Korean War Quonset huts and newer structures. The commissary was new and very small (roughly the size of a Seven/Eleven) there were NCO and Officer Clubs and even a Burger King. One thing that was in short supply during the summer was officer housing.

I was initially billeted in the Royal Hotel in Anjong-Ri just outside the gate to the camp. I stayed in Room 501 on the 4th floor (Koreans feel about 4 like Americans feel about 13 and avoid its use whenever possible, so no 4th floor, not room number with 4 in it either). There were many interesting quirks staying in that hotel, from the non-potable water in the bathroom.You left your key on the counter at the front desk going to work and picked it up again when you returned. All the keys had a long rectangular plastic key tag (almost a foot long) and they were lined up according to room number on the counter. You just picked it up on your way in to your room.

I couldn’t afford a car, so I quickly purchased a 10-speed bike from a departing soldier and I had transportation. In the mornings, I rode in for PT, then showered in the barracks and ate breakfast and lunch on base. I rode back to the hotel in town in the evenings and then I carried that damn bicycle up four flights of stairs to the fifth floor (no fours remember) to lock it up in my room. Unattended items lasted only a few moments, and bicycle theft was a big issue in the town, so up the stairs it went.

Most of my evening meals were eaten in town due to the distance to the dining facility and that is where I first met Warrant Officer 1 (WO1) Steve Perkins. Like me, he was billeted temporarily in town and we ended up roommates in the Bachelor Officer Quarters (BOQ). Steve and I started meeting for dinner in the ‘Ville” since we were both living in hotels. Steve was more internationally experienced than I and was already familiar with the local food scene, he showed me around. When it came to food, I was pretty lame at my meal selection (I didn’t eat anything hot or spicy) I suppose that goes back to the German roots of my family and traditional Indiana American style eating habits. Steve, not so much, he was game for just about anything, so he’d already tried most menu items.

We’d eaten together two or three times when I was about to order “Chicken Fried Rice” for the third night in a row and Steve asked if that was all I ever was going to eat. I replied that I didn’t see anything else on the menu that didn’t look spicy and sniveled how I didn’t eat hot foods. Steve suggested the “Chinese Egg Roll” dinner and for some stupid reason, I agreed. We talked and drank ice cold Pepsi in 16-ounce glass bottles while we waited and soon dinner arrived. The presentation was wonderful. Two large and savory beef eggs rolls, sliced and turned up on edge. Twenty or so total bite sized pieces with fried rice on the side.

I took the first bite, and this explosion of flavor hit me, delicious! Pleasantly surprised, I took another bite and repeated the experience. It wasn’t until the third bite, that the surprise hit me. This dish had a subtle but quiet present back-end heat that built on every bite. I started to feel flushed and I began to sweat and then I noticed Steve laughing at me as I grabbed that Pepsi and chugged it trying to put out the fire. I sure I used some choice expletives at Steve but I also couldn’t stop eating this delicious dish. I drank 3 Pepsis in the process, but I ate it all while Steve continued to make fun of me.

The next day, I ordered the same meal, while Steve at Daejibulgogi (Marinated Pork in red pepper sauce served on s sizzling platter with white rice & the hottest item on the menu). I was prepared for the heat (Mild in my now learned opinion, but hot to me then) and again I reveled in the wonderful flavors. It was through meals with Steve that I expanded my pallet and learned to be much more adventurous with my food choices. If nothing else, I will always be thankful to Steve for getting me to eat better food.

Lucky for me, Steve and I got along pretty well. We were finally given a reprieve from hotel living and moved to temporary quarters in the “Bat Cave”. The bat case was a converted Korea War temporary barracks (Same design as the WWII temporary barracks) and at best it was sad, but it was post and a slight improvement over the hotel (Potable water for one). Steve and I moved into permanent quarters (rooms 215 & 216) sometime in July.

The permanent rooms were essentially dorm sized with an adjoining kitchenette and bathroom. The first thing we tackled in that room was the shower ceiling, which was black with mildew. Steve had quite the confrontation with the maid (Ojuma! You no clean! I pay you to clean!) over how filthy the bathroom had been. We were paying her a weekly fee and we even provided cleaning materials she couldn’t get, like bleach. It took some time but ee got her to understand what our minimum standard of clean actually meant and she started cleaning to that standard and had few problems afterward.

When I arrived at B-2-501 AVN, I was surprised the unit didn’t have any CH-47D Chinooks, they had CH-47Cs instead. The Army was still fielding the CH-47D and they just finished the deployment of D-Models with A Company. The next shipment of 3 CH-47Ds included one for Alpha Company and two for Bravo. I was given my local area orientation flight in aircraft 70-15018 (CH-47C) on June 19, 1989 then I didn’t fly again until our new CH-47Ds had been assembled and tested.

Not flying didn’t mean I wasn’t busy. I was the Supply Officer, Arms Room Officer and Petroleum Oils and Lubricants (POL) Officer, so I got to keep busy trying to ensure that we had everything in order. I finally got to fly a CH-47D in Korea four times in mid-July 1989 and then the D-models were grounded worldwide for a design flaw in the combining transmission oil cooling fan drive shaft. This kept me grounded through the end of August as my leadership figured it would be a waste training me to fly a C-Model since we were turning them in at a rate of about three a month. That changed when September approached and they were running out of C-Model rated co-pilots due to their leaving at the end of their one-year tours.

I was given the world’s fastest C-Model qualification on a field training exercise August 25th and I flew C-Models until the 21st of December after the D-model aircraft were modified and the grounding was lifted. The grounding had been lifted in November, but I took a mid-tour leave and an aircraft crash while I was on leave had prevented my D-Model currency training. Here is an abbreviated incident report synopsis:

"On 4 December 1989, while ascending a draw to cross a ridge line, CH-47D aircraft 88-00092 went inadvertently into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC). The copilot on the controls established the initial emergency procedure. Moments later, visual contact was established with the ridge line. Due to close proximity of the hill mass, collision was unavoidable. The pilot-in-command and copilot initiated a rapid deceleration and power application in an attempt to avoid impact. The aircraft struck in a near level attitude with the 44-degree slope of the terrain. Rotor blade contact with trees and the ground caused the aircraft to roll inverted and slide down the ridge approximately 120 feet. There were no fatalities or serious injuries. The 5 crew members and 14 passengers were rescued by Air Force and Army MEDEVAC helicopters. There was no post-crash fire. SGT Bo Crumpler was the Flight Engineer (FE). CW4 Robert Johnson was the Pilot-in-Command"

Part of the delay in my training was my involvement in sorting out the mess the crash had created. I had a pile of TA-50 field equipment that went floor to ceiling in one corner of the supply room. The supply sergeant and I had to figure out who owned what and get it returned, exchange damaged items and do the accounting for damages and loss. Somehow the one bad thing that did not happen is all the weapons were accounted for an undamaged. The crashed aircraft itself was recovered using another CH-47D and the airframe was shipped back to Olathe, KS, where I believe it was scrapped. I had to document the equipment losses with Reports of Survey, four total. One for the Aircraft, one for the TA-50 equipment, one for the communications security equipment on board and one for the Conex Containers they were carrying as those were Air Force Property. December was a busy month for me that year. The joys of paperwork.

101st Airborne was sent to provide relief in Florida after Hurricane Andrew

On August 24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck southern Florida with extreme devastation. Three days later, President Bush committed U. S. Army support for the storm ravaged state. On September 2, the 101^st Airborne Division deployed ten CH-47D Chinook helicopters to Opa-Locka Airport to assist in the relief efforts. I was a part of this mission and in many ways, it helped change my life.

7^th Battalion, 101^st Aviation Regiment (Liftmasters) sent a task force of Chinooks comprised of elements from all three companies in the battalion so that each unit had enough personnel and equipment to continue their mission as part of the rapid deployment force (RDF). This was important as we had just returned from the Gulf War the year prior and international events were heavy on everyone’s minds. We arrived at the Opa-Locka airport to a near chaos situation with the situation just barely being managed as food and equipment were arriving faster than the support effort could be coordinated. A hangar at the east side of the airfield had been converted into a makeshift warehouse and we were billeted in a vacant shop area in the back corner of the hangar.

The first thing we noticed was that there wasn’t an immediate need for the Chinooks as no cargo had been allocated for shipment and the areas of need for delivery were not yet identified. This left us with the uncomfortable situation of having rushed to the scene and waiting for something to do. We were watching all these volunteers arriving and working from dawn to dusk unloading trucks, sorting supplies and trying to bring some organization to everything while we were just sitting there with nothing to do. After correctly determining that it might be a while before we were actively involved as a unit, I inquired if we could assist in the volunteer effort on our free time with our command leadership and they said we could do what we wanted when we were not working on a mission.

I had noticed that there was a forklift that was being under-utilized and I asked one of the volunteer coordinators if I could assist as a forklift operator. (in one of my previous careers I had been a forklift operator/warehouseman.) I was given a resounding yes and started my contribution to the volunteer effort. I would guess that there were in excess of 100 volunteers unloading and sorting supplies, and there was a steady stream of semi tractor-trailers with all kinds of cargo. Almost all the trucks were owner-operators who volunteered their trucks and donated their time and fuel to haul the loads from all points in the USA. It was incredibly moving to see what people were doing to try any help others they didn’t know.

For the next couple of days, I spent the majority of my waking hours on the forklift loading and unloading trucks. The rest of the task force equally spent a lot of time in the volunteer effort alongside the local people coming in to work the warehouse. Two of the coordinators, a local banker and his wife, a school teacher, did something incredible for the task force, they asked us to come over to their home for lunch, use the pool and to wash all our clothing. They had noticed that while we had cots and food and a place to sleep with facilities, there was no laundry facility available to us on the airport. So they took twelve of us to their home (in Miami Lakes, a very posh Miami neighborhood) where there seemed to be an endless buffet and a wonderfully refreshing pool for us to swim in. I wish I could recall the names, maybe one day I will and edit this to give them full credit. This lady washed and dried clothes while hosting a dozen soldiers for at least eight consecutive hours after a week of 12-hour shifts at the hangar sorting supplies. She and her husband were magnificent and it was a gesture that I will always remember.

The task force was in Opa-Locka for 26 days and during that time, a fellow pilot, Kevin Ballard and I went to the Miami school where this same lady taught fifth grade. It was a show and tell and we wore our flight suits and survival vests and other flight gear. The children were quite excited with the visit and the teacher treated us to lunch at a local restaurant before we returned to the flight line.

I’d say it took the better part of a week for sufficient coordination was made to utilize our equipment. Some of the first missions included flying to Homestead Air Force Base (AFB) which was close to ground zero as far as hurricane damage went. The destruction was epic and I clearly remember a hangar that had been stripped down to the I-beam superstructure and the remains of a C-130 inside that wasn't evacuated before the storm hit. We flew essential items, food, water, diapers and the like into the town of Homestead at a makeshift Landing Zone (LZ) near what had been their downtown. Only a few buildings survived in Homestead as the majority of homes in the area were either mobile homes or modular homes and neither tolerated the wrath of the storm. The damage resembled tornado damage only the area of destruction was miles wide instead of a few hundred yards. I saw less damage in war-torn Sarajevo, it was overwhelming.

There were also some poor decisions made in the relief effort. Some of these were made in the choice of cargo that was selected for us to haul from the fairgrounds in West Palm Beach to Homestead. For this mission, we had several Chinooks (At least 3 and it could have been up to 5) and we were making turns from the fairgrounds to a LZ in Homestead, pretty regular Chinook work hauling external and internal loads. External loads were preferred because they allowed us to make the most use of blade time and personnel. Apparently, there was insufficient heavy cargo to assemble to make legitimate external loads or whoever was coordinating the loads did not understand the physics of external loads. This is how I ended up with a center hook load that consisted of three pallets of things like diapers, and Cheetos. The loads were properly wrapped in Army pallet wraps designed for these hauls but the loads were so light that while flying we had to restrict the airspeed of this load to about 45 knots. Our route was along the west side of the Dade county urban areas along railroad tracks that bordered the swamps. As we flew south with this light load, the load started to come apart in the air. I left a glittery trail of Cheetos bags and diapers along the swamp. At least the gators there had something to amuse them. Due to this unintended distribution of snacks, I was dubbed the “Cheeto Bandito” by my fellow pilots.

I celebrated my thirty-fourth birthday in Opa-Locka which in itself was no big deal. I think I had a Tuna Casserole MRE for my birthday dinner. One of the things you had to do as an Army pilot was an annual evaluation. This required me to have a proficiency check ride as a Night Vision Goggle Pilot-in-Command and an Instrument evaluation with the Instrument Flight Examiner (IFE) who was part of our task force. So pilot training was worked into real missions when possible and other training missions were flown when required. 

I had to complete requirement in my birth month and it was unclear if we would leave Florida before the month ended. Since I needed the eval, we planned an instrument training flight to West Palm Beach and back. We had to fly outside of the Miami area as parts of the instrument navigation aides were still out of commission so we flew to where operational equipment was available. We encountered some difficulties as the commercial air traffic into West Palm Beach was heavy do to limits on flights to Miami. 

One of the requirements for the instrument check ride is a precision instrument approach. We had selected the Instrument Landing System (ILS) runway 09 approach to West Palm Beach. At first we had trouble getting Air Traffic Control (ATC) to work us in, this required us to wait about thirty minutes, so we completed other training tasks such as a holding pattern until we were finally cleared for an approach at the airport.  I established our approach on the ILS glide slope at the standard approach speed of 90 knots for a helicopter. We were almost immediately requested to speed up the approach due to traffic spacing and I had the pleasure of completing the approach at 135 knots (normal speed was 90 knots). It wasn’t pretty and it kept me busy computing the changes in the approach plan but I managed to get the job done and we landed without incident.

One of the benefits of taking an instrument check ride, is you normally get a good meal. It seems the IFE’s make a practice of flying to different airfields and while refueling with the fixed base operator (FBO) they borrow the FBO loaner car and get something to eat at a local restaurant. Getting the car is usually pretty easy when the FBO is refueling a Chinook and 800 gallons of Jet-A gives them a nice profit. When they make the IFE happy, he comes back with more business. We had lunch a local restaurant that had the unique distinction of all the waitresses were modeling lingerie. I didn’t mind, but mostly I was interested in a good meal but a free floor show never hurt.

I think the best side benefit of the deployment to Opa-Locka was getting to know some of my fellow pilots a bit better. Two of the pilots, Kevin Ballard, and Dan Davidson, had brought guitars with them. Kevin played bass and Dan lead. When things were slow, it wasn’t unusual to see then jamming together, even though they had no amps. They were playing country music and while not a big country fan, I did enjoy the distraction. In 1992, we didn’t have cell phones and the internet, and most of us didn’t bring much of any electronics to the field or deployment. I learned that Kevin and Dan were trying to put a band together, they had another guitar player in the unit (Jim Housand) who wasn’t there and they needed a drummer. I had played drums in high school and was fair to middling at best but I offered my services and they agreed to let me have a shot. Out of boredom and wanting to practice a bit, I whittled a pair of drumsticks from pallet splinters and began to sit in with Dan and Kevin. This was the start of the “Red River Band” named after a local river near Fort Campbell and we soon changed the band name to something more fitting: “A Wing and A Prayer.”

We recovered back to Fort Campbell September 28th and it wasn’t but a few days later that our band started practicing in a recreation center at Fort Campbell. We practiced there because they had drums we could use, but I soon purchased a set at a local pawn shop for $400 and we practiced in Kevin’s garage after that. We played about five paying gigs at local bars such as Maria’s Ranch, The Hole and Western Sound. I earned enough at make up the money that I paid for the drums. As with many things, this band was a fleeting moment in an ever-changing life. I left for Degree Completion in the autumn of 1993, Kevin joined the 160^th Special Operations Task Force and Jim became an Instructor Pilot then left he service not tool long after I left Fort Campbell for Germany.

There are two legacy items I took away from my deployment for Hurricane Andrew

• My Humanitarian Service Medal (the medal I am most proud of earning) 
• The experience of having played in “A Wing and A Prayer” 

I finally played some music like I’d always wanted to play, even if it did lean to rock and these guys were country.

Part of how this narrative came to be was Jim looking me up on the Internet in early 2016, thanks Jim.