The family had been in Panama for four years, our best assignment, I got to fly all over South and Central America Nelly had a maid and the children went swimming nearly every day. We owned a 20 ft sail boat, yeah, I worked on it one weekend and my partner used it the next but eventually I got it fixed up enough that we could each use it for a weekend before it needed some attention. My parents had come to visit for several months and I can only say we all had a great time. Then my orders came I was to go back to B-57s and join the 8th Tactical Bomb Sq. at Phan Rang, Vietnam.

We sold our extra car got ready to move and after a lot of paperwork drove back to the US. We spent the first night at the Vulcan in western Panama, the next night in San Jose, Costa Rico, I bought two new tires for the VW there, parts of the Pan American highway were gravel and my old tires did not hold up. In Nicagura we stayed about 50 miles south of Manuaga so we could visit the volcano the next morning. We went up to the rim and looked in, yeah, it was boiling and spewing a bit, we did not know how much until later when we washed our faces, we were covered with ash, fine yes but still we were very dirty. We drove through Manuaga but there was nothing there that beckoned us to stay another day so it was off to Mrs (Ma) Kellys place in San Salvador, I had been there before because she had such good rapport with the embassy, her place was the air crew crash pad, she treated us like family. And this occasion was no different. She had emigrated there during one of the hard times of Irish history and had survived her husband by many years and still maintained a really nice bed and breakfast Inn that provided for her survival. A very tenacious lady, for sure. Guatamala City was next, we checked into the same hotel I was in when there had been an earth quake that scared us all, it is an eerie feeling. But this time there was no earth quake and we went on into Mexico, we spent the night in Oaxca. No, I did not go to the airport to check on the Curtiss Condor II that was rotting there. Some how I knew that nothing had changed. We had to go into Mexico City to get on the road to Acapulco where we spent several days playing on the beach, it was a special time for the family. We spent a day touring Mexico city, went on to Monterrey, Laredo and on to Don and Shirley Shirkey’s place near New Braunfels, Texas. Don and I solved the worlds problems, he being a flaming liberal and me being conservative made for some lively discussions. After a couple of days we were off again headed to the Clearwater, Florida area where Nelly would be close enough to my parents but not too close while I was gone. We found a nice duplex near the school and with good access to shopping, even the VW dealer was only a few blocks away. Once the family was settled I went on to retrain in the B-57 at Hill AFB, UT. Nails Nelson checked me out and I got back into the swing of things pretty quickly, we had a long weekend coming up and I asked Nelly if she would fly out and we would go up to Yellowstone National park. She did and we visited Jackson Hole, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone and Star valley in western Wyoming. That area is famous for their excellent Swiss cheese. Yes, we had a very nice long weekend. I gave Nelly a big hug and a kiss and she went back to Florida and I went to Fairchild AFB for escape and evasion school and then to McChord AFB for air lift to Clark AB in the Philippines. I got to have lunch with one of my air police buddies in Coeur D’Alene one day and spent a night with Sally Payne and her husband that had been our neighbors at Hanscom Field, they lived in nearby Tacoma. At Clark we attended jungle survival school and did plenty of bombing, rocket and gunnery practice, but nothing can prepare one for the real life experience doing it all at night with live ordinance. We had all had been warned “don’t ever do any aerobatic maneuvers at night because you may become disoriented”, we could not have done our job without violating that one rule and there were many others we had to bend.

You taught yourself how to dive bomb at night, you just kept trying
different things until you found something that worked for you, in my
case I would fly with the target on either side but just in view over the
canopy rail and when it was in the right position I would pull up and
roll toward the target, as the nose came down toward the target it would
be in the top of the canopy, letting the nose fall trough and rolling out
so the target was high on the wind shield, dive angle was about 70
degrees at that point but shallowed a bit as you got serious about
zeroing in, throttles were at idle and the speed brakes out so you had
just a little more time for the fine adjustments, but at about 400 knots
things happened pretty fast, and at pickle altitude, you let one go. A
four “G” pull out followed, as the nose came up through the horizon the
speed brakes came in and the power came up and I would dip a wing and watch the explosion but only with one eye open, protecting your night vision was very important. I flew with the cockpit lights off and the
gun sight on its dimmest position. One night I hit a truck dead on and when I looked at the explosion I saw a rear axle with wheels attached come up out of the fire ball, that scene has replayed in my dreams many times it is in slow motion I don’t know how the mind works but I suspect that when the adrenalin is running strong the mind captures things in fast motion but when played back under less stressful conditions every thing reverts to slow motion.

One more war story, many of our missions took us to the area around Tchepone, Laos a transshipping point on the Ho Chi Min Trail. One of the enemy gunners had learned that he could shoot in the opposite direction and we would leave him alone, we called him “the kid on the karst” one night the word was out that they had run in a nine level gunner to replace him and we ganged up on the new gunner and simply took him out. I flew high at about 30,000 ft, above most of the antiaircraft effective range and
turned on all my ligthts, he shot at me ineffectively but exposed himself
to others that were laying in wait, they silenced that gun quickly, a week or so later the word was “the kid on the karst is back”.

One moon lit night a FAC asked me to take out a gun battery that was
giving him a bad time, it was next to a river bed and I dropped down to
1300 ft agl, because of the cloud cover, I set up for a level bomb run,
armed up and started my pass, he spotted me too soon for any surprise and I was committed so I just dropped my string of bombs at close intervals while tracking directly over the gun site, thank goodness he missed and one of my bombs stopped the shooting. I remember that as the most scary moments of my Vietnam flying. Originally the B57 had only one communication radio, early airplanes had the ARC-27 and later airplanes had the ARC-34, neither one was very reliable. So by the time I returned to fly the B-57 for Vietnam they had added a redundant comm radio and mounted an ARC-27 control box in the lower left corner of the glare shield, the canopy switch was just below it, sure enough, one night, pulling off the target on the last pass I moved my hand from the throttles to change the frequency and we were suddenly flying a convertible, it was not too bad for me but Charley Macco my navigator lost all the classified stuff we carried and he spent some time setting all that straight. We landed at a base in NE Thailand and they brought another canopy a few days later and we flew home. John Glen my senator at that time asked me about the canopy incident and I showed him the finger that had bumped the switch, and yes we put one of those fool proof switch guards over the switches after that. Yeah, ever so slowly I was making the B-57 a safer airplane to fly, but progress was so slow.

We had two attacks on the base while I was there, the first was detected
by the guard dogs, bless them, and the attack was quickly quelled, the
bad guys melted back into the country side, of course Puff the Magic
Dragon that was in the area hosed down the area and they found a bunch of bodys the nest morning where the attack had been mounted. The second was a rocket and mortor attack that one of the missles hit an armed F-100 right in the cockpit in a revetment right in front of the control tower. I was one of the part time command post controllers at that time so I headed to the command post to see if I could be any help, on my way there the first bomb went off and it scared the dickens out of me, as I was going toward the trouble, I watched the tower personal depart via the escape rope rather than use the stairs, the fire fighters had several
trucks pouring water on the stricken airplane and the airplane that was
in the opposing revetment that had also been set afire by the bomb
detonating. It turned out that one airplane was destroyed but the one
that was damaged by the blast of the bomb going off in the opposing
revetment eventually was repaired and continued flying missions.

Northeast Airlines where known as the Yellow Birds, the 8th Tactical Bomb Sq. were also known as Yellow Birds, my call sign was Yellow Bird 41. so Northeast Airlines sent a good will mission to Phan Rang AB and we had more real Florida oranges than we could eat for a while, the whole crew from Northeast airlines must have been especially selected because they fit in so well and we really enjoyed each other for the few days that they were there. I remember Sally Eames because she was so enthusiastic about the whole idea. Any how we remain friends and she played a role in my son Robin getting a class assignment with Delta Airlines. Thanks Sally.

We had several bad accidents at Phan Rang one of our B-57’s collided with C-123 FAC I don”t remember if there were any survivors. Don Paxton and Charlie Macco hit the side of a mountain, Charlie had been my regular GIB (Guy in the Back). One air plane had one elevator and most of the stab on one side shot off, they were lucky. One crew lost the hydraulic system and had to belly land at one of the bases north of us. I had an over heat warning shortly after take off one night I did not yet have minimum control speed so I just eased the power back very slowly and reduced the climb angle to get to minimum control speed as quickly as I could, the light went out when the rpm got down to about 85%, I pushed the power back up every once and a while to check the over heat detectors, they kept working and I never shut the engine down. I dumped the bomb load at the designated dump site and burned off fuel and landed after a couple of hours. It turned out there was a five inch by 1/2 inch tear drop shaped hole in the combustion chamber, at high power the escaping hot gas would lift the thermal blanket and heat up the heat
detector just behind. Within a month one of the crews had similar indications but in their case the tail pipe had come loose, by the time they landed they had scorched the wing so badly that a depot crew had to change out the whole wing. The replacement wing came from 503 the B-57 that ran me off the end of the runway at ABQ when I had a total brake failure. That was something to see, one of those big flying cranes with a huge crate hanging below. It seems to me that the repair men from the Depot only took a month or so to remove the scorched wing and put the replacement wing on. The hardest part was getting the wing attach pins out of the trunions of the wing carry through structure at the side of the fuselage, they drilled long ways through the bushings to weaken them so they would collapse and release the pins. They reamed every thing put in new bushings and put every thing back together. The air plane flew fine.

Several of us got orders to the 4713th ECM squadron at Stewart AFB near Newburg, NY. Nelly and the kids had moved out of the duplex and had gone to a friends motel on Clearwater Beach every one had deep tans. I had been awake about 30 hours, I had been on two different C-141’s and an airliner getting there. Nelly had the fixings for martinis so I had a couple of big ones and went to bed. When I woke after lunch the next day the motel room was empty, Nelly and the kids were out soaking up sun on the beach, I was hungry so we all walked up the beach to a restaurant and had a late lunch and we started the process of getting to know each other again. In a few days we bid my parents adieu and headed up the road to Newburg, NY. They put us up In temporary quarters but there was a reluctance about assigning us base housing…

It was finally disclosed that the AF was closing Stewart and our squadron was being reassigned to Otis AFB on Cape Cod. Nelly, the kids and I were advanced party at Otis so we got the pick of quarters and I did all I
could for those that were to follow. I sent them maps of the base, marked the houses that were available and let each family choose which suited their desires, they tended to group themselves by age groups or rank. Our commander Lt Col Steadman was just down the hill from us and
the OPS officer was just around the corner, the Witts, the Widlers and
the Ramses were around the corner and our back yards touched, several of the Lt’s and their wives were up the hill from Nelly and I, on another
street, then another group mostly Lt Cols, chose a different area with
different style houses, it was interesting how we segregated ourselves. Every thing fell into place and we ended up having a really good
squadron. Cape Cod was a fun place except on summer week ends when the traffic jams made it impossible to get around. Nelly and I finally got to un pack the Piano that we had bought through the Navy Bx in Panama. The kids played with it a bit and even took lessons for a while, the piano teacher moved away and the lessons stopped. Later Robin took some more lessons and played “Fer de Lis” flawlessly at his recital. I played with it some a bit later and could do a pretty good imitation of the “Pink panther” at one time. I really admire those that have musical talent. It is clearly a gift, one that has eluded me. But I can’t complain I have been gifted in other ways.

I do not know what the problem was between Col Steadman and his Chief of Maintenance but it was serious enough that Col Steadman asked me if I would go to maintenance officer school so I could be his replacement, that was right down my alley. Yeah, I was a pretty good pilot but I had been fixing things longer than I had been flying and it seemed to me to be the right road to take, so I said yes, he was pleased and I was off to Chanute AFB for a cram course on Aircraft maintenance, six weeks later I got back and faced a hostile group of Junior Maintenance officers that felt that they had been pushed down by a fly guy that had not come up through the ranks as they had. I gave each of them a chance to go to any AF school that they might want to attend and added that I would give each of them a shining recommendation, or they could stick around and I could give them OER’s that would not hurt them come promotion time. Most stayed and each one got ER’s with endorsements that certainly helped toward promotion. Garry Bengimin preferred to go to the 21st Air Division as staff. I never learned how well he did there.

We had a very active R/C model club at Otis I ran the store for them and
kept an inventory of several hundred dollars worth of model supplies on hand for the members, you know balsa wood, covering material, epoxy glue, propellers, spinners, that sort of stuff, I would special order all the
expensive stuff and we had a tax exempt letter so we did not have to
charge sales tax as long as all sales were conducted “on base” I never
violated that letter. It was too presious. I could buy at wholesale from the many suppliers and since I was an unpaid voluunteer, I would only mark things up five percent, proceeds going to the club store and at times we had almost $1000 in the bank. One of our members Mr Frye was the ATT teletype tech for all of Cape Cod including Otis, he would fly anytime he had a few free minutes and was one our best customers. Col Harris replaced Lt Col Steadman and he became an ardent supporter, Jack Bracebridge was a model flyer and he helped build several R/C kit
systems that I had ordered from Royal Electronics, that’s where Robin
learned to flow solder so well.

Col Harris had several model racing planes and he taught me how to call the turns at the far end of the race course, we made a pretty good team. He was one of the few pilots that could use the rudder to get the model off the ground and moving quickly toward the first pylon, the others tended to let the torque control the early part of the race and they lost a lot of ground by not getting their plane leveled out sooner, we would be around the first pylon before some of them got their model under control, yeah it helped being a real pilot. We had fun.

I wish I could have seen it but at one of the races we went to a racer described an R/C racing class that used a particular 36 inch wing span model and a Cox .049 engine with only elevator and aileron control on their racers, they would hand launch them and then race. They said it was the most racing fun they had. I don’t doubt it.

I did not know it at the time but Otis was a serious toxic waste site, the Bomarc interceptor missile that been quartered on the north side of the base some years before used an exotic but very toxic fuel, they had apparently spilled enough that the ground water in that area became
tainted. All I knew was that the AF wanted to close Otis and our squadron was to move to Westover AFB in central Massachussetts, so we started to make plans for the move and this is a good place to end this saga and I will pick it a little later. Have a nice labor day… Bob