OBSOLETE? I THINK NOT!

I came across this picture a few weeks ago while visiting the VQ-1 Squadron website. This sporty little plane is an A-3 Skywarrior (more specifically it's an EA-3B) and I flew a lot of missions in this baby.

For the record, this isn't a picture of a plane just like one I flew, but the actual one - PR-07. It wasn't my favorite one, but it was in the top 3 or 4. The planes were supplied and flown by the guys from VQ-1, but the brains of the operation were the two linguists supplied by the Naval Communications Station - Philippines (Detatchment Bravo). I sat in the cockpit along with the pilot and navigator - and I loved it! I logged 2008 hours, and probably 1500 of them were in A-3's. Our unit provided tacical support to the Air Force and Navy units in Vietnam.

The vast majority of my flights I shared with my roommate, D J Johnson, or our good friend, Hal "Hurricane" Gamble, two of the funniest guys I've ever known. The pilots were a great group of guys that managed to get us back on the ground every morning with a minimum of wild stories to tell and all of our body parts still attached. We also had an Evaluator/Analyst in the back end. A few of them could actually find their butts with both hands if you turned the lights out....but only a few.

Learning Vietnamese was an interesting job - it took almost two years in a variety of different schools - language school at the Defense Lanugauge Institute East Coast, Voice Intercept Officer school in west Texas, Survival school in California, more training in the Phillippines, water survival school in Okinawa and probably another one or two that I've missed. Then 30 days on the USS Chicago (CG11), a truly unique experience - not necessarily a good one! That was followed by three days on the USS America waiting for a flight back to the Philippines and finally a trip to Vietnam to put my skills to work.

Fifteen months of making the World safe for Democracy, and then a return to the World. It was good to be home again.