SwiftVets.com

[Me#1You#10]

I, like you, am relatively well-informed as to Kerry's debilitating character flaws so remarkably demonstrated by SVPT in their 2004 campaign. Much less so as to his track record during his senate (small s) years.

While I would have thought (and hoped) that the SVPT campaign alone would have been enough to render this Kerry nomination unthinkable, that is just not the case...at least not for now.

Fortunately, those with a much more broad perspective are now commencing a re-examination of his 30 years of senatorial malperformance...and it ain't pretty...

[LewWaters]

The more I hear come out about Kerry, the more I feel he should be sitting in Leavenworth still.

Has he ever taken the right side of anything?

I still amazed how our lamestream media slurred the good names of the Swift Vets to protect Kerry.
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Clark County Conservative

[Me#1You#10]

[LewWaters]

That is one of the more laughable articles I've seen on lurch.

Two combat tours? Docking one day in Da Nang and 4 months in Swift Boats is not quite what I classify as "Two Tours."

Equally laughable is "discarding some of his combat medals at a protest at the Capitol" as if he just them aside somewhere.
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Clark County Conservative

[TEWSPilot]

Ah, yes, Da Nang -- my short stint with the 362nd TEWS before they kicked us out of South Vietnam so we could fly our missions from Thailand (Thanks, Kerry and the Democrats). An OV-10 member of the FACNET Yahoo group that I belong to and I had an exchange the other day regarding Da Nang. Let me share the entertaining parts...Kerry missed all of these types of fun and exciting times when he made his one docking I supposed.

Ribbing from the FAC:

Danang, early autumn 1972. The 362nd had a very small building a few feet south, but well outside of and separate from the 20th TASS building. Our wing commander was then an F-4 jock and a U.S. Naval academy graduate. The morning wing standup briefings almost always included mention of an electric goon straying from the runway, during takeoff, then completing their departure somewhere out in the grass between the two runways at Danang. The wing commander came up with a potential solution: "Why don't we have them start their takeoffs out in the grass, then perhaps they'll manage to get the bird back on the runway by the end of their roll?"

Rocket attacks at Danang were daily and nightly events. Tower would close the runway after dawn so that I could drive out in a jeep and carefully pick up and remove all the sharp shards of rocket FOD residue from the full lengths of the duty runways. A new lieutenant had arrived and signed into the 362nd. After two days on base he was put on the duty roster and became the 362nd permanent night duty officer. Had to sit there at his metal desk inside the TEWS building all night and answer the telephone if it rang. He brought along a fairly thick novel to read, settled into his single duty chair, read his book, and waited for his telephone to ring. A slow night. About 2230 that night the wing command post duty officer announced "Rockets, Rockets, Rockets, Da Nang is under attack" over the Da Nang-wide PA system known as "Giant Voice". About a minute later the sounds of several rocket detonations became evident on our east side of the base.

After the "All-Clear" was sounded over the PA, I walked over to the TEWS building from the 20th TASS building to see how your new guy was doing. During the rocket attack a dud rocket had come through the roof of the TEWS building. No detonation. But the rocket carried with it substantial physical rotational energy. It bored a very neat round hole through the roof, then went through a major wood beam supporting that roof. The rocket continued downward, drilled a hole through the right, top side of his large, steel safe containing classified material. Then drilled through the concrete pad floor of the building leaving a curved hole into the earth below. Looking, using a flashlight I couldn't see down far enough to see the end of that hole. The duty officer was emotionally a bit shaken by all this, but was not physically injured. So we talked about normal life at Danang for a while. Never saw that lieutenant again.

And it had never dawned on me that there was more than our single Baron bird who flew north-south orbits near the center of the PDJ every day in a company aircraft. We'd occasionally talk if a triple-A threat popped up which I thought he needed to be warned about. The troops in the back of the Baron did very good work. I never got to directly read any of their source material but the AF Intel guys we had at Long Tieng would occasionally drop significant items from that Baron's listening collection into our post mission debriefing conversations. Like, "The NVA artillery commander on the PDJ sent a message, today, to Hanoi asking that two pencils and one can of shrimp paste be sent to him. Conjunctivitis (Pink Eye) is a raging epidemic among my troops."

Incredibly useful stuff to a FAC! Conjunctivitis doesn't cause much personal damage to people beyond eye irritation for about a week. But conjunctivitis is one of the most quickly contagious and fast spreading infections on our planet. So I just waited to see where in Vientiane Pink Eye popped up. Only took four days. The very first person downtown to show up with that eye infection was our senior AF Intel officer who never went into the field, for any reason, and always worked inside the Air Attaché building. Obviously, someone who had been quite recently in the company of the NVA on the PDJ was in close physical contact with our Intel officer. Probably a lady. That simple fact told me precisely what I needed to know about what not to include within my daily Intel debriefings in order to protect my planned activities on the PDJ

My response:

Ah, the good old days. I never managed to join the "garden club", maybe my time in C-119s helped me learn how to keep two engine recips going straight. I still hold the record for backing a C-119 closest to the fence at Sky Harbor in Phoenix: 3 feet 8 inches from the wire. I tried to teach my cubs not to over-control, and one of the copilots I trained made two-star before he retired. When we left to go to NKP, that hole in the floor was still filled with concrete, and they never replaced the safe...looked like a butter cube that had the corner scraped off by a hot knife... and I guess that dud is there in the ground to this day.

Some of those intel reports were a bit too detailed in minutia to be of value to anyone but the Flight Surgeon and National Enquirer I suppose. The ones that located a MIG base and a SAM site South of the DMZ must have been in another stack.

I shared a cubicle for about 15 years at Boeing in Wichita with Charles K. "Chuck" Nelson (OV-10 pilot, but I don't know his call sign.) He played football at OU under the legendary Bud Wilkerson, and he flew out of several bases including Danang. He passed away two years ago from prostate cancer. He was also a world class sport shooter. I watched him make two of his four hole-in-ones during the years when we were still playing golf before he got too sick to continue. I only have one so far. He had five tours, including F-100s, OV-10s, and B-52s. He led the second cell on the first night of Linebacker II. It was one of his wingmen who got hit by a couple of SAMs but made it back just across the Mekong at NKP before it started breaking up and the crew bailed out. Our Jollys picked up all but the Radar Nav, who landed so close to the road that he flagged down the Baht bus and rode it in through the front gate.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, there were some good memories in spite of the bad ones. I went through C-47 school with Sonny Primm and I flew with Sonny and Bob Bernhardt, the two copilots on Baron 52. I flew with the Nav, Art Bolinger, several times, too. I knew all of the backenders from some of the flights we made, but I didn't fly with the Pilot, George Spitz unless it might have been on an early orientation ride since we were both Pilots and I was an Instructor. Sonny was an LSU grad, and we went through C-47 school in Alexandria, LA, so he was happy to be in Cajun country. Our wives were both pregnant during the training, but his wife wasn't far enough along for him to get a delay in departing when we graduated, so he went on with the class when we graduated, and I got a 30 day delay. Our son was born two weeks after we graduated. Sonny's wife was six months along when he was killed. I corresponded with family members of several of the crew and tried to give them "a day in the life of" type info about our missions so they might find closure and have some memories of what their loved one had done during a mission. I hope it gave them closure; I really believe it did.

Here is the memorial program from the services at NKP:
http://www.ec47.com/memcover.htm#top

Enough rambling. Merry Christmas (beats looking for tanks on the Ho Chi Minh trail like we did one Christmas).

Oh, did you ever see the "Moon Over Cambodia"? A couple of us flew formation down to Cambodia one morning, and the other crew called and asked me to hold steady so they could get a photo of my plane. You can't see me looking out the Pilot's window, but if you look close, you can see the "moon". I didn't see it until a week later when they got the photos developed.

http://www.opaobie.com/images/MoonOverCambodia.jpg
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