Chunky's Dreams
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There are recurring dreams stemming from my Air Force days, flying with crews out of Rhein Main Air Base in Germany and during both temporary and PCS duty assignments to Incirlik, Turkey. I confess that I've had these dreams for over 40 years. They go something like this:
I am in the huts at Adana (Inky-Dink) trying to sleep and finally not caring how many flies are on my face. The outdoor latrines. The tremendous roar as the U-2's took off for Pakistan. The "B-52" races -- B-52's were very large bugs with lots of feet and wings at Inky-Dink. They could be urged to take off after a long run with a properly placed cigarette. Too close and you crashed!
In that tiny ops center or a trailer at Inky-Dink. Rooming with "Schotzi" in the new barracks during one of his bad times. Too many 40-oz Imperial Quarts of "Johnny Walker Black Label." And then he could not walk for a few months!
Tuning the MG demuxer for me and "The Gorb" as we tried to unscramble to understand what we had. Pounding away night and day to transcribe most of the take so that the guys up North had little to do. It was "our stuff" and a matter of pride. The guys I worked with and who were my "brothers" there: Gorby, Bissett, "Staryj Zhelty" and Lebel.
The new regime with the new rules as CMS THT and the Captain Mormon Foreman came aboard and created "structure" while seemingly destroying morale and unit cohesion.
The fancy hotels with no central heating in Teheran. John Angle and I snagging a pair of Pan-Am stews away from the Mormon Foreman and his "ossifer" friends at a bar in the hotel there. The guy who ran a beggar business and set out his "beggar children" each morning outside the hotel. The Shah heading downtown on the Takhte Jamshid from the Summer Palace at Shemiran going at least 100 mph as all intersections were sealed with armored troops and the road secured. Negotiating for "karakul lamb" caps and rugs at the bazaar in old Teheran.
The open bay barracks at Rhein/Main AFB. The Ops Bldg at R/M. That MiG-19 from Putnitz which came up to "look" every time we crossed the ADIZ into the Baltic. The seeming permanent overcast at R/M. Sachsenhausen and the squadron hangout run by Barney Rakestraw's former Waffen-SS father-in-law, also a former Olympic middleweight boxer. It had the "Horst Wessel" song and several other "verboten" tunes on the jukebox. Mein namenglas holding 0.2 liters of Henninger Brau.
Ahhh..., Frankfurt! And Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Munich, Zurich, Paris, London and Barcelona. The mark was 4-1 and my disposable income was equal to that of a German neurosurgeon. My car, a Volvo 544, like Jap's, went faster than the fastest Mercedes, the 220 SE. The 100-mph trips to Zurich on the Autobahn. Almost going off a mountainside in Switzerland with my buddy, Phil, while heading for Spain. Stopping just short of the excavation for the new Frankfurt subway early one morning after crashing through a barrier following a breakup with a girl-friend, Chrystal, who later married Bobby G. Getting my car fixed after that without getting a ticket. 1st Sgt. Schmiedeberg kept a "blind eye" to this for me.
And many, many more. The numerous "ferret" flights. A hairy one in which we were shielding an RB-57 (which planned a photo run over Latvia). Lincoln Gilbert was our AMS, as I recall, and I was his 2 op. Linc had hand-picked his crew and we had rendezvoused for three or four days down at Spang-Dahlem with the RB but aborted due to overcast conditions in the target area. After finally getting the all-clear we were compromised by an SAS flight who reported us to Malmo, Sweden FIR as a “pair” as we passed through that region. I envisioned my Russian or Polish peer in Gdansk getting the tip-off and arranging for an "unwelcoming" party. We were very edgy and aborted the mission on what turned out, after further review, to be an erroneous hand scan. That is when I and many others found out that we would do anything for LCol McElroy. He went to bat for us when the JCS/Intel came scalp-hunting. Seems JCS really wanted those pictures of a new SAM site and felt someone had to take a fall. “Mac” literally offered a “piece of his ass” to the review board instead.
They were the best and most exciting times of my life. Guys flying into Berlin at an altitude deliberately higher than the Soviets allowed and listening to the Russkij fighter jocks repeatedly requesting permission to "flame" us as they built The Berlin Wall; the Cuban Crisis and our unit operating out of MacDill (Tampa). Mike Maloney told me of two USMC F-4's coming out of Key West on full afterburner (he said they looked like Greyhound buses leaving large black smoke trails) after a Russkij in a MiG-21, who had tucked right in on them, “inadvertently” armed his rockets without permission of his ground controller. He claimed to have heard the MiG head for the range to launch his weapons before landing. The Kennedy assassination.
I found out just how much I was capable of as I made decisions and handled responsibilities in my early twenties that never let me sweat the small stuff the rest of my life.
I found role models, good and bad. And friends for life!
Chunky