Latest / So There I Was / That's Us You Moron! Episode 150

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That's Us You Moron! Episode 150 · So There I Was

• 0:00
  Quiet, numbskulls. I'm broadcasting. Air-to-air combat is the ultimate thrill ride.
• 0:05
  An e-coupon, a mainline adrenaline fix.
• 0:09
  Six Gs, followed instantly by zero Gs, with the sky and the ground trading places
• 0:15
  in the canopy overhead in a matter of seconds.
• 0:18
  My job as the Gibb was to keep my eyes peeled for other aircraft and to stay
• 0:23
  awake when I weighed effectively 1,000 pounds under six Gs and when I could barely keep my head up.
• 0:30
  Practicing air combat is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
• 0:36
  Hello, you're listening to the podcast, so there I was. It's how all great aviation tales begin.
• 0:44
  This is episode 150, That's Us, You Moron!
• 0:50
  The clip you just heard is from Fast Eddie's book, One of his many books,
• 0:57
  fine books, this one is, And I Live to Tell the Tales, the Life of a Fighter Pilot.
• 1:02
  And what a great description of air combat maneuvering. Oh, my goodness.
• 1:07
  Fantastic stuff. Was this great or what, Fig? It was great. And,
• 1:10
  you know, you just triggered this. You know, why was it such a great description?
• 1:15
  Well, because you'll find out in an interview, he wrote the tactics manual on
• 1:20
  air-to-air combat in the F-4 for the Air Force Weapons School. How about that shit?
• 1:26
  He's the guy. Constantly learning, you know. But a real flacker.
• 1:29
  I mean, after he went to the school, he had to stay around and instruct to make
• 1:33
  sure he got it right, I guess, you know.
• 1:35
  Yeah, totally. And then, of course, well, I don't want to ruin it,
• 1:39
  but he spent a little time at Top Gun as well. The Navy.
• 1:42
  A little time at Top Gun. A little time teaching overseas.
• 1:45
  We didn't even talk about his time, really, except for one brief thing about
• 1:50
  the French. But he spent time with the Royal Air Force, the French Air Force,
• 1:54
  the Imperial Iranian Air Force.
• 1:56
  Yeah, he tried to kill the Shah of Iran. Tried to kill the Shah,
• 1:59
  you know, but, you know, saw his life passing before his eyes.
• 2:04
  Leave it at that. But seriously, he's the author of five books,
• 2:08
  the one of which was already introduced, right?
• 2:10
  He wore war for the helmet, a fighter pilot's view of Vietnam.
• 2:16
  What else? The first fighter pilot, Roland Garros, The Life and Times of the
• 2:21
  Playboy Who Invented Air Combat.
• 2:24
  Looks like a fun read. Yeah. The Pilot, Fighter Planes in Paris.
• 2:29
  Right. And Fly with the Falcon, Love, Loss, and Liberty. Or Love, Loss, Liberty.
• 2:34
  Yeah. And then the one I talked about, I Live to Tell the Tales,
• 2:37
  The Life of a Fighter Pilot.
• 2:39
  Five great books. I'm in the middle of, and I Live to Tell the Tales,
• 2:43
  and War for the Hell of It. You should set one of those down and read one at
• 2:48
  a time. I need to do that. I know.
• 2:51
  Because I'm jumbling back and forth. And as he talks about it,
• 2:55
  and I Live to Tell the Tales, is actually a prequel and a sequel to War for the Hell of It.
• 3:01
  So it's got tales on both sides of it. And he tells you that in the prologue to the book.
• 3:07
  A fun, fun week this week with Fast Eddie. And for those of you who are Patreon
• 3:13
  supporters and direct donors, you'll get some extra and find out how Fast Eddie became Fast Eddie.
• 3:20
  And how a cool call sign like that stuck.
• 3:25
  Yeah. It's not what you think because I thought I had it figured out before
• 3:29
  he told the story. And then there's a twist to it.
• 3:32
  So let's not ruin that. Nope. Nope. There isn't.
• 3:36
  So, yeah. So thank you to all the Patreon supporters. And a couple other folks
• 3:41
  made this week's show possible, Fig.
• 3:44
  Do you remember who they are? Well, HSI Wealth Strategies.
• 3:48
  Indeed. Give Robbie Walling a call. Put seven figures in your pocket for retirement. Do it now.
• 3:55
  Do it. What did you say? Do it, you dumbass. Call Robbie Walling, you dumbass.
• 4:00
  Robbie Walling, that no-good bastard. I can say that because I know him.
• 4:03
  And I say that in jest. But hey, don't be a moron for crying out loud.
• 4:07
  Yeah. If you just got an airline job and you are not a financial wizard,
• 4:15
  which I can almost guarantee you're not, don't be a moron.
• 4:20
  Get some help, and these people can help you. Absolutely. Even if you're getting,
• 4:24
  as he puts it, near in your Centrum Silver years and getting ready to retire,
• 4:28
  let him help tweak your retirement plan.
• 4:31
  There's no harm in having a second set of eyes making sure you're on track.
• 4:35
  Did you just say Centrum Silver?
• 4:38
  Yeah. What the? All right, let's talk offline. I don't want to know.
• 4:43
  Let's talk offline. Those are vitamins for geezers like you and me.
• 4:48
  I thought that's what you were gonna say yeah i
• 4:51
  just drink brown liquor and do push-ups doesn't everybody there's that
• 4:54
  too but you know and we need to thank also factor factor meals.com slash a podcast
• 5:02
  using the code podcast will get you 50 off your first shipment i love me some
• 5:09
  factor meals man when you're when you're in a hurry or you don't feel like cooking,
• 5:13
  out of the fridge mama's out of town and right look
• 5:16
  you literally it's less than that cook
• 5:19
  it literally in five minutes you're sitting at the table having a nice meal
• 5:22
  yep easy easy peasy hey don't be a moron get factor meals for crying out loud
• 5:28
  do it yeah right i'm on roll it's not fast food it's good food fast yes you
• 5:35
  know i see i should be the advertising guy for them,
• 5:38
  Coming up with taglines like that.
• 5:41
  What do you think, Dago? You heard the interview. What was your favorite part?
• 5:46
  Well, it's not even a favorite part, honestly. It's the fact that he's given
• 5:49
  us 28 years of service, active air reserve.
• 5:53
  And I don't know if you guys knew this. He has an air medal and two distinguished flying crosses.
• 5:57
  We didn't even talk about that. We never got stories. He just snuck that by us.
• 6:02
  Hey, so this is a reoccurring theme. We interviewed these pilots.
• 6:08
  That have these incredible medals and nobody talks about the medals that,
• 6:13
  you know what that is? Yeah.
• 6:14
  They never bring it up. That's, that's, that's some humble shit. That's humility.
• 6:17
  I like to talk about my air medals all the time to guys, you know,
• 6:20
  it's like, Hey, you know how, yeah. I know about my air medals.
• 6:24
  Yeah. I don't have any, but here's, here's, Hey, here's honestly,
• 6:27
  here's the only thing I want to say about my air medals.
• 6:29
  I have more than my friend Sinbad. And that's the most important thing for me.
• 6:35
  That's all I got over him for the rest of our lives.
• 6:38
  And I have to because he retired as an 06, and I only retired as an 05.
• 6:43
  So he hangs that over my head constantly. But I just say, okay,
• 6:46
  how many air medals you got? And that usually ends the conversation.
• 6:51
  But that's good news, though. That means we'll have him back.
• 6:53
  That's right. He's going to hear this, and he's going to go,
• 6:56
  okay, fight's on. We're coming back to refute.
• 6:58
  What do you say we get out of the way and listen to Fast Eddie?
• 7:01
  I think we should do it because this is a great show.
• 7:04
  You're going to enjoy this. We had a ball. Don't sit on the ejection seat handle.
• 7:09
  Don't do it. This here is a true story about crossing the pond at night in the.
• 7:12
  Music.
• 7:17
  World's smallest cockpit on the tanker through the weather.
• 7:23
  Oh, and to the tanker crew who did that.
• 7:26
  Music.
• 7:43
  Crossing the pond and you could see that I wasn't exactly fun Yeah, there I was.
• 7:49
  I was leading a flight of four Jaguars. I was with the Royal Air Force.
• 7:54
  We were at low level in the Great Glen of northern Scotland over Loch Ness,
• 7:59
  proceeding down Loch Ness in a finger four formation, tactical formation,
• 8:05
  at a normal ops condition of 480 knots, 250 feet, and keeping a lookout for
• 8:13
  the monster, gun cameras armed.
• 8:16
  And the weather was stinko, overcast, getting lower and lower,
• 8:21
  and pushed us down to 200 feet, pushed us down to 100 feet.
• 8:25
  And now we're 100 feet over Loch Ness.
• 8:28
  And I looked up in the distance, and I could see the fog reaching all the way
• 8:32
  down to the water of Loch Ness.
• 8:34
  And I knew that we had to be in the clouds one way or the other in just a few seconds.
• 8:40
  And that's when i call for the pull-up and took a flight of four in tactical
• 8:45
  formation into the soup but the encounter did not end as i had planned.
• 8:55
  My palms are sweating already hello you're listening to the podcast so there
• 9:02
  i was and that is how all terrifying aviation stories start this is fig coming to you from my,
• 9:09
  Well, my home, finally.
• 9:11
  I'm home after six or seven days. Where's my co-host?
• 9:15
  Nice. Yeah, repeat here, coming to you from New Hampshire, also home.
• 9:19
  And, oh, my God, for any of you who have not flown tactical,
• 9:25
  particularly in formation with the weather going to shit on you, that story...
• 9:32
  Echoes terror in my heart oh dear
• 9:35
  god so that is fast eddie
• 9:38
  we're going to welcome fast eddie author of five books
• 9:41
  war for the hell of it a fighter pilot's view of vietnam the first fighter pilot
• 9:46
  roland garros the life and times of the playboy who invented air combat the
• 9:51
  pilot fighter planes in paris fly with the falcon love lost liberty and i live
• 9:57
  to tell the tales the life of a fighter pilot.
• 10:00
  And let me tell you, the excerpt you heard at the beginning was from one of those books.
• 10:06
  And oh man, are they fun reads. I'm having a ball going through them now.
• 10:11
  So Fast Eddie, welcome, sir. We are humbled and honored for you to join us. Glad to be here.
• 10:19
  Yeah. So, but you didn't start off as a fighter pilot in Vietnam.
• 10:23
  Where did you realize that maybe flying airplanes was something that you wanted to do.
• 10:29
  Well, I can never remember not wanting to fly them. Since I was six or eight
• 10:35
  years old, it appealed to me.
• 10:37
  And, you know, I grew up the usual way. I built model airplanes.
• 10:41
  I, you know, read everything I could read. I particularly focused on the Battle
• 10:46
  of Britain because I was very interested in the Battle of Britain.
• 10:48
  But I think I read every aviation book that you can find back in the early 1950s
• 10:55
  and got a job at the airport servicing aircraft.
• 11:00
  I worked on Jimmy Hoffa's airplane, which is another story.
• 11:05
  And then I went to Georgia Tech and went through the Air Force ROTC,
• 11:12
  got accepted for pilot training.
• 11:14
  And I can tell you with exquisite detail where I was and what I was doing when I got those orders.
• 11:21
  Oh, nice. All right. Very cool. Is it publicly shareable?
• 11:28
  Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh, let's hear it. Where were you? What were you doing?
• 11:32
  What did that feel like? Well, I walked by the Air Force ROTC office and a sergeant
• 11:38
  came out and said, here's your orders.
• 11:41
  And I didn't want to open them right there because I didn't know if I was going to make it or not.
• 11:46
  I didn't know if I'd get assigned to, you know, run the PX or something.
• 11:51
  And so I went outside the headquarters and started walking down the sidewalk
• 11:56
  towards the dorm and opened the orders.
• 11:58
  And there it was, Webb Air Force Base undergraduate pilot training.
• 12:04
  Nice. Nice. Okay, I'm not familiar with Webb. Where was that? Neither am I.
• 12:09
  It was in Big Spring, Texas, way out in West Texas near Odessa and Midland. Okay, okay.
• 12:16
  Since closed now, but not a garden spot. No, no.
• 12:23
  Unless you like growing cactus in your garden yeah wow
• 12:28
  fantastic and probably some
• 12:30
  tumbleweeds too all right so graduated off off to undergraduate pilot training
• 12:37
  it was at t-37s t-38s or what'd you fly primary was t-37 your primary trainer
• 12:43
  no no you start out the t-41 which is okay Brick, militarized.
• 12:48
  Yeah, 172. Yeah. And that would just call the propeller-driven washing machine
• 12:54
  just to eliminate people who weren't really suitable.
• 12:59
  And then it's T-37, T-38.
• 13:02
  Okay. Okay. Okay. Anything memorable from there? Oh, was it?
• 13:08
  I think it was your book I was reading about tying the wrong knot and,
• 13:13
  you know, what would you do if you had to avoid that?
• 13:16
  Yeah, the checkride in a T-41 was given by an Air Force lieutenant instructor.
• 13:25
  And so we started out with the briefing and he said, what would you do if you had to abort?
• 13:31
  And I said, I'd chop the throttle and stand on the brakes.
• 13:35
  And he said, that's not the procedure.
• 13:37
  And the procedure written down was throttle, close, brake supply.
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  And I told him, I said, you didn't ask me for the procedure.
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  You asked me for what I do.
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  That didn't go over well. Oh, that set the tone right there.
• 13:54
  That set the tone right there. And without getting into all the gory details,
• 14:02
  I thought I did all right.
• 14:04
  But at the end and during the debriefing, he, you know, reamed me a new one
• 14:09
  about not quoting the procedure.
• 14:12
  And then he proceeded to criticize the knot that I had tied the aircraft down
• 14:17
  with. And so that kind of summarized the way to check right now.
• 14:25
  I had water coming out my nose. I was laughing so hard.
• 14:29
  I had to get out of the way because I thought it was going to come out onto the screen.
• 14:36
  Okay, that really, I was there when you told that story.
• 14:40
  Right. We never had instructors like that, did we, Fig? Nope.
• 14:44
  Except every other day. Geez. Right?
• 14:49
  Oh, man. Anything memorable in flight school?
• 14:54
  Closed calls or anything like that? Yeah. There was one episode which,
• 14:59
  well, first off, about two weeks into the T-37 phase, we lost a couple of guys.
• 15:06
  They started a loop at minimum altitude, a loop in the T-37 as an altitude losing maneuver.
• 15:15
  Okay. They didn't make it. And that was kind of a wake-up call.
• 15:20
  It was like, okay, kid, you're in the big leagues now. We play for keeps here.
• 15:27
  That got my attention. And then the other thing that happened that kind of set
• 15:33
  the tone, we took a couple of T-38s up to Buckley Air Force Base,
• 15:38
  Colorado Springs, dual-use field.
• 15:41
  We were taking off two airplanes. I called for the active. They cleared us under the duty.
• 15:47
  And then a civilian aircraft called in for landing instructions on the same
• 15:53
  other frequency, but the tower answered them on both frequencies.
• 15:56
  And so he gave me landing instructions and he said, use caution,
• 16:00
  Air Force jet fighters on takeoff roll.
• 16:03
  And I put my head in a swivel and looked around and said, Air Force jet fighters, where?
• 16:08
  And the instructor said, that's us, you moron.
• 16:17
  Yeah yeah well so it's good it's good to know it wasn't just the navy navy instructors
• 16:22
  that yeah were that way right yeah right oh that's us you moron that's almost
• 16:29
  a show title there but yeah we'll keep going.
• 16:36
  Oh, great stuff. So, all right, when you finished flight school,
• 16:41
  well, how was it you came to select F-4s?
• 16:44
  Well, that was one of those things which you didn't work out, but eventually did.
• 16:50
  I ended up that a limb ride in the T-41 was followed by a limb ride in the T-37,
• 16:57
  which was followed by a limb ride in the T-38,
• 17:01
  most of which were due to the fact that I like to do things my way and not the Air Force way.
• 17:08
  Like T-38, one of the check rides was landing stage.
• 17:13
  And you had three landings that were graded for mobile control.
• 17:17
  And what I like to do with the 38 was just kind of float it down and gently
• 17:22
  touch down and call a tower and ask if we were down yet.
• 17:26
  But that puts you 2,000 or 3,000 feet down the runway, and the procedure was
• 17:34
  they wanted you to put them down on the piano keys or on the numbers.
• 17:38
  And so I got a down check on that and had to redo it.
• 17:43
  Anyway, I ended up ranked in my class, and you make choices.
• 17:48
  You put on your dream sheet what you'd like to fly.
• 17:51
  And three or four of the guys ahead of me who had not run afoul of the authorities.
• 17:59
  Had put down F-100s and they all got F-100s and I was a little bummed about
• 18:05
  that because I wanted to fly a single-seat fighter and then I got assigned to the backseat of the F-4,
• 18:12
  which was plan B but it turned out to be,
• 18:17
  good deal for two reasons. One is the guys that got the F-100 checked out at
• 18:24
  Luke, went to South Vietnam,
• 18:26
  flew a year of close air support, and then there was nowhere for them to go
• 18:30
  because all the F-100s were in South Vietnam.
• 18:33
  And so they came back and they got assigned to the training command or the F-111,
• 18:39
  for crying out loud, or, you know, something like that.
• 18:43
  And it turned out to be, kind of a dead-end career flying-wise in the F-100.
• 18:50
  Anyway, I got to the F-4, and holy cow, it's big, and it's ugly, and it's fast.
• 18:58
  I've had one at 2.4. Damn.
• 19:03
  Yeah. Here we are in the real Air Force with real front-line fighters.
• 19:09
  And the other thing that worked out was when I went overseas to Thailand,
• 19:14
  and 8th Tech fighter wing, the Wolfpack, most of the guys in the front seat were old heads.
• 19:21
  We had one guy that had 13 kills in Korea.
• 19:24
  We had three guys that had flown with the Thunderbirds, F-100 pilots,
• 19:30
  and those guys knew what the hell they were doing.
• 19:33
  Yeah. So I'm in the back seat, and I'm tapping their brains.
• 19:38
  I'm saying, well, why did we do this? I mean, what was your decision here?
• 19:41
  What the hell is that for? And I learned a hell of a lot, you know,
• 19:46
  being in the back seat with guys in the front seat that were actually old pros.
• 19:50
  And so that worked out well. So I'm kind of glad I busted all those check rides.
• 19:59
  All right. So, hey, Dizzy's asking...
• 20:02
  Was that Robin Old's wing? Yeah, exactly.
• 20:07
  Were you there concurrently? No, no. He had just left.
• 20:12
  I knew Old's, but I never flew with him. I knew most of the guys under Operation
• 20:17
  Bolo, but that was before I got there. Okay. Gotcha.
• 20:23
  And was Operation Bolo the...
• 20:27
  That was the fake out, right? The trickery, right?
• 20:30
  Yeah. Now, they had done a tactics conference at a bar in Bangkok with the F-105 guys.
• 20:39
  That's the place to do a conference. Yeah, yeah.
• 20:41
  And came up with a plan that the Vietnamese knew who they were bouncing.
• 20:48
  They had radar coverage. They had radio coverage.
• 20:50
  And so the plan was to – and they would bounce the F-105s and avoid the F-4s
• 20:57
  because the F-4s were the mid-cap. And so they came up with a plan to present
• 21:03
  the F-4s like they were a formation of 105s.
• 21:06
  Yeah. And so they came down Thud Ridge.
• 21:09
  They flew the Thud routes. They flew the Thud airspeeds. They used the Thud
• 21:13
  call signs, you know, and just talked to each other like the Thud guys did.
• 21:18
  And then that's what happened.
• 21:20
  When that happened, they got jumped by seven MiG-21s, which was the entire MiG-21
• 21:27
  Air Force in North Vietnam.
• 21:29
  And they bagged all of them. That's awesome. Yeah, that's a great story.
• 21:35
  All right. Very cool. All right.
• 21:40
  We have such a varied career. I mean, where we're going to go with all of this.
• 21:46
  I'm just giddy with questions.
• 21:51
  One of the questions I had is we opened the book, and I live to tell the tale.
• 21:58
  You open it with your night flight as a sewer doer, as you called it.
• 22:04
  Flying the sewer pipe into Laos.
• 22:08
  But what were you doing? And can you, I won't spoil it. Can you tell us what
• 22:13
  happened that night that was a changing event?
• 22:16
  Yeah, that's the opening chapter of War for the Hell of It.
• 22:20
  War for the Hell of It. I'm sorry. I'm reading both at the same time.
• 22:23
  So I'm going to intermix those apologies. Yeah.
• 22:25
  Well, you're never going to pass the quiz then. But anyway, we were trying to
• 22:32
  interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the idea was I had the flares.
• 22:37
  I was going to put out the flares over a road intersection, and my wingman had the bombs at CBU-24s.
• 22:45
  And the idea was I put out the flares. As soon as the flare is light,
• 22:50
  he rolls in. And hopefully, when you did that and you did it right,
• 22:54
  you could look down on the roads below.
• 22:58
  And it looked like when you walk into your kitchen and you switch on the lights
• 23:01
  and all the cockroaches are there, you know.
• 23:04
  Yeah, they start scampering out of the way. Yeah. Anyway, so I put out the flares
• 23:10
  and then pulled up to the left to circle back around for another flare run.
• 23:14
  And then I saw his airplane hit the ground.
• 23:17
  And that, you know, that was that that was, again, an attention getting step
• 23:22
  that said, OK, this we're not screwing around here.
• 23:28
  Right.
• 23:32
  Okay, so did he get, was that pilot error or did he get shot down? Do you know?
• 23:39
  It was probably pilot error because we didn't see any AAA in the area. Okay.
• 23:45
  And the guy in the front seat, it's really sad. The guy in the back seat was
• 23:52
  the wing commander's son.
• 23:54
  And he flew his first combat mission with his dad.
• 23:59
  Anyway, the guy in the front seat was an ex-F-102 pilot who'd spent his whole career at 50,000 feet.
• 24:10
  And he was not into ground attack. And he was not into night flying.
• 24:16
  And it scared the living shit out of him.
• 24:20
  And he went ahead and did it. He was the bravest guy I ever met.
• 24:25
  And so my view is that he just got overwhelmed and flew out of the sky and into the world.
• 24:33
  Bombing under flares at night is not for the meek. No.
• 24:37
  I know that. In the mountainous terrain. No, right. In the mountains.
• 24:40
  In the mountains. We were doing it where it was flat. It's still not fun. Yeah.
• 24:48
  No kidding. And you stayed on station for a substantial amount of time.
• 24:53
  Yeah, I was there for two years.
• 24:55
  Okay. Was that a normal rotation, or did you volunteer for an extra one?
• 25:01
  I volunteered for another one. Okay. I was having so much fun, I hated to quit.
• 25:06
  What kind of aircraft do you call the sewer pipe?
• 25:10
  Well, the deal was, and it was a smart deal,
• 25:16
  is if you were night flying, that's what you did for
• 25:19
  at least a month and so you didn't have this jet
• 25:23
  lag getting back and forth you know and losing sleep
• 25:26
  so the guy us guys that
• 25:29
  flew at night only flew at night and you know we had tried to get our esprit
• 25:34
  de corps up and we had read about in south vietnam they had these guys called
• 25:39
  sewer rats and they had the vietcong tunnels everywhere and their their job
• 25:45
  They were little wiry guys,
• 25:47
  like 5'7", 5'6", and they'd go into these tunnels with a flashlight and a .45
• 25:54
  pistol and take out the Viet Cong.
• 25:57
  And we were in awe. We thought, man, those guys have got big brass ones.
• 26:02
  And so they called themselves sewer rats.
• 26:05
  And so we equated that with flying at night in the sewer. So we were the sewer doers. Right.
• 26:14
  We're out. Beautiful. But all your time over there, you said you spent,
• 26:20
  you were stationed in Thailand. Yeah, Ubon, Thailand.
• 26:27
  Nice. Nice. Now that, somewhere in your book, I read something about,
• 26:33
  and we talked about it on another show.
• 26:35
  It was the Da Nang Open Officer's Mess, the Doom Club.
• 26:39
  The Doom Club, yeah. Did you make it over there at all? Were you in Da Nang?
• 26:42
  Did I read that in your book?
• 26:45
  I'm sorry, everybody. It's all meshing together. I shouldn't try to read two books at once.
• 26:49
  I was there a week, and that was enough.
• 26:59
  So I had the most extraordinary interview with the DO or the wing.
• 27:04
  There was three guys, three new guys. We just signed into the wing.
• 27:08
  We went through the new guy's school, and then we had an interview with the DO.
• 27:12
  And he sat behind his desk, which was completely clean, nothing on the desk,
• 27:18
  which tells you something right there.
• 27:19
  And he said, in this wing, no one is better than anyone else.
• 27:28
  No pilot is better than any other pilot.
• 27:30
  I will not tolerate competition between pilots.
• 27:34
  I will not tolerate competition between squadrons. And I'm thinking,
• 27:38
  I've got to get out of this chicken shit outfit. Right.
• 27:42
  And so that's it. That's the Doom Club there.
• 27:46
  Wow. Yeah, we put a picture of it up on the... Yeah, there used to be a Mark
• 27:51
  82 hydrag stuck in the grass in front.
• 27:55
  But anyway, I called over to Ubon and said, can you get me out of here?
• 28:01
  And they were having, we were dropping laser-guided bombs.
• 28:06
  We introduced a laser-guided bomb to the world, and they were having trouble with success.
• 28:12
  The initial success was good, and now they were having trouble with it.
• 28:15
  And I had done quite a bit of the LGB bombing, and they said,
• 28:20
  you know, we need somebody that can fix this.
• 28:22
  And I said, can you get me there? And they said, yeah, I think so.
• 28:25
  I packed my bag, collected my flying gear, went over to the aerial port,
• 28:31
  got on a Marine C-130 and flew to Ubon.
• 28:34
  No orders, no permission.
• 28:38
  I went AWOL to Thailand. And I'd been there about 10 or 15 days when my orders kept caught up with me.
• 28:49
  Nicely done. Could you imagine doing that today? Repeat?
• 28:53
  No. No. Oh, no. Especially not in the Air Force.
• 28:57
  I mean, it'd be tough in the Marine Corps, but the Air Force would just,
• 29:00
  you know, it'd be rackers.
• 29:03
  Somebody would pop a gasket. Yeah. Right.
• 29:08
  You do talk a little bit about the bureaucracy, and you try to leave politics
• 29:12
  out of it as much as you can, but you're pretty harsh, and I'll say I believe rightfully so,
• 29:18
  on the fact that politicians and desk flyers back in Washington were trying
• 29:26
  to run so much of this war without any regard to what was really happening on the ground over there.
• 29:32
  How much of that was on your mind and in your mind while you were physically present?
• 29:38
  Or did your feelings evolve later as you got home after getting home?
• 29:44
  Yeah. You know, I knew it was going on.
• 29:47
  But, you know, you're kind of busy to think about politics, you know.
• 29:51
  And it was really aggravating, the rules of engagement that we had to follow.
• 29:58
  And there was one time when we had unilaterally declared a bombing halt in North
• 30:04
  Vietnam, thinking that the Vietnamese would respond equally and back off,
• 30:10
  which, of course, they didn't.
• 30:11
  And late in the day,
• 30:14
  you could fly around down the Laos, North Vietnamese border and see convoys
• 30:22
  of trucks backed up into North Vietnam waiting for night to cross over into
• 30:28
  Laos and go down to O Chi Minh Trail.
• 30:31
  And so you had a stream of targets, you know, 30 or 40 trucks just over the
• 30:37
  border and you couldn't touch them.
• 30:40
  And they had munitions that were going down to kill GIs in South Vietnam.
• 30:47
  And that yanked our chain. But when you're doing stuff like that,
• 30:53
  you can't let the politics affect your performance. You just have to. You either.
• 31:00
  And I had a pilot training buddy that he was against the Vietnam War.
• 31:07
  I mean, he said, you know, this is a big mistake. We're throwing people's lives away.
• 31:11
  You know, well, not to be here. But he went and did a tour, a one-year tour
• 31:17
  in Vietnam, then came back and put in for conscientious objector steps.
• 31:22
  And he got it. I said, why the hell didn't you do that before you went to combat?
• 31:27
  Right. And he said, I didn't want anybody to think I was a coward. Wow.
• 31:33
  Okay. Yeah. Impressive. I'll give him that.
• 31:38
  So, no kidding. Well, without trying to jump around too much,
• 31:44
  you obviously flew in the Air Force.
• 31:47
  Right. You flew with the Navy. So, you taught at weapons school. You taught at Top Gun.
• 31:51
  You did an exchange tour with the Royal Air Force, the French Air Force.
• 31:55
  Right. The Imperial Iranian Air Force. Right.
• 32:00
  Oh, and on top of that, 375 combat flights in Vietnam.
• 32:06
  What was the most difficult and or the most interesting? So that may be two questions. Oh, yeah.
• 32:13
  Well, leaving aside combat, which is both the most interesting and the most
• 32:19
  difficult, instructing into weapons school, it was a challenge.
• 32:26
  And the challenge was keeping ahead of the students, you know,
• 32:30
  because the guys coming to the weapons school were the best in their squadron.
• 32:34
  And they were they're going to come there and tell you, show you what they're made out of, you know.
• 32:39
  And so so you had to you had to keep on top of it.
• 32:44
  I've instructed in three different weapons schools and the people in them are interchangeable.
• 32:50
  They're all the same guys or say that's all the same people.
• 32:54
  I can't say guys anymore, but that was a challenge.
• 32:59
  And at that time, the rewarding part of it was another guy and I rewrote the U.S.
• 33:08
  Air Force air-to-air tactics manual.
• 33:11
  And so that was, you know, that was, I thought that was a rewarding thing to do.
• 33:16
  But another story, the guy that replaced me in the air-to-air business in Las
• 33:23
  Vegas decided that he wanted to rewrite the air-to-air tactics manual,
• 33:28
  which he did a good job. He actually did a better job than we did.
• 33:33
  But he started out by interviewing every air-to-air combat veteran he could find.
• 33:40
  And he was trying to uncover the secret. What are the principles,
• 33:46
  not airspeeds and altitudes, but what are the mindset, what are the principles,
• 33:51
  what's the overall framework of air-to-air combat?
• 33:55
  And he found that in Las Vegas, there was a 93-year-old retired guy from the
• 34:02
  Army Air Corps from World War I who had flown biplanes in World War I.
• 34:09
  And he went and interviewed him, and he said, you know, what he was doing,
• 34:14
  what's the secret to air combat?
• 34:17
  And the guy said, the secret is watch out for the hunt in the sun.
• 34:22
  That's the secret sauce right there. Right.
• 34:27
  Oh, man, another show title. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
• 34:32
  Oh, fantastic. All right. Yeah.
• 34:36
  Someone using everything. The hunt in the sun. So, hey, Fast Eddie,
• 34:40
  the air-to-air tactics manual, was that aircraft-specific?
• 34:46
  Yeah. Okay, and you were writing it for the F-4, okay. Correct.
• 34:52
  How much time did you have in the Phantom before you went and taught at weapons school?
• 34:57
  A thousand hours. Okay.
• 35:02
  So, feeling pretty comfortable with it by then. Well, I knew where all the switches were. Right.
• 35:10
  Well, that comes from doing it at night, doesn't it?
• 35:14
  What's the average combat sortie?
• 35:18
  A .9 or a 1.2? No, nearly half the time you'd be refueling.
• 35:25
  So you're talking about two hours, two hours and a half, depending on what you're
• 35:29
  doing. Yep, that makes sense.
• 35:32
  Did you guys fly with drop tanks at all, or was it just weapons on your stations?
• 35:39
  Nearly always with drop tanks. Okay. Yeah.
• 35:43
  And to get into North Vietnam and back, even with their refueling,
• 35:47
  I mean, you're looking for 450 all the time, and that really eats up the fuel. Sure.
• 35:56
  Sure, yeah. The Phantom was not a fuel-efficient bird. No, no. Faster than hell.
• 36:03
  So, Fast Eddie, were the majority of your combat sorties air-to-ground sorties? Did you do air caps?
• 36:10
  Only a few times. Okay. It was almost always air-to-ground. Okay.
• 36:17
  Well, and were your targets up north?
• 36:21
  North Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. I never dropped a bomb in South Vietnam.
• 36:27
  We were high-threat area specialists. high angle, high altitude release,
• 36:33
  and we weren't allowed to work friendlies in contact because they might not
• 36:38
  stay friendly very long.
• 36:43
  Time to piss them off when you hit your own guys, right? Right, yeah.
• 36:46
  Oh, man. So you're bombing military targets, bridges, ammunition dumps, things like that?
• 36:54
  And a lot of it was, again, it was a waste. It was interdicting dirt roads.
• 37:00
  You know, you dig a big crater in a dirt road and stop the trucks going,
• 37:05
  and the next morning the crater's all filled in and truck tracks across it, you know.
• 37:11
  That's got to be. That's got to be, yeah, my sentiments exactly. Yeah.
• 37:17
  Okay. How many hours total did you wind up with in the Phantom?
• 37:20
  16, nearly 1,700. Okay. And then total time in all the airplanes? About 2,500.
• 37:28
  Nice. Okay.
• 37:32
  And was the Phantom your favorite? You flew Jags?
• 37:36
  Well, that's a long story. And I get to ask that question a lot.
• 37:44
  I flew the F-104 with the Germans for a while. And like I said in the,
• 37:48
  like you said in the opening, flying the F-104 is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
• 37:55
  And then I finished up my career flying the F-16 at the Tucson Air Guard.
• 38:01
  And I was in my late 40s at 48 or 49 when I did it.
• 38:06
  And that probably would
• 38:09
  could have been the favorite but flying the f-16
• 38:12
  when you're 48 years old it was like dating
• 38:16
  a porn star there was yeah there there was more performance there than i could
• 38:24
  physically access yeah and i'd come back from a sortie you know aching oh i
• 38:31
  bet so So the Phantom, yeah, the Phantom,
• 38:34
  you know, I've got the same number of landings as takeoffs.
• 38:38
  I've got 1,000 hours of combat time, so that's the favorite.
• 38:42
  That's saying something.
• 38:44
  You know, it's an awesome plane. I envy you for being able to fly that thing.
• 38:52
  You know, I can only imagine. Yeah.
• 38:55
  Yeah, what a cool beast. Is there any airplane that you haven't gotten to fly
• 39:02
  that you would have liked to have flown? I would have liked to have flown the F-15.
• 39:06
  Okay. Yeah, that's kind of the successor to the Phantom, you know,
• 39:13
  multi-mode, big, loud, fast, but it didn't work out.
• 39:20
  Yeah. No, I totally get that. I remember the first time I'd been around A4s
• 39:27
  a lot with a family member in flight school down in Beville,
• 39:30
  seeing the A4, and then walked out on the New Orleans ramp.
• 39:35
  And there was a phantom sitting there. And I'm like, oh, my God,
• 39:38
  that thing is huge. Yeah. I had no idea how much bigger it was. Oh, that's right.
• 39:43
  And I had to see it, yeah. Yeah. And I had a similar experience.
• 39:47
  I went down to Fatima in Okinawa for an air show and walked up to an Eagle for the first time.
• 39:54
  I'm like, oh, damn, that's a whole lot of airplane.
• 39:58
  Right. Yep. The thing is huge. But what amazes me more is how quickly they disappear
• 40:04
  when they turn nose on to you in the sky.
• 40:07
  You know, they block out the sun and plan for them, and then they come nose
• 40:11
  on and they just disappear.
• 40:13
  Well, that's the strategy we used in an F-104.
• 40:19
  Do a bounce a guy in an F-104, plug in the afterburner minimum stage to erase the smoke trail,
• 40:27
  descend so you put him a little above the horizon so you're against the ground
• 40:32
  and then you fly collision course because in collision course it's constant
• 40:37
  bearing decreasing range yep and and head on for his eye to pick up yeah and
• 40:43
  head on an f-104 is only this big you know.
• 40:49
  Wow fantastic all right so well
• 40:52
  what did what did you do after uh well do we want to
• 40:55
  stay in vietnam for a little while longer anything else notable over
• 40:58
  there that no no i'm i'm tired of
• 41:01
  vietnam yeah there you go all right so well where'd you go next did you do an
• 41:06
  exchange tour or is that when you went to weapon school yeah i went to weapon
• 41:09
  school i went went through the weapon school and stayed on as an instructor
• 41:14
  and i was there for about three and a half years and during that time,
• 41:21
  The Air Force came to the conclusion that the Navy had figured out something that we didn't know,
• 41:27
  and sent me down to Top Gun, and I checked out as an adversary pilot in Top
• 41:33
  Gun, and I was supposed to come back to Nellis and tell everybody what the Navy was up to.
• 41:40
  Did you?
• 41:44
  Well, what I learned at Top Gun is what I put into the tactics manual. So, yeah.
• 41:50
  They were way ahead of us. There's no doubt about it. No kidding. All right. Yeah.
• 41:56
  And my understanding is it's all joint now. They actually talk to each other
• 41:59
  now, right? Well, I would hope so. Yeah.
• 42:05
  All right. What was clearly a slacker if you stayed on as an instructor after
• 42:10
  going through the weapons school course? Because, you know, you can't send that
• 42:13
  guy back to the fleet. Yeah.
• 42:15
  So, no, in all seriousness. And you said it was hard to or, you know,
• 42:19
  it was challenging to teach. And I would imagine because of the because of the
• 42:25
  caliber of students coming through. That's right.
• 42:30
  Was there anything notable that led to that revelation or was it just a grind the whole time?
• 42:36
  Well, it was, you know, it was obvious from, you know, the guys showing up.
• 42:40
  But one of the things I count myself lucky, and I flew with Randy Cunningham,
• 42:47
  the Navy ace, and I flew with Steve Ritchie, the Air Force ace,
• 42:51
  and learned a lot from both of those guys.
• 42:54
  Yeah, there's Duke and Irish.
• 42:59
  When you have that in your resume, people tend to listen to you,
• 43:04
  and that worked out. Nice.
• 43:08
  Very cool. All right. Where'd you go after that?
• 43:13
  Well, I wasn't ready to quit flying, and I thought about getting an exchange
• 43:19
  tour, and there's an office in the headquarters in San Antonio that runs the
• 43:24
  exchange program, And he said,
• 43:27
  you can go to Canada and fly the F-104.
• 43:31
  And I thought that's kind of a step back. The F-104 is kind of a 50s airplane.
• 43:36
  And the base is at a place called Coal Lake.
• 43:41
  That's all I needed to know about that. Yeah. No, thank you. No, thanks.
• 43:46
  Yeah. Let me think about that, Noel. Yeah. And then the next one was in New Zealand.
• 43:52
  And I'd flown the A-4 Top Gun. and New Zealand Air Force was flying A-4s then.
• 43:59
  And that was kind of an appeal. But my wife looked at the globe and said,
• 44:04
  if we go there, we'll never see anybody we know.
• 44:08
  And so that didn't fly.
• 44:11
  But the one I was really interested in was with the Royal Air Force because,
• 44:16
  like I said, I've been a huge student of the Battle of Britain and all the traditions and all that.
• 44:22
  And so he sent me to the Jaguar, called the OCU.
• 44:28
  I mean, it was a conversion unit. So we trained Jaguar pilots.
• 44:32
  And then once a year, we had what the RAF calls a weapons instructor,
• 44:38
  qualified weapons instructor.
• 44:40
  It's like our patch wearing guys.
• 44:43
  And so we trained them. But that, you know, that was, it was like,
• 44:49
  I'm in a world which I read about, but had never been there.
• 44:54
  I met Sir Douglas Botter. I met Johnny Johnson.
• 44:58
  I knew guys that blew the Spitfire. I knew guys that were in the Battle of Britain, you know.
• 45:04
  I bet that was amazing. Oh, yeah.
• 45:08
  And so that was, that was really a career broadening experience flying with
• 45:14
  the Royal Air Force. And were you flying at Lake and Heath?
• 45:18
  Uh lossy mouth lossy mouth scotland oh it's
• 45:21
  okay yeah the only thing between us and
• 45:24
  the north pole was a few oil rigs wow right
• 45:29
  that that so the jaguar so that's a two seat that's a trainer right uh was it
• 45:35
  was it was the was it a one seat and a two seat version like for a tackle or
• 45:40
  was it just a two seat trainer it started out as a two seat trainer and then
• 45:45
  the the chancellor of The exchequer said,
• 45:49
  you know, we're paying five million pounds a piece for an airplane with no combat.
• 45:53
  And so they converted, took out the front cockpit and put in two guns and made
• 46:00
  it a round attack airplane.
• 46:01
  And so eventually the majority of Jaguars were single seat. Okay.
• 46:06
  Okay. How did it perform? Did you like flying it? I mean, you know,
• 46:11
  the eight-way. Oh, you did not?
• 46:13
  Hold on. Think about that for a while. So could you just, you know, get why? Tell us why.
• 46:21
  Well, I enjoyed the mission.
• 46:24
  At that time, the Royal Air Force was really hurting for money. They always are.
• 46:31
  But their whole mission was low-level ground attack, day VFR only.
• 46:37
  And, you know, that's kind of an exciting mission, you know, 480 at 250 feet.
• 46:44
  But the aircraft, as I said, was originally designed as a two-seat trainer.
• 46:50
  And when they converted it to a combat airplane, the compromises that they had to do were.
• 46:58
  Really severe. For example, you're in a combat airplane, the cockpit structure
• 47:05
  all around you, the metal cockpit structure is magnesium.
• 47:09
  Oh, you know about that.
• 47:12
  Yeah. Your G suit is inflated with a hundred percent oxygen and, uh,
• 47:19
  and, and your oxygen regulators in the middle of your chest with a high-speed
• 47:24
  oxygen or high-pressure oxygen line leading to it.
• 47:28
  And I made up my mind that the first whiff of smoke in the cockpit, I'm out of this.
• 47:35
  Wow. Yeah, things could get hot real quick. Yeah, that does sound good.
• 47:40
  Yeah. And they didn't really have enough money to properly develop the airplane.
• 47:47
  They put a laser rangefinder in it for bomb dropping. The guns didn't work.
• 47:52
  The ECM gear wasn't installed.
• 47:55
  Eventually, they made a reasonable combat airplane out of it,
• 47:58
  and it did well at Desert Storm.
• 48:00
  But when I was there, I was in the second class to fly the Jaguar,
• 48:07
  and it had a long way to go.
• 48:10
  But it handled well, and it was really fast.
• 48:15
  A normal mission was an hour 45 at 480 and 250 feet. So, you can go a long way
• 48:24
  very fast at low altitude.
• 48:27
  Nice tour of the countryside. And that's when you could see,
• 48:30
  though. But we opened over Loch Ness.
• 48:32
  And Nessie didn't reach up and grab you. But how did you unscrew that situation?
• 48:37
  You got four of you in the goo now. Yeah.
• 48:42
  It was a kind of a joy ride. The French Air Force flew the Jaguar,
• 48:47
  of course. They have a different version, but it was a Jaguar.
• 48:50
  And they came over to fly with us.
• 48:52
  And so I was leading a four-ship, and number two was a Scotsman named McDonnell.
• 48:59
  And three and four were Frenchmen in their own airplanes.
• 49:04
  And good guys. I mean, all fighter pilots are interchangeable, so they fit right in.
• 49:10
  And so the plan was to go to the northern part of Scotland,
• 49:16
  wind our way through the glens there, hit the Great Glen south of Inverness,
• 49:21
  fly down the length of Loch Ness and look for the monster, and then come back
• 49:25
  through the carngorms and land.
• 49:28
  And the weather was supposed to be marginal in the northern part of the route,
• 49:33
  but less than marginal in the southern part of the route.
• 49:37
  And so I briefed a procedure that we would use if we encountered the weather.
• 49:42
  And I briefed it in French and I briefed it in English and I briefed it in Francaise.
• 49:48
  And hopefully I got to the guys.
• 49:51
  And the Frenchman seemed to understand what I was saying. And so the plan was
• 49:55
  if we hit the weather, we would be in finger formation.
• 50:01
  If I call for the pull-up, we were to pull up into the weather and come out
• 50:05
  on top, and number two was to turn 10 degrees off of my planned heading.
• 50:13
  Three turns 10 degrees the other direction off the planned heading.
• 50:17
  Four turns 20 degrees off the planned heading. And so we're going up through
• 50:22
  the clouds with diverging flight paths, just like you did.
• 50:25
  That was the plant, OK, so I saw I saw the fog on the unlocked nest and I called
• 50:32
  for the pull up and the standard procedure was 30 degrees of pitch,
• 50:37
  full reheat until you get out on top, whole 450 to get out on top.
• 50:41
  And so we came I got out on top about 12,000, 13,000 feet and I looked over
• 50:48
  in there, Sandy McDonald, where he should have been and I didn't see the Frenchman.
• 50:52
  I mean, I looked at where they're supposed to be, and they weren't there.
• 50:57
  And I'm like, holy cow, they hit the ground. I mean, jeez, this is going to be bad for my career.
• 51:03
  And then I looked, and the two Frenchmen were on the other side of number two. Oh, shit.
• 51:11
  They had passed through the formation in the clouds, reversed from one side
• 51:17
  to the other. Yeah, exactly.
• 51:25
  And thinking back on it, as I climbed back through the clouds.
• 51:31
  There was a dark shadow over the airplane and then a bump of turbulence.
• 51:36
  And I thought it was just normal thunderstorm sort of stuff.
• 51:39
  But then later I figured out it was a jaguar going over the top of my canopy. Oh, my gosh.
• 51:43
  Canopy. I guess it wasn't your day.
• 51:46
  No. And so we went back and landed. And usually these sort of flights are debriefed at the bar.
• 51:52
  But I insisted on a detailed debriefing.
• 51:56
  I wanted to know what the hell happened, you know. And the bottom line was the
• 52:04
  Royal Air Force Jaguars had an inertial platform,
• 52:08
  and we flew on true north.
• 52:13
  The French Jaguars did not.
• 52:17
  They flew on mag north, and the variation in Scotland is, what, 10 degrees.
• 52:23
  And so I had briefed a tri-national midair but it didn't work out oh my gosh
• 52:32
  well I'm glad that didn't happen one for lack of trying huh that's right oh man,
• 52:39
  that was a no shit fleur de lis yep I flew with the French and that was fun
• 52:47
  I enjoyed doing that but they had a different approach to combat than we did.
• 52:56
  I'm not surprised to hear that at all. Anything else notable about the Royal Air Force tour?
• 53:03
  No, I mean, there's all kinds of stories. But again, it was worthwhile with their traditions.
• 53:12
  They've been in the combat business since 1912.
• 53:17
  And they said, I got to meet a bunch of guys I'd only read about. So that was worthwhile.
• 53:24
  That right there is probably worth the ticket. Right. Did you...
• 53:31
  Ever learn to understand the Scots? Asking for a friend. Well, that's another story.
• 53:38
  I've been there about a week. I've been there about a week.
• 53:42
  And the little fishing village we were in didn't have a supermarket. You had to do the shops.
• 53:48
  You know, they had a baker and a butcher, a green grocer and all that.
• 53:52
  And so my job Saturday morning, first Saturday morning we were there,
• 53:56
  was to go to the butcher shop and get something to eat.
• 53:59
  And so I'm standing in line at the butcher shop, and there's three or four Scots
• 54:05
  ladies standing in front of me.
• 54:07
  And I realize I can't understand a word they're saying.
• 54:12
  Not one word.
• 54:14
  At first, I thought they were speaking Gaelic, but we weren't in a Gaelic area.
• 54:18
  It was just, you just couldn't get it. And so I'd watched, and this lady would
• 54:24
  walk up to the butcher, say something to him. They would both look out the window,
• 54:29
  look back in, and he'd say something to her.
• 54:31
  And I said, they're talking about the weather, you know.
• 54:35
  And so when I got number one in line, the Scotch butcher looked at me.
• 54:41
  I looked out the window, and I said, do you think it'll rain?
• 54:44
  And then he looked back in, and he said, no, laddie, it's clear today.
• 54:48
  He could switch from English to Scots just instantly, you know.
• 54:52
  But when he was speaking Scots, forget it.
• 55:00
  We went on a cruise last summer, and it was funny.
• 55:03
  The guy down in Spain, one of our tour guides, was like, look,
• 55:06
  I understand the Brits, the Aussies, the Americans, everybody except the Scots.
• 55:11
  He goes, when the Scots come here, it's the damnedest thing.
• 55:14
  He says none of us can understand. Right.
• 55:16
  No, and the fastest way to spool a Scotsman up, especially if he's had a few
• 55:21
  pints, is to say, are you speaking English?
• 55:24
  Oh, that's not the way you go.
• 55:29
  And being as my middle name is MacDonald, I am a Scot, and so I'm just poking fun at us. Oh, yes.
• 55:39
  But I can't speak that fluently.
• 55:43
  How many years did you fly in the military, Fast Eddie?
• 55:48
  Because I'm looking at your resume, and I'm like, holy shit,
• 55:51
  you did a lot. 30, 40 years.
• 55:54
  13. 13 active duty? 13 active duty.
• 55:59
  And then did you spend some years in the reserve or the guard?
• 56:02
  Right. Okay. Yeah, I was in the reserves another 15 years.
• 56:08
  So is that where, I mean, was it the...
• 56:13
  Did you do an exchange tour with the Iranian Air Force?
• 56:17
  No, it wasn't a classical exchange tour. This was under the Shah, of course. Yes.
• 56:25
  Whatever the shawl wanted, the shawl got. And he wanted, there was two things
• 56:32
  that was going on in the Air Force.
• 56:33
  They were introducing the F-4 with the leading edge slats.
• 56:37
  And the next summer, they were introducing the Maverick TV guided missile.
• 56:42
  And so the head of the Air Force, a guy named General Cotterby,
• 56:47
  who was a super guy, he said, who are the best instructors at this?
• 56:51
  And that was at the weapons school. So I spent two summers in Iran,
• 56:56
  one summer teaching them to fly leading-edge slats, and one summer teaching
• 57:01
  them to launch Maverick missiles. Okay.
• 57:05
  But that was, yeah, that's it right there. Yeah. Got a picture of the Maverick
• 57:10
  up on the YouTube feed. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
• 57:13
  So is that how you, I got the bullet here, you managed to nearly kill the shawl?
• 57:21
  Yeah, yeah. So tell us that story.
• 57:24
  Well, the Maverick training was going very well.
• 57:29
  Was. Yeah, it was.
• 57:33
  General Academy came to talk to us. And if you called up Central Casting and
• 57:38
  said, send the commander of the Air Force over, this is the guy you'd get.
• 57:43
  You know, 6'2", broad at the shoulders, slim at the hips, well-built,
• 57:48
  gray hair, hawk's nose. was, you know, just a classic guy.
• 57:52
  And he said, why don't we put on a firepower demonstration for the Shaw?
• 57:58
  Okay, great. So the plan was they took an old tank and parked it on the other
• 58:04
  side of the runway, took rattle cans and painted it black so it had nice contrast,
• 58:09
  and then built a reviewing stand on the other side of the runway.
• 58:13
  And the plan was for the ops officer of the Iranian squadron to fly down the
• 58:20
  runway, lock the missile onto the tank,
• 58:24
  shoot the tank while the shawl was standing in the reviewing stand.
• 58:30
  And so my job was to be in the reviewing stand and kind of watch things.
• 58:36
  And the shawl, he was an interesting guy.
• 58:40
  I'm not going to go into it now, but interesting guy.
• 58:44
  Anyway, he had survived two or three assassination attempts,
• 58:50
  and he traveled with this group of armed guys.
• 58:53
  Oh, the Immortals, which he copied from Cyrus the Great, they were like the
• 58:59
  secret service of Iran. They were supposed to protect him.
• 59:03
  And the rule was nobody got to stand behind the Shah.
• 59:08
  And so the Shah was standing at the reviewing stand. General Academy was on his right.
• 59:13
  I was further off on the right with one star who had a Jeep radio so we could talk to the air crew.
• 59:22
  Well, the Iranian guy that was going to do the demo rolled in,
• 59:27
  and the prime directive of firepower demonstrations is don't release ordinance
• 59:36
  until you're past the reviewing set. Okay? That's key.
• 59:40
  That's key. Seems like a good safety rule. That's a good rule.
• 59:44
  Yeah. And I thought it was so evident I didn't bother briefing it,
• 59:49
  you know? And so I didn't brief the guy.
• 59:52
  Anyway, he rolled in, the backseater locked up the missile, and I think he got
• 59:57
  buck fever or something.
• 59:59
  And so he launched the missile.
• 1:00:02
  The seeker lock didn't survive a launch transience, and the missile came off
• 1:00:07
  the rail, turned left, and headed right towards the reviewing stand.
• 1:00:11
  Oh, shit. And I'm thinking, if I survive the missile impact,
• 1:00:17
  these Secret Service guys are going to take me out because it looks just like
• 1:00:22
  an assassination. Sure. Oh, yeah.
• 1:00:25
  And so I'm thinking, okay.
• 1:00:29
  Spent a good life, but the missile headed forward to a reviewing stand and started
• 1:00:36
  to climb and went over the top of the reviewing stand at about a thousand feet
• 1:00:41
  and disappeared south into the desert.
• 1:00:44
  And so I got on the radio and, and told the, uh, uh, major by easy to come around
• 1:00:52
  and do it again and, and don't launch until you pass the shawl, you know?
• 1:00:56
  And so he did and he blew up the tank and it was a big success,
• 1:01:00
  but it was, as they say in the RAF, a close run thing.
• 1:01:09
  Holy cow. Oh my God. Oh, that's fantastic.
• 1:01:13
  I'll tell you what, these are great stories and fig, we've been going almost an hour.
• 1:01:16
  Let's take just a couple moments and thank the folks who make bringing these
• 1:01:20
  stories to you possible.
• 1:01:26
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• 1:01:40
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  In two minutes flat, I was refueling with a hot chicken and mushroom tetrazzini
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• 1:02:10
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• 1:02:26
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• 1:03:49
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• 1:04:01
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• 1:06:39
  so you survived the iranian experience how long did you spend over there you
• 1:06:45
  said two summers two summers yeah okay yeah and what time frame was that obviously pre-79 Yeah,
• 1:06:53
  like 76, 77, something like that.
• 1:06:59
  Awesome. What was Iran like then in 76, 77?
• 1:07:05
  I really enjoyed it. The Persian people were wonderful.
• 1:07:09
  The food was good. Wine was good. They had a drink they called vodka,
• 1:07:15
  which we would call tequila.
• 1:07:17
  But the whole country was opening up and modernizing.
• 1:07:24
  And they were very proud of it.
• 1:07:26
  You sit around and talk to the guys in the mess and they'd say,
• 1:07:29
  in 50 years, we'll be like the West Germany of the Middle East.
• 1:07:35
  They were very ambitious.
• 1:07:37
  And it was an eye-opening experience to me.
• 1:07:42
  And I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed working with them. and I enjoyed once you learned.
• 1:07:50
  Lay of the land, like anywhere else. You have to know what the social boars are.
• 1:07:55
  And for instance, when I first got there, they'd have a party at the officer's
• 1:08:01
  club and the guys would be there with their wives and we'd be talking and they
• 1:08:07
  wouldn't introduce their wives.
• 1:08:09
  Their wives wouldn't say a word.
• 1:08:11
  They were like potted pants. They were just standing there.
• 1:08:15
  And I couldn't figure that out. So there was a guy at the embassy that was an
• 1:08:22
  air attaché that knew a lot more than I did.
• 1:08:25
  And so I called him up and I said, what's the story? And he said,
• 1:08:29
  well, Persian wives of Air Force guys believe that U.S.
• 1:08:36
  Air Force fighter pilots are out to bed any woman they can get their hands on.
• 1:08:41
  Yeah, what's your point? And I said, there's some truth to that.
• 1:08:47
  There's some truth to that. But anyway, once they figured out that squadron
• 1:08:53
  mates' wives were off limits, they opened up to us.
• 1:08:57
  And for some reason, the guys spoke pretty good English.
• 1:09:01
  Their wives all spoke French. Okay. And I had never figured that out.
• 1:09:06
  Okay. But after that, we did along pretty well. That's awesome. Yeah.
• 1:09:11
  And any other cultural differences? I'll give you an example that I remember
• 1:09:17
  because my mother spent eight years in Saudi Arabia in the 70s and 80s.
• 1:09:21
  And we had a book called The Era of Mine. She asked me to get it for her so
• 1:09:25
  she could better understand the culture. And I read it before I sent it to her.
• 1:09:28
  And it was like, if an Arab asks you over to dinner and you say yes,
• 1:09:31
  they don't know if you're coming.
• 1:09:33
  You have to say something to the effect of, you know, a thousand horses couldn't
• 1:09:37
  drag me away from your front door at the point in time.
• 1:09:40
  And then they think, well, okay, you might show up. But anything else along
• 1:09:44
  those lines that you found? Yeah.
• 1:09:46
  Yeah, it, we went, the, the guy that ran the base was a general and I was there
• 1:09:55
  with another, another weapons school instructor.
• 1:09:58
  And one of the first weeks we were there, he invited us to dinner at his house
• 1:10:06
  and he had this really nice house.
• 1:10:08
  It was both squadron commanders, the chief of maintenance, the head of the base,
• 1:10:13
  you know, all those guys and their wives. And the food was terrific.
• 1:10:18
  They were very friendly. They went out of their way to speak English or French to us.
• 1:10:24
  But I noticed that on the table, they had water for China. They had spode.
• 1:10:32
  They had silver place settings, crystal, all that.
• 1:10:36
  Tom and I had white plates from the chow hall and plastic water glasses,
• 1:10:42
  you know, and, you know, stamp steel flatware.
• 1:10:48
  And we were the only ones that had that. And I thought, okay.
• 1:10:52
  So the next morning I called up the embassy and I said, what's the story on that?
• 1:10:57
  And he said, don't you know? I said, once an infidel has eaten off of a plate,
• 1:11:03
  devout Muslims won't eat off of it.
• 1:11:06
  So they took your plates and your flatware and your glasses after the dinner and threw them away.
• 1:11:15
  Unbelievable now they're willing to fly in the airplanes you flew in after you but yeah,
• 1:11:20
  yeah yeah unbelievable but but
• 1:11:24
  we had another another story we had there's two
• 1:11:27
  orderlies in the voq you know
• 1:11:30
  that made the beds and cleaned the latrines and swept
• 1:11:33
  out and they were two young persian
• 1:11:36
  guys 18 17 18 years old
• 1:11:39
  from northeast iran and they
• 1:11:42
  were you know flunky butts in the air force airman basics
• 1:11:45
  or and we got to know them and you
• 1:11:48
  know said how did you join the air force he said they
• 1:11:52
  were in this little village in north northeast iran they woke up one morning
• 1:11:56
  and the army had surrounded the village and all the eligible guys were now in
• 1:12:01
  the military it was a you're in the army now yeah it was a draft board you know and And anyway,
• 1:12:12
  they got assigned to the Air Force and...
• 1:12:16
  They had given us a Land Rover to drive around, and we had this Land Rover,
• 1:12:21
  you know, kind with the tire and the hood and all that.
• 1:12:25
  And we taught those Persian guys how to drive it. They didn't know how to drive.
• 1:12:31
  And so we had plenty of spare time, and so we taught them how to drive.
• 1:12:36
  And then as we left, they came up to us with tears in their eyes,
• 1:12:41
  tears in their eyes, thanking us for teaching them how to drive.
• 1:12:45
  He said, well, when our tour is over and when we go back to our village,
• 1:12:49
  we have a skill. We have a skill we can make a living with.
• 1:12:55
  Very cool. Wow.
• 1:12:59
  So, well, how were their pilots? Could they fly worth a damn?
• 1:13:06
  There were two tiers of them. There were guys who had been flying fighters for
• 1:13:11
  years. They started out in the F-86, and they went to the F-100,
• 1:13:15
  and they were good sticks.
• 1:13:17
  They were some of the best stick and rudder guys that I ever flew with.
• 1:13:21
  And then they were like 10% of the squadron.
• 1:13:25
  And the other guys were, you know, nuggets right out of pilot training and right out of RTU.
• 1:13:32
  And they were very enthusiastic and eager to learn and sponges for information,
• 1:13:39
  but they had a long way to go. Okay.
• 1:13:42
  Fair enough. Yeah, that's kind of how it is everywhere. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:13:50
  But what was interesting is this book, The Hair of Mind, which I think I read,
• 1:13:56
  as a matter of fact, but in instructing these guys, you had to pay attention to their culture.
• 1:14:04
  And the reason being, in the U.S., Navy, Air Force, certain sense,
• 1:14:09
  RAF, you go out on a sortie and it gets all screwed up.
• 1:14:13
  And you come back and you debrief it and you tell the guy, look, you screwed this up.
• 1:14:18
  You did this wrong. You know, here's what there are mistakes that you made.
• 1:14:22
  We'll go out tomorrow and you can try again.
• 1:14:24
  OK, that's that's kind of the way it works.
• 1:14:27
  If you do that with an Iranian pilot, what you got was I didn't understand poor
• 1:14:34
  English or aircraft malfunction or control.
• 1:14:38
  They did everything they could to not accept the fact that they'd screwed up.
• 1:14:44
  So the way that you approach that is you go back to the debrief and you say,
• 1:14:51
  okay, Muhammad, this maneuver did not go as we had planned, and it's all my fault.
• 1:14:57
  He said, if I was a better instructor, I would have told you what to do here
• 1:15:05
  and what to do there, but I didn't, and I apologize for things not going well. There you go.
• 1:15:11
  Can you imagine that happening? No. I used to do that all the time for my students.
• 1:15:15
  Didn't you think? Sure. Come on.
• 1:15:18
  Yeah. You bet. Yeah.
• 1:15:23
  But anyway, if you took that approach, then they came back to you and they said,
• 1:15:29
  Captain Ed, no, it's my fault.
• 1:15:31
  I screwed up. And then you had a regular debriefing. But you had to take the
• 1:15:35
  blame first, and then they would listen to you. Okay.
• 1:15:40
  How about that? Repeat. Yeah. Right? Yeah, it's like you say,
• 1:15:44
  you got to respect the culture to get to get it done and get the mission accomplished.
• 1:15:49
  So, so fast, fast, Eddie, I look at the notes here and I'm kind of I got to know what this means.
• 1:15:57
  Spent time in a make believe French brothel. Yeah.
• 1:16:04
  Sure are you sure you want this,
• 1:16:09
  okay well here it goes the.
• 1:16:13
  The squadron that I was assigned to in the French Air Force a base called San
• 1:16:19
  Dizier which is in Alsace-Lorraine and close to the German border and in World
• 1:16:26
  War II the Germans came across the border took over the base operated as a Luftwaffe base,
• 1:16:33
  and the officers' mess and the officers'
• 1:16:36
  quarters were in downtown San Dizia. They weren't out at the base.
• 1:16:40
  And so they had this officers' club, it was very nice downtown.
• 1:16:44
  And the Germans, during the three or four years that they were there,
• 1:16:50
  decided it would be a lot of fun to redecorate the officers' quarters like a French whorehouse,
• 1:16:58
  you know, which they did.
• 1:17:00
  Okay and and i guess they thought it was you know a lot of laughs and then after the war.
• 1:17:07
  The french they're you know they didn't have any money they
• 1:17:10
  couldn't reverse anything they couldn't redecorate
• 1:17:14
  it so they put a plaque in the reception of
• 1:17:17
  the officers club and the plaque said interior design
• 1:17:21
  courtesy of the loofwafa and so
• 1:17:26
  and so and so my room there i had crimson velvet wallpaper with gold trim i
• 1:17:37
  had a gold etched mirror a four poster bed that's great And mirrors on the ceiling.
• 1:17:43
  Courtesy of the Luftwaffe.
• 1:17:46
  That could be a title. That could be a title, too, right there.
• 1:17:49
  Yeah, right? Oh, yeah, good point. Courtesy of the Luftwaffe.
• 1:17:55
  That's great stuff. Well, thank you for that. I'm going to tell my wife that
• 1:17:58
  story because she's an interior designer. She'll get a kick out of that.
• 1:18:02
  Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, and also in the notes, so you almost killed the
• 1:18:07
  show of Iran, and you almost got to meet Howard Hughes. playing a lot of horseshoes
• 1:18:12
  here got some almost yeah.
• 1:18:16
  Yeah, okay. At that time, the Air Force had a duty called the Aerodrome Officer,
• 1:18:23
  which tells you how long this regulation had been around, you know.
• 1:18:28
  And usually a junior captain would be appointed the Aerodrome Officer for 24 hours.
• 1:18:35
  And your job was to make sure that the rotating beacon is rotating and the transient
• 1:18:40
  maintenance guys are awake and all that.
• 1:18:43
  And the guys that ran the base knew what they were doing. You didn't have much to do.
• 1:18:46
  But you were there in case something, you know, something happened that needed some attention.
• 1:18:52
  And so this was in Las Vegas.
• 1:18:56
  And at that time, Howard Hughes was ensconced on the 13th floor of the Desert
• 1:19:01
  Inn. Yes. Nobody had seen him for years.
• 1:19:05
  And one morning or early morning, two o'clock in the morning,
• 1:19:09
  he left the Desert Inn in an ambulance.
• 1:19:12
  He had a motorcade of the ambulance and three or four SUVs. And they left the Desert Inn.
• 1:19:18
  And of course, the media had spies in the Desert Inn. And as soon as they saw
• 1:19:22
  this happening, they called.
• 1:19:23
  And pretty soon his motorcade was being trailed by a media swarm. My gosh.
• 1:19:30
  TV reporters and print reporters and who knows.
• 1:19:35
  And the motorcade drove out to Nellis.
• 1:19:39
  And because Howard Hughes was a military contractor through Hughes Aircraft,
• 1:19:44
  His motorcade had the right decals on the windshield, and the gate guard just
• 1:19:49
  waved them right on through.
• 1:19:51
  The following press entourage did not, and the gate guard stopped them.
• 1:19:57
  And so they couldn't get on base. So Howard Hughes went to base ops,
• 1:20:01
  got on his executive business jet, and flew off to London.
• 1:20:07
  Okay the guy that was the airdrum officer that night watched all this happen
• 1:20:12
  and didn't do anything about it you know just oh look at that it must be Howard
• 1:20:17
  Hughes and the next morning.
• 1:20:21
  The two-star that ran the base got a call from the editor of a Las Vegas review journal.
• 1:20:30
  And a guy named Hank Greenspun. And he'd come out to Vegas with a much-beloved
• 1:20:36
  civic planner named Bugsy Siegel.
• 1:20:38
  And he proceeded to ring the general a new one.
• 1:20:43
  Freedom of the press, military-industrial complex, blah, blah,
• 1:20:48
  blah, blah, blah, about not letting the press coverage cover the biggest story in Las Vegas that year.
• 1:20:57
  And so if there's anything that generals love, it surprises.
• 1:21:04
  It helps their career so much. And so, yeah.
• 1:21:10
  And so, you know, the shit hit the fan. And so about a year later,
• 1:21:17
  I'm the airdrome officer.
• 1:21:19
  And the way you did that, you went down to base ops and got a briefing of what was going on.
• 1:21:24
  And they gave me a loose leaf notebook of about 30 pages of what the duties were.
• 1:21:31
  And about two thirds of those pages were what to do if Howard Hughes decided to come back and land.
• 1:21:39
  Oh, that's great. Fantastic. Yeah.
• 1:21:43
  And I was supposed to turn off the field lights, station fire trucks at the
• 1:21:51
  end of the runway, alert to security police, all that.
• 1:21:54
  I was supposed to call the command post, call the general, you know,
• 1:21:58
  alert general quarters.
• 1:22:00
  Okay. Anyway, so...
• 1:22:03
  I read that, got the briefing, did my thing, had dinner at the Officers Club,
• 1:22:09
  went to the BOQ because you had to stay in base, and turned on a 10 o'clock
• 1:22:14
  news in Las Vegas, and the headline news was, Recrucive Billionaire Howard Hughes
• 1:22:20
  has left London destination unknown.
• 1:22:23
  Oh, here he comes. It's not going to end well for me.
• 1:22:27
  Here he comes. so I got out the book and I re-read the 20 pages all over again
• 1:22:34
  so I knew what I was doing and then I went to sleep and about 1 o'clock I got
• 1:22:39
  a call from the control tower and the sergeant there said Captain Cobble, yeah,
• 1:22:45
  he said an unidentified civilian aircraft has landed at Nellis Air Force Base,
• 1:22:51
  and all I could think of was is it Howard Hughes?
• 1:22:56
  And the guy in the tower said i don't
• 1:22:59
  know sir what does howard hughes look like and howard
• 1:23:03
  hughes hasn't been seen in public in 15 years you know
• 1:23:05
  what does howard hughes look like my career
• 1:23:08
  is hanging by a thread and i got bob hope in
• 1:23:11
  the control tower you know so so so
• 1:23:16
  i jumped in the staff car and zorkstone down
• 1:23:19
  to the airfield and i could see uh the dim
• 1:23:22
  outline of a civilian airplane and the air
• 1:23:25
  police security police were there and i drove up
• 1:23:28
  and there was three guys spread eagle face down on the ramp with m16s pointed
• 1:23:34
  at them and i thought i'm gonna walk up there and if one of these guys is a
• 1:23:40
  tall guy with a leather flying jacket right i'm toast so.
• 1:23:47
  So I walked up there and three guys in a bonanza who had mistaken Nellis from
• 1:23:55
  North Las Vegas Air Terminal, you know.
• 1:23:57
  And so the procedure in the book for that was I was supposed to examine their
• 1:24:02
  pilot's license, examine their medical certificate, have them file a flight
• 1:24:06
  plan, escort them, the whole thing, you know.
• 1:24:10
  I did none of that, you know. I told the security police to let them up off
• 1:24:15
  the ground, and I said, North Las Vegas is 340 for seven. Get in your bug smash.
• 1:24:23
  GTFO. That's right. Come back.
• 1:24:26
  Oh, man. Oh, that's fantastic. I was thinking you were going to say I was just
• 1:24:31
  two Marine captains who walked across the red line in the wrong place. Yeah.
• 1:24:36
  I have my memories of that. Oh. Or Kunzang.
• 1:24:41
  Yeah. Right. Well, how did your Thunderbirds try out go, Fast Daddy?
• 1:24:49
  Not well. Yeah.
• 1:24:54
  When I was there, I'd been there about a year, and I got invited to try out for the Thunderbirds.
• 1:25:00
  And so I went and flew with them for a week, and it's easy to do in the back seat.
• 1:25:05
  And we flew air shows. Yeah, that's it right there.
• 1:25:09
  We flew air shows at three or four places, including the Air Force Academy.
• 1:25:13
  I mean, came back, and the end of the audition was you go through like a murder board,
• 1:25:20
  And the existing team members sit behind a desk and you're sitting in a chair
• 1:25:26
  in front of them and they fire questions at you because, you know,
• 1:25:31
  flying to the Thunderbirds is about half of its flying and half of its public relations.
• 1:25:36
  And so oftentimes you get a lot of tough questions from the press or from people
• 1:25:41
  and they want to know, you know, how you handle yourself under verbal pressure.
• 1:25:46
  And so they're firing questions at me and I'm thinking I'm doing okay.
• 1:25:50
  And then the commander, a guy named Tom Swann, he said, well,
• 1:25:54
  you know, you've flown with a team for a week.
• 1:25:56
  He says, do you think you can hack the flying?
• 1:26:00
  And the A answer was, I don't see how I could ever be as good as you super pilots, you know.
• 1:26:08
  The B answer was, you know, if I bust my ass, I just might be able to hack the program.
• 1:26:15
  The answer I gave was a D minus answer. And I said, it didn't look all over. Oh, yeah.
• 1:26:23
  Don't impress me much so that hard yeah and so yeah and there was three of us
• 1:26:32
  trying out and swan looked up the door and that was that,
• 1:26:36
  that was that was that yeah that's all right.
• 1:26:44
  Where are we at repeat sorry i had to cough so i was i was hiding i was looking
• 1:26:48
  for the mute button Oh, that's fantastic.
• 1:26:51
  Well, I wanted to ask a couple of questions. One I asked pre-show,
• 1:26:55
  and then I want to ask about, you did some work with some three-letter agencies,
• 1:26:59
  to whatever degree you can chat about that and how your experience as an Air
• 1:27:04
  Force pilot helped or hindered in that cause.
• 1:27:08
  But the other question was, essentially, I was like, look, we've had a few authors
• 1:27:15
  on and most of them have written notes throughout their career,
• 1:27:19
  kept a diary, that sort of thing.
• 1:27:20
  So I was asking you the same thing. Did you keep notes? Is this all recollections?
• 1:27:24
  So if you go through how it is you became an author, because you've had some good success.
• 1:27:29
  And man, let me tell you, folks, these are good books. I'm enjoying them.
• 1:27:35
  Yeah, good. I'm glad you are. The way I got into it was my dad joined the U.S.
• 1:27:43
  Army in 1939, and he joined the cavalry with horses.
• 1:27:50
  And so when we got into war in 1941, they mechanized, they got rid of the horses.
• 1:27:55
  He went and served in World War II, came home, got on with his life.
• 1:28:01
  You know, that's that's what you did back then.
• 1:28:04
  PTSD hadn't been invented yet. And he he never, never said much about what it
• 1:28:10
  was like to be in the horse cavalry.
• 1:28:13
  And when he passed on, all his stories went with him.
• 1:28:16
  And I made up my mind. I said, you know, it's not going to happen to me.
• 1:28:20
  I'm going to put all these stories down on paper.
• 1:28:23
  And, you know, I've got two daughters and four grandkids and relatives and,
• 1:28:28
  you know, they might want to read them someday.
• 1:28:30
  And so I did a couple of chapters and I knew a guy that was a journalist for Aviation Week.
• 1:28:38
  And he wrote James Bond thrillers on the side.
• 1:28:42
  And I sent him a couple of chapters and he said, you know, people would like
• 1:28:47
  to read this if it was a book, you know, let me know when you finish the book.
• 1:28:51
  So I went ahead and expanded it into a book.
• 1:28:53
  I sent it to him and it's the usual thing. And he knew a guy who knew a guy.
• 1:28:58
  And the book was eventually picked up by Penguin and published by Penguin Books.
• 1:29:03
  And it's done well. I've sold like 40,000 copies.
• 1:29:08
  And so that that let me know that I could at least read something that a few people will read.
• 1:29:15
  But the interesting thing is when you read books that are aimed at fighter pilots,
• 1:29:21
  you get lots of feedback. Yeah.
• 1:29:24
  Usually, usually, usually it comes in by a finger poke in the chest, you know?
• 1:29:29
  And so that's. Need more pictures. That's pretty good.
• 1:29:35
  Yeah. It's a tough crowd. Yeah. I know you, I know you realize that.
• 1:29:40
  Yeah. It's a tough crowd.
• 1:29:43
  Yeah. You know, people love aviation, love to hear about it and read about it.
• 1:29:47
  But when you're a aviator and you read about it, that's the,
• 1:29:50
  there's the tough crowd right there. Right.
• 1:29:54
  Yeah what i with the books i try
• 1:29:57
  to to yeah to write it for not just
• 1:30:00
  aviators just the general public and then
• 1:30:02
  i try to askew acronyms and jargon and abbreviations and stuff like that so
• 1:30:09
  that the average guy or average woman can read it and get something out of it
• 1:30:14
  and not be which is a big challenge in this business right i mean it's it's
• 1:30:18
  a lexicon all its own yeah yeah Yeah, we've had to fight that all along.
• 1:30:23
  Yeah, we do our best to define acronyms because, you know, we throw acronyms around like.
• 1:30:30
  Yeah, sure. Like everybody knows what they are. Because we have a specific language
• 1:30:33
  to speak, and you know that. So when you're writing, that's how you got to spell it out.
• 1:30:39
  Make it simple or make it understandable. Sure.
• 1:30:45
  Understandable, yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. All right. I had some other comment
• 1:30:50
  that slipped my mind. Don't get old. It's bad for your memory.
• 1:30:54
  I'll come back to it if we can. All right. So, were you working for the three-letter
• 1:31:00
  agency before you got out of the reserves? Or how did you work your way into that?
• 1:31:09
  Okay. Easily.
• 1:31:13
  Next question.
• 1:31:18
  Yeah.
• 1:31:21
  No, my civilian job, I was in international business development for Hughes Aircraft.
• 1:31:27
  And so I got to travel around the world and meet a lot of procurement people and military people.
• 1:31:35
  And that's all I'm going to say about it. All right. Okay. All right.
• 1:31:40
  Oh, I know what I was going to say. We were talking about it being a tough crowd,
• 1:31:43
  writing books for – doing it for everybody, but in a relatively focused area is –.
• 1:31:54
  How was i gonna put it it's it's essentially this
• 1:31:57
  if i'm watching a television show or a movie or something like that
• 1:32:00
  and then they're talking to the
• 1:32:02
  air traffic controller and atc says roger you're
• 1:32:05
  cleared land on runway four three left that's it movie's over show's over i'm
• 1:32:10
  out yeah yeah right right if it's totally you know off off the mark it's like
• 1:32:15
  i can't watch this crap this is right do a little just do a little research
• 1:32:20
  try to make it just a little somewhat,
• 1:32:23
  just a little i i know and that's the
• 1:32:26
  thing you know when when we see movies aviation's involved if it's not right
• 1:32:32
  or correct it's like there it is there's that yeah right so there's the challenge
• 1:32:38
  right especially when you're writing to make it understandable and also keep it,
• 1:32:45
  right keep it real yeah yeah so well which was your favorite book to write.
• 1:32:54
  Oh, that's a good question. The first one, I think I enjoyed doing the first one the most.
• 1:33:00
  And after that, I enjoyed them all.
• 1:33:03
  I found out that I enjoy writing, but I enjoy selling the books and marketing
• 1:33:09
  them almost as much as I enjoy writing.
• 1:33:12
  There you go. Well, we're thrilled that you are.
• 1:33:16
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, jeez.
• 1:33:21
  I'm, uh, we've, we've been going, uh, 90 minutes here.
• 1:33:26
  It doesn't seem like that. No, it seems like it was 10 minutes in here. Yeah.
• 1:33:33
  Well, you haven't, you haven't asked me. Okay. I've been waiting.
• 1:33:36
  Well, well, see, I was going to ask if we could do that in the extra.
• 1:33:42
  Do you have another extra story? Because what we do is for the people who lose
• 1:33:46
  all sense of common sense and throw money at us to help support the show,
• 1:33:50
  we give them an exclusive.
• 1:33:53
  Actually, hold on.
• 1:33:56
  I teed one up that I was holding in reserve here. Okay.
• 1:34:00
  Jimmy Hoffa's airplane. Oh, right. Yeah, we played straight over that like it
• 1:34:04
  was nothing. Talk about that in the extra or talk about that now and then talk
• 1:34:10
  about call sign in the extra. Okay.
• 1:34:14
  Let's hear about Jimmy Hoffa's airplane. Did it disappear in the Bermuda Triangle?
• 1:34:19
  Does anyone know where it is today?
• 1:34:22
  No, no, no.
• 1:34:26
  I was in high school. I got a job at the airport, you know, pumping gas and
• 1:34:31
  washing airplanes and things like that.
• 1:34:33
  And at that time, Jimmy Hoffa was on trial in my hometown for jury tampering.
• 1:34:41
  And he would fly in from New Jersey or wherever he lived, you know,
• 1:34:46
  Monday morning, you know, be on trial through Thursday.
• 1:34:50
  Thursday night, he would get his airplane took off. And he had a really nice twin beach.
• 1:34:56
  And but the issue was the guys that were with him scared the shit out of me.
• 1:35:03
  I mean, he was accompanied by two or three bulky Italian looking guys with suits
• 1:35:12
  and bulges under their arm and names that ended in vowels.
• 1:35:16
  And they, whenever I was around the airplane, they, they followed me,
• 1:35:22
  you know, making sure I wasn't putting a bomb on board or something, you know.
• 1:35:26
  But all I did was, you know, check the tires and oil and fuel it up and then
• 1:35:31
  get the hell out of there.
• 1:35:34
  So that's it was anticlimactic.
• 1:35:37
  I never met Hoffa. I saw him a lot. All right. But he wasn't about to talk.
• 1:35:41
  Hey, and also there in our notes, there was.
• 1:35:46
  Did you do some instructing on the USS Hancock? Were you do it?
• 1:35:49
  Were you briefing tactics or were you flying? That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:35:54
  Yeah. Yeah. the.
• 1:35:58
  My squadron had introduced laser-guided bombs to Southeast Asia,
• 1:36:03
  and we'd had super success with them.
• 1:36:07
  There were days when my squadron had more BDA than the rest of the outcountry
• 1:36:14
  air force. Just because of the accuracy of the laser-guided bombs. Oh, yeah.
• 1:36:18
  Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Instead of trying to hit a truck with a 500-pound
• 1:36:24
  unguided bomb, you could put a laser-guided bomb in the bed of the truck.
• 1:36:29
  And so anyway, the Navy realized that we were doing a lot of things that they
• 1:36:35
  weren't doing and getting more BDA than they were.
• 1:36:38
  So they decided to buy some laser-guided bomb kits from Texas Instruments and
• 1:36:44
  have their A4 guys drop them.
• 1:36:46
  They put them on board, flew them into the Philippines, put them on board to
• 1:36:51
  Hancock and, you know, set sail for Yankee Station.
• 1:36:55
  And then they realized that nobody on board had ever dropped a laser gun bomb
• 1:37:00
  and had no idea on how to do it, you know. Oops.
• 1:37:04
  And so they sent me over there on board to instruct the A-4 guys.
• 1:37:11
  They didn't have any two-seat airplanes, all single-seat A-4s.
• 1:37:16
  And my job was to teach these guys how to drop laser-guided bombs.
• 1:37:21
  Well, in the Air Force, we had a laser illuminator in the backseat of the F-4,
• 1:37:26
  which was mounted on the canopy rail.
• 1:37:28
  It had a four-power scope and a joystick, and you could actually hold the crosshairs
• 1:37:34
  on a small target and illuminate it with a laser.
• 1:37:39
  The Navy didn't have that. They didn't have any two-seat airplanes.
• 1:37:43
  And their laser illuminator was a picture of shoe box with a handle on each
• 1:37:49
  end in a wire gun sight on top. That was their laser illuminator.
• 1:37:55
  And, and the idea was that they, they, they had their one TA4J and they would
• 1:38:02
  put a guy in the back seat and the guy in the back seat,
• 1:38:07
  was supposed to be an F-8 pilot whose airplane was down.
• 1:38:11
  And so you had these F-8 fighter pilots who were in the backseat of a TA-4 dropping
• 1:38:17
  bombs, which they are not real happy about.
• 1:38:20
  And the laser was unstable. I mean, you had to hold it in your hand.
• 1:38:26
  And a laser-guided bomb will steer out some jitter in the illumination.
• 1:38:32
  And you don't have to hold it directly on.
• 1:38:34
  But I started talking to him and I said you guys are going to be dropping bombs hither,
• 1:38:42
  thither, and yon over laos because the
• 1:38:45
  bomb is not going to steer out 500 feet of air it can steer out 20 feet of air
• 1:38:52
  but not 500 feet and it's really hard for me to see how an F-8 guy in the back
• 1:38:58
  seat is going to be able to illuminate these targets with sufficient accuracy,
• 1:39:04
  And after that, they decided not to do it.
• 1:39:08
  Okay, then. They sent me back to Thailand. Never mind.
• 1:39:12
  Nice. I was going to ask, you explained it very well. I was going to ask, who lays for him?
• 1:39:19
  I'm like, okay, that explains it. Wow, okay.
• 1:39:23
  Hey, one other thing, it's out there on YouTube, is thinking of the Hancock, it's called Launch'Em.
• 1:39:29
  And it was a cruise video from the 1950s.
• 1:39:32
  Very funny. So, if you know anything about carrier ops, launch them.
• 1:39:36
  It's a funny video to go watch. About three, four minutes.
• 1:39:39
  Yeah. Well, Fast Eddie, I can't thank you enough for coming on.
• 1:39:44
  We've been out this almost an hour, 40 minutes.
• 1:39:46
  I want to save a little something for our extra.
• 1:39:52
  And so, we should probably start wrapping this up. Repeat. What do you think?
• 1:39:56
  Yeah. Let's go ahead and land the airplane, sir.
• 1:39:59
  We got obviously we we
• 1:40:03
  we need to thank you for your service sir to our country and
• 1:40:06
  and you know it's uh 375 combat
• 1:40:12
  missions in vietnam that's that's just truly remarkable and you have you have
• 1:40:19
  yes you have such great stories you have such a great you know demeanor and
• 1:40:25
  and attitude and And I am looking forward to reading the rest of your books.
• 1:40:32
  Yeah, please do. And be advised that I offer a money-back guarantee.
• 1:40:38
  Outstanding. So if you don't like, I'll give you your money back.
• 1:40:44
  Yeah, right. Let's see James Patterson make that.
• 1:40:47
  All right. A couple other thank yous we need to throw out there, Finn.
• 1:40:51
  We need to thank, of course, our man Dave Hamilton, who gave us the technical
• 1:40:54
  know-how to do this whole podcasting thing in the first place,
• 1:40:58
  and Sadie, who's doing a lot of social media work for us over at BeckBeatMedia.com.
• 1:41:04
  Thank you to both of them for helping to continue to make this show possible.
• 1:41:10
  We got to thank Bago, who's in the background there, making all the pictures and words come up.
• 1:41:16
  Before we know what we're going to say, he's putting up the pictures.
• 1:41:19
  I know. We usually say thanks to Sticks. Also, Sticks, well, he has to work today.
• 1:41:27
  Yeah. He's out wading in the shallow end of the G's. He's out wading.
• 1:41:29
  That's right. He couldn't have waded.
• 1:41:31
  I haven't seen him on the chat, but we need to thank Brad Silcott for BDS Aviation,
• 1:41:40
  all the beautiful photographs.
• 1:41:41
  That's call sign badass, Brad Silcott.
• 1:41:44
  And then we got a couple sponsors to pick. Absolutely.
• 1:41:48
  We got a factor at factor meals.com slash podcast with the, the code podcast
• 1:41:56
  to get 50% off your first box and Robbie Walling over at HSI wealth strategies.
• 1:42:02
  Let him help you get your retirement plan tweaked and organized and put another
• 1:42:07
  seven figures in your pocket for retirement.
• 1:42:09
  You know, get, get up, call Robbie two one four jet 70 30.
• 1:42:18
  Yeah, don't be a dumbass. Call Robbie. There you go.
• 1:42:25
  Say what you think, Fig. That just came out.
• 1:42:28
  Hey, we need to thank all our Patreon pilots who've lost all good judgment and
• 1:42:35
  continue to send money to us to produce the show.
• 1:42:39
  And we are truly humble and thankful. And we're going to have a Patreon extra
• 1:42:43
  with our guest today, Fast Eddie.
• 1:42:46
  Find out how Fast Eddie came about. Well, I, I, yeah, I, I, you know,
• 1:42:50
  it's, it sounds, it sounds intuitive, but I got a feeling that's not really
• 1:42:53
  it. So I'm looking forward to that.
• 1:42:56
  Hey, and you know what? If you want to give us a rating, you can go to,
• 1:42:59
  so there I was.us slash rate and give us five stars. Five stars.
• 1:43:04
  Count them. Five. Not four. Not three. Give us five.
• 1:43:07
  Well, you need to send an email to repeat and tell, tell him to tell me or,
• 1:43:13
  or, or bago or sticks how in the hell we can get to five stars because we're trainable.
• 1:43:18
  Damn it right we've proven it they let
• 1:43:20
  us fly airplanes go figure yeah yes and
• 1:43:24
  you can show your pride in the show get
• 1:43:28
  some fine fine so there i was
• 1:43:31
  merch at so there i was that us slash merch
• 1:43:34
  get yourself a bar glass look
• 1:43:37
  we're working on flasks and keychains and all that but for right
• 1:43:40
  now you get a sweatshirt a hat a polo shirt or i
• 1:43:44
  don't know fig can you think of any other cool merch that we've got there that
• 1:43:47
  someone might be well in the northern hemisphere it's starting to warm up again
• 1:43:51
  and that means bikini season's coming and everybody looks good and so there
• 1:43:56
  i was bikini except sticks yeah well every everybody of the female persuasion.
• 1:44:04
  So yeah do that and i'm trying to think it seems like i always forget one,
• 1:44:12
  oh those guys that's the two air force f-16 pilots that make the air force sound
• 1:44:19
  good those are the dos gringos,
• 1:44:24
  They were great guests. They allow us to use their music.
• 1:44:29
  They have four albums. There's not one bad song on any one of those albums.
• 1:44:32
  There's not one in the bunch.
• 1:44:33
  They lack judgment, but they're fantastic musicians and fantastic pilots and fantastic gentlemen.
• 1:44:40
  Hey, and in a true fighter pilot guest, the advice we have for you until next
• 1:44:47
  week, folks, is stay safe and check six.
• 1:44:53
  Music.
• 1:45:00
  There I was, crossing the pond And you could say that I wasn't exactly fond
• 1:45:05
  Of all the shit I was wearing on that day,
• 1:45:11
  Now an F-16 is cramped enough But it's even worse With all that stuff supposed
• 1:45:17
  to save your life But we knew there was no way Because when you're going down
• 1:45:24
  the North Atlantic, man, it's over,
• 1:45:28
  What'd he say?
• 1:45:29
  He said it's over Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? No!
• 1:45:37
  Brought to you courtesy of the Lufafa And we are out Outstanding.