Latest / So There I Was / Squints and Moles Episode 177

Transcript

Squints and Moles Episode 177 · So There I Was

• 0:00
  Quiet numbskulls i'm broadcasting hello you're listening to the podcast so there i was,
• 0:06
  this is episode number 177 quince
• 0:11
  and mole wow squints and mole stay time night time hear all about it i mean
• 0:18
  177 too fig it's almost like we're getting regular at this you know i know i
• 0:23
  know it's crazy and this is what another outstanding show our very first ov-10 bronco pilots?
• 0:30
  Yep. Rink or OV-10? Two of them. Two of them. Yeah. Two Bronco drivers. Pigpen.
• 0:36
  Fantastic stuff. You'll find out how they got their call signs later, if you're lucky.
• 0:41
  Absolutely. And well, that's to the, especially to the folks at Patreon,
• 0:46
  because I don't think we closed the loop on that.
• 0:48
  Well, we got Felix's during the show and then we got sidetracked and never did get Pigpens.
• 0:53
  So we put that in our extra, which will be coming out. So if
• 0:56
  you want to learn about how pig pen got his call sign
• 0:59
  subscribe to so there was.us slash patreon
• 1:02
  and speaking of patreon there's a couple folks
• 1:05
  that have lost a sense of financial responsibility crack
• 1:08
  their wallets open and given us money to
• 1:11
  keep this show coming to you we're grateful for that dean
• 1:14
  chick correa gave us a hundred dollars thank you chick outstanding yeah nick
• 1:19
  shockley i'm probably butchering the name but nick shockley was we mentioned
• 1:24
  him back in i want to say April or May about being a tanker aircraft commander
• 1:29
  and he kept it rolling for four more months. So a total of $800.
• 1:33
  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Nick. That is over and above.
• 1:38
  We're, we're deeply grateful and he's trying to hook us up. Amazing loss of
• 1:41
  judgment, but we are so appreciative.
• 1:44
  Thank you. And he's trying to hook us up with some of the folks that flew down
• 1:49
  in Central America back in the 80s. Oh, nice.
• 1:53
  Yeah, maybe able to help us expand our guest list, as it were. Break, break, break.
• 2:00
  Coming into the middle of our preamble here, Fig and I have another announcement
• 2:04
  that we realized we didn't announce when we recorded the preamble.
• 2:07
  What haven't we done in a long time? We haven't hung out.
• 2:11
  No. We haven't had a hangout. Yeah. No.
• 2:14
  So what I want you to do is go to sothereiwas.us and I will have a link up there for our Zoom Hangout.
• 2:23
  We're going to do that on the 24th of September. That's a Wednesday,
• 2:28
  the 24th of September at 1900 Eastern Time.
• 2:33
  Get as many of us together. Just shoot the BS. Talk aviation.
• 2:38
  Pretend like we know what we're talking about. That kind of stuff.
• 2:40
  What do you think, Fig? I love it. I got it on my calendar right now. There we go.
• 2:45
  1900 Eastern, 2300 UTC, Wednesday, 24th September. So there I was, hang out.
• 2:54
  Be there or be square.
• 2:56
  Here endeth the breaking in announcement. Now back to your regularly scheduled preamble.
• 3:05
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• 3:13
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• 3:17
  is phil ivy and poker how not to give away your tells you know what i learned
• 3:22
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• 3:27
  to do magic oh yeah i did i did indeed that's a layer onion.
• 3:33
  I haven't appealed yet. There you go. That and stage hypnosis.
• 3:37
  And yeah, a quick story from that in just a second here, but let me tell you
• 3:41
  for you to go to masterclass and get 15% off, go to masterclass.com slash.
• 3:47
  So there I was masterclass.com slash.
• 3:50
  So there I was get 15% off your subscription. We'll talk more about that in
• 3:54
  the show, but a quick story from my stage hypnosis days, we were doing,
• 3:59
  I think it was the Chittenden County state fair in Vermont.
• 4:02
  And I told people, you know, sit down, relax, and you can't find your belly
• 4:08
  button when I count to three, you'll open your eyes and you can't find your belly button, and I'm,
• 4:13
  So I had them do that and they're, you know, people are all kind of freaking
• 4:17
  out. They're looking around and stuff.
• 4:19
  And the next thing I know, my wife was running the sound for me and she picked
• 4:23
  up a microphone and goes, turn around.
• 4:27
  Like, oh, there was a woman there and she was taking her shirt off looking for
• 4:31
  her belly button. I'm like, oh, I was interviewing someone with my back to her.
• 4:35
  I was like, turn around. This woman was starting to take her shirt off at the
• 4:39
  fair. It was like, no, no, no. Okay. You got it. It's back. Sit down. Relax. Close your eyes.
• 4:44
  All right. Well, hey, back to Felix and Pigpen. Yeah.
• 4:48
  Those guys, what a fun show. We did come on with Squints and Moles as the show
• 4:53
  title, but we had a bunch of other great possibilities. One of my favorites
• 4:57
  was a seven-ton missile magnet.
• 5:02
  I liked understanding what the Earth people do might be important.
• 5:05
  Might be important. He was referring to the ground pounders as in our Marine infantry brothers.
• 5:12
  Yeah whom they supported a lot and was the other one a dirt bike with wings,
• 5:20
  yeah how was it fun to fly yeah it was like a dirt
• 5:22
  bike with wings yeah uh let's see the excellent adventure which was how they
• 5:29
  how they referenced their what it'd take them a month to get a month to get
• 5:34
  from california to the middle east
• 5:35
  in the ov-10 bronco flying at 180 knots whether they needed to or not.
• 5:40
  They scattered airplanes all over the place. All over the globe.
• 5:44
  Hey, but they got there, right? They got there and they flew in the war.
• 5:49
  And, well, they took some, they had some airplanes that went down and I'm not
• 5:54
  going to ruin it, but good stories.
• 5:56
  Yeah, they lost their skipper and sadly he's now passed.
• 6:00
  Guy Hunter was the warrant officer in the back with their skipper who got shot
• 6:04
  down and was in the, I don't know, Was it the Baghdad Hilton with Bart?
• 6:10
  Yeah, we'll call it the Baghdad Hilton. Yeah. Yeah.
• 6:14
  So, what's some other great stories to include? Some wonderful stories about
• 6:18
  a buddy of mine from TBS, Flair, who has since passed. But some good stories about him.
• 6:23
  Squadermate of theirs, right? Yeah, squadermate of theirs. Flair and I were
• 6:27
  friends from day one at the basic school.
• 6:30
  And he was Mr. Cool. I learned a lot about the airplane.
• 6:35
  So did I. from guys that actually flew the shit out of it.
• 6:38
  So I was, I was really, I was really happy about that. And then to hear their
• 6:43
  stories about flying it were, that was just icing on the cake.
• 6:47
  Exactly. I mean, I think I knew a little more than, than I thought I did,
• 6:51
  but I mean, I certainly learned a lot last night, but having talked to Flair
• 6:55
  about it early on when he was flying it,
• 6:57
  I was unbelievably impressed with the mission and how hard it is to do that
• 7:04
  mission in that airplane.
• 7:05
  Because they were down there in the weeds getting the...
• 7:13
  Getting the eyes on target and marking targets for the mud movers,
• 7:17
  as they call them. Yeah. For us guys.
• 7:20
  They were down in the heart of the small arms, weapons envelopes, and AAA.
• 7:26
  And you know what else I lost sight of is that that was part of the Jet Strike pipeline.
• 7:31
  I really forgot that that was an option.
• 7:34
  Of course, I guess it really wasn't an option for you and I because they quit
• 7:37
  putting guys in that pipeline. But holy shit, that could have been an option.
• 7:41
  Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I think most people would have thought that when
• 7:45
  we finished primary, you could go helos, props, or strike.
• 7:50
  And the guys that went strike could go to the OV-10. That was not a prop airplane
• 7:54
  to go to, even though that has two of them.
• 7:58
  Yeah, some cool missions. Great missions, great stories.
• 8:03
  I think the best thing to do is get out of the way and listen to Felix and Pigpen
• 8:07
  tell us all about it. Let's get out of the way.
• 8:10
  All right, here comes show 177. 177, a Felix and Big Pen.
• 8:14
  Don't sit on that ejection seat handle. Ooh, it's not in this airplane. It happens fast.
• 8:19
  Music.
• 8:58
  So there I was, crossing the border between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, 1991.
• 9:06
  We had been patrolling a lot a couple months before the actual war kicked off.
• 9:12
  So we're flying into Kuwait.
• 9:16
  I think we're on a mission just for recon in a Bronco with a beanie in the back,
• 9:22
  a forward air controller in the back.
• 9:24
  And we're flying in and not seeing anything unusual. We don't see anything out of the ordinary.
• 9:29
  We're in about, I don't know, maybe three, five miles in past the border.
• 9:34
  And we notice some black, puffy puffs in the sky around us.
• 9:43
  Initially, it was like, what's that? And then immediately, it was like, oh, we know what that is.
• 9:48
  And I'll stop there, I guess. All right. Yeah.
• 9:53
  That's one. All right, Pigpen. So there I was after three days stuck in the
• 10:00
  rain at Goose Bay on the way on the Excellent Adventure, rotate the airplane,
• 10:05
  swat the gear handle up, and my big giant tack chart goes flying around the
• 10:09
  cockpit like John Belushi in 1941.
• 10:12
  So I quickly slap shut the air vent to collect my stuff.
• 10:17
  And then I go back to open air vent up and realize that I'm going to be the
• 10:22
  first and only pilot to arrive in Saudi Arabia with frostbite.
• 10:26
  Oh, shit.
• 10:29
  Whoa, well, so, hello, and welcome to So There I Was. That's two,
• 10:36
  two So There I Was openers.
• 10:40
  And I can't wait to hear what's next. Reepy, where are you tonight?
• 10:46
  Reepy's home in New Hampshire, and thrilled to welcome two marine aviators this week.
• 10:54
  And maybe next week, we'll see how long the show goes. We may split this one up.
• 10:58
  That we're good friends with a buddy of mine from the basic school who I had
• 11:03
  the pleasure of attending his daughter's wedding a couple weeks ago and got
• 11:06
  to meet these gents there.
• 11:07
  Sadly, we lost flair about 16 years ago to pulmonary embolism,
• 11:13
  which was just horrible.
• 11:15
  But it was a privilege to see his daughter and then meet the Marines who flew in Gulf War I with him.
• 11:21
  So we're here to welcome Felix and Pigpen, our first Bronco drivers.
• 11:26
  Vig, we got a first here. Yeah, we're popping our Bronco cherry. Very cool.
• 11:30
  And, you know, we've never talked much about the OV-10 Bronco,
• 11:33
  except I think if it's ever been mentioned, I'm pretty sure I would have said,
• 11:38
  that is a fucking hard mission. So all respect to you guys, man.
• 11:43
  That looks like a handful of airplane to fly and do the shit you had to do when you were flying it.
• 11:49
  With charts and shit. Yeah, charts, man.
• 11:53
  Charts? I and S, right? I can't wait to hear all about it. He did beat walking, so, yeah. Yeah.
• 11:59
  All right. No kidding. So, let's go alphabetical order. So, Felix,
• 12:03
  when's the first time you looked up at the sky and went, I could do that?
• 12:07
  Oh, man, I wanted to fly since I was a little kid.
• 12:10
  All right. Yeah. So, I actually got an Air Force scholarship,
• 12:17
  full-ride scholarship, that I thought was flight designated,
• 12:21
  like I was designated for pilot, which they do those things, the Air Force did.
• 12:26
  And I was going to Clemson and about after at the end of the first year,
• 12:30
  beginning of the of the of my my sophomore year, I was somehow I figured out that it wasn't a flight.
• 12:37
  It was it was an engineer tagged billet.
• 12:41
  And so I'm trying to get them to change it. They wouldn't change it.
• 12:44
  So I, I, I dropped the scholarship, I quit and I went, I did the Marine PLC
• 12:50
  program and, and because they, they, they, they said they were going to guarantee
• 12:55
  me a flight slot, which they eventually did. So that was nice.
• 12:59
  Eventually, eventually, you know, we're in that weird delayed program.
• 13:03
  Like we, we all had the, had the flight contract.
• 13:06
  And then you get you know by the time you get
• 13:09
  you get to go to tv you know you get go to tbs yeah but you
• 13:12
  know at that point oh the flight school's full we
• 13:15
  can't let you in yeah you know we're going to put give you
• 13:18
  a second billet and then we'll we'll let we'll let you know when you get to
• 13:21
  go to flight school that's what happened to disco and strut right and repeat
• 13:26
  yeah yeah and flare oh yeah and flare yeah flare and i were in the same company
• 13:31
  tvs so it was great yeah so uh But yeah, in fact, Flair and I, it was funny.
• 13:37
  I checked in in Charlie's because I had already bought my uniform.
• 13:41
  And so I'm standing outside waiting for my wife to pick me up.
• 13:44
  And Flair comes up and he's in a suit to check into the basic school.
• 13:47
  And he comes up to me and goes, sir, is this where I check in? I'm like, sir?
• 13:51
  Yeah, second lieutenant, just like you, dude. I just checked in. Yeah, right in there.
• 13:55
  And we were fast friends and good friends ever since.
• 13:58
  So, yeah, it was awesome. And we remained friends until the day of his passing.
• 14:04
  So, all right. Well, very cool.
• 14:07
  Jeez. And I just told you before the show, write it down, and I didn't write
• 14:10
  it down. And my question now has slipped by mind.
• 14:12
  Oh, that was it. Which company were you in? Do you remember?
• 14:18
  At the basic school, yeah. When did you start? I think, oh, man,
• 14:23
  I don't know. I think I was Charlie Company. Now I'm trying.
• 14:26
  Delta 85. Okay.
• 14:30
  Nice. so pigpen you
• 14:32
  went if you were in delta you went straight to the to pensacola
• 14:36
  after tbsn i did actually yeah i
• 14:39
  did yeah because that was the big lie they told us that no one will go to flight
• 14:43
  school that that's behind you and they took uh like golf hotel alpha bravo charlie
• 14:48
  and stuck us all to the fleet so when did you start when you start well the
• 14:53
  guys in my company started in 1986,
• 14:57
  so two years later.
• 14:59
  And I didn't, long story on mine, I lost my flight contract.
• 15:03
  I didn't actually start until November of 87. I had to fight to get my flight
• 15:06
  contract back, which I eventually did, but it was definitely not guaranteed.
• 15:12
  So, yeah.
• 15:15
  So, all right. How about you, Pigpen? When did you look up in the sky and go, how can you get?
• 15:21
  Like, I still go to bed at night thinking about airplanes and wake up thinking
• 15:27
  about airplanes. Right on.
• 15:29
  Yeah. It's looked at that way. I think we actually lived off the approach of
• 15:35
  Erie International Airport as a kid.
• 15:37
  And my dad would take me to the hangars and poke around. And one day,
• 15:39
  I figured out it was right around my eighth birthday. He took me in a,
• 15:43
  it must have been a 206 or 182 because they got the whole family in it. And we flew around that.
• 15:48
  And then the next time I flew was on an airliner on the way to PLC program. I like that.
• 15:55
  Yeah. Yeah. Always was awesome. Yeah. Right. And a nice welcoming committee
• 15:59
  at Washington National. Yeah.
• 16:02
  Vamp up, baby. Yeah. The worst, the second time, I was an idiot.
• 16:06
  I went, I went to the suburb, two increments, you know. I don't know.
• 16:11
  That was tough. I don't know, you know, I could, I don't think I could have done that.
• 16:15
  I did the 10 weeker thing and, and, and I was so pissed when I left.
• 16:19
  I was thinking the two timer thing. I don't think I could have done it.
• 16:24
  I didn't, I did not enjoy the bummer summer either, but anyway, it was fun.
• 16:28
  I mean, I learned a lot there. There were parts that I learned as a,
• 16:32
  in our community, being, understanding what the earth people do was important.
• 16:35
  So I think there were some lessons learned.
• 16:38
  My experience carrying a rifle around. but uh that's great i uh yeah yeah absolutely
• 16:47
  no i i like to say i failed life's iq test i went to plc junior and senior as well.
• 16:56
  Thank you sir if i had another exactly wait you went back you went back for
• 17:01
  more of that shit All right.
• 17:08
  Too funny. So, hey, this is for either one of you guys, both of you.
• 17:14
  Does any special...
• 17:21
  Experience stick out from officer candidate school
• 17:24
  oh shit yeah yeah because
• 17:27
  right on let's go i would love to hear it well i'm
• 17:30
  i can remember i'm on the ground so i'm on the grinder we're marching
• 17:33
  around you know and somehow i was like i was this
• 17:36
  they made me the scribe you know i was a guy who was not quite in charge but
• 17:40
  i was you know riding watch anyway and uh i don't know i was getting a little
• 17:45
  cocky or what but we're out there marching around doing something and this mean
• 17:49
  old fat gunny came through our squad bay and a hurricane you know blew through it i'm like oh shit,
• 17:55
  and next thing you know hey it was me oh said hey you're right by the front door.
• 18:03
  Well i you know what he did was he just went and looked for someone who had
• 18:07
  you know how you know you pre-do your lock so you can just snap it open i didn't
• 18:12
  you know i had it right on there he found mine and oh boy oh and it was a yard
• 18:19
  sale of your shit going down the squad bay right,
• 18:22
  it's like you know what i then i cleaned it up then the
• 18:25
  biggest thing was you know i go do that and then i was like well how do
• 18:28
  i where do they go how do i get reintegrated with this it's just
• 18:31
  crazy yeah we have
• 18:34
  had drill instructors on to include
• 18:37
  first sergeant crouch who was at Parris
• 18:41
  Island among other things but also did AOCS in
• 18:44
  Pensacola and we had a wonderful story from
• 18:47
  First Sergeant Crouch about finding various various
• 18:51
  articles and you know unsecured foot locker yeah
• 18:54
  unsecured foot locker desk I'll briefly tell look
• 18:57
  I've teased it I'll tell the story briefly here yeah he found a wallet with
• 19:01
  $174 in it and did the did the young candidate a favor since nobody steals loose
• 19:06
  change he had 174 converted to loose change and then he had to do ups and downs
• 19:11
  with the up downs with his rifle while counting the loose changes it was scattered about the deck and.
• 19:19
  However however this is a very
• 19:22
  impressive part which he didn't catch the first time he
• 19:25
  told the story so he went to the bank and got it in
• 19:28
  they were you know nickels dimes and quarters and they were in rolls so
• 19:32
  he's got this kid oh there's no quarters pennies nickels dimes remember no quarters
• 19:35
  because people take quarters he has this kid with the rifle doing all this shit
• 19:39
  you know and he's and he's taking these these rollers and he's throwing them
• 19:42
  on the floor and they're coming apart and he goes he goes all right that's 17
• 19:46
  this and 17 that how much is that and the kid would get it right and he goes son of a bitch,
• 19:53
  so you know it kind of backfired on him in a way but it was still impressive
• 19:58
  very impressive yeah and then he then he was kind enough to donate to us,
• 20:04
  $174 in loose change so thank you for starting his doorstep weighing like 39
• 20:09
  pounds it cost more to ship it,
• 20:13
  put him over the $200 air tanker aircraft tanker commander level,
• 20:20
  So thank First Sergeant Crouch again for that.
• 20:24
  We are deeply grateful for the humor and the – but those guys are comedians. Anyway, all right.
• 20:29
  That was a rabbit hole and we didn't need to go down. Felix,
• 20:32
  do you have any standout memories from OCS that you still giggle about?
• 20:39
  There's a funny one that they would make,
• 20:43
  you know, when you march and you're running that slow jog run with the platoon,
• 20:48
  I guess, with it with you and so you're running and then
• 20:51
  they pull you know they rotate rotate candidates out
• 20:54
  to do the chance and so you know
• 20:57
  they and that's like you know we don't know how to do chance oh
• 21:00
  man i couldn't yeah couldn't you do jody's for shit but
• 21:04
  i i remember the one so
• 21:07
  they do let's see i'm trying to think of what this the chant was like uh so
• 21:13
  you'd go like uh dead dedication and you run into that and then one guy and
• 21:21
  then they do some other one and then one of them was determine,
• 21:26
  erm, erm, erm, erm it doesn't really work and so I kind of cracked up about
• 21:32
  that and that was not good, that was not good so I got,
• 21:37
  if I die on a Russian front,
• 21:41
  alright, well thank you,
• 21:44
  fantastic Oh, man.
• 21:47
  So you reach on daddy and all those characters. Oh, yeah. Right?
• 21:51
  So Pensacola for both of you guys for initial, right?
• 21:55
  Initial like AI, whatever they call it. That's what they called it back then.
• 21:59
  And then did both of you guys go through primary at Whiting or did somebody go to Corpus?
• 22:04
  I thought all primary was Whiting when we were going through.
• 22:07
  Yeah, Corpus. But, yeah, I was VT3. Were you VT2?
• 22:11
  Yeah, VT2. I was VT3. All right. And then you went to Beeville,
• 22:16
  right? And I went to Kingsville.
• 22:19
  So, let me ask you this. You guys, out of primary, did you select Jets? Yes.
• 22:26
  Jets. Okay. We weren't expecting to get OB-10s. Yeah, we were.
• 22:30
  None of us were very happy. We weren't happy at the time. None of us were happy. But it worked out.
• 22:35
  OB-10s weren't an option when we went through.
• 22:40
  I mean, actually, the last F-4 squadron, the VMFP3 was off.
• 22:46
  The guys in my class guys in my
• 22:49
  class flew with vmfp3 like walt wright and some guys
• 22:52
  i knew guys john bond all those
• 22:55
  so i i could have gotten that i wanted a6s is
• 22:58
  all i wanted i didn't want to fly but you know there
• 23:02
  there was a time though when they were doing from helo guys and
• 23:05
  they're mixing it up it was a interesting community
• 23:08
  i'll just say that but kind of a mixed it's like a bikers gang
• 23:11
  there you go people from all
• 23:14
  community pretty crazy we had a marine
• 23:17
  corps birthday ball out in fallon at the boat the birthday ball was at the hyatt
• 23:22
  lake tahoe and it was a combined ace deployment out there and q1 right vmo q1
• 23:28
  was out was with us and those fuckers got in a fist fight amongst themselves at the ball.
• 23:37
  I mean, it was awesome. They were bloody. Their ribbons were torn off.
• 23:42
  I mean, they got knocked out, drag out, fight. We're like, whoa.
• 23:46
  I thought they'd pick on us, but no, they fighting amongst themselves. Yeah. That's funny.
• 23:52
  I'm trying to think. Yeah, by the time I went through, I think there were still
• 23:55
  OV-10s occasionally, and then Harriers, and then the EA-6s.
• 24:00
  That was it. Oh, and Hornets. but there were no Hornets by the one I selected.
• 24:03
  Well, you still think they got A6s because there was guys that from my class that got A6s.
• 24:09
  Okay, maybe. I know there were Navy guys still getting A6s. I didn't remember
• 24:14
  any Marines. I guess there was, yeah.
• 24:17
  When did you get your wings, Pete?
• 24:20
  January of 90. Okay, yeah. And one thing that I think that we did a little differently
• 24:26
  is they actually put us through the Air Force OB-10 rack, which is kind of interesting.
• 24:31
  So we went to Patrick, did you go to Patrick or did you go to Tucson? It was Patrick. Yeah.
• 24:35
  It was probably three, four months of basic flying stuff and a little bit of
• 24:41
  tattoo. Two weeks all crammed into four months.
• 24:43
  Yeah. I mean, it was, it wasn't, it wasn't as hard as strike training as for sure.
• 24:47
  And a four, it was kind of fun, but it was interesting because we've got to
• 24:51
  see how the other, other world lives.
• 24:53
  And, uh, we were definitely misfits amongst, I mean, Oh yeah.
• 24:58
  But I met some really cool people. There were guys coming through,
• 25:01
  like F-111 guys coming out for like a B tour for flying a different airplane.
• 25:06
  And it was pretty cool. I met a lot of interesting people there.
• 25:09
  And it was nice, nice, clean airplanes. I noticed as well.
• 25:12
  Exactly. And they had a better avionics package, too.
• 25:15
  I remember flying into Patrick on, I don't, I'm with a instructor doing something.
• 25:21
  And so he comes and goes, okay, shoot the ILS approach. And I'm going,
• 25:23
  what the heck is an ILS? An ILS?
• 25:26
  But luckily, though. How do you spell that? Yeah.
• 25:29
  Okay, I'll try it. Well, it's super easy. I had an Atari computer,
• 25:35
  like an Atari 64-bit computer, and it had a flight simulator on it, and it had ILS on there.
• 25:41
  So when I'm practicing, you know, before, this is like I'm playing with this
• 25:45
  flight simulator, and I've flown the ILS there, so then you go shoot the ILS,
• 25:49
  and I'm thinking, okay, well, I've done this on the simulator.
• 25:51
  And it was ILS is easy, though. You just keep those bars lined up. It's like, okay.
• 25:56
  I learned that, but they had nice clean planes with upgraded avionics.
• 26:01
  I mean, we had pretty crap.
• 26:03
  I mean, we didn't – when we were – and so I remember, Picfin,
• 26:06
  remember when we got those Trimble GPS units that we got, just portable units
• 26:12
  that you'd stick on your dash so you wouldn't get lost in that sea of sand out there.
• 26:16
  I mean, that's the kind of avionics we had. And the satellites were useful like
• 26:21
  four hours a day. And we'd be flying along. Of course they were.
• 26:24
  And Targ would go, hold on, it's time. And he'd pull it up and kind of hold
• 26:28
  it up. And he'd go, okay, ready? He'd read me a lot long. I'd write it on the map. I'd go, okay.
• 26:34
  Tells me we're on the 180 for 25 in the tech end store. There's your moving map.
• 26:38
  Yeah. Put the vent on your map. We'll start moving. I remember they gave us the Loran as well.
• 26:44
  They put a Loran system in. Wow. They're going around the world with the tech
• 26:48
  ends following the Hose Dragon piano players.
• 26:52
  And the SEAL teams blew up the Laurent Towers in the first day of the war so
• 26:57
  that was useless so we had a TAC-AN.
• 27:01
  And we just did that and you know just cuts off the TAC-AN you guys,
• 27:08
  because that airplane did not have an INS right?
• 27:10
  No, the D did but we never used it, remember the D had an INS but it was useless it did?
• 27:18
  But I think it took out a D plus But the older D's had it, it was useless.
• 27:22
  So can you tell us the official version of what the OV-10's mission is, was?
• 27:32
  Well, for us, it was primarily forward air control, right? I mean,
• 27:35
  our job was basically, you know, it's an interesting community because we had
• 27:41
  in the back seat either an infantry officer or artillery guy.
• 27:45
  And later, NFOs called SACAs who were trained.
• 27:49
  They were ground pounders or infantry officers or combat arms officers who were then naval aviators.
• 27:56
  And it was a two-seat mission. So we were, you know, I think what the great
• 28:00
  Tubo Sams would say, we were the hyphen in the air-ground team.
• 28:04
  We would coordinate the ground and the air activity.
• 28:07
  Sometimes it would be more of a TAC-A thing, often a FAC-A thing.
• 28:11
  Okay. I mean, a bunch of cool things we would do. I mean, Felix, what am I missing?
• 28:16
  No, that sounds right. I mean, the first class that we went to for the N-type
• 28:21
  training at the Air Force for the OB-10, the first thing that we did,
• 28:24
  I don't know if you did this too. I think you must have.
• 28:27
  We went to Hurlburt Field and had to learn all the TAC and FAC stuff,
• 28:32
  the border control. Okay.
• 28:33
  And that was our first, which I have to be honest, I didn't care for. But, I mean, you know.
• 28:41
  But I'll tell you what, though. You're a brand new kid in the fleet, and you're showing up.
• 28:44
  And, you know, I mean, you get in the squad, and you work your way up.
• 28:48
  The next thing you know, you're at Red Flag, and you're controlling four F-16s.
• 28:52
  And if they don't say wings level, they're off the range.
• 28:56
  And if you don't, you guys are, you guys are, you know, you guys are mud moving
• 28:59
  HUD guys. You know, if the fact can be pushed around or not. No. Yeah.
• 29:04
  A good one won't be. So, and you guys were, were you guys marking targets with rockets?
• 29:10
  Yeah. So in Desert Storm, we had, we had, we had, we had flares and we had laser
• 29:14
  guide. We have a flare with a laser spot tracker in it. Okay.
• 29:17
  Okay. And then we had, we had Zuni rockets as well.
• 29:21
  And we had flares on the Ds, but I remember that story I started.
• 29:25
  I was in an a they didn't they didn't all they
• 29:28
  only did we didn't have we brought a's over right or were
• 29:31
  they all did but but yeah so we
• 29:34
  had big pen you had to be on the a team to
• 29:37
  get the one with the flare you weren't supposed to say that no we
• 29:41
  got to fly at night dude and that's the word yeah
• 29:44
  so we did both we did
• 29:46
  both but i split ourselves up into crews we
• 29:49
  had we had squints and moles we had dig crews so we
• 29:52
  had it we had an assigned backs you know there's screwing moles there's
• 29:56
  another show yeah yeah we had assigned crews and
• 29:59
  we we we rotated basically our schedule was we would fly five days right we'd
• 30:06
  rotate so if i was a night guy anywhere there were blocks i think there were
• 30:11
  four and a half hour blocks and you just rotate through and then at the end
• 30:15
  You hit SDO, and that was great.
• 30:17
  Or you hit strip watch, 30-minute launch.
• 30:21
  And so basically, you flew six days and one day off.
• 30:24
  What was your one day off a duty day? Yep, SDO. That was the best day because
• 30:30
  you were going to get shot at in your SDO.
• 30:33
  And every time I had a trip alert, I always had to launch because some knucklehead
• 30:37
  from another squadron, I guess. I don't know.
• 30:39
  Either way. And the phone probably never rang as an SDO. Although you probably
• 30:42
  didn't answer the radio.
• 30:44
  So how many squadrons, when you guys got to your squadrons, how many OV-10 squadrons did we have? Two?
• 30:50
  One on the East? Two at Eastern West Coast and VMO. So you had VMO-2 in Pendleton,
• 30:54
  VMO-1 in New River, and then VMO-4 in Atlanta.
• 30:58
  So VMO-4 was the reserve? Yeah, yeah. And then a debt that was jointly supported
• 31:04
  for a long time, but finally VMO-2 had the debt in Okinawa. Okay.
• 31:09
  How many airplanes in a squadron? 12, 14.
• 31:14
  I mean, we had airplanes plus, right? I mean, we'd have 12 to 16,
• 31:18
  I'd imagine. And then on the debt, you'd have six or so over there that are sort of separate.
• 31:24
  So it was a pretty tight community, really.
• 31:28
  I mean, you guys probably all knew, either knew each other or knew about each
• 31:32
  other, right? Okay, that's pretty small.
• 31:35
  Well, on the east and west coast, you're kind of separate, right,
• 31:38
  in our own little worlds.
• 31:39
  The one thing, and I'll let you talk, Felix, is what was happening was there
• 31:43
  was a contract where they were taking the OV-10s and they were slapping them,
• 31:48
  right? service life extension program.
• 31:49
  So airplanes have come through as A's.
• 31:52
  So airplanes, it was kind of neat. If you open up your logbook,
• 31:57
  like there's these things flying around.
• 31:59
  Most of the airplanes, we got to fly because they came, maybe I flew,
• 32:03
  like the first airplane I flew in the Marine Corps OB-10, I first was an A model
• 32:08
  and the last was a D model.
• 32:10
  It was the same airplane, but had been converted. So the point is,
• 32:13
  airplanes are first crossing.
• 32:15
  It's also a very small community to your point but yeah so so you see you flew
• 32:19
  the same bureau number it was the two different airplanes exactly it was an
• 32:23
  a model and then it was a d model yeah and i think the a models fly better i
• 32:27
  think what was the big difference when they slept it and turned it into a d
• 32:31
  what what kind of upgrades was it.
• 32:34
  They put the FLIR, they put a FLIR on it before looking in for it.
• 32:38
  So they had, the D was it had a thousand horsepower versus 700 horsepower.
• 32:43
  Okay. More structure and a longer nose. And then the slap, they went in and
• 32:48
  they, they did a bunch of, they put in all digital radios and zhuzhed up a few
• 32:52
  things here, electronically, electronic wise.
• 32:55
  Okay. We went to digital, which is weird because like digital radios,
• 32:59
  you guys understand this.
• 33:00
  In the OV-10, you're listening to, we had two FMs, an HF.
• 33:04
  And so you're listening to all these radios. And these airplanes sound like,
• 33:08
  yeah, we've both flown that airplane. I guarantee it.
• 33:10
  These airplanes, if you're listening on an FM radio and you're listening on
• 33:14
  a UHF radio, they sound differently because of the side tone in a classic airplane.
• 33:19
  And you can kind of keep them separate in your head. But when we got the digital
• 33:23
  radios, they all sounded the same. Oh, shit. I couldn't do that.
• 33:27
  You could not listen to three channels at once. I couldn't anyway.
• 33:31
  There's nuanced things, but it's still a 7-ton missile magnet.
• 33:36
  It would still fly about 200 knots.
• 33:39
  7-ton missile magnets. It's not an airplane to fly, but just,
• 33:43
  you know. Not in a sophisticated threat environment.
• 33:48
  So, okay, I want to know all there is to know about how it flies and all that,
• 33:54
  but let's go back real quick before we get too far downrange.
• 33:58
  You're not calling him a weapon. He's a aerial observer or, and then later on became a weapon. A.O.
• 34:04
  A.O. is top. Okay. A.O. or a SEC A. Were they controlling airplanes or,
• 34:09
  or were they coordinating gunfire or, you know, marking targets?
• 34:14
  Sometimes. Yeah. They could, they would all be certified to.
• 34:18
  To run the air but usually the way it would
• 34:21
  work out is they're experts in the ground but but it is it is a two-man operation
• 34:25
  for sure like okay but typically they all had to be called to run air and that's
• 34:29
  just sometimes you need them because you need another set of eyes yeah but it's
• 34:33
  also a challenge to make sure you know you know having a situation situational awareness to do that job,
• 34:40
  requires a certain i don't know a bit of tenure so some of some are better than
• 34:45
  others i guess is what I'd say. That applies to both seats.
• 34:48
  Then also, they're not pilots.
• 34:53
  I would imagine that some had issues with air sickness.
• 34:59
  Oh, yeah. There's some guys. Remember Lefty used to always every time we'd go
• 35:02
  flying. It's funny. One thing that got him was, this guy's a great American.
• 35:07
  The climbing left turned, but I always kick his ass. He knew that.
• 35:15
  He just And the dirty secret is the airplane has a message drop door, too, you know?
• 35:21
  Oh, boy. So one of our cool missions would be we would drop.
• 35:24
  We're supposed to back in the days, you take a Polaroid, and then you put the
• 35:28
  Polaroid into the drop pouch and drop it on the grunts.
• 35:30
  And that would be fun because we get to do that and get the access.
• 35:33
  So we would try to hit the Humvee with whatever we might find in the pouch,
• 35:38
  which might have come from someone's box at the CACS.
• 35:42
  It may not be tactical pictures, but they were pictures. Anyway.
• 35:45
  I see where that's going. You get good at, it's anyway, I digress.
• 35:50
  But he can find a way to drop it. Bombing, man. Vomit bombing.
• 35:57
  All right, that's unpressurized, correct? Cop gets unpressurized or was it pressurized?
• 36:04
  No. It's unpressurized. You can pull that little thing down for the air and
• 36:08
  the vent. Remember the vent?
• 36:10
  A little door that goes in like this. All right, so you guys flew those airplanes
• 36:14
  all the way to Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and I'm guessing,
• 36:19
  what, you were at 14,000 feet?
• 36:23
  It varied. I mean, we followed the 2C-130s full of our troops and parts and stuff.
• 36:28
  And I'd say, yeah, probably 12,000 to 15,000 feet-ish is about right.
• 36:32
  You guys weren't breathing oxygen, were you? Yeah, oxygen left hand.
• 36:36
  Oh, okay. It has a G-suit and oxygen.
• 36:40
  So I would often use oxygen, especially flying at night. Look at that old thing.
• 36:45
  That's a busy cockpit right there. Yeah, I'm showing an old cockpit on the YouTube
• 36:50
  feed. That'll be on the, so there it was, the US slash episode slash 177.
• 36:56
  Yeah. See a photo of the cockpit. Yeah, it is busy. Holy shit.
• 37:00
  I feel like it's a feed light.
• 37:03
  How was it to, how did it fly? Was it nimble? Oh, yeah.
• 37:08
  Yeah, it was maneuverable. Yeah. Like a dirt bike with wings.
• 37:13
  That's right. There you go. That's a good way to do it. Really great airplane. Nice.
• 37:16
  Look, when I got orders, I was like, wait a minute.
• 37:18
  Once I settled down and got into it and applied myself and got to do cool things,
• 37:24
  I mean, I could think of times me and Ron here flying along the desert at 500
• 37:28
  feet doing tack turns just on a daily day training, ripping around at 100 feet.
• 37:32
  What a blast. I mean, it's funny.
• 37:35
  Yeah. It was highly aerobatic, but also….
• 37:41
  Hard to fly in the clouds, I think, because you got glass coming down your thighs
• 37:45
  and it wasn't a whole lot of help. And we'd fly that thing.
• 37:50
  We'd fly four hours straight in ink black and there's no autopilot.
• 37:54
  It's just you saw it. There's not much there.
• 37:56
  Well, hold on a second. Pigpen, I thought I heard you say there's no autopilot.
• 38:02
  Yeah, no autopilot. No. Well, if the guy in the back's any good, if you teach him how to.
• 38:08
  There you go. voice activated autopilot don't hit the fucking ground you want to fly?
• 38:14
  You want to fly? hell yeah you can fly hold this heading.
• 38:19
  I didn't even consider that I knew they didn't have any fancy avionics but holy
• 38:23
  shit no autopilot you should see when I got in the G1000 a year ago I'm about
• 38:26
  to have a stroke damn there she is look at that view,
• 38:34
  so oh man so you guys carry the
• 38:37
  centerline external fuel tank is that what i see yeah probably
• 38:41
  you must have had uh incredible
• 38:44
  loiter time i think we could stay six hours right dan yep we had we had four
• 38:49
  and a half hours on so we carried an oversized 300 gallon ferry tank we'd fly
• 38:53
  that thing from fatima to cubie point and that was cool you hold the tack end
• 38:57
  until it spins it clock mark the clock and you you wait wait 30 minutes,
• 39:02
  and then you shoot the approach into cubie anyway yeah things we do this airplane
• 39:07
  were great but I lost my train of thought, sorry.
• 39:10
  Yeah, because he started thinking about QB Point. We were talking about the
• 39:14
  center tank and what kind of loiter.
• 39:15
  We carried a 300-gallon tank. We could loiter four and a half, five hours, six hours.
• 39:23
  We carried that. We carried a Sidewinder. We carried one or two pods of Zuni
• 39:28
  Rockets, and we carried parachute flares.
• 39:32
  A lot of shit. The thing was pretty much gross. How many hard points under the
• 39:36
  wings did you guys have? Do you remember?
• 39:39
  Two under the wings, and then five in the sponsors.
• 39:44
  So outboard there to the wing tip. You see the drop tank there?
• 39:48
  And then the Zuni would go right there, the Zuni pod. OK. Right next to it there.
• 39:55
  Zuni's got those guys. Those are a blast. That tank there is a standard-sized tank.
• 40:00
  The big tank is ginormous. And then they would put the.
• 40:04
  There we go that's a good that's a good shot i flew i flew a mission how did
• 40:09
  you felix we flew that that one flew in desert storm ah okay yeah i'm probably
• 40:13
  i don't i probably flew it yeah i'm throwing various photos up on the youtube
• 40:17
  feed they'll all be on so there i was in the episode 177.
• 40:23
  Me and the redneck savant are cruising along at three o'clock in the morning
• 40:27
  and one of the simple pleasures in life that they will be 10 that i didn't really
• 40:30
  come to appreciate until,
• 40:33
  desert storm was the use of the relief tube and so
• 40:37
  at first you'd be very careful i'm going to pin the
• 40:40
  seat there's an ejection seat there and in the proximity of
• 40:43
  the you don't want something ripped off if you pull the handle you're
• 40:47
  using it but anyway
• 40:50
  it was like what it's kind of like having a cup of coffee having
• 40:53
  a break you know i'm going to go over here and hold for a few minutes and anyway and
• 40:56
  and one that we're flying it's pitch black solid just dark
• 41:00
  and i i'm doing my thing and next thing you know
• 41:02
  oh no what's the tube was not draining oh
• 41:05
  shit god damn it that's exactly i said tarred's
• 41:08
  like what what what what i go piss tubes clogged he goes
• 41:11
  hold on a minute so he's like ah shit so now
• 41:14
  we both have a clogged piss tube and we have another hour and a half to go so
• 41:17
  no eventually give up and kind of drop that to the floor and that airplane smelled
• 41:22
  like a urinal oh no it probably still does what it was is the turnbacks god
• 41:27
  bless these guys they're in And they're tweaking these motors and they're absolute, you know.
• 41:33
  Masters at their craft.
• 41:35
  They get triple prop things behind the props, but you know, those who spit,
• 41:39
  there's a spittoon right there.
• 41:41
  There you go. How about that?
• 41:45
  These are things you just don't think of, repeat. No.
• 41:48
  Right? So, who made the OB-10? Who manufactured it? What company?
• 41:52
  Oh yeah. Rockwell. Is that Rockwell?
• 41:57
  And it had two was it pt6 what were the motors pt6s
• 42:00
  no it was a garrett it was a gear i thought
• 42:04
  they were pt6s are you sure i'm quite
• 42:07
  sure okay these sixes
• 42:10
  and king airs and t34s yeah they're garretts well
• 42:15
  they're monsters same thing as
• 42:18
  in a merlin yeah yeah direct drive you had uh beta a capability of a prop so
• 42:25
  you could stop that sucker in a dime back it up too yeah back it up yep yep
• 42:30
  and because of the straight wing i'm assuming you had really nice short field performance.
• 42:37
  Did it have slaps and slaps or just flaps no just we didn't have some pretty
• 42:42
  cool flaps that have some you know vents sort of them but yeah i would yeah
• 42:46
  there's nothing in the leading edge now,
• 42:48
  We would practice landing on – in Pendleton, you did this thing.
• 42:53
  We practiced landing on roads.
• 42:55
  Yeah. And so, yeah, you'd take that thing and land it on a – Well,
• 42:58
  you'd fly the ball and just slam it right on there and hit reverse and stop it. Yeah.
• 43:02
  Yeah. The funny thing is when Desert Storm began, there was talk like,
• 43:06
  we've got to get ready for the boat. They're going to put us in the boat.
• 43:07
  I'm like, no, they're not going to take us.
• 43:09
  There's no way they let us near the boat. But we did anyway do some FCLP stuff,
• 43:13
  but there's no way they were going to let us land on their boat.
• 43:18
  Would have been we could have done it i'm sure but yeah well it
• 43:21
  would have been awesome but that would have been a long
• 43:24
  way to go a long way to go to work when you're not you
• 43:26
  know when you can't do 500 knots all right what so exactly when
• 43:30
  you're flying around tactically controlling you know
• 43:33
  for being for our control mission what what kind
• 43:36
  of speeds are we talking 150 knots is
• 43:39
  about it all you could do or less right pig yeah if
• 43:42
  i'm it depends what i'm doing if i'm honestly the thing would go
• 43:45
  we would run it wide open and i'd get
• 43:48
  about 180 knots to 200 knots if i'm
• 43:51
  if i'm looking to hang out for time i'm orbiting maybe i'm doing some tech a
• 43:55
  stuff i'm going to pull pull the condition levers back and i'm going to get
• 43:58
  get it quiet down to you know maybe 600 pounds an hour and it'll you know we're
• 44:04
  talking 120 130 knots just kind of run out of 15 000 feet but if i'm
• 44:10
  down low, the CAC's yanking and banking,
• 44:12
  it's conditioned liver's up and as fast as it'll go.
• 44:16
  So did you guys think when you guys got deployed, you know, Saddam Hussein invaded
• 44:24
  Kuwait, August of 91, you know, we are all, everybody's going to war.
• 44:30
  You guys are, you loaded your shit, you flew you over. Let's start with that.
• 44:34
  How long did it take to get over there?
• 44:36
  Oh, the excellent adventure was, what, about almost a month,
• 44:41
  three weeks. Holy shit. Yeah, it seemed like at least a month.
• 44:44
  It was great. It was the greatest aviation adventure of all time.
• 44:48
  So it was the Alpha to Delta Mod, pulled an airspeed indicator and put in a calendar? Holy shit.
• 44:54
  No, we broke down. We were a marine aircraft group. We were breaking down. Well, fair enough.
• 45:01
  Every place we stopped, somebody had broken down. Almost.
• 45:05
  Only the finest in Vietnam-era technology, right? We had 10 weeks in Lake and Heath, right?
• 45:12
  Yeah, I went down to London. Yeah, I cured the power of London.
• 45:18
  We need a new one. Okay.
• 45:24
  It was no rush to get there. Trust me. Yeah. Okay. Well, you knew you were going
• 45:28
  to be there when you got there.
• 45:31
  Wow. And then because you, so the F-18D,
• 45:37
  which was eventually going to replace your mission, And I think,
• 45:42
  what, we only had one squadron stood up and trained at the time?
• 45:46
  Yeah, we knew guys in a squadron.
• 45:48
  Yeah, that whole fast fact thing didn't pan out. They don't want to do that.
• 45:53
  They want to do cooler things, right? They want to do.
• 45:57
  Well, that goes back to, you know, what I was saying at the very beginning is.
• 46:02
  I'd like you guys to both talk a little bit about the mission and how long it
• 46:07
  took you to get even a little bit good at it because you're marking targets,
• 46:13
  you're trying not to hit the ground, you're flying at night,
• 46:15
  you're doing it low to the ground.
• 46:17
  And this was when I learned what you guys were doing, I became immediately terrified,
• 46:23
  like, oh, my God, people do that shit in airplanes.
• 46:28
  So let's talk about that. What a typical mission was like nighttime,
• 46:32
  daytime and the very well, I say typical, but you had so many.
• 46:37
  To include, here was, where did it go? I'm looking for it. Oh, there it is.
• 46:42
  Bago found this. Oh, yeah. That's the fun. You used to throw Marines out of
• 46:46
  the back of that damn thing, too. I forgot to do it in an airplane.
• 46:49
  That was fun. Yeah, me too.
• 46:51
  Look at that picture that I've got up there, Fig. Whenever you talk to recon.
• 46:54
  That guy is elbow to elbow, and they used to stick four Marines in there and
• 46:57
  throw them out the back. No, they didn't.
• 46:59
  Yeah, it's crazy. That's a great, you got to do that, right?
• 47:02
  Yeah, yeah. You get 100 feet, and you pitch vertical. You go straight up.
• 47:08
  And they kind of wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. And you do a wing over. It's crazy.
• 47:12
  Well, I mean, I wouldn't do it if I was one of them. Because if you're low, you're 100.
• 47:17
  Then they drop at it maybe 300 or 400 feet. It's really low.
• 47:21
  I don't know how they're. They come out inverted. Yeah. And then they swing down. It's insanity.
• 47:27
  How to get a swing in the chute, you know? Holy shit. You talk to any SEAL or
• 47:31
  any recon, Daddy, and you tell them you're an OB-10 guy. They go,
• 47:34
  oh, it's the best jump there ever was. Because, I mean, it's a rock star.
• 47:40
  We never did it. The D, you couldn't do that because you had all this flir gear
• 47:46
  embedded in the tail cone for the weight and balance.
• 47:50
  But, yeah. So did you take off without the tail cone on? And they were just.
• 47:55
  They put a load master. They put a jump master in the back.
• 47:58
  And then four guys, like you said, you know, butt the belly button and a gunner
• 48:02
  strap. You can run it in. And we did it with two airplanes.
• 48:05
  We simulated tactical ingress into the Camp Pendleton range.
• 48:09
  And we'd come ripping in it.
• 48:11
  And then, you know, someone calls it. We both go up vertically and,
• 48:16
  you know, opposite direction hammerheads and aggress out the back. It's pretty cool.
• 48:21
  That sounds bad. If you're flying it. Yeah, if you're flying, that's actually.
• 48:25
  Not if you're jumping. Well, if you get caught in the tail boom,
• 48:27
  that's my big worries. If they get caught up in the boom.
• 48:30
  And I'm just like, if you hear our seats fire, you're dead. Because I'm not
• 48:35
  going to be – I won't be able to help you out if you ever – and there was never a problem.
• 48:40
  I can't remember that. Yeah, right. Static line from 100 feet or however high it is.
• 48:46
  And the thing runs at airspeed fast. I mean, you don't – I don't think you're at more than 1,000.
• 48:50
  I mean, you might get to 1,200 feet, and now you're kind of come over at 90
• 48:55
  knots and not get too slow and spin the thing. Because it's a bit of a drag queen.
• 49:03
  Yeah. Well, big, thick, straight wing. I get it. Yeah. Wow.
• 49:09
  Guns.
• 49:11
  We had toy guns, decorative guns, the M60s.
• 49:15
  Yeah, they're M60s. We had the M60s in our quadrant, and we finally took them
• 49:20
  out because they were – when we were in the Philippines, we got to shoot at
• 49:24
  the banners in the Philippines.
• 49:26
  Even when you hit a banner in the air, they're a worthless weapon.
• 49:29
  They don't work. So the point is they would jam up.
• 49:32
  We did have a 20-millimeter gun pod that could fit to the bottom.
• 49:36
  I got to shoot that a couple times at the CACs.
• 49:38
  But, you know, if you're making attacks with a cannon in an OV-10,
• 49:42
  I guess it's a different environment.
• 49:44
  Right. But, you know. Yeah.
• 49:48
  Yeah, you got control of those guys. The M60 was, they would jam.
• 49:52
  I mean, you'd shoot them and, you know, they would jam up.
• 49:56
  And there's four of them. Once they're jabbed up, now you've got a problem with
• 49:58
  the D-arm area. And you've got a lot of hot rounds. It's just a pain in the
• 50:01
  ass. We usually shot rockets.
• 50:05
  Mostly you know 7.6 you know the uh 2.75 that occasionally we get to do the zunis,
• 50:10
  and then we would we didn't fire the flare much because
• 50:12
  we use the flare a lot but we didn't do much lazing because before desert
• 50:16
  storm it took an active congress to get the laser range
• 50:19
  to turn anything on we just never did it and then
• 50:22
  over there we had to have detect wraps get them get them
• 50:25
  synced up for us but we didn't have the lasers by tracker so we
• 50:27
  had to assume the thing was boresighted no sense
• 50:31
  training like you fight huh yeah so so it
• 50:36
  took you about six months to get to the war the war
• 50:39
  hadn't started yet and i'm being facetious now so you you guys have been training
• 50:45
  like all of us back in the that period to you know we were fighting the russians
• 50:50
  so we were always using low altitude tactics and Suddenly you show up to the
• 50:54
  AOR over there and get in.
• 50:57
  Did you find out, oh, shit, you know, we can't do what we've been training?
• 51:02
  I mean, what? Yeah, our skipper got shot down. So that probably gave us the first clue.
• 51:06
  What I'd say is the first day of the war, we all were all we were we were operating as a squadron.
• 51:12
  VMO wanted to show up and we had, you know, we had split the load and they had
• 51:16
  more guys and crews. But anyway, we had our thing.
• 51:18
  And I remember the first day everybody was shocked and afraid on both sides
• 51:24
  I think I remember when the sun came up in the first morning me and some Cobra
• 51:28
  guard trying to make a hellfire work and it didn't work out very well we were
• 51:31
  just fumbling through a lot of stuff and the con was messed up but he turned his thing on.
• 51:36
  Yeah there was a lot of that so you know go ahead Felix I don't want to do all
• 51:42
  the time no no that was yeah.
• 51:46
  Yeah so so that for the day one of
• 51:49
  the war your skipper got shot down right yeah so that
• 51:52
  night we had noticed guys are coming back and they were saying
• 51:55
  hey we're all getting shot at because we were kind
• 51:58
  of down low because there wasn't no one shooting at us right
• 52:01
  later in the day people were getting shot at but at
• 52:03
  first no one was getting shot at so we had i remember we
• 52:06
  went to chow we all kind of sat down and had an informed meeting said guys you
• 52:09
  gotta be careful let's start flying higher and skipper
• 52:12
  and great white were already in the rack because they were had the first launch in the
• 52:15
  morning okay we're not in that conversation and i don't know they would
• 52:17
  have mattered but i think they were probably seven eight
• 52:21
  thousand i don't know how high they were but they were they were like lead the
• 52:24
  harriers in follow me you know and they were uh i guess right in the envelope
• 52:29
  so that got us to uh we lifted things up considerably i would spend i mean i
• 52:34
  was often up at 18 000 feet you know now if you're doing actual if you're doing
• 52:38
  actual fact a work you have to be
• 52:39
  of lower but a lot of the time at night especially we were you know a6s from
• 52:45
  the ship or whatever we'd be checking into our area and we would approve grid
• 52:49
  squares that kind of stuff so sometimes it where there wasn't much direct control
• 52:53
  and it's more high level stuff high altitude,
• 52:56
  i mean the the the brits got hammered right the tornado guys yeah yeah they
• 53:02
  get they get it hard they get it hard so kind of glossed over it there so yeah
• 53:06
  your skipper and you called him gray waves was guy hunter got shot down and
• 53:10
  taken pow and i think it took six or eight weeks to get them back.
• 53:15
  Were they in the clink with Bart? Yeah. With Bart? Yeah. Yeah. Right.
• 53:21
  Skipper was a senior officer for a while. Yeah, they were, yeah, that was a bad day.
• 53:27
  Yeah, he got, yeah, he got, the Skipper got, he got beat up real bad,
• 53:33
  messed up his whole face.
• 53:34
  I mean, they had, the rifle butted him in the face. We also had a, he had an ejection.
• 53:38
  He tells a story when he, you know, they got hit and he's a Cobra guy.
• 53:42
  So for what it's worth, he was new to the new to new to ejector seat flying.
• 53:47
  And he commented that, you know, you get the temporal distortion, right?
• 53:51
  He pulls the handle and, and OB-10 is like the fastest seat in the inventory, right?
• 53:56
  It goes 0.4 second back seat or 0.4 the front seat. It's fast.
• 54:01
  He says he pulls it. He pulls the handle and he's waiting and he's waiting.
• 54:05
  And here's, here's guy go out. He's like, he's still waiting.
• 54:08
  He's still waiting. He's like, what's going on? He looks down.
• 54:12
  And if you look back any of those videos he's one of the POWs of his head because
• 54:17
  he really messed up his neck muscles so yeah,
• 54:23
  and we've heard that before from guys that have ejected it like oh my god the
• 54:28
  seat's not going to work even though shit's happening so fast,
• 54:32
  everybody's got it's funny you say that either I remember every nanosecond or
• 54:36
  I woke up in a parachute I wouldn't know either,
• 54:40
  so is he still with us?
• 54:42
  I know we lost Guy Hunter awesome he still lives up in Seattle or someplace
• 54:47
  in Northwest I'd love to chat with him.
• 54:51
  I don't have his contact Rayman does Rayman's working on the same way we're
• 55:00
  working on you for the reunion oh yeah that's right.
• 55:05
  Soon we'll all be dead yeah,
• 55:10
  So walk us through a typical, so let's see, I know it was a fairly abbreviated
• 55:17
  air war. Walk us through a typical day.
• 55:20
  What was it like? You said you were flying six off one, which really you weren't off.
• 55:25
  You were that duty officer for the day, squadron duty officer.
• 55:28
  So what did that look like?
• 55:30
  I know you said some guys were knights, some guys were. Yeah,
• 55:34
  so we were putting the knights.
• 55:35
  We had a pretty good routine. And so if I was a night guy, I would fly anywhere
• 55:39
  from sun down to sun up and maybe some pinky time on either end.
• 55:43
  Wow. And so I'd know what time slot I was going to do.
• 55:47
  I'd know – I mean, we all flew 25 to 28 missions. So it gets into a good routine.
• 55:54
  You know the area very well. The basic premise is I know what time I'm going
• 55:56
  to fly like any other thing. You're going to, you know, go to child,
• 56:00
  go PT, whatever you'd normally try to do.
• 56:02
  Sleeping during the daytime was, of course, a challenge. And then I think we
• 56:06
  would go to ops for a brief.
• 56:08
  We would go to talk to the intel guys who would tell us. I just stopped listening
• 56:12
  because it was such a gloomy story.
• 56:15
  And then walk to maintenance control, sign like an airplane.
• 56:18
  And then I call it the long walk from maintenance control down,
• 56:21
  you know, grab your flight gear.
• 56:22
  You walk out to the flight line and saddle up and go. I mean, it was very routine.
• 56:28
  You guys go out as a section to go to combat? No, we didn't. Or do you go single ship?
• 56:32
  We talked about that. We flew single ship. We trained in everything we did,
• 56:36
  and we talked about that.
• 56:38
  One of the reasons was we had to cover the clock, and I think that's why,
• 56:42
  because of the bandwidth we had.
• 56:44
  And I guess, I don't know, we talked about that because we trained all the time
• 56:50
  as a flight or two, but during Desert Storm, we flew a single ship.
• 56:54
  Okay. Wow, that seems… Train like you're flying.
• 56:59
  Well, yeah, and you lose your mutual support. Yeah. So, you know,
• 57:04
  you feel like you're naked, probably.
• 57:06
  Well, yeah, I mean, it's hard to...
• 57:12
  The other thing, though, is when you're in a position where you're working the
• 57:15
  same area over and over every day and you get to know all the guys on the ground,
• 57:18
  you have the ATO in the back, you can dial for dollars.
• 57:22
  So it isn't like I can do more with a good backseater who knows what's coming
• 57:28
  up in the queue in the ATO versus some guy trying to hold on my wing.
• 57:33
  I just think it's more of, I guess, a better resource spread.
• 57:37
  And it's hard to say. I think most fact work is done single ship.
• 57:41
  I think Vietnam era we're like a follow on to the Vietnam era that push me pull
• 57:46
  you Obi-Wan or whatever that thing was I think they,
• 57:51
  operated singles also I don't think they were we would do the section stuff
• 57:56
  that we would do would be if we're going in and doing for instance escorts we
• 58:00
  do helo escorts all the time we might do vehicle escorts,
• 58:03
  so there are plenty of missions where we'd go as a section maybe bring in dropping
• 58:07
  the guys out of the back But the FACA mission is what it is.
• 58:14
  Okay. And so would you describe the FACA mission, if you would,
• 58:21
  a little bit? What is it those guys are doing?
• 58:23
  And you said, you know, a good one is obviously very helpful and very resourceful.
• 58:30
  And a bad one probably just made your job harder.
• 58:33
  What constituted a good FAC?
• 58:36
  A good fact, and I'll let Felix, you could add in your piece.
• 58:41
  I can say that there was never, for instance, a blue-on-blue kill when OV-10 was on station, right?
• 58:47
  Forward air control, close air support, as you guys know, is dangerous stuff.
• 58:52
  And coordinating everything from putting the bombs on target,
• 58:56
  the right kind of bombs on target, going in the right direction,
• 59:00
  deconflicting the artillery guys.
• 59:02
  There's a lot of shit going on, and so you have to be able to compartmentalize,
• 59:09
  and you have to rely on your back. I think it's a two-man job. I do believe that.
• 59:16
  And you have to have a situation awareness, right, Felix?
• 59:20
  You've got to have a good essay to know what to look for and know what to do
• 59:23
  and when because you're switching back and forth, talking to guys in the ground.
• 59:27
  But there is also a flow to it. You guys have done it. Like from your end,
• 59:30
  I mean, you've worked with it. But you tell me what's a good fact.
• 59:32
  You're on a range and someone's there controlling you. You're on the air or on the ground.
• 59:35
  If they give you what you want, it should be a referee. You should even know I'm there.
• 59:42
  Yeah, I'd say that's fair. I'm just trying to think, you know,
• 59:45
  we didn't do that with a guy in the back seat trying to do that job.
• 59:49
  I can't imagine you're trying to fly the airplane, not hit the ground,
• 59:53
  and help him get eyes on what he needs to get eyes on and have enough SA to
• 1:00:00
  go, who's he trying to talk to, what is it he's trying to do.
• 1:00:03
  I mean, I imagine the same thing is true of the pilot.
• 1:00:07
  A good pilot could make a fat-gaze job really easy. and a guy who's picked up
• 1:00:12
  is just making his life miserable no matter how good he is.
• 1:00:17
  It's like there's mission command or whatever tactical command of a mission
• 1:00:21
  or a hop can come from either seat.
• 1:00:23
  And so there's some backseaters that really have their shit together.
• 1:00:26
  My job is to put the airplane where they want it. That happens too.
• 1:00:29
  It's really about coordination because, and it's also, I think it was great
• 1:00:36
  that we often flew with the same people because you become, you pick up the
• 1:00:41
  habits and you see you know what to expect,
• 1:00:43
  because it's important when you're in a high workload environment you know,
• 1:00:47
  you said flying with the same people did you mostly do that? you teamed up?
• 1:00:53
  Only during the war during the war we teamed up with a backseater yeah I had
• 1:01:00
  Beanie in the back who were you flying with?
• 1:01:03
  TARD oh you're flying with TARD redneck savant.
• 1:01:10
  This guy was a gunny and then was a Mustang and came through.
• 1:01:16
  Salty dude. He's a great American. That's awesome.
• 1:01:22
  I call him the rednecks of one. He's an Auburn boy. Probably the smartest guy.
• 1:01:28
  One of the smartest guys I've ever met. He's up there with Felix.
• 1:01:31
  We would play chess every day.
• 1:01:32
  The whole tent full of jarheads played chess. He never once lost.
• 1:01:37
  But he's also very you know,
• 1:01:41
  Very Southern. Wait, wait one. I'm suffering.
• 1:01:46
  Do we have enough fuel for this? Wait one. I'm suffering. Let me get my shoes off.
• 1:01:53
  Oh man. That's awesome. Oh, well, geez, we've been going at this almost an hour.
• 1:02:00
  It feels like easily eight or 10 minutes.
• 1:02:02
  Yeah. So I'll tell you what, what I'd like to do is take just a moment and thank
• 1:02:07
  the folks at masterclass who are helping to bring this show to you.
• 1:02:11
  And then we'll come back. I'd like to chat a little bit about our friend Flair
• 1:02:14
  and some of the hijinks that you guys got into, as well as the war stories.
• 1:02:21
  Whoa! I just discovered something really cool.
• 1:02:25
  I've been diving into Chris Voss's negotiating sessions on Masterclass.
• 1:02:29
  And this guy, former FBI hostage negotiator, teaches you how to get what you
• 1:02:35
  want without anyone realizing you're steering the ship. tactical empathy, mirroring, labeling.
• 1:02:41
  I actually tested it on my dog.
• 1:02:43
  He wanted three treats. I labeled his feelings, mirrored his little head tilt,
• 1:02:49
  and I walked away with two beers and he only got one treat.
• 1:02:54
  That's a win in my book. Hold on. You negotiated up from a dachshund? Yeah, yesterday.
• 1:03:00
  He had me open a jar three times before breakfast.
• 1:03:04
  Today, I used Voss's tactics. I came out ahead. For the first time,
• 1:03:08
  I beat him at his own game.
• 1:03:10
  Nice. Well, while Fig was trading with his dog like it's the UN Security Council,
• 1:03:15
  I've been having a blast with Penn and Teller magic and Steve Martin comedy on Masterclass.
• 1:03:21
  I used to do stage magic and hypnosis at state fairs.
• 1:03:25
  So Penn and Teller were right up in Wheelhouse. They started with some simple
• 1:03:30
  tricks, and then they throw in some advanced theory that It makes you go,
• 1:03:33
  wait, how did they even think of that?
• 1:03:36
  And Steve Martin, he makes starting stand-up sound easy.
• 1:03:41
  All you need to do is have the ability to notice stuff.
• 1:03:45
  And that kind of works out for me because people already laugh at me when I'm
• 1:03:49
  just sitting there quietly.
• 1:03:50
  It's because of your face. Well, I do have a face for radio. I get it.
• 1:03:55
  That's the thing. These sessions cover everything from negotiating to magic
• 1:04:00
  to comedy to leadership. and they're chopped into bite-sized sessions.
• 1:04:05
  So even if you're slammed, you can fit one in. I do mine on audio right before bed.
• 1:04:11
  Oh, yeah. That's a good way to go to bed. So here's the wild thing, though.
• 1:04:16
  The stats are that three out of four members are inspired every single time
• 1:04:21
  they watch Masterclass.
• 1:04:23
  That's not just hype. I watched Penn & Teller and immediately pulled off a trick.
• 1:04:27
  I made Fig's beer disappear.
• 1:04:29
  That's my last beer. I'm still grieving.
• 1:04:33
  Well, like Steve Martin says, comedy is tragedy plus time. You'll laugh about it later, Fig.
• 1:04:40
  All right. All right, folks. If you want to sharpen your skills,
• 1:04:43
  whether it's negotiating like Chris Voss, making things vanish like Penn and
• 1:04:48
  Teller, or cracking people up like Steve Martin, this is your chance.
• 1:04:52
  Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at
• 1:04:58
  masterclass.com slash so there I was.
• 1:05:01
  That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash so there I was all one word masterclass.com slash so there I was.
• 1:05:13
  Seriously, folks, we've had some fun with this, but we mean it.
• 1:05:16
  Masterclass is worth trying. It's one of those things that can actually make
• 1:05:20
  you better at something you care about and maybe even surprise you with something
• 1:05:25
  new you never thought you'd try.
• 1:05:27
  Go give it a shot. You'll thank yourself later.
• 1:05:32
  So we got over the war, got into the war. As I recall, the air war was relatively
• 1:05:36
  short, which is what prevented Fig and me both from ever getting over there.
• 1:05:41
  We were all loaded up, ready to hop on the airplanes and head that direction.
• 1:05:44
  The back clean up for everybody. And they said, yeah, don't bother.
• 1:05:47
  It's done. It's over with. So we never got there. At the time,
• 1:05:51
  it was disappointing. And in retrospect, it turned out to be a very good blessing in my life.
• 1:05:56
  So how long were you there after the air war?
• 1:05:59
  War i guess talk about a little bit about the
• 1:06:02
  highway to hell and were you guys
• 1:06:05
  involved in that or yeah the highway
• 1:06:09
  to hell i i would cut i would cut it drop a cut of the scene with kevin baker
• 1:06:13
  in animal house remain calm you know when the people are panicking in the streets
• 1:06:18
  and this is this is the very towards the end of this thing and a lot of guys
• 1:06:23
  are launching and there's not Not much stuff to drop on and people who want
• 1:06:26
  to go home and somebody got something going.
• 1:06:29
  I was working that day and I had this, you know, we would have sort of sectors,
• 1:06:33
  grids. Okay. And I had this grid.
• 1:06:37
  You'd like to have control of who's coming in and dropping bombs. It just went crazy.
• 1:06:41
  And guys were showing up and dropping bombs. And I just remember I had to get
• 1:06:44
  out of there because I was afraid I would get run over.
• 1:06:46
  It was absolutely – because no one had – I think it had been three weeks since
• 1:06:51
  anything had really happened.
• 1:06:52
  And so there was a lot of pent-up – I shouldn't say that. There were actual targets.
• 1:06:56
  And it was as far as I could see. Now, I know some guys, Ron,
• 1:06:59
  did you – some guys went up there after the war on the ground. I never did.
• 1:07:03
  Some guys went up to kuwait to drive around and i
• 1:07:06
  just had eod nightmares thinking about all
• 1:07:09
  the crap that was on the ground there but uh yeah yeah
• 1:07:13
  it was a big big mess yeah i i
• 1:07:16
  flew over it after it happened i mean we flew
• 1:07:19
  up there and it was it was looked it looked it was a horrible scene and then
• 1:07:23
  i don't know that was when they lit the the other big thing that happened there
• 1:07:28
  is they lit all the wells on oh yeah and so there was like you know when you
• 1:07:31
  went out it looked like It looked like a hellscape because you had all these
• 1:07:34
  fires with the black smoke coming up.
• 1:07:36
  And then, I mean, everywhere. Because I think just about every oil well they had there was burning.
• 1:07:41
  Yeah, it depends on when the wind was blowing. Some days it blew skies.
• 1:07:45
  The next day it's 200 overcast and oil and smoke. And you'd launch and fly through
• 1:07:49
  it and all over the airplane. It was nasty stuff. Yeah.
• 1:07:54
  I bet. Holy shit. It's cold and shitty.
• 1:07:58
  And winter in Saudi Arabia is not a pleasant time. It is not. It's cold and nasty.
• 1:08:05
  So how much longer did you guys stay? When did they pack you up and start sending
• 1:08:09
  you back states on? We sat around on that base for probably six weeks, I'll bet you.
• 1:08:14
  We were hoping they let us fly home, and they almost didn't. No.
• 1:08:18
  They craned them on a ship. It would have been so great to come home and come
• 1:08:20
  in for the break. That's all I wanted to do was fly home. We didn't.
• 1:08:23
  So they put us on our 747, and we flew home.
• 1:08:27
  Okay. Wait, you got to come back on a 747?
• 1:08:30
  I thought I came back on a 141 or something, and it was like I was stuck in
• 1:08:34
  the back of – wait, how did you – I might have come – maybe I came back earlier.
• 1:08:39
  Did you come over with any of the POW stuff or no? No. A lot of guys – I don't
• 1:08:43
  think I stayed six weeks maybe. Maybe I left a little earlier.
• 1:08:47
  I don't know. I got on – we were on a 747. I remember watching Home Alone laughing my ass off.
• 1:08:52
  It was funny. They were saying, like, 0-4s and E-9s board first.
• 1:08:57
  And I was like, oh, I don't want to get a shitty seat. And all these knuckleheads
• 1:09:00
  ran up to the very top of the 747.
• 1:09:02
  And first class was wide open.
• 1:09:05
  And I remember they served us. We landed in Ireland on the way over.
• 1:09:08
  And they were waiting for us, an airplane full of Marines with just pints of beer.
• 1:09:13
  And by the time we got over to the North Atlantic, the heads were overflowing.
• 1:09:16
  And people were puking in the aisles. But it was a little great ride home.
• 1:09:21
  That's okay. Irish serving the Marines beer? That sounds like a beautiful thing. Holy shit.
• 1:09:27
  So was Flair, who went home with Flair?
• 1:09:31
  Well, Flair was with us the whole time. So the Flair stories were,
• 1:09:35
  I remember when we showed up in Greenland.
• 1:09:40
  And so Flair was on my wing often, and we were in these new SLEP airplanes.
• 1:09:45
  And it's the D, but you can imagine it's got a little bit different checklists
• 1:09:50
  and digitals, buttons and stuff.
• 1:09:51
  And I was always rushing him to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up,
• 1:09:54
  hurry up. I was giving him grief.
• 1:09:56
  But we had to go from – so we left Brunswick, wherever it was,
• 1:10:03
  and then off to Iklut, you know, that weird ice station zebra kind of place.
• 1:10:07
  And then from there we hopped over to Saundersdom.
• 1:10:09
  And when we got there, it was like the Swedish bikini team was waiting for us.
• 1:10:13
  You know, there were all these kids from Greenland or wherever,
• 1:10:17
  Nordic women and young kids all over the place. And so Flair lobbied very aggressively
• 1:10:24
  that the weather looked kind of rough at Keflavik.
• 1:10:27
  And we really consider holding over here for weather.
• 1:10:31
  And Kipper agreed.
• 1:10:35
  I'm shocked there was gambling going on in that casino. Holy shit.
• 1:10:41
  He wouldn't tell us anything. He was single at the time.
• 1:10:44
  Yeah, he was a ladies' man. There's no doubt about it. And I know I've told
• 1:10:48
  some version of this before.
• 1:10:50
  There's two people in my life and flair is one of them that two men that i've
• 1:10:54
  ever met that everywhere they went women just would write down their phone number
• 1:10:58
  and hand it to them it's like dude what are you doing so i don't know baby it's
• 1:11:03
  a gift well the other funny thing was i find it so crazy that,
• 1:11:09
  His beautiful daughter is marrying a musician, a saxophone player,
• 1:11:12
  no less, because Flair was always about – he would get really enthusiastic about
• 1:11:17
  things, and he just loved jazz, and he was going to learn how to play the sax,
• 1:11:21
  and he got a sax, and he could not play that thing.
• 1:11:25
  He brought it out to Cax once, and it was like, put that thing away.
• 1:11:29
  It sounded like a – It was an electronic one, though. It wasn't a real one,
• 1:11:35
  right? No, it was a real on sax.
• 1:11:36
  I thought it was electronic. I couldn't write it. The same guy that somehow calmed his way.
• 1:11:41
  When we got out, the airlines were not hiring, and that was fine. I was ready to go.
• 1:11:46
  And he found a way to get an interview with FedEx.
• 1:11:50
  And he did well in the interview, and they said, come and fly the simulator of an SFO.
• 1:11:55
  I was like, okay, cool. Now, this guy is a freaking OV-10 pilot,
• 1:11:58
  and he's not current or proficient.
• 1:12:01
  So he hops in the simulator, confident is all, and he says he was supposed to
• 1:12:06
  go, you know, launch to go to this, proceed to this heading,
• 1:12:09
  enter holding here at this point, and stay in a rate, whatever.
• 1:12:13
  And he just like, he said he'd never been in a full motion simulator. We didn't have a sim.
• 1:12:17
  We had a dumpster that went out in the backyard, you know, a couple times a year, went in motion.
• 1:12:21
  Anyway, so the point was he gets in the sim and the motion starts.
• 1:12:25
  He's like, holy shit. He's safe.
• 1:12:28
  The thing ran for about 30 seconds. Motion stopped and they escorted the mountain building.
• 1:12:34
  Because they thought he was an imposter. He laughed about it.
• 1:12:37
  He's a good pilot, but he's so funny.
• 1:12:41
  Yeah, he was. Yeah. Absolutely. Because, you know, that's the other thing. I didn't fly with him.
• 1:12:47
  I never saw the man get ruffled, though. He just was smooth.
• 1:12:53
  Well, he's like any good wingman. You don't need anyone to add stress, right?
• 1:12:59
  The other thing about Flair was, and I'll let Felix tell him,
• 1:13:02
  But he had this thing with food, really high-quality food. He called it quality.
• 1:13:08
  And so we're living in the middle of nowhere in this stupid soccer stadium.
• 1:13:12
  And first of all, he found an isolated special, like, royal bathroom that had
• 1:13:17
  literally golden fixtures and pearl, all this crazy.
• 1:13:20
  And he was, like, the only guy who knew about it in the whole soccer stadium
• 1:13:23
  where there was, what, 3,000 Marines.
• 1:13:25
  And then he had this constant supply of food, gourmet food.
• 1:13:30
  He'd always pull it out of a pocket someplace, and it was coming to him every
• 1:13:34
  – I mean, I couldn't believe it.
• 1:13:35
  Guys would be going off to the little PX that he said, I've been buying all
• 1:13:39
  this crappy food. I got plenty. He always had a supply chain coming in.
• 1:13:44
  He had it figured out. And he was so laid back.
• 1:13:48
  Dan knows this further than I do, but he was always like, there was that LL
• 1:13:53
  Cool J song, Going Back to Cali.
• 1:13:55
  And he was like, just when all the time, just randomly, it's like, Going Back to Cali.
• 1:14:03
  And then he would be, yeah, he'd do that, and then he'll do it on the intercom.
• 1:14:09
  Two days before the war, a war attack spread heading east on the border out here.
• 1:14:16
  Over the radio. I'm going back to Cali.
• 1:14:20
  Cali. Cali. Going back to Cali. And then he waits. I don't think so.
• 1:14:27
  I love that guy. He said, I just like him too. Oh, holy shit.
• 1:14:33
  I can see him doing it. this is a guy who ran for town council so he could get
• 1:14:39
  the permit to build his house because he was building a commercial zone,
• 1:14:46
  ran for town council and got elected so he could change the zoning and then resigned,
• 1:14:54
  well played well played sir, well played yeah.
• 1:15:00
  Crap let's see,
• 1:15:04
  i have one more question to ask oh no
• 1:15:08
  i already got it i already got it answer okay the guns the guns
• 1:15:11
  the guns on the airplane the 7.62 millimeter
• 1:15:14
  machine gun which wasn't really on the sponsor whether you need it or not right
• 1:15:19
  yeah well uh we'll tell you where to shoot your gun please right was that uh
• 1:15:24
  was that a easy airplane to to spot land land i mean yeah i I thought it would
• 1:15:31
  be an easier plane to fly because you got the, you know,
• 1:15:33
  the props there are great speed brakes. Yeah.
• 1:15:36
  Very responsive. It requires, you know, rudders. And it's a true stick and rudder
• 1:15:40
  airplane. You can feel it very much.
• 1:15:42
  And, yeah, it's easy to fly.
• 1:15:47
  As I mentioned before, in the clouds, you know, or, you know,
• 1:15:50
  with all that glass, because the canopy comes down to your thighs.
• 1:15:54
  There's a lot of, you can imagine you can get yourself some vertigo going there if you're in the clouds.
• 1:16:01
  Pretty easy airplane to fly on. So how many hours did you guys – how long were you in the squadron?
• 1:16:08
  I was in the – I checked into the squadron in 88 maybe.
• 1:16:13
  Anyway, I left the Marine Corps in 93, 92. So after the Gulf,
• 1:16:18
  I came back, and then the Air Force had shut down the OB-10.
• 1:16:23
  So they said, we're going to stand up a rag with the Cobras,
• 1:16:26
  HMT-303. So me and some guys went over, took some airplanes, and stood that up.
• 1:16:31
  And then six months later they said forget the whole thing and
• 1:16:34
  so i was up after that you know i had a chance to transition to
• 1:16:37
  some i mean guys in my i don't know if they offered you around
• 1:16:40
  but i could have gone flown horrors or harriers or whatever i had a good a good
• 1:16:44
  opportunity but i was just ready to go well yeah i didn't stay yeah i got it
• 1:16:49
  i think i came about 88 too i think we got there about the same time roughly
• 1:16:52
  the same time right when rob man had crashed right when I got there.
• 1:16:56
  Were you there before he crashed or after?
• 1:16:59
  Is that the big bear crash or no? It was after that because I had not He crashed
• 1:17:04
  down in the Philippines, right? Where did he crash?
• 1:17:06
  No, this is the one that was out in the Borrego. You must have showed up after.
• 1:17:10
  I was after, yeah, because I wasn't around for that. Was that the VMO2 where the doc.
• 1:17:16
  Ejected? We never had a dock ejected, I know.
• 1:17:20
  No, that was some weird thing. We had a couple sad mishaps.
• 1:17:25
  One was, we don't know what happened. The most recent one was a guy went up
• 1:17:30
  a box canyon and couldn't get out.
• 1:17:32
  But most of the reasons their planes in the military crash are fairly common.
• 1:17:37
  If you flew it safely, it could get hairier when it's really heavily loaded out of 21A on Palms.
• 1:17:42
  And boy, if you lose an engine, the book says you can fly that way well we'll
• 1:17:45
  see but uh you know if you're smart about it and
• 1:17:49
  we're and wear your earplugs in your helmet someone told me i'm glad
• 1:17:51
  i did because those are some loud loud engines they
• 1:17:55
  really are prop tips are
• 1:17:58
  right at supersonic so you know let's just explain what
• 1:18:04
  a box canyon is if you would please sir our listeners well this
• 1:18:09
  happened you know not far from palm springs there's
• 1:18:11
  a place called banning pass it's sort of a valley that
• 1:18:14
  goes from the desert to the ocean and these guys were flying in in those mountain
• 1:18:19
  areas and were flying up these different canyons and you know b10 is a high
• 1:18:24
  performance airplane but it's not like an f18 or a you could just stand on its
• 1:18:29
  tail and fly out so they were they flew into an area of terrain.
• 1:18:33
  That was rising faster than the airplane could and they they got to where they
• 1:18:37
  couldn't recover and they ejected and didn't survive.
• 1:18:41
  So it's a fundamental thing around mountain flying is you always have to be thinking for a way out.
• 1:18:46
  Like if you're flying up a valley, they taught us always be on one side.
• 1:18:50
  So if I have to turn out, I can do that versus, you know, having no alternatives.
• 1:18:55
  And so a lot of guys who fly military airplanes don't run into that situation
• 1:18:58
  because you have lots of power. I'm sure in a Harrier, you got plenty of power.
• 1:19:01
  In A-4, we did. But in that airplane.
• 1:19:06
  Yeah. And that incident, Flair was was on the I guess he was assigned to be
• 1:19:12
  on the investigation team. He had to go up there and invest.
• 1:19:14
  Now, as laid back and unflappable as Flair was, he was he was angry.
• 1:19:21
  I mean, he was still, you know, he was that made him so angry to talk about it.
• 1:19:25
  He was so angry. I've never seen I never saw Flair get angry like he's always
• 1:19:28
  cool and laid back. But if you brought that up, man, he couldn't stand it because
• 1:19:34
  I think he thought that was really a dumb thing to do.
• 1:19:38
  And I think he knew the people. I don't know if I knew.
• 1:19:41
  I don't know if I know Sergio. Did I know Sergio? Yeah, you knew Sergio.
• 1:19:44
  Okay. I don't remember him because it happened not long after I got there,
• 1:19:48
  I don't think. Okay. I think it was not. Or maybe I was deployed.
• 1:19:51
  I went on two back-to-back debts to Okinawa. Yeah, you probably know what happened.
• 1:19:54
  Yeah, so I might have missed that. We were both in Okinawa when that happened.
• 1:19:57
  Yeah. So did they take... Squadron minus.
• 1:20:01
  Did they take... Was it just from your squadron or did they take guys from Key One?
• 1:20:05
  So for Desert Storm, they took six airplanes, I think, seven crews, if I'm not mistaken.
• 1:20:10
  And they just picked the crews and they said... So they took an attachment because
• 1:20:15
  they had to maintain coverage of Pendleton as well as Okinawa.
• 1:20:21
  So the whole squadron didn't go. I want to say maybe half the squadron went.
• 1:20:25
  Yeah. So I talked to Joel about coming on with you guys, and he said he was
• 1:20:29
  talking about being over at Subic during all of this.
• 1:20:33
  So was he in the dead over there? Was he VMO2 as well? Yeah, those guys.
• 1:20:38
  So all the guys in the squadron then went one of two ways, either the desert
• 1:20:43
  or the PI, and a couple of dudes left behind. But basically everyone was gone. It was split in two.
• 1:20:49
  Had to go to the PI and spend time there. That was terrible.
• 1:20:52
  Well, you know, that was the first war. There were people who were excited to
• 1:20:57
  get over there, I'll say that much.
• 1:20:59
  And that's all when Pinatubo was going off, too.
• 1:21:04
  So, you know, nothing else going on. Yeah. Keep it interesting,
• 1:21:07
  I guess. The PI was great. I mean, some of the best-selling ever.
• 1:21:12
  It's beautiful, beautiful countryside over there. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:21:17
  Although those monkeys and bats were a bit. You'd go running.
• 1:21:20
  You would go running. You probably did that route that me and Duke used to run
• 1:21:23
  that a lot. There's some route you'd run down through. All the way up. The monkeys.
• 1:21:28
  In the mountain, in the hills. And you guys first saw the bat during the fall
• 1:21:32
  in November, these bats.
• 1:21:34
  Right? You see the bats in the cube? I don't remember.
• 1:21:37
  Eight foot wingspan bats. Holy shit. They were monsters.
• 1:21:41
  That's a pterodactyl. They're fruit bats. And they live in the mountains in
• 1:21:45
  QB, wherever. And during the month of November, December, they migrate back
• 1:21:49
  and forth and they have to stop airplanes because you'll hit them and they're
• 1:21:52
  the size of a monkey. It's like the Wizard of Oz. It's the craziest thing.
• 1:21:56
  Yeah. Have a bat strike. Bat strike. It's like having a cat with wing strike. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:22:04
  And you guys talked about it. I just want to confirm you guys never did any
• 1:22:08
  carrier ops in the airplane, right? Not a new one.
• 1:22:12
  No, but didn't somebody, somebody did a test. Was it Ralph? Somebody did a test.
• 1:22:17
  Yeah, somebody did a test.
• 1:22:18
  Well, they flew them off. VM01 craned them on and flew them off routinely, right?
• 1:22:24
  But Pax River did landings with them. We never did. We went through a strike
• 1:22:27
  pipeline, of course, in the A4 and T2.
• 1:22:29
  But we did not have to land at night, thankfully, or live on a boat.
• 1:22:35
  Did that have a tail hook? No.
• 1:22:37
  No, they did. Did they do a special mod for the test landings they did?
• 1:22:43
  It seems like I remember them talking about that. No? So they just try to land it.
• 1:22:47
  Come on. You've got 30 knots, 40 knots coming over the nose.
• 1:22:50
  You go to full flaps. You wouldn't have any brakes.
• 1:22:54
  What's the landing speed at full flaps? What are your approach speeds?
• 1:22:59
  Well, typically, usually it would be half flaps, nine knots. Come in as fast as I can.
• 1:23:05
  Come in for the brake. Six feet around the turn.
• 1:23:09
  Gear and flaps down to – An instrument approach might be 130,
• 1:23:14
  120, 130, but in a pattern, 105, no flaps.
• 1:23:18
  But I usually have flaps, 90 knots. I would never – I hardly ever did full flaps
• 1:23:22
  because you lose an engine in your hose. So typically I go half flaps.
• 1:23:25
  A lot of guys would do no flaps. We'd fly – Pendleton was a 5,000-foot runway,
• 1:23:29
  and we had a Fresno lens we'd fly off of.
• 1:23:34
  Very easy airplane to fly.
• 1:23:37
  Except when you were doing a mission. Yeah. Then it got busy.
• 1:23:43
  It did have a G-suit, too, believe it or not. Yeah.
• 1:23:47
  How many Gs would it pull? That straight wing would probably lay it on really quickly, too.
• 1:23:52
  It would. I think Huggy, were you there? Huggy, I think we were in Okinawa.
• 1:23:57
  He was doing some flight. He came back and something's warped,
• 1:24:01
  all warped. I think he pulled, it was maybe seven or eight.
• 1:24:06
  Flare did a little over G once he did I thought it was ugly maybe more than one of us,
• 1:24:13
  there's our boys flare there there's Tard and I don't kid on the left and Babar
• 1:24:20
  on the right yes that's it,
• 1:24:23
  there I was there I was yeah I think 6 G's I think it was I was talking about
• 1:24:32
  it the other day with a buddy of mine and that airplane if you're pulling six
• 1:24:36
  G's you're not pulling for a long time,
• 1:24:40
  you'll lose all your air speed you'll be flying around like a helicopter usually
• 1:24:44
  if you're yanking and banking on a lap course you're probably doing three,
• 1:24:48
  four G turns here and there but it's not like you're going to horn it or something.
• 1:24:55
  We had the same problem in the Harrier with no reheat you just weren't getting
• 1:24:58
  your energy back unless you had gravity on your side,
• 1:25:02
  he better pull this sucker it better be for a reason otherwise i'm out of airspeed
• 1:25:05
  and ideas yeah you know uh that's never good no altitude airspeed and ideas you need at least two,
• 1:25:15
  at all times at least two at all times right yeah i'm kidding so they had a
• 1:25:22
  stick in the back too okay yeah that's right you were saying you let them fly
• 1:25:25
  yeah hold this heading when we get there.
• 1:25:30
  Duke always wanted to fly. I know Rayman was a pilot. Rayman just retired from FedEx.
• 1:25:40
  Rayman was a backseater too? Yeah, he was. He just retired as a check-airman
• 1:25:44
  captain over at FedEx. He got out.
• 1:25:46
  That's a great picture there. I found that one. You like that one? I just found that one.
• 1:25:52
  I don't know him, but he didn't look like that over the last 30 years.
• 1:25:58
  I used to always joke, he's like, you know, he just got hired to be a checker,
• 1:26:01
  do they let you talk in the radios? Because I wouldn't let him talk in the radios.
• 1:26:07
  He's a great American. He flies warbirds and all kinds of cool stuff. Oh, that's fantastic.
• 1:26:13
  Yeah, he really loved flying. I think he was...
• 1:26:16
  He's one of those guys that had his contract.
• 1:26:20
  The NAMI-WAMI got him. We had a kid like that, and I forget his name, but the same thing.
• 1:26:26
  He was a pilot, and NAMI-WAMI got him. and he wound up getting
• 1:26:29
  the nfo track and somebody
• 1:26:33
  ran into him later and he's like they were talking about the things they were
• 1:26:37
  doing in flight school and he found out the flight students were talking on
• 1:26:41
  the radio to get clearance take off land and they're like let you talk on the
• 1:26:45
  radio it's like oh dude they just tell us to squawk 7600 and take off.
• 1:26:50
  Talking on the radio we don't have nfos in flight school handling the radios for us man He's like,
• 1:26:58
  because that's all he basically got to do was talk on the radio.
• 1:27:01
  That took me some getting used to because we were trained as single-seat attack guys. Yeah.
• 1:27:05
  It's like, just don't touch anything back there, dude. Just,
• 1:27:07
  you know, and if you're going to puke, use it in the back.
• 1:27:10
  It took a while, but they were great to fly with.
• 1:27:13
  It was really, that whole Marine Corps air ground thing really comes together
• 1:27:17
  when you're working with these guys because it's a pretty interesting job that
• 1:27:20
  turned out to be way better than I thought it would be.
• 1:27:24
  All right, Pigpen, you show up at your squadron. You're a squadron pilot.
• 1:27:29
  What other jobs did you get right out of the gate?
• 1:27:32
  Because it ain't nobody just to be a squadron pilot. Oh, yeah,
• 1:27:36
  the shitty little job officer. So let's see. My first shitty little job was NBC officer.
• 1:27:41
  Oh, okay. That came into play years later when the scuds were coming in,
• 1:27:45
  but I wasn't then the NBC officer, thankfully.
• 1:27:47
  And that was at the National Broadcasting Corporation, folks.
• 1:27:51
  The scuds were plentiful in anxiety creating and then i was the,
• 1:27:56
  Yeah, I did your analysis. I did NBC. So NBC is nuclear, biological,
• 1:28:01
  and chemical. Your analysis.
• 1:28:05
  Nobody cares is NBC. Oh, there you go. The guns are in the air.
• 1:28:09
  They want to know where their masks are.
• 1:28:11
  And then I got into other flying jobs, you know, ops and real jobs after that
• 1:28:17
  bit of time. How about you, Felix?
• 1:28:19
  You know what? I'm trying to remember, like, what did I do? I don't remember
• 1:28:23
  doing anything but flying and working out.
• 1:28:25
  That's exactly how you want to do it he's that
• 1:28:28
  guy he's that guy i must i must
• 1:28:32
  have had a job i must have had any jobs but i don't
• 1:28:34
  remember well there
• 1:28:38
  you know every squadron had one of those guys i guess it was me i know i was
• 1:28:43
  that guy all i wanted to do was fly i tell you what man i i knew i was doomed
• 1:28:47
  i'd look at i'd look at a major go you stupid son of a gun you know i just I
• 1:28:52
  had this disdain for going off and being a fact or anything like that. I just wouldn't have it.
• 1:28:58
  I respect the guys who did. Don't get me wrong. Did you guys fly after the Marine Corps?
• 1:29:04
  I did a little bit. I was in the gliders, but I got out of flying.
• 1:29:08
  Airlines weren't hungry. I had an interview date at American,
• 1:29:10
  and it kind of petered out. I flew for a year in reserves.
• 1:29:14
  And then about five years ago, I started getting back into flying GA stuff. All right.
• 1:29:20
  Civil Air Patrol. What about you, Felix? No, I, so when I went through Beeville,
• 1:29:24
  I bought a plane, I bought a PA-12 from actually from my on wing that was my instructor.
• 1:29:30
  He, he sold me his PA-12.
• 1:29:34
  For twelve thousand five hundred dollars i guess
• 1:29:37
  that was a good that's a lot of money back back then yeah well it seems
• 1:29:40
  like but it actually was a good deal yeah it was a good deal back
• 1:29:42
  then too pretty good deal i think but no and i was
• 1:29:45
  flying out of uh my future wife's father's grass strip he had a pa-12 and a
• 1:29:52
  piper cub so i'm so i bought so i had a plane and i'm flying in beeville i'm
• 1:29:57
  just having a great time because i'm flying you know i'm flying flight school
• 1:30:00
  i'm at chase field And then I'm flying my own plane with my father-in-law.
• 1:30:04
  And that was a lot of fun. So I still had that plane. But when I got out,
• 1:30:08
  I got out right after Desert Storm.
• 1:30:10
  I got out like maybe four or five, six months after we got back.
• 1:30:15
  And I still had the plane, but it was in Beaville. I'm living in Dallas.
• 1:30:20
  And I don't have a good job, so I can't afford to keep that.
• 1:30:24
  So I had to sell it. And I haven't flown since.
• 1:30:28
  What was the N number? Do you remember? Yeah, 3218 Mike.
• 1:30:31
  And and i sold it to my it was i
• 1:30:34
  sold my plane to uh a club a
• 1:30:37
  guy a club out in midland i believe and
• 1:30:40
  they were then they were they i guess they still have it
• 1:30:43
  i checked on it maybe i don't know 10 or 15 years ago and they were still they
• 1:30:46
  still had it yeah so i guess it's still flying and the problem is i didn't want
• 1:30:51
  to just leave it sitting in a hangar down in bevo because it's no good for a
• 1:30:54
  plane so i i felt like it's like it's like you know you don't want to you don't
• 1:30:58
  let your baby die so you let get into somebody else.
• 1:31:02
  I haven't flown since 1991.
• 1:31:05
  It's registered at Slowfly LLC.
• 1:31:09
  Okay, that sounds like a different place but maybe they changed the name.
• 1:31:14
  You can't see a restricted view. People do that now but it's obviously an active
• 1:31:18
  airplane. That's kind of neat. Yeah, that is cool.
• 1:31:23
  That just became a thing. You could not have your name and address show up when
• 1:31:26
  someone ran your end number anymore. So that's kind of different.
• 1:31:30
  Yeah, so Felix married a Beeville gal.
• 1:31:35
  It was fun to meet her and chat with her at the wedding and find out all the
• 1:31:41
  people that she knew that I had met when I worked there when I was in high school.
• 1:31:46
  For the local hardware store and out on a ranch.
• 1:31:50
  I'm sorry. I think I missed something. And I had no idea you lived in Beaville, Texas. I did.
• 1:31:56
  The summer between my junior and senior year in high school,
• 1:31:59
  I worked at Burroughs Hardware Store in Beaville for a couple weeks.
• 1:32:03
  Then the foreman died on the owner's ranch.
• 1:32:08
  And I was the only guy with a driver's license. So I had to go pick all the
• 1:32:12
  laborers up every morning, go out and work on the ranch and come back.
• 1:32:16
  But hung out with some folks, learned some Texas living,
• 1:32:21
  doing the uh the oh gosh not the vfw it was a vfw dance but also the american
• 1:32:28
  legion dance you know friday night saturday nights that kind of stuff and yeah
• 1:32:31
  it was a hoot man i love texas i bought it i bought a pair of steer horns that
• 1:32:36
  i put on the front of my 68 impala.
• 1:32:42
  So yeah yeah me and me
• 1:32:45
  and repeat have probably one degree like it's
• 1:32:48
  at seven what six degrees of uh we
• 1:32:51
  get like a one degree because i think we can probably go one
• 1:32:54
  person and know everybody everybody in bville yeah bville's small and like my
• 1:33:00
  wife's from there she knows everybody so you name people and pete and linda
• 1:33:04
  were you know yeah you know darlene yeah new john well yeah new john west yeah
• 1:33:10
  well you know bugsy bugsy's wife was from bville,
• 1:33:14
  I didn't know Debbie was from B-Ville. No kidding. Oh, you know what?
• 1:33:17
  Hold on a second. Now, I'm pretty sure he was a B-Ville guy.
• 1:33:20
  Yeah, I went through with him. Yeah. Yeah. I never realized she was from B-Ville.
• 1:33:24
  That's where he met Debbie. Yeah. How about that?
• 1:33:28
  Who knew? Who knew? It's too funny.
• 1:33:31
  We can do a show on B-Ville flying because I heard Linda's dad was a,
• 1:33:36
  he got his license when he was like 60.
• 1:33:40
  And then he took off and flew to alaska and
• 1:33:43
  in the pa-12 and if you know that's just dangerous well he
• 1:33:47
  didn't know and any any his pa-12 had a
• 1:33:50
  had a he'd had the loran c put in his like
• 1:33:53
  the only he claims it was the only fabric playing
• 1:33:56
  with a loran c in it and they had to you know anyway it
• 1:33:59
  was he's got anyway yeah so there's he's
• 1:34:02
  there's a ton of flying stories i'm sure from lots of people
• 1:34:05
  from people but yeah it's now listen we
• 1:34:08
  we have to get you guys have to help us we got to get more ov10 guys to come
• 1:34:13
  out and tell stories because you're the first two and we've been doing this
• 1:34:16
  what two and a half years yeah oh rain man you get rain man it's three and a
• 1:34:21
  half years to do it rain man love to do it right right dan rain man would love it,
• 1:34:25
  you probably are i think well yeah so so some hygiene some uh liberty stories in subic or,
• 1:34:33
  Rikivik.
• 1:34:39
  I cannot speak of Subic.
• 1:34:46
  I'm trying to think of Subic. The biggest thing about Subic was the flying there was incredible.
• 1:34:52
  I mean, it was just flying down a freaking river and looking to the right and
• 1:34:57
  seeing like water buffaloes and grass huts with antennas.
• 1:35:02
  And then it was just crazy. It was like living. It was like going through the
• 1:35:07
  ancient times. the best flying ever.
• 1:35:09
  Can't complain about it. And the Liberty is what it is.
• 1:35:13
  Some guys love that stuff. I know some of the troops got in trouble.
• 1:35:16
  Everyone has their Subic Bay stories. I was lucky. I saw some interesting things, though.
• 1:35:22
  We'll edit that out, but that's all I can say. It's Subic Sea.
• 1:35:26
  Although Cutie Point really is a cool place to be, and I think that anybody
• 1:35:29
  who gets to the Pensacola Museum, there's a VMO2 plaque in there.
• 1:35:34
  In fact, I think Ladd's name's on that plaque.
• 1:35:36
  And maybe, Felix, you're on there, too. I'm almost sure.
• 1:35:40
  So the famous O-Club and the Cubie Point Air Station O-Club,
• 1:35:45
  they took it out and put it in the Pensacola Naval Aviation Museum.
• 1:35:48
  All the monkey pod wood plaques with everybody's name is up on there. If you can get there.
• 1:35:53
  It's a piece of history. I wonder, you know, I never thought to look for a VMO2
• 1:35:58
  plaque to see a flare. Oh, they're there.
• 1:36:01
  Just to be clear they disassembled the bar and reassembled it with the plaques
• 1:36:09
  and everything and you could have a beer there yeah.
• 1:36:15
  That's why you have to come to the reunion in Pensacola,
• 1:36:19
  my brother moved right by there so I really have no excuse so we're doing our
• 1:36:26
  own reunion for the birthday Yeah, on the 8th of November for VMA 223.
• 1:36:31
  Are you guys going to be there too?
• 1:36:34
  Okay. No, I think our reunion, I want to say it's May of next year. I'll pass that around.
• 1:36:40
  We're doing a squadron reunion dinner and 250th Marine Corps birthday that weekend.
• 1:36:47
  There is an OB-10 association in Dallas, and every couple years they do a thing.
• 1:36:52
  And it brings in, they got over the museum, they've got a couple airplanes.
• 1:36:56
  They got a bunch of airplanes you can crawl around in.
• 1:36:58
  And there's a Marine OB-10 there that you, Ronald, have flown,
• 1:37:02
  I can promise you, because it was in Okinawa.
• 1:37:05
  Sitting there. It's harder to get into than it was before, when last time I
• 1:37:08
  flew it. That's weird, isn't it? Yeah.
• 1:37:13
  So they have people who affiliate with, you know, Rockwell guys,
• 1:37:18
  Air Force OV-10 guys, Marines, the troops, everybody.
• 1:37:21
  I think that's coming up this fall as well, in October.
• 1:37:25
  Well, that's pretty cool. Yeah.
• 1:37:30
  Repeat, what do you think? Yeah, well, a couple more questions I've got,
• 1:37:34
  we've got to do call signs, Felix, Pigpen, you know, and how did the squadron assign call signs?
• 1:37:41
  Oh, and if either one of you want, let's go with Flair's first,
• 1:37:45
  and it's okay to tell, because Deanna knows.
• 1:37:49
  Flair is the curve of a woman's small of her back. Yep. Yep.
• 1:37:57
  He's the only guy that ever showed up and said, my call sign is Flair.
• 1:37:59
  And we said, okay. Usually that's quickly removed, but it worked for him.
• 1:38:06
  Yep. His favorite part, he said. All right.
• 1:38:09
  Favorite part. All right. And how did you guys do call signs for the most?
• 1:38:13
  Did you guys do kangaroo courts?
• 1:38:15
  We had kangaroo courts, but call signs just happened. but I don't remember specifically.
• 1:38:20
  I know I can think of a couple of guys I'm pretty sure gave call signs to.
• 1:38:23
  I think I know how Felix got his call sign. It's kind of obvious.
• 1:38:27
  It's obvious to us guys, but, you know, like young people would have no idea.
• 1:38:32
  Kids ask your parents, yeah.
• 1:38:34
  It's like Duke thought it was from Felix the cat, so he's older than us.
• 1:38:38
  It's the odd couple Felix.
• 1:38:39
  Yeah, it's the odd couple Felix. Yeah, because my last name is Unger,
• 1:38:43
  so it's like Felix Unger. Yeah, that's how I got Fig Newton. Okay, yep.
• 1:38:49
  I know. The greatest OV10 call sign I ever saw was Senta, which is short for plus Senta.
• 1:38:58
  He's so ugly, that he's a baby out by mistake. No.
• 1:39:03
  He chose up with that patch, call sign Senta.
• 1:39:08
  Is he really that ugly? I don't know.
• 1:39:13
  We interviewed a fellow Marine guy. It's been a couple years ago now.
• 1:39:18
  He wrote a book about call signs.
• 1:39:22
  Oh, man. Brutal. Brutal.
• 1:39:28
  Macro was an acronym. Married a crack hole.
• 1:39:35
  Yeah, there's some rough ones out there. I told one of you, and I think it was Felix earlier.
• 1:39:41
  My other favorite one was Lamb Chop. The guy was about 5'2",
• 1:39:45
  5'3". and they used to run his seat all the way down. He was a Hornet guy.
• 1:39:51
  They'd run his seat all the way down, so he'd get in the airplane,
• 1:39:53
  and he couldn't sit over the canopy rail.
• 1:39:56
  He's so short. He'd get pissed off, run it up. And then the final straw that
• 1:40:00
  pissed him off was when they put no step on his helmet.
• 1:40:06
  Pretty good. Lamb Chop was an acronym also. Little angry man,
• 1:40:11
  can't handle our program.
• 1:40:16
  It's beautiful I can hear now
• 1:40:21
  chop flight 2, 3, 4 this is terrible love it don't fight it and then Simba,
• 1:40:31
  What was that? What was Simba? Help me out.
• 1:40:34
  I think he did that in the extra, but the long and short of it was in the movie Simba, I guess,
• 1:40:41
  I haven't seen the movie, but somehow Simba gets the name Simba as they're putting
• 1:40:49
  like a cross on his forehead in blood or a streak of blood on his forehead and name him Simba.
• 1:40:54
  And so this dude is with his wife one night, and he makes the mistake of telling
• 1:40:59
  a buddy and goes, yeah, don't tell anybody.
• 1:41:01
  She's with his wife one night. He finishes.
• 1:41:04
  She takes the extra and goes on his forehead and goes Simba.
• 1:41:10
  And he tells somebody about it. Dumbass.
• 1:41:18
  Oh, man. Yep. Yeah. That just happened. Yeah.
• 1:41:23
  That's awesome. And there's a guy in the background here right now.
• 1:41:30
  Bago's with us tonight doing show production, coming up with pictures and stuff like that.
• 1:41:34
  And Bago and Styx both do that for us.
• 1:41:38
  And as he told the story and said, you know, here's what happened.
• 1:41:42
  He puts a picture up, which is a screen freeze frame from the movie of Simba
• 1:41:47
  getting, you know, named.
• 1:41:51
  Because he's that fast. He's that fast and that good.
• 1:41:54
  You know, these guys are amazing and helping in the background.
• 1:41:57
  So, oh, holy shit. This has been fun.
• 1:42:03
  Yeah, I think we probably ought to land the airplane, Fig.
• 1:42:07
  We have had what an amazing time. Thank you both for coming on with us and spending this time with us.
• 1:42:13
  Great stories. We can do it. Yeah, right. Oh, my gosh. There it is. Awesome. Thank you.
• 1:42:19
  First of all, thank you both for your service. We appreciate that you spent
• 1:42:23
  time away from your family and in the desert of Southwest Asia,
• 1:42:30
  hoping to... In harm's way.
• 1:42:32
  Yeah, in harm's way, putting your life on the line and signing that check for
• 1:42:36
  your country when a lot of people don't do that.
• 1:42:38
  And that's a big damn deal. So we're grateful to you and all veterans who stepped up and did that.
• 1:42:44
  And your families who kept the home fires burning whilst you were away. And that means a lot.
• 1:42:51
  It's a big deal, and none of this is free.
• 1:42:54
  Freedom isn't free, and so thank you.
• 1:42:57
  It's two little words that seem so trite, but really, truly mean so much to us.
• 1:43:06
  Cool any others uh fig any other thank
• 1:43:09
  yous yeah well we need to thank
• 1:43:12
  all our patreons for uh losing all
• 1:43:15
  judgment and throwing money at us
• 1:43:18
  to keep this uh the big wheel spinning which it does thanks to you thank you
• 1:43:23
  we are very humbled and of course yeah yeah in fact and let me take this moment
• 1:43:29
  to mention the nick nick chocley fig this i don't remember if i cc'd you on
• 1:43:34
  the email or not. I noticed that. Yeah.
• 1:43:37
  So he, he canceled his membership this week and, and I'm surprised he didn't
• 1:43:41
  do it three months ago because we had one of the levels we have pilot and section lead and division lead.
• 1:43:47
  And those are levels at five, 10 and $15 a month. And then we have tanker aircraft
• 1:43:51
  commander, which is $200 a month.
• 1:43:54
  And damn it, he didn't do four months.
• 1:43:58
  So he, and somehow I got the first month
• 1:44:01
  and read the dedication to his dad and the other three months
• 1:44:04
  dropped out and oh my god that's like
• 1:44:07
  wing commander level now yeah that's
• 1:44:11
  like wing commander chairman of the joint chiefs i
• 1:44:13
  don't know i mean that's a lot of coin so thank you so much you're right up
• 1:44:17
  there with with chucker and sal and you know that's and uh and michelle who've
• 1:44:22
  sent us a lot of money over the years and we're deeply appreciative and now
• 1:44:26
  i'm in trouble because i know i've left other people out who've given that kind
• 1:44:29
  of coin and and i'm Humble, humbly apologizing. Yeah, way to go.
• 1:44:34
  Fig forgot to tell me who you were, and so blame it on him. Send him the nasty gramps.
• 1:44:42
  You know, send Fig the nasty gramps. Listen, I don't remember what I did yesterday
• 1:44:46
  half the time, so I got a good excuse. Stick with that.
• 1:44:51
  How about a big thank to Dave Hamilton? Great. Gives us all the knowledge,
• 1:44:55
  know-how, server space, puts cash flow on our way, and gets us advertising like
• 1:45:01
  those fine folks at Masterclass.
• 1:45:03
  So, yeah, backbeatmedia.com gets us our advertising and Masterclass sponsoring
• 1:45:09
  this show. We are deeply grateful.
• 1:45:11
  Man, I don't know about you, Fig, I am having a ball with the Masterclass videos. Those are awesome.
• 1:45:17
  Holy shit. But yeah, I actually had a pretty good time watching the first two
• 1:45:24
  episodes of, you know, the Art of Negotiation.
• 1:45:28
  Phil Ivey, how to play poker, how to how to not give your tells away,
• 1:45:32
  how to pick up other tells.
• 1:45:33
  He's a human lie detector, that kind of shit. So, yeah, it's amazing stuff.
• 1:45:37
  And I don't know. Hey, if you're enjoying the show, there's two things you can do for us.
• 1:45:43
  One is share it. Share the show. You know, sharing the show and having other
• 1:45:48
  people listen is as good as money to us. It really is.
• 1:45:53
  The more people that are listening, the more we can charge confiscatory advertising
• 1:45:57
  rates and take money from people for plugging their products.
• 1:46:02
  But that being said, we aren't going to plug stuff that we don't believe in.
• 1:46:06
  I'm loving this master class, or I wouldn't talk about it. So,
• 1:46:09
  yeah, no thanks. I'm still trying to process confiscatory.
• 1:46:13
  That's your 50-cent word of the day, brother. I'm going to have to look that up.
• 1:46:17
  I'm going to have to ask Grok what the fuck confiscatory is. Right? No shit.
• 1:46:22
  So anyway, let's see. What else do we need to talk about there?
• 1:46:26
  Oh, so share the show and give us a rating.
• 1:46:29
  Go over to stherawas.us slash rate and throw five stars on our rating.
• 1:46:33
  Follow the little links they give you there and do that. Don't give us four
• 1:46:37
  stars. Don't give us three.
• 1:46:38
  And if you give us two or one, we're going to hunch it down.
• 1:46:42
  And someone is going to put Simba on your forehead. I'm just saying you might
• 1:46:47
  get confiscatorized. That's right.
• 1:46:50
  Don't do it. If you know, it's good for you.
• 1:46:53
  So, a couple other things. Oh, there you go.
• 1:46:57
  Fig was out for a couple weeks. He's back now, but I think he was out trying on bikinis.
• 1:47:02
  Actually, I got asked to never come back to the beach last week where I was.
• 1:47:07
  And because I was wearing my, so, no, actually I wasn't.
• 1:47:11
  However, if you have a female friend, there's no way that she wouldn't look
• 1:47:16
  good in the, so there I was bikini.
• 1:47:19
  Or any other thing, you can get it, so there I was, dot us slash merch.
• 1:47:24
  Because we've got a shitload of stuff. Absolutely. And the cool thing about
• 1:47:28
  that bikini, man, you can go, if she's wearing it, you can go right up to her
• 1:47:31
  with your phone and take a picture
• 1:47:33
  because it's got that QR code with the website right on the bottom.
• 1:47:38
  Let me run out to my wife real quick. Hold on. There you go. Get one for your wife.
• 1:47:43
  Maybe stand still for a second. I'm trying to take a picture of your QR code.
• 1:47:48
  That's it. That's all, honey.
• 1:47:51
  She would reject that pointy thing off of her body. That's awesome.
• 1:47:55
  Hey, we got to thank Badass. Badass, indeed. He's here tonight.
• 1:47:58
  He's in aviation photography.
• 1:47:59
  He was with us tonight, and he has awesome aviation pictures. It's art.
• 1:48:05
  The man is an artiste. Yeah, and he supplies us with an unlimited number of
• 1:48:09
  awesome pictures. He does, indeed.
• 1:48:12
  And then I guess lastly, but certainly not leastly, is the folks from the Air
• 1:48:16
  Force that make the Air Force sound good.
• 1:48:20
  Are you talking about the Dos Gringos? Both of them, man. Not one, but two. Dos Gringos.
• 1:48:25
  Four albums. Not a bad song in the bunch. And you know what?
• 1:48:29
  Generally, generally great guys.
• 1:48:33
  Generally, genuinely great guys. New lips. Genuinely great guys.
• 1:48:39
  Trip and Snooze, God bless you, man. Thank you for letting us use your music.
• 1:48:44
  It's deeply appreciated.
• 1:48:46
  It helps make the show. Yeah. Yeah. And we're grateful for it.
• 1:48:51
  Thanks, Jits. Indeed. So, I guess until next week, everybody,
• 1:48:56
  all we can tell you is stay safe and check six.
• 1:48:57
  Music.
• 1:49:05
  Well, there I was, crossing the pond, and you could say that I wasn't exactly
• 1:49:10
  fond of all the shit I was wearing on that day.
• 1:49:16
  Now an F-16 is cramped enough, but it's even worse with all that stuff.
• 1:49:22
  Supposed to save her life, but we knew there was no way.
• 1:49:28
  If you're going down the North Atlantic, man, it's over.
• 1:49:33
  Hold on, it's what? He said it's over. Oh, that makes me sad.
• 1:49:38
  This one's for you, Pigpen.
• 1:49:40
  That boy is a P-I-G pig. Ha, ha, ha, ha.
• 1:49:46
  And we're out.