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OK… This war story was generated from reading a post from another section of this forum… Somebody mentioned puking… so here it is… And I swear “This Ain’t No Shiat”
Being the Intel Wienie, it was my responsibility to carry the first aid kit along with all the other junk we carried for the rest of the battlestaff.
Inside this little olive drab canvas bag was an assortment of this and that… band aids, gauze, tape, aspirin, etc. that a battlestaff might need. Also in there was a bottle of Dramamine… in case anyone got nauseous from the sometimes bumpy rides. I don’t recall anyone ever using it up to that point… but it was there.
Well, I’d been flying for about a year or so… This had to have happened sometime in late 1970. I was maybe 22 and an E-4… One night, soon after our aircraft had been outfitted with Igloo White relay equipment, the bumpy ride was a lot more serious than earlier in my ABCCC career. This was because prior to our aircraft hauling Igloo White relay equipment, we could pretty much buzz wherever we wanted to in the night skies over Laos.
It used to be “If it’s rough over here… let’s fly over there… but those rules no longer applied. Because we were now carrying Igloo White relay equipment which relayed commands to and responses from acoustic and seismic sensors seeded all over the trails in Laos, it was necessary for the ABCCC aircraft to pretty much fly in prescribed locations so the relay equipment would work properly.
Well, this one night is was like flying through a washing machine. It was hour after hour after hour of turbulent toil as we went about the business of ABCCC. The longer it went, the more everyone was getting worn out in one way or another.
I recall about 6 or 7 hours into this roller coaster ride of a mission, I slowly came to the conclusion that I was starting to become nauseated. I fought it for quite a while but as my mouth started watering much more than normal, I just knew that the conclusion of this condition was fast approaching and I’d better do something about it.
I reached down and picked up the first aid kit and poked through it until I found the Dramamine. I took one and then made one of the most stupid decisions of my ABCCC career… I offered others in the battlestaff the opportunity to join me.
I forgot that I had been crewing with Fighter Pilots, old grizzled NCOs, macho-men from all walks of life and all of much higher rank. The laughing, pointing, jeering and calls of “#####! Wimp! F@%!ing Intel Wienie seemed to last for some 15 minutes. It was brutal and I’m sure deservedly so…
I was so embarrassed that I just sunk back into my Station 7 chair and tried to disappear… “Why did I do such a stupid thing? “I could have just popped the Dramamine quietly and not shown myself for the ##### that I apparently am… “I am such a dork… This’ll get around the entire squadron… “I’ll never live this down…
Well… we continued to bump, and grind, and shudder, and shake. Up and down… Down and up… it just kept on and on and on… But you know what? About an hour or so past my public flogging, I was nauseous no more… I was doing OK, despite the terribly bumpy ride. I was doing OK and the sting of the public ridicule was subsiding.
So things are going quite well, when all of a sudden Capt Jim “Buddah White EXPLODED out of the High Controller seat - Station 4. When I say EXPLODED - I mean EXPLODED. He leapt up and was in an immediate dead run toward the back of the capsule. He didn’t even have time to rip his headset off of his head. That happened for him as he reached Station 5 when he ran out of headset cord.
Well… I guess old Jim made it to about mid-Station 6, headset still in mid-air, when a veritable eruption of barf propelled itself from his mouth toward the back of the capsule… Jim, still in a dead run, mind you…
And that did it… Jim White’s unsuccessful sprint to the capsule head was the trigger that EVERYONE in the Battlestaff was waiting for to induce their own voluminous eruptions of air sickness. Everyone but me that is… From Radio Operator to DABS to BSOO to TTY to AIO to all positions… barf was flying everywhere!!!
And there I sat… the #####, the Wimp, the Intel Wienie… right as rain and even better once I pulled the Emergency Oxygen bottle from beside my seat and masked up…
I went through my bottle and the bottles from two other stations before we got home that morning…
Sitting there… sucking emergency oxygen… watching the entire rest of the battlestaff continue to run operations while gagging, mopping, blotting, soaking, and otherwise living a miserable, wet, stinky existence for the rest of the time we were airborne.
It was all pretty gross and I feel worst for the capsule maint crews that were tasked to get things back to normal in that box after we came home… but ya’ know what? Nobody called me a wimp or a ##### after that flight. It was sooooo cool…
Gene Hilsheimer
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A memorable trip to the Holiday Inn Bath House
This Entry Was Transfered from our Legacy Site’s “War Stories Forum”
Actually - they all were memorable…
After a big Squadron Sawadee Party late one evening, a bunch of us ended up down at the Holiday Inn bath house in Udorn…
Probably 5 or 6 of us…
Capt Doug Hawley, Moonbeam Intel, was there… as was Maj Gov Karki, Squadron Intel…
Major Karki was of Indian or Pakastani decent and out of uniform, he could pass for just about any businessman in downtown Udorn.
So into the bath house we went…
Of course, I opted for good old Number 19… and Doug and Guv and the rest went their own separate ways…
An hour or so later… I’m bailing and I see Doug Hawley settling up as well.
Doug is all dressed but he’s carrying another set of clothes with him.
I asked him what the deal was and he told me he had figured out that Major Karki was in the cubicle next to him…
Knowing that, Doug stood up on the “massage table” on his side of the cubicle and peeked over.
He saw Karki’s clothes hanging on a hook within easy reach so he quietly lifted Guv’s pants and shirt over the cubicle wall and left with them… (Guv’s wallet was still in the trousers)
Doug and I went our separate ways after leaving the Holiday Inn and I watched as Doug got into a taxi with Major Karki’s clothes and off he went…
I heard that Major Karki ended up at the main gate of Udorn several hours later… waaayyy after midnight, in black lowquarter shoes, black socks and a pooying’s sarong wrapped around him… trying to convince the gate guard that he was a fighting American military man… not some local Pakistani trying to sneak on the base…
I guess Guv had to sign his life away to get out of that bath house without paying up front and kudos to him for talking them out of a sarong and cab fare…
Doug hung Guv’s clothes on the doorknob of his room in the BOQ so he did eventually get them back.
I don’t know if Guv ever found out that it was Doug that did that to him… so here it is… in the open now…
Gene Hilsheimer
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Near Mid-Air - 1972
This Entry Was Transfered from our Legacy Site’s “War Stories Forum”
It was in April 1972 as I recall when Moonbeam was diverted to fly an orbit over Vietnam instead of our normal orbit near Savannakhet.
It was unusual but something had broken somewhere and TFA at NKP needed us there because of the sensor relay equipment we carried and the fact the the North Vietnamese Army had just crossed the DMZ a while back.
Well… because we were in a different orbit than usual, there was “more to see” out of the cockpit windows.
Ken Bortz (TTY) and I were up in the cockpit early on during that mission. I was on headset, he was not. He was standing behind the pilot, looking out the port cockpit window and I was to Ken’s right… He had the better view that I did.
We had been there about 15 or 20 minutes, watching actual fighting going on on the ground… we could see explosions from Air Support as well as ground to ground tracers… it was something different and something interesting…
About that time Bortz spotted flashing aircraft lights off at about 9:00 o’clock headed toward us. He pointed them out to me and because he wasn’t on headset and I was - I advised the pilot.
The lights were maybe 30 seconds away and headed toward us… and because we had our lights on, the pilot didn’t see a need to make a radio call as the lights appeared to be below our flight level… but not by much.
We watched and watched as the flashing lights came closer and closer and the aircraft, some sort of fighter, passed right below us by maybe 100 feet or so. We could all see his cockpit instruments glowing as he went underneath.
Just as the jet was out from under us, a call from the back end came through the headsets asking Bortz to return to the capsule, as a TTY message was coming in.
I relayed that info to Ken and back to the capsule he went.
A few seconds after Ken left the cockpit, there ensured a conversation that went somethin like this -
“Peacock, Gunsmoke. (Not the actual fighter callsign)
“Go ahead Gunsmoke”
“Who do you have out here at 210 for 90 at angels 24?”
“Gunsmoke, Peacock - that’s Moonbeam”
“Well Peacock, can you tell him to turn his f-ing lights on, I almost ran into him” (Our light were on all the time)
Our pilot stepped in with something like - “Gunsmoke - Moonbeam… we had you all the way… you passed right under us… no sweat”
“Moonbeam Gunsmoke, I didn’t pass under you. I had to pull up hard to avoid you”
So the conversation on the intercom went something like this:
“Stupid fighter jocks… they just don’t have a clue… they don’t know up from down… hahaha… blah, blah, blah...”
We all laughed about how wrong the guy was and how fighter pilots were dorks and all that… and we bid the Gunsmoke guy adeau and left it at that.
Some 15 or 20 minutes later, Ken Bortz returned to the flight deck and this time he was on headset…
After a while on headset, he said something like “Man, did you see those two aircraft that came so close to us a while back?”
We all looked at Ken and someone said “Two????”
Ken replied “Yeah… two. One went right under us and the other went right over our back...”
Man, you should have seen the blood drain from the faces of that ABCCC aircrew…
Of course, Bortz had his normal face on… that look of bewilderment that we all loved…
Gene Hilsheimer