Interview with Colin Wilson, Vietnam War Veteran. CCSU Veterans History Project

today is june 13th 2018. i'm interviewing colin koch wilson at his home in norfolk connecticut the interviewer is mary louise torrent working with central connecticut state university please state your full name date of birth city and state in which you live colin frederick wilson 219 wheeler road norfolk connecticut and your date of birth zero seven zero five nineteen forty okay um in which war did you serve well the cold war mostly okay and i had one tour into vietnam what was your branch of service the united states air force and what was your highest rank captain captain in what general locations did you serve well we went to uh my wife went from the hallway we bounced around the united states but we went first to selma alabama for pilot training okay and i spent a year there then we went to reno nevada the stead air force base for survival school survival training in p.o.w indoctrination from fence we went to castle air force base in california for kc-135 school and then for my first assignment i went to omaha nebraska flying the looking glass and the standing alert with the 34th air refueling squadron after they merged with the 55th air reconnaissance wing half of us went to pease in new hampshire where i stayed for two years or two and a half years and then separated okay were you drafted or did you enlist i was a volunteer i went to cornell university and since it was a winter grant college we all had to sign up for something and i got in the air force because it was the shortest line on silent day i love the reasons um remember you so you were at cornell at the time and where were you living at the time where was your home winter connection okay [Music] okay do you recall the date well it was sometime in september of 1959 59 okay and why did you join well i said you had to sign up for something okay because because of the requirements of the land-grant college my dad was a retired air force officer from world war ii and i decided to follow his footsteps okay i like the way you say it was also the shortest line when you signed up um that pretty you yeah you pretty much said why you joined that branch of service um tell me about your first day in the service when you went to camp or whatever well or training we we went to uh in the junior year we went to summer camp at otis air force base for our boot camp or indoctrination and we were lucky enough to be close to where the president of the united states at the time john kennedy spent his weekends so he came over and observed dissolved us from all the merits each weekend so we never had to do anything like that that was a good good deal for us he must have known that the weekends were good and so he wouldn't have a good time right that's good neat and that was my first indoctrination to the military and then my first assignment was supposedly the del rio texas but fortunately i was delayed and went to craigout air force base in some alabama which was a nicer climate if nothing else and the business so you graduated from cornell yes um land grant is that um rotc land grant requires yes requires you to sign up for at least two years of rotc okay okay and uh when we decided to go in you extended to four years you know went to advanced training right and they and that was a pretty nice operation because the last two years we went and started our pilot training in the local airport so we got to fly that was fun and we marched in uh various parades and things of that nature you know did whatever they wanted us to do okay so when you graduated from cornell were you commissioned as a captain then or i was conditioned the commission is the second lieutenant second oh that's right second attempt so it was a busy time my wife to be graduated from college i graduated from college got commissioned to the air force and the next weekend we got married so it was a busy yeah i guess so um okay so after after graduation you went to um you did your boot camp juniors well we didn't i never enjoyed the boot camp because i was an officer then you went office i had the boot camp that otis a couple of years before okay okay so we uh hopped in our national rambler and drove that snow in alabama got there in september of the 63. started flying cessna t-37 which was a training aircraft of of the time for the first indoctrination ultimately we went into the t-33 which was a civilian or a two-seat version of the f-80 shooting star which was a korean war fighter wow and uh that was that was a nice airplane nice one to fly and then as i said when once you graduated from pilot training we we moved on out back into the nash ramble and drove out to reno so did you um so your boot training if you will was junior year when you went to otis okay so was that your basic what any other any other um servicemen would gone through would be training a lot of marching and and um different different assistants you know marching and doing all sort of ridiculous things whatever your drill sergeant wanted you to do right okay um do you remember any of your um instructors at the boot camp evans no no okay and how did you get through it i did very well good i uh i ended up a deputy commander in the unit by the time we got through i think it was about a six-week program but i'm not sure so that was basic military boot camp there was an element of air force within it it was an air force operation on an air force base okay but we uh did whatever your other indoctrinated inductee does you know yes but you say we march we did a lot of things like that we got to ride around in a rc 121 those are the same thing as the uh did you forget what it was now anyway big airplane and when you go over and orbit for hours and wait for the russians to come oh because that was a radar ship there okay and uh you know we flew around with the radar going practice and got air sync basically all about that so that's that's not the guys in the navy you have to have that first time when you get seasick and then then hopefully survive after that um so when was your so you actually train your actual training was in selma alabama obama as being an air force pilot that's correct okay okay um what were your first impressions when you arrived in selma well to to be honest it looked like a very depressed area and uh we first struggled looking for a place to to live and all that found a rental very nice little house at karen right most of the other guys were in the neighborhood so we had carpooling and everything the base itself was a very nice facility the people were great and have no complaints it was a good time we really enjoyed it um so you would basically you would go for instruction you would go to classes there we would alternate every week they either did the flying in the morning and books studying in the afternoon lectures or vice versa you know the following week you'd fly in the afternoon go to school in the morning and it rotated uh there were four squadrons of uh people and so we had to jam all of all of this you know we had a lot of a lot of people that get through flying the set and the other so they had to keep switching off that's why they rotated like that okay i was in red flight first and then um so you had training on bombers and reconnaissance and all kinds of no or did you specifically after after pilot training like they said we had the cessna right and then the lock 8 f-80 from then on i was in the kc-135 i went to castle air force base for training there that's what i flew the whole rest of my career okay and what is a kc-135 an air refueling tanker refueling tank oh wow like we used to say we passed gas i've never heard that before i guess that's true it's pretty happy but yes um okay so from summer you went to um reno yeah and then to california the castle okay so um tell me a little bit more about reno what was well that was survival school that was survival school um we went through a lot of classroom studies you know how to do this how to do that and the other it turned out we we uh normally the process was to go on what they call a trek which is a two week or ten day hike from one point to the other in the sierra nevada mountains and you get there and you're captured and then you go to the compound and get interrogated and do all that sort of thing wow so we were there and happened to be thanksgiving weekend so they changed the routine so that we went to the compound first we didn't get captured we just reported and that was an experience wasn't wasn't much fun to uh to compare it with torture is ridiculous what we did but we got in they put us in a little box probably the size of that chair behind you or this chair where you could could move but very tediously you know to change position and we were i don't know how long we were there it seemed to be overnight and uh then it was winter time it was right at thanksgiving and there was snow in the ground and they had a little a little trick we hadn't eaten so they took turkey and made a big turkey soup and had us all standing in our underwear in the snow with this big kettle smelling absolutely wonderful you know all the vegetables going in it and everything like that then they served it to us in a metal can but what they had done is filled it full of pepper so we got all the all the uh aromas everything in your ravenous and you took the first sip and everybody got sick threw up so from there on things went downhill they went downhill from there to pack it back into the box and then for the interrogation part of it they're the the protestant and waterboarders they did everybody yeah quite frankly it wasn't a big deal however if i'd known anything i probably would have told them see this was this was a right after the korean war and the koreans north north koreans and the chinese used the waterboarding technique so they wanted us to have it okay we were told don't worry about giving stuff up you know everybody breaks you're going to break try and try and hold it off a little while but you're going to break but anyway the water boarding they put you back in the put a cloth a wet cloth over your head and pour water on it and it just straight you know it was just they're very panicked but there was no pain no no nothing like that but like i say i would have told them whatever i i know if i know anything yeah yeah there's only so much you can so they they were pretty much working off what had happened in during the korea war korean yeah from what from the survivors of people who got repatriated from the prison war camps and things like that okay so this was this was before vietnam um unbeknownst to us it was not before vietnam it was vietnam had already started but we were all scheduled to go over there that's why the uh when it went through the survival school right but the vietnam was spinning up it hadn't been going for quite some time when kennedy was was visiting us at otis vietnam was going on there what got me they were already trying to get us out of there before the war really started and uh come to find out later you know that the whole thing was a joke yes not a joke a tragedy yes and not honest how did you get through the um the waterboarding in the survival school was it was it pretty difficult or did you know i mean everybody did it you know they aren't going to kill you okay you know it's just a matter of time it's going to add sometimes so you just took it yeah it wasn't the same as uh mccain going you know and over there getting shot down and being there for seven years it wasn't like that at all we knew it was gonna end right so that that's that's a way to keep going just saying if i can get through this yeah okay yeah just deaden your senses and yeah black out if you can you know when you were in that little box was there a soul-searching or just trying to recover and when they put you back in that box again as you said you just tried to find a comfortable position you couldn't uh okay and you couldn't no you know you just realized the purpose you can't try to try to scrunch around to change your position but all of a sudden you got stuck there now you're really in trouble right and you're tall too well so that that probably didn't help there were people taller than me oh yeah yeah right but wow um okay so after that you survived that then you went to california right yeah that was really fun that was a good operation yeah um like i say karen went with me she got to travel around but uh learning to fly a big transport category or airplane was a lot of fun yeah but then because i was going to off at air force base which was sac headquarters strategic air command headquarters to fly the looking glass which was the airborne command post i had to go through the specialized training for being a receiver fueler as well as pumping gas we had to be able to fly in and take gas from another tanker right so that was a lot different so you know that that would make life happy you know it was something different just going up and flying level and waiting for the bomber to come in and or the fighters and give gas to them we had to do the receiving part too so were you trained as a pilot or to do any of the jobs to also connect i was trained as a a pilot and a co-pilot i can either okay but you had you were responsible for lining up so the connection could be made yes to fly next to another as a tanker yes tan compiler okay did you have much did you have a very large crew with you we had a crew of four okay aircraft commander co-pilot a navigator and a boom operator boom up so that was the connection right the boom operator it was also the general maintenance and stuff if it was necessary it was did you have any experience as a boom operator they train you also in that part of the job so yours was to be a pilot yeah okay all right and then you flew you flew you practiced and you flew operations in california practicing we flew training you flew training flights okay yeah and we did some refueling with other people going doing training flights okay and uh there were b-52s going through castle with pilots going through castle at the same time wow so we did a lot of swap with the bombers you know we did our you know it was real real life refueling and stuff we didn't have any fighter planes at that time because they weren't um haven't really ginned up the operation of vietnam right so there weren't a lot of fighters capable of doing the refueling okay did you see any um helicopters when you were stationed there because that became such a big part of vietnam no it was mostly the larger none whatsoever there in california however in reno our best man was going through a cell phone helicopter school there so i went up with him for four hours and 15 minutes so i could get my flight pay for that month or for that quarter okay yeah so i did fly in the chopper but uh that was all i saw those choppers were amazing well this one was a h-19 and it was a korean war helicopter it wasn't very amazing oh okay in reno nevada it's because on the ground it was practically at a service ceiling okay you know the altitude was so high that you couldn't really do that yeah but they'd be they were so important during the vietnam war it's a whole different ballgame yeah yeah um okay so um was that pretty much your your day how you would spend your time in california training and refueling and both receiving yeah and they had a simulator that came in was a railroad car that they pull in there and we go do emergency equipment you know emergency exercises and stuff on the simulator which you couldn't do in the real airplane oh okay you know because you didn't want to crash the rear airplane nope and then were you able to um after you were trained on a simulator we were also sent in the air to do this perform the same operations yeah okay so that was that was a way of training yeah yeah it was a training training aid okay um so tell then after california you were sent to vietnam no california went to omaha nebraska to the 34th airways wheeling squadron and our mission there was that we had actually three missions one was manning the looking glass aircraft which was a a uh another kc-135 actually it's called an ec135 that had on board a general and a staff of 17 people was airborne for 24 hours a day from i don't know when some say 1954 until uh the cold war was over yeah but it was up 24 hours a day and we did it in three shifts three eight hour shifts a day and when one would take off the other one be touching down you know so it's continuous wow continuous so that that was uh maybe fly three of those did you fly the lift looking glass real pilot on the looking glass it was it wasn't described it was a pretty good operation we had three pilots on the looking glass okay because the general was on board all when we always wanted to fly and do the landings we had to have an instructor pilot on it okay so i got to do all sorts of different things on there as long as the instructor pilot was there so we swapped seats all the time okay when the general got in instructor pilot got in the co-pilot seat and the other two of us went back okay but we uh you know the general didn't always want to fly but a lot of times it did okay but we did it was pretty nice operation because there was a general we had a nice meal every every morning when you wake up and have steak and eggs or something like that on the plane on the planet wow i don't know all the stuff that went on and back there we weren't supposed to know right but they had a lot of communications here running the war in case omaha got blasted by a bomb okay the airplane was supposed to take over and run the war of course there were places all over the country doing the same thing okay hopefully somebody would survive yes so you met the general well i i knew some of the generals that i did oh okay they didn't i really didn't meet them oh okay you were we'd be on the same plane together okay i'd say yes or no sir okay wow so that obviously if that was in the air 24 hours that that involves some refueling too oh no actually we could fly eight hours easily with a tanker okay you know so with the 200 000 pounds of fuel on the airplane so that was enough to get you through eight hours easily okay um when they had a exercise in other words a phony alert or a simulated attack then we'd go into what was called red orbit and then we would refuel okay red orbit was a place up in the southwest corner of nebraska and we'd just go around in circles okay and let's try to stay out of everybody's way but we'd have to refuel two or three times okay that we were limited by the amount of oil in the engines wow so would you say you'd stay there you know 36 40 hours so when you were when you were on a plane uh and i know it had they had titles that was a refueling plane um how much how much gas did it carry how much fuel did it carry it's called a tanker tanker and and it carried 200 000 pounds wow divided by 8.6 get gallons you know okay and so it could it could it could fuel several planes and then have to go back and would you get another tanker would you refuel that one again in red orbit yes they had a continuous flow okay and what about as part of your training with the tankers would you use all the fuel and then go back and get another tanker that had then been refueled on we would go for a normal training mission we take off and the navigator would practice and say go from omaha to denver and coming back from denver the bomber would meet us and we'd do a rendezvous and refuel and do that and then we'd go back in the middle of the night and do touch and go's and do our practicing and training on the airport okay so to see a lot of people had to get training i get yeah it was a constant you know everybody had to get training everyone that was in okay all the time so so you didn't the same people just didn't do the same thing all the time you had to do everything were you ever a trainer or were you you were trained and you were mostly a pilot or co-pilot mostly pilot okay so you said in nebraska there were three three things you had the looking glass and then were there other things yes operations then we had an alert commitment which in case of an emergency war order we would launch refuel a bomber going heading overseas and then recover wherever we could the the other one the other job was a strip alert we were there in case of emergencies in the air and we could launch and refuel somebody we had lincoln air force base not far away they had b-47s which were on their last legs so we would launch a strip alert quite often to refuel the b-47s when they're firing them down to the boneyard or something like that but that was the only time i ever launched on strip alert okay so you had all those experiences while you were while you were there okay and how long were you there in nebraska oh gee i got there i think march 65 and left around june 57 67. oh all right so a couple of years yeah just about and then [Music] they decided to change the operation the other thing we've been doing it off it was was supplying a aircraft for what they call the thule monitor which is a bomber orbiting over thule greenland 24 hours a day okay and we would fly up to fairbanks spend a week going across the top of the world refueling the bomber and if the bomber broke down for some reason we had to take up the orbit and stay there the aircraft was over thule in case they figured that would be the first bomb that hit the julian if we were looking down we'd see it over we'd call them up and say hey or okay something like that okay no right okay but that was another thing that took a lot of time flying to anchorage and uh i mean uh fairbanks to fairbanks and we did the thule monitor thing which took a lot of time and also we had detachment one of the 55th which is a reconnaissance unit these are the people going to russian nuclear test sites and airports and all that stuff and doing the same sort of thing that francis gary powers was doing in his youtube taking pictures of it only only these airplanes recorded everything and uh got all the radar frequencies and radio frequencies and everything in other words they got all the information so if we send bombers in there they had the stuff to counteract the radars and things there so that yeah i mean that was that was a big deal anyway detachment one of the 55th was was quite a sharp unit and they uh i don't think they ever lost anybody the people doing things like that there was over 100 people killed by the russians and the north koreans and chinese doing that they call them ferrets they were shot down but for one reason or another in the in the reconnaissance planes yeah yeah but they weren't in the 135 so the 135s were a little bit different because they had much more capability than the earlier planes the earlier planes were like b-29s and kb-50s which was a modern b-29 electors and p2s from the navy and all that sort of thing i interviewed my former eye doctor who was a he was in the air force during korea and he was sent to seoul and he developed film from the reconnaissance amazing stories he said he he pretty much only developed the film but he said sometimes he would sit with the analyst and they would fly over to as you say to direct the bombers were to go and they wanted to prevent north korea from coming down and bombing over the border and at one point north korean bombers kept coming and they couldn't figure out why they kept coming so they sent the reconnaissance planes out again to take pictures and dr deangelo told me about he sat with the analysts and compared he said he said dr d'angelo go get me these shots from such and such a date and he compared them and what they had done is that they um when when they bombed it would create like a cab a hole and it would be a there would be a site that you could see where you had bombed a crate while they they kept moving they found out later they would move the sights of these crates so it would look like that it was totally wiped out um and then they and then they figured out that that's he said the analysts figured out that's what they were doing and then sent bombers out from that so really fascinating and he did say that they they had lost a couple of the reconnaissance planes because of that he's very treacherous yeah yeah during we took the films when they brought them in at the time and brought them down to office that's where they were analyzed and everything right that is why they decided to merge the 34th with the 55th and bring them in the 55th down to do the looking glass okay because they have the stuff in their airplane so they get it there immediately right rather than going to the fairways and putting it on our airplane and bringing it down well that was a technology of the time i mean now you've got the satellites and everything but amazing how the military has developed all this technology as the need arose it really is incredible yes i'm interested yeah yeah i don't blame you i don't blame you at all um okay so was that pretty much okay you went to a fairbanks was this the time when you were um out of omaha yes that you were saying too okay still in omaha um and then after omaha where did you go then we moved to these air force plates in portsmouth new hampshire okay karen wanted to get closer to her family so so we decided we had an option to stay at offutt or go to peace so we went to pease which was a nice area to be in you know the seashore in this set and the other oh yeah but it was a typical strategic air command operation you know from there on i spent my time on duty either training in the airplane we're sitting in the what they call the molehole which is an underground facility and just we had to be able to get the to the airplane in airborne in 15 minutes that was the ballistic missile early warning time that they set so we were in the hole in the ground near the runway and the clacks went off we ran out started our engines and usually didn't go anywhere okay but uh you could get out there well also maine at the time that was at the end of the coast so you know on the east eastern coast so that was also just somewhere he did too well we had two bases in maine we had one in plattsburgh new york we had peas in westover i mean we had a lot of a lot of airports around there that was closer to the closer to the targets to the targets yeah so our job as tanker pilots was not to give them gas to get to their target their job was to give them enough gas to get back if they survived the bomber so that's what we did we practiced for doing that okay we had a mission we had a a place to recover with when we gave them all our gas and then we'd land the airplane and i don't know what we did after that okay wow and how long were you there until i got out so that was the spring of 66 to october 68. um when were you um commissioned a captain promoted the captain it's on the thing there i think oh okay i think it was 67. okay was it 66 omaha no it was appeased i believe oh it was oh okay yeah it was promoted to first looks at that profit and then captain appease okay first lieutenant where i'm sorry when i was at office okay in omaha okay i forgot that yeah my um one brother went to west point army and then another brother was an rotc lasalle he was army too he was armor and he went to um desert storm he was a tenth commander but anyway so yeah i remember the first lieutenant second lieutenant captain okay um so you you didn't serve in vietnam well no i never was in in vietnam except then tons of mood a couple of times you know back i went over on what was called a young tiger mission which was about five or six months mission and we all wanted to do it because being in the mall hall all the time wasn't much fun so we wanted to get over there so in the the fall of 67 i went over there with a as a co-pilot with another crew and uh we did our young tiger out of thailand utapau which was down down on the golf siam and then takly which was a little bit north and east of bangkok okay so you you supported you refuel jets or bombers we at that point the bombers the p-52s if they were at utapau they had enough gas so they didn't they didn't need any refueling because it was such a short distance if they're coming out of guam or okinawa then they did have to be refueled but i didn't do that because they had people stationed there to do that our job was to refuel the fighters there was let's see takly and karate and udorn and uman with the f-105 and f4 bases they were all in thailand the reason they were in thailand was because johnson wanted to keep the the number of people in combat over there a secret so we put all the air force or most of the air force into thailand and so then they didn't count them as people in vietnam okay yes so we've got these this bunch of f-105 which is a fighter bomber yes and they were going over in very well defended areas like iphone and hanoi and the set and the other the f-105 didn't have the capacity to take off with a full load of gas and a full load of bonds okay so that's why the tankers came in they could take off with a full load of bonds and we'd refuel them then they could go drop their bombs then they'd come back out we'd refuel them and go back if they had filled up with gas instead of bombs what's the sense of going back yeah so that was that was a deal if they had been entirely in the vietnam themselves you know they would have the fuel probably to do the operation right because our whole reason for being was was because of the perception of of uh the government to buffalo the public and congress actually okay so but but in thailand these were mostly the the bombers obviously the helicopters were was that air with the helicopters air force or were they air force oh they were mostly army yeah we had we had air force choppers too but okay mostly army and then okay in thailand they had a dust off which was the red cross helicopters they had a unit there that dropped flares on the ho chi minh trail at night so people could see if there was activity there they had a bunch of jolly green giant which would rescue helicopters to go in and get the fighter pilots out when they got shot down and then they had a bunch of a1es which was a cover for the a1e was a world war ii fixed wing propeller airplane but very tough and very uh slow and very fuel friendly so it could stay there on station awful long time okay so that was another group but that let's see that was uh right on the border of vietnam in north vietnam thailand yeah because they didn't have they didn't have they they didn't have the capacity to fly from thailand to do their mission so so they were in thailand these helicopters that you told me about the jelly green giants well they they were there to rescue people who were shot down and go anywhere they could okay they were they were all over too weren't just there there was a bunch of them there the dust-off people were we would go in when there was an emergency evacuation you know to get people out did you ever visit with those pilots no never never landed there you never landed there i don't think the runway was long enough okay oh okay when you were um when you were in thailand though did you ever talk to any of the pilots like the bomber pilots or anything was there any camaraderie there where you could oh yeah or they would tell their stories and wait we go to the uh the the strike briefing every morning oh you did okay and uh when i got over there when i got to thailand i first didn't in utah i walked into the officer's club to get lunch and one of my buddies from pilot training was there it was a b-52s oh my gosh and he didn't say anything was a coke they're trying to kill us linebacker too but but uh that was a first perception the things weren't going very well over there when i got to to uh ty takley one of the squadron commanders was an instructor of mine from craig so he told me the whole dirty story about how they're running the war and how bad it was and i got into the briefing there and i was shocked because those kids were scared they were really scared well they should be you know yes none of them are getting 100 missions in before they got shot down right and but i was surprised that it was such a shoddy operation so that's when you that's when you found out when you were in thailand yeah and you could tell i really didn't know we didn't know anything about what was going on no because you got a different story from well nobody else had been there either you know okay or they weren't talking but they um the whole operation was scary and so many of these these kids as you say boys were drifted were drafted or whatever or enlisted so they wouldn't be well not not the air force guys not the air force guys pretty much that that was murder yes it was yeah i mean the air force guys probably weren't drafted okay you know they usually weren't okay the marines the army those guys were drafted more than these other services okay and uh to them it was terrible this is volunteers that are scared yes yeah no yeah you know but anyway that's that's my my time over there was uh was there i was there long enough to get back just before 10. oh just before ted okay we got done with our time there just before ted and uh about the second thing after i kissed karen's i put my paperwork in for retir for separation they decided to send me back in the fight or something yeah that's what happened i interviewed jim stotler a couple weeks ago and he said he was all set to get out he was something about a 90-day leave and he was engaged to sandy and she was making all the wedding arrangements and then tet happened and he got called back again yeah no choice he was um i put my five years in right okay so my contract was up but if they gave me orders to extend before i put my paperwork in to get out right i was caught okay so the first thing i did was go to personnel and put in my paperwork okay so from that point on i was a co-pilot not not a aircraft commander anymore okay and the pay was the same so that was fine by me together and then and then at least you could see the end in sight did you um okay so you did have you did have some battery training in a way um did you were there any casualties in your unit anybody's that you had um worked with either through rotc or been assigned with or well a couple of my classmates were pows i don't know about a lot of them i just don't know okay they sort of dropped off the radar so i wonder i never went to the vietnam memorial to go through the ritual i went to it but i didn't you know check all the all the different spots you know with different names and everything right so i don't know but uh one of our b-52s flying over there the wing fell off so that killed that crow there's ten of them out of bomb um like i say there was a couple of my classes were pows a couple of kids i went to loomis with or were killed over there but not not in the air force i think the other guys all got back okay um how did you stay in touch with your family well karen was with you pretty much the whole time except over there except when he was sent to we wrote every day did you keep in touch with your family too or was it is it pretty much you and karen no i didn't it was just the two of us pretty much i mean we were friends with all our parents and everything but they had their own life okay we had ours um was the food pretty good food food i don't know yeah because you want an air force base this is this these some of these questions are a little bit the thai food was pretty good oh yeah but it was hot spicy um did you have enough supplies for what your job was you didn't have to worry about no we didn't have it okay any logistics problems it resolved that to flip the plane was tough okay good um did you ever feel pressure or stress uh a couple of times yeah and how did you handle it well i survived so pretty well okay um did you have anything special for good luck nope okay um how did people entertain themselves on the basis uh stateside there was quite an active uh community you know a lot of parties and stuff like that in the in southeast asia he drank mostly yeah that wasn't very easy because you had to get up at three in the morning you know okay so the the one thing i did notice was i wrote karen a lot every day with my uh thoughts on what was going on over there she said she didn't get most of those letters so i expect that oh they went through them and oh went through him and decided that i was a not a good good camper interesting um did she keep keep the did you keep the letters that you did write to her yeah that that was the part you wanted to go did you see any uso shows or entertainment no because you were stateside um did you go on leave i had one uh one leave to bangkok when rnr they call it how was that did you have it oh it's okay see downtown bangkok yeah that was very scenic we went on a tour of the clung and all that sort of stuff went through went to lewis temple as well you know it was interesting went to a place called tim land tim land tim lyon which was sort of a thai disneyland really but it had didn't have rides it had elephants doing work and you know moving logs and stuff like that and kickboxing and all the stuff that the thai people do oh okay so it was that was interesting too different totally different culture yeah yeah i have some pictures but i don't know where the heck they are the eight millimeter film you know it's one oh yeah yeah that's that's what dr d'angelo used to um used to produce them all the time um were there any humorous or unusual events oh i suppose i don't recall it could not be recall okay where did you think of your officers and fellow servicemen because you were an officer too and often all the officers were first class they were really sharp people our squadron commander was a full colonel and uh he and a very nice guy he set the whole tone when we got the peas a real jerk came in the squadron commander it's another reason to get out right and also we merged with a group from barksdale which was the 509th so we merged two two different cultures if you will and so there's a lot of uh irritation between what would you say friction between them really just because of their cultures because of two cultures they did things everybody did something the way they wanted to do it the old way nobody wanted to change okay and there was some uh between a couple of rednecks and some of the black airmen too yeah which was ridiculous yeah unfortunate no yeah i've heard some pretty bad stories but especially the southern boys you know when they came up from barksdale yeah that's unfortunate i heard some pretty bad stories in world war ii about how the jews were treated too well they were yeah um by our military not just germany but anyway did you keep a journal no okay um so where are we when your service ended i'm sorry where were we when your service ended i was at peace and tell me about that day and being discharged well i signed out you know turned in all my equipment that was loaned to me and got in my 1954 jaguar roadster which i had rebuilt that's what i did when i was on alert we could go to the re the body shop or the auto shop which is right next to the alert facility so i rebuilt the jag there oh and uh coming down 494 the engine quit blew up so that's how he spent my oh no so karen was behind me in the station wagon and we threw a chain around the jacket towed at home that's how i spent my first day out we were able to rebuild it again or no i was done with it i've done my um just replaced the put a another engine not a new one but another engine in it uh what was your homecoming like did you go to your see your families yeah i went right to my house karen's mother at the time was living right next door so okay it was nice for me but we've seen them you know once we got to pees that was we could come home on the weekends oh that's right too yeah and what were you living at that time in windsor oh in windsor okay um what did you do in the days a week afterwards look for a job okay did you go back to school you had already had college right so you didn't use any benefit of the gi no i uh i interviewed with a couple of airlines we interviewed with the american and they said they'd give me a job but they kept slipping the date so i got a christmas card from a couple of my squadron mates saying that they were in minneapolis at northwest they're hiring so i went out there and got a job oh okay and we moved to minnesota okay oh you moved you moved to minnesota because that was their hub yeah at the time minnesota minneapolis and seattle oh okay so we've lived there 14 years huh now where was your um where where did you usually fly were you stateside did you fly overseas too for northwest for northwest both wherever oh okay depending on the equipment 727 was pretty much stateside the 707 dc 10 and 707 we're all international or a lot of international okay did was karen ever able to go with you and just on one trip together one trip yeah that was enough for her it was it was the one that left early very early in the morning and made all the bounces all the way out to seattle and we had 18 hours there and we left at midnight did all the bounces back okay she was scared so she never wanted to go again but we had a good meal there well that was that was good jenna's supposed to be a beautiful city too yeah yeah she had also fallen apart fast oh yeah okay um did you make any close friendships in the service no no oh the friendships that i made in college carried over to the service and there's still friendships today but okay because three of the guys in my wedding party went to craig where they're at the same time i was and they were on the air force so we still correspond you still correspond um so your career after your service was as northwest pilot um how did your military experience oh this is this is i've got two heavy questions coming up how did your military experience influence your thinking about war or the military in general well i don't think war is really a good deal uh when when bush went into iraq i said to karen my god here we go and that's been war ever since yeah i hope uh hope we can solve all that i don't know and it's it's it soured me when you find out your government's lying to you and doing things counter to what they say their end result is making it impossible how can you have any trust anymore right and especially at the expense of oh oh oh that means yeah yeah and especially the draftees that did they were forced into it you know they're constricted i'm not a hawk i believe in strength but i don't i don't believe in you um did you join any veteran organizations no afterwards um did you ever go back for any of the unions or just keep in touch with those buddies yeah my motto has never looked back did the same thing out with the airline you know i never joined anything there never looked back that's kind of the way don feels about retiring well i did my thing i've done a good job yeah yep you you live there you do your you do your work and you keep your head up and right and when you leave you leave yeah and you're proud of what you did because you you do what you're supposed to do and you can't go back right exactly you can't change it yeah um how did your service and experiences affect your life well dramatically yeah you know was it was it was a good number one i learned to trade so i went to the airline after that so that was that was a big effect and uh seeing seeing the the destruction up close is another good effect you know to change your uh perspective and was that the question yes yeah okay is there anything you'd like to add that hasn't been covered no i i don't know what to what to add okay thank you coke so much for letting me interviewing you and thank you for your service you're welcome that was

Channel: ccsuvhp

Views: 2,736

Rating: 4.7446809 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: v4FoJDn_16I

Length: 63min 19sec (3799 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021