Archive for November, 2009:
We moved from Hellenikon Air Base in Athens, Greece, in the summer of 1984. I was reassigned to Ramstein Air Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany. I was supposed to be in Athens for 30 months but the military moved me after just 14 months. Things had gone very well for my career in Athens so the move to Ramstein was a sort-of compliment from the Air Force. I was “invited” to move up to the United States Air Forces in Europe Headquarters to be a staff officer in the Munitions Support Squadron directorate. I was to help with the support for all the MUNSS units in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. The time in Germany was a continuation of my Greece assignment so I was only obliged to stay there for two years. That turned out to be a good thing because I really didn’t like my two years there. In fact, it was the worst assignment I had as an officer!
We had a large GMC Safari van in Greece and I decided to drive to Germany rather than ship it and fly. We took a ferry from the Port of Pireus, Greece, to Venice, Italy, and then drove over the Alps to Germany. The ferry left in the late afternoon and we went through the Corinthian Canal after dark. I took the three bigger kids up on deck to watch as we passed through the really deep canal. We had driven over the canal on a bridge with the kids several times so they knew where we were. It was a good experience for them. We then sailed through the Ionian Sea the rest of the night and arrived at the port in Venice the next morning. We got the van off the ferry and drove north to Aviano Air Base, where we got a couple of hotel rooms for several nights. The next morning we drove to a parking area outside Venice and took a bus in (remember, Venice is a city of canals so you can’t drive in the city).
Venice is a really beautiful, historic, and interesting city. The weather was beautiful the day we were there and the place was full of tourists. I remember one incident from that day very well. We wanted to take the guided tour through Saint Marks Cathedral. It was free but you had to wait for your turn to go with a guide. We were waiting in a big entry hall at the front of the church. I don’t remember how long we waited but it was probably about an hour or so. There were signs in several languages telling everyone to be respectfully quiet and that women couldn’t go into the cathedral with shorts or revealing tops. There was a large souvenir stand that ran almost halfway across the front of the entry hall. There was a big, burly, hairy Italian guy manning the stand. After awhile the noise got pretty loud in the entry hall. Suddenly, the big guy slammed his ham-sized palm onto the top of the wooden stand with a thunderous pounding sound and shouted in English, “Be quiet! This is a house of God!” I laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all. There he was, in the entryway of a cathedral hawking trinkets and he scolded us about being too loud in a house of God. I still chuckle to this day when I remember the incident.
After a couple of years in Florida I knew I was hot for an assignment. I didn’t want to go on a remote assignment (unaccompanied by my family) but I did want to move overseas. I wanted to go to a place where I could be close to Bible history. We didn’t have any bases in Israel so I looked for the closest I could find. Hellenikon Air Base near Athens, Greece, was as close to real Bible history as we could get. I inquired about being sent to Greece as an Aircraft Maintenance Officer and was told there were no aircraft slots in all of Greece. There was, however, a Munitions Maintenance Officer slot coming open at Hellenikon. The assignment people offered to send me to Lowry Air Force Base, CO, for six weeks for cross-training to the munitions maintenance field. I wasn’t that hot about going into munitions maintenance but I really wanted to go to Greece so I accepted the cross-training and the assignment.
My assignment was to Hellenikon Air Base, near Glyfada, which is about five miles from the center of Athens. I was to be the Munitions Support Squadron Liaison Officer. My job was to provide all the main base (Hellenikon) support for the Munitions Support Squadron at Araxos, Greece.
We were supposed to fly from JFK Airport in New York, directly to Athens on a Pan Am 747. I out-processed from Eglin AFB in May 1983 and took a month’s leave to visit family before flying to Athens. We were to leave JFK on July 2, 1983. The military gave me the airline tickets for the whole family before we left Eglin in May. We visited our families and then headed to New Jersey to drop off our GMC Safari Van at the shipping dock and then rented a car to go to New York. We visited with some friends we had met at Shaw AFB while we were in the NY and NJ areas. We also visited with my sisters. Joyce lived near Philadelphia, PA., and Kathy Sue lived in Rehoboth Beach, DE. We took a ferry out to see the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Along the way we took the kids to Gettysburg and Valley Forge. It was a good time for our young family to see some different historical things in America before moving to the very historical country of Greece.
On the day of our departure we dropped the rental car off and lugged our five kids and almost twenty pieces of luggage on a shuttle bus to the airport. We checked in all the check-in luggage and proceeded to our gate. We stopped to use the toilets along the way. We had about an hour or two before our scheduled time of departure. While I was taking Jeff to the toilet Deborah went on to the gate with the girls. When I met her she said it seemed strange that no one was there yet. Some cleaning ladies were cleaning the area. We checked the tickets again and it looked as if we were there in plenty of time. We found a Pan Am representative to ask about the flight and he told us it had left about twenty minutes before we arrived. It seems Pan Am changed to a summer flight schedule sometime in June or early July, which moved the overseas takeoff times up by two hours. He also told us that all the luggage we had checked-in at the curb had gone directly to the plane and was on its way to Athens without us. We asked him what we had to do to get onto another flight. He checked and told us there was one leaving the next day but all the seats in the coach section were full. He said (I don’t know if he was joking or not) there had been seven empty seats on today’s flight but that was unusual for this time of year. I showed him my military orders and told him I had to be in Athens as soon as possible. This was a bit of a bluff but it worked. He did some more typing on his computer and then he printed out seven tickets for us for the next day’s flight. The good part of this entire saga is that we got “bumped up” to Business Class on a 747 (the upper deck, right behind the cockpit). We went to a hotel for the night and arrived at the airport the next day in plenty of time to catch our flight. We arrived in Athens the day before the 4th of July in 1983.
When I finished Aircraft Maintenance Officers Course I was assigned to the Tactical Air Warfare Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach, FL. We were excited about this assignment because we had never lived near an ocean. Jennifer and Julie were especially excited because they were old enough to understand what living in Florida meant. We were all looking forward to the warm weather, sunny skies, and beautiful beaches.
We drove out 1980 blue and silver GMC van to Florida. I announced to the family when we crossed the Alabama-Florida border. We stopped at one of the first rest areas we came to in Florida. Julie was just five but she was already quite the athlete. As soon as we let them out of the van Julie did perfect cartwheels across the rest area and started shouting that we were in Florida. I remember thinking how strange the parking lot looked because instead of gravel, the asphalt contained seashells as the aggregate. Also, the grass looked different and the soil was more sand than dirt.
I graduated from Officers Training School and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the US Air Force on April 1, 1980. I was commissioned as an Aircraft Maintenance Officer, mostly because the Air Force needed maintenance officers but also because I had almost nine years in that field as an enlisted airman. The technical school for aircraft maintenance officers was at Chanute AFB in Rantoul, Illinois. The base, which opened in 1917, closed for good in 1993.
The school was about six or seven months long and was divided into various blocks of training. Everyone had to complete the first block, which was basic orientation to aircraft and the aircraft maintenance field. I was not alone as a prior-service aircraft maintainer. As I recall there were about 14-15 people in our class. All but two were prior-service maintenance technicians of some sort. One guy and one girl had never before seen or touched a real Air Force aircraft. The instructors were obliged to teach to the lowest level so this block was extremely boring. We jokingly said, “the pointed end goes to the front and the fire comes out the back.” We added it up one day and found that we had almost a hundred years of combined maintenance experience among the students in our class. Once we finished the first block we could test out of up to three other blocks of instruction and graduate early. I tested out of two.
I reported to Officers Training School (OTS) at Medina Field in San Antonio, TX, on Jan. 3, 1980. Who ever imagined I’d end up there?
I got out of the Air Force after almost nine years because of some really bad supervisors in my last several assignments, low pay, and a desire to become a preacher/missionary. I never thought I’d go back into the military.
At the beginning of my last semester I started applying for preaching jobs in the Lubbock area. We had three children and one on the way at the time. What I found was that no congregation wanted a relatively new Christian (I was baptized in Oct. 1977) with a fresh degree and no experience. I had only one job offer that paid so little I wouldn’t have been able to pay my existing bills, let alone buy food and clothing. One day, out of frustration, I decided to talk to the Air Force recruiter about coming back into the military. I had in mind to just go back in as an enlisted airman. The recruiter asked me some questions about my prior military experience, my college grades, and my health. He told me that I was a good candidate for the VIP program of OTS. This was a program implemented in the late 1970s to get prior service airmen into OTS so the Air Force could have young officers with lots of military experience. It seems the Air Force let too many junior officers out of the service after the end of the Viet Nam war. By the mid to late 70s they found themselves with lots of senior officers but not enough junior officers. They initiated the VIP program to identify prior service airmen who had college degrees and who had served in fields where they needed junior officers. If a person qualified for the VIP program he didn’t have to go through as rigorous a screening process as non-prior service applicants. As I had been an aircraft maintenance technician and later a master instructor in aircraft maintenance they were very interested in me. It didn’t hurt that I had a very high GPA at college.
I took the Air Force Officers Qualifying Test in Amarillo on August 8, 1979 (as it happened, our fourth child–Jessica–was born in Lubbock, on the same day I was taking the test) and received very high scores. The Air Force offered me a slot at OTS as soon as I graduated from LCC. Our graduation ceremony was on December 7, 1979. I reported to OTS on January 3, 1980. Deborah and the kids moved to San Antonio with me and lived in a small, rented apartment near Medina Field.
I got out of the Air Force in August 1978 to attend college at Lubbock Christian College (now University). I had taken night classes in the military for several years and many of the military courses I’d taken counted toward college credit. When I had all the credits evaluated, I had almost three years of college credit.
My initial idea upon getting out of the Air Force was to attend the intensive two-year course of biblical studies at the Sunset School of Preaching (now the Sunset International Bible Institute) in downtown Lubbock. I had been accepted at the school and was very excited about going there. We were attending the Greenlawn Church of Christ at the time. Greenlawn is located just across the street from LCC. Hugh Rhodes was the athletic director at LCC and one of the elders at Greenlawn then. One Wednesday night after Bible classes Hugh put his arm over my shoulder and asked if I’d come by his office in the LCC Fieldhouse at my earliest convenience. That night I told my wife that I was sure he was going to try to talk me out of going to Sunset School of Preaching and attending LCC instead. Sure enough, that’s what he wanted. He asked me why I wanted to go to Sunset and I told him I really wanted to be a preacher and maybe even a missionary. He told me that after two years of intensive study at Sunset I’d only get a certificate that may or may not be accepted as credit at accredited colleges and universities. He said that on the other hand, with less than two more years of full time studies at LCC I’d get a Bachelor Degree that would serve me and my growing family (three children at this time) much better. He sent me to talk to Dr. Jim Byers who was head of the Psychology Department and another of the elders at Greenlawn. Dr. Byers evaluated my transcripts, consulted with the Dr. Charles Stephenson, head of the Bible Department, and told me I could start LCC with two and a half years of college credit. I could complete a Bachelor of Arts in General Studies with a minor in Biblical Studies in just another year and a half. I decided this was the best way for me to go, for my future education as well as for the good of my family.
We moved from Sumter, SC, to Lubbock, TX, in June, 1976. I was assigned as an aircraft maintenance instructor in a Field Training Detachment (FTD) located on Reese AFB, about 6 miles west of Lubbock. We drove from Sumter to Lubbock in a 1975, blue, Honda Civic CVCC station wagon. It was small but it we bought it new and it was easy on gas.
Jennifer was three, Julie was less than a year old, and Deborah was pregnant with Jeff when we made this trip. Julie had diarrhea before we started the trip so we went to the Shaw AFB hospital to have her checked. The doctors looked at her and said it was just a normal stomach problem and to give her plenty to drink. The diarrhea continued with a vengeance during the trip. By the time we arrived at Reese AFB we were quite concerned about her becoming dehydrated so we took her immediately to the base hospital. After a few quick tests the doctors told us she had a stomach parasite and gave us the appropriate medicine to take care of the problem. She got well in just a day or two.
My job at Reese was to teach aircraft mechanics how to work on the T-37 and T-38 jet trainers. I also taught ground service equipment operation and technical order (TOs) document (the books that told mechanics how to fix specific airplanes) maintenance.
There were four other airmen assigned to the detachment when I arrived. Among them were MSgt. Lamar Gautney, MSgt. Tom (Tinker) Bell, and SSgt. Rick Shuskey (sp?). I forget the name of the Master Sergeant who was the detachment commander at the time.
I was assigned to Shaw AFB in Sumter, SC, upon my return from Thailand. We arrived in Sumter in late December, 1973.
I was assigned to the 363 Tactical Reconnaissance Wing. I worked first in the heavy maintenance branch of aircraft maintenance. We were responsible for all heavy airframe maintenance on the RF-4C Phantom. This was the reconnaissance version of the F-4C fighter. It carried only camera and reconnaissance equipment, no weapons of any sort. We were also responsible for heavy maintenance on the RB-57A. This was a transition for me because prior to this assignment I’d always worked as a crew chief of flighlines in Alabama and Thailand. I liked maintenance and I saw this as a challenge.
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