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.