#udorn rtafb

[jenorv]

Coming Home

In his remarkable memoir of the Second World War: Quartered Safe Out Here, George MacDonald Fraser shares his experiences in the Burma Campaign as a 19-year-old private in the Border Regiment fighting the Japanese during 1944-45. In this work, he deals with many of the universal experiences of men in combat; he notes: Nobody in his right mind longs for battle or sudden death.  But once you’ve…

View On WordPress

[jenorv]

A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life

F4 Aircraft over SEA

I  was thinking today about how I would have spent this day during the war  My squadron the 13TFS had an air to mud mission, so unlike the 555th which was mostly air to air, we spent a lot of time blowing things up.   

.Most days in combat began early.  There was what we called an “0 Dark Thirty” wake up.

Then it was breakfast.  There were two options. One,  eat at the club…

View On WordPress

[jenorv]

A Picture worth many words

A Picture worth many words

  I have been looking at this picture a lot this week. I posted it to several F4 facebook groups.   It shows me standing in front of an F4C parked on the ramp at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona 45 years ago — spring 1973.

I had just completed nearly two years of flight training, which began in the fall of 1971 at the Navigator Training School at Mather Air Force Base.  When I graduated from Nav…

View On WordPress

[jenorv]

Not all the Targets were In North Vietnam- A tale of the Panther Pack

Not all the Targets were In North Vietnam- A tale of the Panther Pack

As the war in SEA wound down, plans were put into place for an aggressive training schedule. Now schedulers were faced with actually having to plan training, not just assume it would happen in the course of daily events. It was an odd thing to be flying combat one day and the next acting as if it had never happened. With the end of the war there were few opportunities to see if the entire wing…

View On WordPress

[jenorv]

Elephant Walk

As the war in SEA wound down, plans were put into place for an aggressive training schedule. Whereas during the war, training consisted of basically OJT – i.e. learning to drop bombs was the act of actually dropping bombs. Now schedulers were faced with actually having to plan training, not just assume it would happen in the course of daily events. It was an odd thing to be flying combat one day…

View On WordPress