I find that difficult to believe.but oddly they didn’t consult me about my wishes.
The Navy was VERY accommodating of my wishes.
I find that difficult to believe.but oddly they didn’t consult me about my wishes.
60th anniversary
The 419th Tactical Fighter Wing says goodbye to the F-105 Thunderchief at Hill Air Force Base June 4, 1984. The farewell was complete with a 24-ship flyover to commemorate the occasion. The event saluted an aircraft that played an important part in USAF history and focused on the continuing modernization of the Air Force Reserve. (Archive photo by Raymond Massa)
IIRC one-third of the Thud fleet was shot down in Vietnam.https://media.defense.gov/2015/Sep/24/2001304406/-1/-1/0/150924-F-IL704-007.JPGView attachment 356970
View attachment 356971
That’s a pretty nice formation.
The 419th TFW, an Air Force Reserve unit, was the last operational unit of F105 Thunderchiefs in the Air Force. The 105s were replaced with F-16s starting in 1983. Two years later the 419th won the Air Force’s Gunsmoke gunnery competition for fighters.
The 419th lists some interesting stuff on their website:
1998, Kuwait, Operation Southern Watch, 419th Wing’s 466th FS became the first F-16 unit to deploy precision guided munitions in combat.
1999, Operation Northern Watch, the 466FS became the first F-16 unit to employ the Litening II targeting pod in combat.
466 FS became first F-16 unit deployed in Operation Enduring Freedom and are credited with destroying important Al Qaeda assets, and provided close-air support to ground troops.
466 FS first to fly F-16 combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
In 2007 they became part of a Total Force Initiative where an Air Force Reserve Wing and an active duty wing (in this case the 388th) would co-locate and fly and maintain the same aircraft and deploy together.
2017 419th Wing joined the 388th FW for the F-35A’s first deployment to Europe in April and the aircraft’s first Indo-Asia-Pacific deployment for a Theater Security Package mission in November.
In April 2019, 419th FW pilots, maintainers, and support personnel deployed to Al Dhafra Air Base*, United Arab Emirates, as part of the very first F-35A deployment to the Middle East. Working with the active duty 388th FW, they also conducted the F-35A’s first combat strike.
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*Al Dhafra hosts the 380th Expeditionary Wing, originally formed during OEF I in the days after 9/11. It is composed entirely of TDY units and TDY individuals from various parts of the Air Force. The 419th/388th F-35As would have constituted one (or more) of the 380th’s squadrons and been given an Expeditionary squadron number.
While I was there, we had a KC-10 squadron, a U-2 squadron, and a Global Hawk squadron. Each brought their own pilots and maintainers with them. We also had expeditionary security forces, medical, communications, and engineer squadrons, all pieced together from individual officers and airmen from all over the Air Force.
The 380th Wing staff and group staffs were also pieced together from individuals tasked from around the Air Force. IIRC I was in the 2nd or 3rd rotation to the 380th, so was the second or third Executive Officer. This was pretty early in the history of OEF, so there was still a lot to figure out. It was interesting deployment in some respects.
That’s correct. 300+ out of 800+ built. It was both CAS/ground attack and wild weasel.IIRC one-third of the Thud fleet was shot down in Vietnam.
So random memory belches up out of nowhere…
I conclude the meeting for my source selection team, and they happily rush for the door. As soon it opens the lieutenant who has been waiting impatiently outside rushes in and blurts those fateful words:
“Sir I really need to talk to you!”
O happy day.
He explains that my secretary and one of the Navy civilian engineers got into a huge screaming match and threatened each other over the use of a copier.
This is a joint program office, staffed and run primarily by the Air Force, but with considerable representation from other services. In my particular branch or team, I have as direct reports an Air Force GS05 secretary, several Navy civilian engineers, a couple Air Force lieutenants (engineers), and an Army major. I think the Army guy was Signal Corps(?), and he didn’t really report to me for anything other than administrivia. He had to be someplace on the org chart, and I had half of the GPS user equipment devices (receivers), and he was the Army’s project officer for the PLGR, so he ended up in my branch.
I also had numerous other people matrixed to my source selection efforts. They didn’t report to me for official evaluation purposes (although I had a big input), but they perform tasks we needed done for the source selection. Contracts, Logisticians, Finance, etc. Mostly Air Force civilians.
So this is basically a big office building full of people doing office type work. Important office type work, developing, and buying GPS equipment for the entire department of defense, lotsa dollars, paperwork intensive.
This includes copy machines. We were just getting into networks and email and so forth but the computers are still mostly being used to print final documents like orders and contracts and such, which then of course had to be copied several times.
So there was this big industrial grade copier in the hallway, and it had a wee little problem: the paper feed on it didn’t work properly. There was a request in to get the copy guy to come fix it but of course, that takes time, this is the government. So most people knew that if you wanted to copy, a big stack of paper, walk around the corner to the other hallway, where there was a different copier.
My secretary, who is about as useless as they come, and was, in fact, in the process of being terminated for falsifying her time sheets, something that my predecessor had discovered and initiated against her. However, being the government, and her being a civil servant, this took a long time. I inherited the problem, and we were basically just waiting around for the ONE lawyer on base who reviewed all these things to verify that all was in order before she got the acts. This took months, maybe close to a year?
So you can imagine how motivated she was. And the icing on the cake was that under the civil service rules, once we had a proposed punishment against her, we could levy no other punishments until that one was resolved. Didn’t matter what she did, we could not formally punish her in the any manner until the current issue was resolved. Basically, I just left her alone in her tiny little outer office and hoped she wouldn’t commit suicide or go postal or something that would be a lot more paperwork.
But for some reason, she came up with something that had to be copied, so she went to the copy machine, dropped it in the hopper not knowing that the feeder didn't really work, hit copy, and went to the little girls room.
Along comes one of my Navy civilian engineers with something that he wants to copy. He was a very quiet, meek really, very conscientious, polite, and studious Vietnamese guy. He and his brother had been in Vietnam as teens when the Commies took over, and they tried to escape at least three times. Once their boat foundered and they just got washed back up on the shore, another time, pirates caught them at sea, took everything they had, and they ended up having to go back to Vietnam, but the third time was a charm, and they got picked up by somebody who took them to the Philippines. Eventually they made their way to the United States, he learned English, went to university, got an engineering degree, and got hired by the Navy.
He gets to the copier, sees a stack of stuff in the hopper that’s not going anywhere, and he sets it to the side so that he can manually copy whatever he’s working on.
Along comes my useless secretary, and she sees what he’s done. Being high strung, always under stress about her imminent termination, and generally just too tightly wrapped, she starts screaming at him about it. My normally meek, polite, studious engineer blows a fuse and starts yelling back at her because of course, it was stupid to leave a stack of paper in a paper feeder that doesn’t work.
And it went downhill from there.
I interviewed various witnesses, and apparently it was quite a row. She called him a “boat person”, which was technically true, but she wasn’t using it in a technical sense. She also told him that her “Chinese husband“ would get him, maybe with a knife? That part was a little unclear. He yelled back at her, and apparently used some American slang term he had learned that did not reflect favorably on females. And so on.
And of course, I can’t just tell everybody to shut up and get back to work because damn near everybody in the building heard this happening. I have to do a formal investigation because unkind things were said about various nationalities and sexism and so forth. And also, of course, I could do absolutely nothing to my secretary formally. I did tell her to stay in her office and don’t copy her personal **** on the copier.
When I had to counsel the Navy engineer, he was completely mortified that he had lost his cool, and that he had embarrassed himself and me and the Air Force and the Navy and the Vietnamese people and pretty much everybody else under the Sun. I wagged my finger at the him, told him to stay away from my secretary, even if he had to walk the long way around the building, and with any luck she’d be gone in a couple months. Wrote an official memorandum for record documenting my investigation and counselings, and filed it away just in case until I could throw it out once I got orders for another assignment.
The things we do for God and country.
Ugh. How sad.He was later killed in the Beirut Barracks bombing in 1983.
I was tempted on occasion, but … officer, civilians, eh.I had enough and hit him in the face as hard as I could without damaging him.
Not sure this reflects well on me or not.
This reminds me, in 2005 I'd just got back from deployment to Iraq and casualties were going worse. Fort Hood had to start doing one large memorial service a month because there were too many to do individually. We were upset but also understood.I was at military funeral at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio a while back. There were so many funerals going on that day that the firing squad would fire their rifles, right face and march directly to the next funeral, fire, march to the next funeral, lather rinse repeat. They only stopped to fire the rifles.