The light was bright in the early October afternoon. It reflected off the concrete ramp at Dyess Air Force Base, located on the west side of Abilene, Texas. The ramp was filled with a number of large aircraft, B-52s and KC-135s, not surprising because Dyess was a Strategic Air Command Base. There were also a few C-130Es, the aircraft I was flying. In the distance, to the south, were the short flat mesas that typified west-central Texas. I had just come from a meeting with Colonel Sidney Richardson, the squadron commander. I had told him that I was volunteering for one of the C-130 aircrew openings at Ching Chuan Kang Air Base in Taiwan. I had been on Dyess AFB for only a little over seven months, yet I had just told Colonel Richardson that I wanted to leave Dyess so that I could fly cargo planes in the war in Southeast Asia. After asking some questions concerning my motivation for volunteering, he told me he would approve my request.
Bill Knipp didn’t believe it. Bill and I had been assigned together for a long time, through a year of pilot training at Webb Air Force Base in Big Spring, Texas, and then two years as young lieutenant copilots flying obsolete KC-97s for the Strategic Air Command at Selfridge Air Force Base near Detroit.
“What do you mean, you volunteered?” he asked. He was incredulous. “Haven’t you learned never to volunteer? We haven’t been on base a year. You don’t have to go yet.”
“The way I see it, it doesn’t make much difference,” I said. “We go now, we go a year from now. Will it be any better a year from now?”
It was late in the summer of 1966. President Johnson had announced another increase in troop strength in Vietnam. His weathered visage was a familiar sight on the television screen, as he solemnly announced the necessity for even greater numbers of American armed forces to assist the South Vietnamese in making their country and all of Southeast Asia safe for democracy.
I remembered my pilot-training tactical officer at Webb Air Force Base, Captain “Press-on” Smith, gleefully rubbing his hands together three years earlier as he told us of the potential of Vietnam as an arena for aerial combat. We flying students had found it hard to believe that a shooting war might occur anywhere in the world, much less in the distant lands of Southeast Asia. The last aerial combat had taken place in Korea, several years before. In 1963 few of us had heard of Vietnam.
The latest list of assignments consisted of vacancies at a recently established C-130E wing at Ching Chuan Kang Air Base, near Taichung, Taiwan. The B-models, we knew, were flying out of Mactan Air Base, in the Philippines. We had heard less than enthusiastic reports about living conditions there. The A-models were flying out of Naha Air Base in Okinawa. A nice place, but an assignment there meant an accompanied three-year tour. The E-models were the best of the C-130 cargo fleet, in my opinion, with external tanks and the latest navigation and communications gear. With their extended range and proven durability, they were given the best and most interesting missions.
I had been flying E-models at Dyess. I liked flying E-models. If I had to fly in Southeast Asia, I wanted to do it in one of the few aircraft the Air Force had that was fun to fly. And I didn’t particularly want to retrain into anything else, even a fighter. I had a special fondness for the E-model of the C-130. I had been flying it for less than a year and was just beginning to feel comfortable in it. And although the base on Taiwan had just been established, we had heard favorable comments about it.
“What does your wife think about your volunteering?”
“She’s not happy about it.”
“Where’s she going to live?”
“Go home and live with the family, I guess.” Bill and I were both from Michigan.
“When do you leave?”
“My port call is in four months—early in February.”
Bill walked away shaking his head slowly. He liked it at Dyess and didn’t want to leave. I liked the area, too. Abilene, Texas, was a nice place to live, and Dyess was a good place to fly out of. Lots of wide open spaces for low-level navigation missions at 500 feet, a clear and unobstructed drop zone west of the north-south runway to practice personnel and heavy equipment drops, low altitude ground proximity extractions, and assault landings. A good place to come back to after extended missions to Europe, Africa, the Far East.
But events in Southeast Asia were happening too quickly. I thought it was a good idea to try to anticipate, at least a little, the movements of the forces that were turning us. And so, in early February 1967, I boarded a contract air carrier at McChord AFB in Spokane, Washington, for the long flight to Japan, Taipei, and finally, Taichung, Taiwan, my home for the next fourteen months.