Praying

I don't know if all y'all have read Sarge's Post titled "The Mail".  It is an exceptional story (and ALL Sarge's stories are pretty darn good).  It's the story of a young infantry man (Boy really) doing sentry duty on the front Line of WWI.  If you haven't read that posting, please do so, it'll help with the tale I'm telling this morning.  While the situation in his story is unique, it had a lot of things about it that I said to myself "Yep,  I understand that thought" which is the source of this post.

So...There I was...I'm stationed at my first “real” fighter assignment at Kunsan AB Republic of Korea (aka ROK) as a fully qualified F-4D driver and brand new First Lieutenant .  Have been there for a little while and have been (barely) qualified to carry and employ all the various weapons the F-4 could employ.  There were a lot, I did more studying for that duty than I did for my first Master's degree.

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Anyhow, there I was sitting Special Weapons alert in the alert hut located abour 250 feet away from our Steeds.  The first couple of days was spent reading books and magazines looking forward to our next meal. I'm pretty nervous given the realities of the weapon. 

But the daily grind is boring.  Not much variety on TV on the ROK.  So...Boredom begins to seep in.

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So, the four (two pilots, two weapons systems officers AKA WSO's) of us are sitting there playing cards when the Klaxon goes off.  There is about a microsecond of "WTF?" and then we're off to the races.  First guy to the truck starts the truck and gives about a 5 count for the others to dive in.  Then no gas is preserved in driving to the jets.

That takes about a minute or so.  Screech to a halt as the doors are opening and the other three are jumping out.  Run the 50 feet or so to "my" jet and up the ladder.  My chute harness is spread out on the ejection seat.  I start the right engine as the back seater and I are sitting down on the seat.  The crew chief and assistant chief are strapping us in as this begins.  We grab the leg straps as the chief grabs the shoulder harness.  We're strapped in before the engine is at idle RPM.  The chief has slid down and removed the ladder.  As soon as the RPM is at idle, we start the left engine.  Meanwhile in the back seat, the WSO is turning on all his equipment.  Radio and Radar are the two priorities right now in this incident.  The code word to travel to the end of the runway could cause the blood pressure to go even higher.  Most of the time once we're up and running, the code word is shut down, exercise complete.  A taxi to the runway code keeps that heart rate high.

This time it's the latter, a rare exercise event, we're headed to the runway at a very high ground speed.  Pull in to the arming area and put our hands on the canopy rail so the ground crew knows we haven't and won't touch any switches.  That ground crew goes around looking for leaks or other issues. A member of the arming crew pulls the safety wires off the weapons and walks out to the side and holds them over his head to let the aircrew knows that "Fight's On" has a new and terrible meaning.

At that point, the aircrew is waiting either for the launch code or exercise over code.   Fortunately, though I've gone through a few of these exercise, as you may have surmised I've never received a launch code.  Nor is it this time. The next thought through my brain when I get the endex code is "Thank You, Lord"! 

The jet is safetied before taxi back.  Yes, Beans, even though flags "from the weapons" were shown to the aircrew, they were never pulled unless it was for real.  They had extra flags to make the exercise more realistic.  There were a couple of WSO's who after their first of these exercises, came in and told the commander they couldn't do this. That was another objective of the exercise.  They were relieved and reassigned immediately.  Nothing was held against them, they just quietly left the squadron.  Probably a good thing for all concerned.

Those TDY's taught me a lot about myself and how I handle stressful events,  Sitting that "special" alert is the most effective at showing ones handling of those events, there are others.

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So, when I read Sarge's post, I remember the similar feelings that I had had when combat seemed to be possible in my close future.  Many were very similar to those described in the post. Not wanting to influence Sarge's story, but I hope the soldier gets through it.  

Peace out y'all!