JBlank

Enjoyed reading about 1297. I was a crew chief at LRAFB with the 314th OMS and I had worked on both 1293 and 1297. I remember that on Friday night that the planes that we launched returned early. When I ended my shift at midnight I was told to pack my bags. I left for PI at noon on Saturday. When we arrived at Clark we immediately started turning the planes around and other crews came out to fly to them to Ton Son Nhut. They were wearing side arms and the flight engineer said that I had a pretty looking airplane – with all its non-camouflage markings on it – and he hoped that it didn’t get them shot at. Two SPs also got on board with M-16s for crowd control - I have always wondered how that would have worked out. When the planes returned we were briefed not to inspect “unauthorized holes” and to squeeze upside down coffee cups left in the cargo compartment before picking them up for grenades. The next day when I showed up for work our supervisor asked for volunteers to grab our tool bags and standby for a flight into Ton Son Knut to scavenge something off of 1297, but fortunately for me that never happened. Within the hour, as I remember it – it could have been longer, one C-130 that was ready to taxi just shut down its engines and the evacuation was over for fixed wing aircraft. A few weeks later I ended up at Utapao AFB for three days when Cambodia hijacked the USS Mayaguez. Three Little Rock C-130s were hauling BLU-82s. One dropped its load. An interesting few weeks for my second TDY. Jeff