Chapter 21: What was a typical day in the military for you?

During peacetime, or at Stateside bases during the Vietnam war, our work was very routine. My work hours were usually 0700 to 1600 or 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. The main difference is that I was handling munitions. Working with ammo is relatively safe if you follow the checklists. If you take shortcuts and don’t follow the guidelines, then it can be dangerous. There was an old saying in ammo, “You only make one mistake.” (Ammo is a shorthand way to say "ammunition," meaning bullets, gunpowder, bombs, rockets, missiles, etc.)

The Munitions Storage Area is commonly called the “bomb dump.” There are many sections in the bomb dump. I mostly worked in storage, maintenance, line delivery and munitions control. During a typical day, the jobs were rather mundane. After arriving at work, we were given work orders and once the job was completed, we would be given another work order. It was pretty much the same routine every day. But once in a while, things got hectic rather quickly. I will talk about some of these situations.

In 1976, while I was working in the munitions control center at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, there was a major incident in the DMZ between North and South Korea. There was a tree blocking the view between the two sides. Two US officers decided to trim the trees. The North Korean guards got angry and confronted the Americans face to face. The Americans would not stop trimming the tree and the North Korean guards killed one of them with an ax.

I got a call from the base command post. They gave me a “shopping list” of munitions to be delivered to the flight line. We normally use operational plans in case we must go to war. Each plan would direct types of aircraft, types and quantities of munitions, etc. based on the situation. This tree cutting situation was not planned for and they had no idea of what would happen next. We had to prepare for the worst. Over the radio, I told everyone to stop what they were doing and then directed each crew pull many types of munitions from storage and load them onto trailers and standby for further directions on where to deliver them.

I found out later that we were very close to an all-out war with North Korea. Fighter aircraft and naval ships were heading toward bases and the waters near Korea. Many types of fighter aircraft, including B52s, were in the air. Fortunately, North Korea realized that they could be completely destroyed within hours, but they continued to say that it was the Americans’ fault. The South Korean president didn’t want war and asked us to not attack. Those were very tense days. Everybody was ready to go to war, and our adrenalin was flowing, but we were all relieved when we were told to return everything back to storage.

I was stationed at Nellis AFB in Nevada in 1972. I volunteered to go to Takhli Air Base in Thailand. I went there on temporary duty (TDY). A TDY can be from a few days to 180 days. After six months at Takhli, I had to return to Nellis for a couple of weeks and then returned to Takhli for about four more months. I worked in Line Delivery, or Line-D, during my whole time there. Our job was to deliver munitions to the fighter aircraft. Our primary aircraft was the F111. Six 500 lb. Mk 82 bombs were attached to a “bomb release unit,” or BRU. We used special MHU 85 trailers to deliver the ordnance. We were limited to towing two loaded trailers to the flight line or four empty trailers back to the bomb dump to be reloaded. We worked 12-hour shifts and I was in charge of the night shift. We had gone a few weeks of everything being really quiet. We’d come in, get everything done and sit around for eight or nine hours. I told half the crew to go home and about a half hour later, the phones were ringing off the wall. We suddenly went into max-effort mode and were told the F111s would be doing quick turns after making their bombing runs over North Vietnam. The planes that weren’t schedule to fly the next day were loaded. We hauled the bombs to the flight line four at a time and returned with empty trailers eight at a time. Some of the flight line supervisors saw this but looked the other way. Of course, safety is very important, but to get the mission done, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Again, everyday routines in the military are not so exciting. At stateside bases we have a few exercises during the year where we stop our normal routine and go into a combat training condition. Even the people who complain about the work come together and as a team we get the job done. In a war zone, a quiet day can become rather hectic at the drop of a hat. I enjoyed the hectic days and the challenge of making sure that everything runs smoothly.

The following are the tree that was being cut in the Korean DMZ and an F111 loaded with bombs loaded on BRUs.