This is a book reading from when I spoke at the 2014 EAA Convention in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Memorial Day speech in Chicago (2014)
Video of my Memorial Day speech in Chicago (2014)
Photos from my time off
- The Chao Phya Hotel. It was mostly taken over by the U.S. military in the late 1960s because there were so many people coming and going in Bangkok. It was for officers only.
- A shot of the inside of our apartment in Bangkok. It was fully furnished.
- A theater marquee in the town of Nakhon Phanom.
From the air
- Looking at the base to the SE. Note the dust on the road south of the base.
- This shows the M in the river in Ban Ban Valley. My wings are empty of ordinance, meaning I’ve already made my strike and am on the way home.
- The pilots called this Roadrunner Lake near Khan Kai in the NE part of the PDJ. Not long before I took this picture, this area had belonged to the bad guys, who had big guns defending it. I would not have ventured into that area if the friendlies hadn’t taken it. Of note are the bomb craters all around.
A-1’s in flight
- A1 en route to northern Laos with Don Combs in the other airplane. Don was shot down in this same airplane several months later. The picture shows some clouds of the monsoon and the big bend in the Mekong which I refer to frequently in the book.
- The karst in Laos not far from the river. It is a good picture of a single seater, A-1H or A-1J. Unfortunately, the pilot in this airplane didn’t return from a mission about forty hours later. On this mission, I was flying as an IP for a guy getting checked out at night.