Text 14107, 73 rader
Skriven 2011-02-15 07:14:02 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
  Kommentar till text 14103 av Roy Witt (1:387/22)
Ärende: The Smolensk crash on April 10, 2010
============================================
Replying to a message of Roy Witt to Bob Ackley:

 RW> 11 Feb 11 06:32, Bob Ackley wrote to Roy Witt:

 BA>> The backenders (who ran the equipment) were assigned to the 6994th
 BA>> Security Squadron or one of its detachments.  When I was in it
 BA>> (1971-2) the 6994th was at Saigon, Det 2 was at Da Nang and Det 3
 BA>> was at Nakhon Phanom.  Don't remember where Det 1 was, maybe Nha
 BA>> Trang.

 RW> Ahhh. These frontenders don't say that on their site.

The frontenders were all officers, the backenders were all enlisted swine.

 BA>>>> After the peace treaty was signed the unit at Nakhon Phanom moved
 BA>>>> south to Ubon RTAFB and the other two units merged and moved to
 BA>>>> Nakhon Phanom.

 RW>>> They may have been the unit that formed the 361st?

 BA>> Nope.  Strange setup, the pilot/copilot/navigator assigned to one
 BA>> unit, mission supervisor, radio operators and analyst (me) assigned
 BA>> to a different unit.  Of minimal interest is the fact that most of
 BA>> the pilots and copilots were not cleared to be in the back of the
 BA>> airplane during the mission.

 RW> The nature of the electronic equipment onboard would most likely be
 RW> the reason for that. A need to know, comes to mind.

Some folks don't understand the conept of need-to-know.  Our pilots and
copilots
pretty much knew what we were up to.  One thing we did do - very unofficially
and very illegally - was quietly brief the intelligence people at NKP; this
stemmed
from a situation where they were briefing a specific area as good for Escape
and
Evasion if one was shot down, but we knew that there was a fairly good sized
unit
of the North Vietnamese army there - so we very quietly alerted them to the
fact
(they never asked how we knew and we didn't tell them that).

Most folks are unaware that North Vietnam maintained two regiments of regular
infantry (the 372nd and 373rd) in the Plain of Jars area of Laos from shortly
after
the Geneva Accords in 1954.  In 1974 we watched them move one of those
regiments
back into North Vietnam and south to the DMZ in preparation for their invasion
of
South Vietnam in 1975.  Note that the Laotian government didn't approve but it
couldn't
do anything about the situation.

Laos was a basket case back then.  It was nominally a kingdom with its capital
at
Luang Prabang, which is north of Vientiane (the largest city).  The last king
of Laos,
Savang Vatthana, had three sons, and two of those three sons were political
opposites
while the third was neutral.  Souvanna Phouma was the neutral and was the prime

minister and head of government; Souphanouvong was the left wing kook that was
in
bed with the Hanoi regime (which owned and operated the Pathet Lao for him,
just as they
owned and operated the Viet Cong in South Vietnam), and the other guy whose
name I've forgotten was a right wing kook that ran the Laotian military (such
as it was).  I quit
keeping track of such things in about 1973, so I've no idea what's going on
there now.

--- FleetStreet 1.19+
 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)