Some memories of the Air Force Reserve - for Veterans Day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In spring 1972 I enlisted in the Air Force Reserve to be a medic - before the Army could draft me. That meant I would first be on active duty, and then have reserve duty for six years: one weekend every month and two weeks during the summer. So, I spent the second half of that year on active duty. First was basic training in San Antonio. Early one morning the son of a Chief Master Sergeant (the highest enlisted rank) told me his father’s favorite joke:

 

“What is the difference between the Air Force and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.”

 

Then I had tech school in Wichita Falls. Finally, I had on the job training in a hospital near St. Louis.

 

In 1973 I started graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University. I also was working for one weekend a month as a reserve medic in the clinic out at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport that was part of the 911th Tactical Airlift Group. Most of my job was helping do the annual flight physicals. That meant I did tasks like eye tests, hearing tests, blood pressures, pulse rates, electrocardiograms, and even footprints.

 

From 1973 until 1975 on paper I belonged to a unit called the 911th Mobility Support Squadron. It is jargon meaning replacement troops, and had the acronym MSS. No vowel you add to make it pronounceable looks good. I vote for mess. You may remember the 1988 movie Bull Durham about a minor league baseball team. Kevin Costner plays the veteran catcher Crash Davis who just has been sent to the Durham Bulls to balance out a trade. When he walks into the team manager’s office the manager scowls and asks, Who are you? He introduces himself by replying that he is just the player to be named later. My reserve unit felt like that. We were only a minor league team. Morale always was near zero. If I did not have to be there, I would have preferred to be somewhere else.

 

In July 1975 I was told I had been reassigned. Now I belonged to the 758th Tactical Airlift Squadron. I walked up the hill to the base operations building to sign in with my new unit before going to work. When I went in, I noticed that everyone was smiling. They all were happy to be there. Their Admin sergeant welcomed me. His first five words were that: we are all professionals here.

 

Before I headed down the hill to work at the clinic, I needed to stop and use the bathroom. What I saw there amazed me. Inside the toilet stall door, under a clear plastic cover, was a sheet of paper listing exactly what each aircrewman (pilot, copilot, and flight mechanic) had to do to handle an in-flight nightmare – having one of the two piston engines on the plane fail. The title read Don’t just sit there; have an accident. As I washed my hands I looked around and saw that the same emergency procedures also were posted on the wall above every urinal. I thought, wow, these guys are really serious.

 

The 758th flew a twenty-year-old cargo plane called the C123K. If you saw the movie Con Air then you have seen one. It looks like the one shown above.  It has a high straight wing with two piston engines, and a fuselage shaped like a pig. It carries 15 tons of cargo or up to sixty troops The C123K was not pressurized, and wasn’t really even watertight. It has a wimpy official name - the Provider.

 

But the C123K had a secret. Under the wings there also were a pair of auxiliary jet engines. Their added thrust could get the plane into the air from a very short dirt runway. It also could keep the plane flying normally with one piston engine completely shut off. The Air Force had a series of jet fighters whose names started with the powerful word Thunder: the F-84 Thunderjet and Thunderstreak, and the F-105 Thunderchief. So the 758th renamed their plane the mighty Thunderpig.

 

The 758th had adult leadership. They believed in personal empowerment. Treat all your people like adults and give them room to blossom. Tell them what needs to be done, and let them work as a team to get it done. Other than emergency procedures you don’t need to spell out exactly how.

 

Now, that was not the typical attitude in Pittsburgh back then. Mostly you got arrogant management butting heads with powerful unions like the United Steelworkers, the USW.  Loadmasters in the 758th were a burly, boisterous, bunch of Polish-American sergeants who worked as hammersmiths over at a USW forge shop. Most were almost in the same shape as back when they had played high school football. They were proud of their reserve unit and treated it like it was their football team.     

 

Eighteen months later I watched the 758th accept an award – the Grover Loening Trophy for best flying unit in the Air Force Reserve. Here is one reason why. One of their planes was flying low at night with a full load of Army Rangers getting ready for a paratroop drop. The ramp and door on the back of the plane already were wide open when one engine sputtered and then quit. They began to lose altitude rapidly. The crew feathered the propeller, started up the auxiliary jets and the mighty Thunderpig climbed and got them home safely. A less skilled crew probably would have crashed and killed all 45 people aboard.  

 

Personal empowerment comes in all sorts of places. I found it in an Air Force Reserve unit. Which unit does your workplace resemble more, the Mobility Support Squadron (a mess) or that Tactical Airlift Squadron? Could you help change it?

 

An image of a C123K came from Wikimedia Commons.