Inside a Cold War USAF Fighter Squadron (463)

25:42Michael Makatura:So by the end of the conversation, there's 10 guys standing around with this new lieutenant. And so the grizzled veteran would say, oh, they called you Thor, huh? That's a pretty good call sign. But I think we're going to call you Bambi. And of course, what ensued was raucous laughter and slapping on the shoulders. And everybody would say, hey, Bambi, welcome to the squad. And meanwhile, the young guy standing there, what the hell just happened? Like I told him that my call sign was Thor. And now they're going to name me after a baby deer is happening. And so that, again, was part of this kind of ritual breaking down the cocksure young lieutenant and helping him understand that he had a place in this ecosystem and wasn't at the top.

26:30Michael Makatura:And so we're going to make sure that you're safe and that you know how to fly. So that's one part of the call sign. And sometimes I get asked the question, so did you guys call him Bambi for two weeks? We sure did, as a matter of fact. We even got him a name tag that said Bambi. Now, most of that didn't stick. And so at some point, he would be given a long-term call sign. And when I say long-term, 35 years later, those call signs still stick with guys, right? And the way that normally happened, there were usually two ways that you got a call sign. Sometimes it was your name. So my last name is Mac Atura.

27:08Michael Makatura:It was shortened to Mac, and that stuck, right? The commander of the 10th, Ed Hul, became Julio. So kind of an off take from his last name. So last names happened. But more often than not, it was stupid things that you did that the guys didn't want you to forget. And one of the flight commanders when I got to Han was Craig Wilkerson. And his nickname, his call sign is Skip. And he got that call sign because he was on a bombing range. And on a bombing range, there are skip pits and strafe pits. Skip pits are made of concrete and allow you to bounce a bomb, skip a bomb off the concrete into the side of a building.

27:53Michael Makatura:Strafe pits are made of sand and allow you to use the guns on your airplane and the sand absorbs the bullets. Well, if you get those two things confused and you shoot your bullets onto the concrete skip pit, they become deadly projectiles when they're not supposed to be. And, of course, he did that. Hence, his nickname was Skip. And usually that occurred over some formal naming ceremony that involved alcohol and laughter. Brilliant. Brilliant. A while back, this was quite a while back, I interviewed a Canadian F-104 pilot, and he had accidentally crossed over into East Germany very briefly across the border.

28:36His last name was Horn, and he became Hornsky.

28:41Michael Makatura:Yes, exactly. I think the other thing that I found really interesting is the language, the shorthand language that the pilots use in the air has a lot of it is originated from the Royal Air Force. So angels. And I don't know. Do you use Tally Ho? Yes, Tally Ho. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. And it just sounds like something out of the Battle of Britain. I was surprised you didn't have your own language. In the fighter pilot community, there is a strong tie to those who came before us and showed us the way. And there were a lot of things that tied back to the RAF. And that's certainly one of them. The thing that's really interesting is those terms make their way into your vernacular and you start using them in a civilian setting.

29:31Michael Makatura:And even now, all this many years later, if my wife and I are driving and I see what we're looking for, I'll say tally ho. And she'll look at me like, you can stop doing that now. But yes. And when your gas tank's getting low, you go, oh, we're on bingo fuel. Bingo fuel. So, yeah, some of that still happens. Old habits die hard. Brilliant. Brilliant. Love it. Love it. You did mention a while back life on the economy. So life on the economy is living outside the base. So you're living amongst West German civilians. That was one thing that you chose to do was to live on the economy. Yeah, most of us did.

30:11Michael Makatura:It was a fabulous experience. It was a growing experience. I always believe, Ian, that context is important to telling any story. And so the context here in the mid to late 80s, it was only 40 some years after World War II, which means that children, German children and young adults during World War II were still active in society in this time frame that I'm writing about. And certainly, the fact that the Axis powers lost and the Allied powers prevailed was still fresh in everybody's mind. In addition, Germany, following the war, essentially became an occupied country. There were so many U.S. bases and servicemen, a sprinkling of British.

31:03Michael Makatura:They were, even in 1988, they were an occupied country. and going to live out amongst them in a quote unquote on the economy against that backdrop. So that said, it was a fabulous experience. Rented the top floor of a home, of a German home. The home was absolutely beautiful, completely different than how I was raised and what I was used to in the United States and different in so many wonderful ways. And then just living in a small German village next to German farmers and their families was just a wonderfully immersive experience. And what I would tell you is the German people are formal people.

31:52Michael Makatura:Two Germans can live next door to each other for 30 years and not refer to themselves or each other by their first names. It's Herr Müller and Herr Wagner. And so even more so this young American who's probably driving too fast through the village. So there's an element of those two cultures meeting. They didn't clash, but they met. And really, it was incumbent on us to embrace the culture in which we were living. And we did. And it was a wonderful experience for all of us, but especially for a young man, be able to live a little bit of the German lifestyle in these tiny villages. you're near the moselle valley aren't you so the lovely vineyards as well fabulous absolutely fabulous and i can tell you we we certainly took advantage of that we fell in love with the traditions around german winemaking and but i will tell you i can remember they there are they would have wine fests and we would go to enjoy those wine fests and there were many Americans who over-served themselves during those wine fests and behaved boorishly.

33:06Michael Makatura:And I can remember thinking to myself, it's too bad that happens because these are proud people who are living out traditions they've had for hundreds of years. And in a way, we're soiling them with some bad behavior. But truthfully, that happened and it occurred and we watched it, there was much more appreciation for being able to participate arm in arm with our German neighbors. And how good did your German get, Michael? Not very. I try hard not to live life in regrets, but it is something as I look back that I wish I had immersed myself in the language more. I have enough to order a beer, find the train station, and potentially bail myself out if needed.

33:51my german's not great zwiebier bitter what else do you need to know yeah that's a typical british answer that i want to talk about the sort of social structure of the squadron so in in the book you describe the flight which is the close-knit cell of four to eight pilots who trained and partied together you've got the lieutenant's protection association and then almost the glue that holds the thing is the family life as well in terms of and you described the wives of

34:27Michael Makatura:the steady force yeah wow what a tremendous group of people so again some context is in order the husbands signed up to be air force officers and signed up to be pilots um the wives didn't They got brought along as part of the package, right? And they're enormously courageous and strong women to be able to live that life. And I referenced earlier that every day that a pilot goes to work, there's a chance that they're not coming home. The wives are aware of that too, right? Every day that my husband or dad leaves the house, I'm not sure that he's going to make it home. That in and of itself is a tremendous burden to bear.

35:14Michael Makatura:And then you add to that some of the frivolity that occurs to release pressure, as we were talking earlier. And so the wives have to put up with that tomfoolery. My wife says, I'm the same as a 12-year-old. I just have deadly toys now. And she's right. And so those wives had to deal with that part of the culture. And then just the nature of military service, there are demands placed on military members, whether those demands are over the course of a week or a surprise deployment or even a scheduled deployment where you go away for 30 days to better flying weather to keep yourself current. And then mom becomes everything in the household.

35:57Michael Makatura:She bears all of the responsibility for making the household work and for tending to the children. And then after 30 days, the husband comes back and it takes its toll on the wives and the families. These are very impressive, talented, strong women who also go through their own gauntlet and become accentuated in all of those characteristics that they already hold. And they really were the glue that held it all together while all of us knuckleheads were off doing what we do. They were the fabric that kept it all together. And all of us who have had the honor to kind of walk this path recognize how special these ladies are.

36:45You mentioned a while back as well about the nuclear missions harm. And the pilots themselves had to maintain an annual nuke certificate. Can you just explain what they had to do in order to retain that?

37:02Michael Makatura:Yeah, I think that it came down to two things. The biggest is incredibly strict, detailed standards around their missions. And I want to be careful. I know it's 35 years down the road, but I do want to just be careful from a classified standpoint that my discussion doesn't reveal too much. But so there were, we called them lines. There were lines in the overall NATO plan. And we have the 10th were the custodians of a number of those lines or missions. And an incredible amount of study went into the intricate details of those taskings, those missions. And just to give you an idea, each of those missions had a time over target or TOT.

37:56Michael Makatura:And that was the moment that you would be dropping or releasing your weapon. When we planned for those missions, the tolerance for pass or fail was plus or minus one second. Think about that for a moment. you're flying a very complex machine through a war zone with enemies interdicting you and weapons coming up and trying to thwart your mission and through all of that your pass fail criteria is plus or minus one second and the reason for that precision is if you're dropping a nuclear weapon and you're dropping it 30 seconds late, the ripple effects from that could be disastrous for not only the mission, but for other airmen and other ground troops, et cetera, et cetera, right?

38:51Michael Makatura:And so the whole plan required an immense amount of precision and therefore an immense amount of discipline and study and a very rigorous expectation of how you were going to tackle that mission. So that was part of it. Another part of it, frankly, was mental temperament and mental steadiness. We're human beings, right? And things happen in our lives. Family members get sick and pass away. And marriage is a difficult institution to be part of. And kids are demanding on us. And so there was a mental stability and an even temperance that was required to know that if in fact, because you never knew when we might be deploying this plan, it could be tomorrow.

39:36Michael Makatura:And so you needed to be well to be able to carry that responsibility. And that was part of the program as well. Because these guys, they're flying low level in northern Europe, where the weather is often not as good as it can be. So even without enemy fire or anything like that, you've got quite a lot of challenges there. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I'll give you one little anecdote that amplifies your point. J.D. Williams, my sponsor who we talked about earlier, came back from a mission one day and he just looked horrible. He just didn't look like himself. And I said, hey, what's going on?

40:13Michael Makatura:And he said, well, come with me. And we went back into the mission planning room and he took out his map and he showed me where one of his steer points was located. and he had actually drawn a circle around that steer point and the black marker of that circle occluded a communications tower. And so as he was flying that mission, he, as he was turning around there, he didn't expect the big tower to be right in front of him. And it was. And so he quickly jinked out of that and wasn't sure he was going to survive it. He did obviously, but by the time he got back to the squadron, he was quite shaken and yeah, flying low level in the fog and rain of Central Europe was not for the fainthearted.

40:53No, no. Did you ever go up in any of the aircraft to get a feel as to what it was like?

40:59Michael Makatura:Thank God I did, yes. Yeah, it's fabulous. Would you like me to describe some of that? Absolutely. Yeah, it was fabulous, Ian. And flying, I mentioned earlier the F-16 is a single-seat fighter. There are models called D models that had a second seat behind them, and they were there for training purposes. and important in the F-16 is that the back seat is a full replica of the front seat so you can actually fly the jet from the back seat it is a full functioning cockpit back there as well now if you've listened this far you must be enjoying the show at least I hope you are the reason I say this is on the Spotify app you can now leave comments on individual episodes so do me a favour and hit that pause button and leave a comment.

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42:20Michael Makatura:And so one of the amazing things about the F-16 is you sit above and in front of the majority of the plane. So the engine is below you and behind you, and the fuselage is obviously behind you. And there was a big bubble canopy in the F-16. Previous to the F-16, canopies were more shrouded in metal. And in this case, you're sitting up in this big bubble canopy and you've got this incredible visibility. You're reclined in the seat by 30 degrees. And so it's quite comfortable, even though it's not spacious. It's quite comfortable and it's quite serene. And in fact, in the book, there's a section called serene lethality.

43:03Michael Makatura:So you're flying in this very lethal instrument of war, but it's actually quite quiet and quite serene in the cockpit. The other thing that made the F-16 kind of a dream is it's the first aircraft that did not have mechanical controls. So previous to the F-16, when you moved the yoke of an aircraft, there was linkage tied to your ailerons or your stabilizers. And it was that linkage that when you moved the yoke, the linkage moved those flight controls. In an F-16, that's not the case. It's all computerized and we referred to it as fly by wire. And so there were no mechanical controls as such. So in the F-16, the throttle is on your left and that does in fact move, but the stick, there's no yoke in the center.

43:58Michael Makatura:There's a stick on your right hand and that stick actually doesn't move very much. In fact, an interesting little aside is when they first fielded the F-16, the stick didn't move at all. And so all of your inputs were based on pressure. That was very disconcerting to veteran pilots who were used to moving a yoke back and forth, left and right. And so they actually had to build some play into the stick so that guys had a kind of a tactile response to moving their hand. That said, even today, it doesn't move very much. It doesn't move an inch, right? So it moves just a little bit, but combined with seating at a 30 degree angle above and in front of the loud engine with a bubble canopy with these controls that are hands-on throttle and stick controls with a HUD in front of you.

44:52Michael Makatura:And it was a dream. It was like flying a two-seat convertible sports car. And the jet is incredibly responsive to what you want it to do. And the F-16 is actually pretty small. And so that small size also makes it highly maneuverable. The thrust to weight ratio of the engine to this small airplane makes it highly maneuverable. Man, it was a ton of fun to fly that jet. And it was incredibly exciting. At the same time, very physiologically taxing. The fighter pilots have to be in really good physical shape to withstand the forces of G that get placed on their bodies. Of course, you're wearing a G suit, which is an inflatable ladder that starts at your diaphragm and then goes down to your ankles.

45:43Michael Makatura:And it has an umbilical that you plug into the jet. And so it's all kind of automatic. And based on the Gs that the jet is pulling, it speaks to that G suit and it inflates and deflates based on the conditions you're in. What that does, though, is it constricts all of the major muscle groups in the lower half of your body with the idea that you want to keep all the blood in your brain. Because when the blood has gravity pulling it down towards your feet, if it leaves your brain, you go nighty-night. And so you've got on this G suit and the jet is doing that too. you, but you also have to essentially bear down very much like a woman giving birth.

46:24Michael Makatura:Although I won't share that example with my wife, I don't think, because I think I'd probably have some backlash there, but very much you have to bear down. So you're breathing and you're constricting your chest muscles and you're pushing out air as you will, all of which is designed to keep the blood up in your brain. After doing that for a couple of hours, you're pretty tired, right? You've exercised all the major muscle groups in your body, and it can be really draining. But it was an absolute joy to be able to sit in the back seat with some of these guys and fly with them. Yeah, because in the book, you describe a situation with the G's where you don't successfully keep the blood in your brain.

47:05Michael Makatura:That is true. In fact, I'm golfing with that gentleman next week. We were down in Riosa, Spain for a weapons training deployment. and I went up in the back seat of Doug Frenchie French. And after we flew our mission, Frenchie said, hey, do you want to pull nine G's? And I'm like, absolutely. And so he said, all right, you see that lake down off of our left? We're going to pull down off over that lake. And I said, all right, great. So as the F-16 has two multifunction displays that basically sit above each of your knees. So one slightly to the left and one slightly to the right. Those multifunction displays, as their title suggests, can display a lot of different information.

47:42Michael Makatura:And in this case, the G meter was on the right MFD and we're about to pull left. And so I'm in position, the G suit starts to inflate. I'm bearing down and doing my breathing and I'm looking down over the left out of the cockpit, but I'm still trying with my peripheral vision to see how many Gs we're pulling, which is on the right. And I made the mistake of easing up and I picked my head up and I turned to the right to see the G meter. and I think the last thing I saw was 6.8 and then that was it and the next thing that occurred was I can hear Frenchie laughing and he's saying he's laughing he's saying Mac you okay Mac get your feet off the front rudder pedals Mac you okay and I'm starting to get my wits about me and I answer and I'm like yeah okay and he's laughing the whole time and he's like so what's going on and I said I don't know.

48:36Michael Makatura:I can't see. He's what do you mean? You can't see. And I said, I can't see anything. All I can see is white. And so he knows instantly what happened and he's laughing. And he said, okay, pull your chin to your chest. And so I do that. I do the bobblehead. And what had happened was I had a G induced loss of consciousness or G lock. And I went to sleep for a moment. And when I did so, the top of my helmet was resting on the back of the seat. And I was looking straight up out of the cockpit at the clouds. And so he helped me reorient my head. And that was good. And again, all of the while Frenchie's laughing and he said, all right, can you take the jet?

49:17Michael Makatura:And I said, I can't. And he said, why not? And I said, I can't move my arms. And he said, what do you mean you can't move your arms? And I said, my arms are up on the rails and I can't move them. And so again, I turned into a rag doll when I lost consciousness and I literally could not move my arms. And he's like, so it took about 10 minutes for me to gather myself before I can actually fly the jet again. But, and then Frenchie said to me, you don't want to tell anybody that this happened because they'll never let you fly again. And for 35 years, I held that secret. And as I was writing the book, I said to Frenchie, Hey, can I tell this story?

49:51Michael Makatura:And he's like,

49:55yeah, Wow, that sounds like a hell of an experience. So you're at Hahn when the Berlin Wall opens.

50:05Michael Makatura:Can you remember hearing the news of that and how you heard it? Yeah, distinctly. I was actually supposed to be in Berlin that weekend. A guy in the squadron, Jerry Jethro Black, and his lovely wife, Teresa, were going to Berlin to visit. And there was a corridor, there was one Autobahn that provided a corridor from West Germany into West Berlin. And you had, and they actually, Jethro actually came to me because as the admin part of the squadron, I had to create those orders, which were actually on Russian stationary with Cyrillic letters and all of that stuff. And I had to type in Anglo answers to all of those questions.

50:43Michael Makatura:And so Jerry and Teresa invited me to go with them. And again, no regrets, but boy, I should have said yes, because what ended up happening was that was weekend in the week that the wall came down. And gratefully, Jethro and Teresa actually brought me a piece of the Berlin Wall that I have in my office. So, yeah, I remember it very well. The most interesting thing I think about that, Ian, was the reaction of my German landlords. And so we anticipated that this would be a great thing for the German peoples. For 45 years, families had been separated by a wall and a fence. And so shortly after the wall came down, I was speaking with my German landlords.

51:31Michael Makatura:And I said, hey, this is great news, isn't it? Do you have family that you're going to be able to reunite with? And they were very measured. And they said, yes, it is great news. And yes, we have a couple of generations of family that we've never physically met. So we're looking forward to doing that. And I said, you seem a little reticent, though. Tell me more about that. And they said, we've spent 45 years rebuilding our society and putting ourselves in the position that we're in today. And those people are going to want all of that tomorrow. And so we were very grateful that they're free. We'd just like them to be free over there.

52:08Michael Makatura:And I thought, wow, that's really vulnerable. Some may say even a little caustic, but it was very real. and there was that aura that was going on at the time in West Germany that we're very glad that this has occurred but we're also a little wary of what it's going to mean for West German society moving forward. Were you at any point concerned about what impact that might have on your livelihood? The fact that suddenly we were going to be friends with the East Germans and... No, not really. I think that the term that we used is peace is breaking out all over, as opposed to war breaking out all over, peace is breaking out all over.

52:51Michael Makatura:But we knew that there were other missions and other duties around the world for the Air Force, and so we just will be reassigned to one of them. So no, I don't think there was ever any hint of worry about our livelihood. and you were right about other duties because within a year there's operation desert storm where your squadron is trained to fight and they are in combat and you're still the xo then how difficult was it to do that logistics i don't know jump through hoops to move from han to to the desert. Again, a little bit of a context here. I actually did not deploy with the 10th. And the second half of the book is all about Desert Storm.

53:44Michael Makatura:And I couldn't tell that story from a first person narrative. And when I began writing the book, I contacted Colonel Julio, who was the commander during Desert Storm, and said, hey, would you like to write this book with me? And he said, I don't want to be a co-author with you, but I'll certainly help you. And 90 % of the second half of the book, the desert storm part of the book, is a third person narrative based on Julio's war journal. His name deserves to be on the cover of this book. I think he just doesn't want to be associated with me anymore or something like that. I was in the Han command post when the 10th deployed.

54:20Michael Makatura:And so to answer your question, it is a Herculean task to pick up a fighter squadron from where it is, not only just everything from maps to toilet paper, But the 24 jets, all of the maintenance crews, it's a Herculean task to pick up and move, which is why we did it twice a year in peacetime. So we were used to deploying to either Zaragoza Air Base in Spain or Angelic Air Base in Turkey. And so we had practiced moving the squadron often, but it's still a very big task. In this case, the pilots shuttling 24 F-16s out of Europe, over the Mediterranean, through the length of the Mediterranean, over Egypt and the Middle East, and ultimately landing over there in the UAE.

55:10Michael Makatura:That's a big flight with a lot of coordination. A lot of air refueling has to go on. Think about, told you how fun it was to fly on an F-16, and I likened it to driving a two-seat convertible. Think about driving a two-seat convertible for 12 hours, right? except you can't stop, right? You can't pull over and use the restroom. And yeah, it's a really big task. I think the biggest task though, Ian, is the mental one. We had spent all of our time flying low level over Central Europe, training to fight the Soviets. All of a sudden, we're going to go fight a war that we didn't train for because we're not going to fly low level over verdant fields.

55:51Michael Makatura:we're going to fly high level over the sand. And we're not going to be fighting against Russian pilots. We're going to be fighting against the Iraqi pilots. That was a huge difference. And I think it's a testament to the skill and talent and training of the air crews that they were able to do that flawlessly. The last thing I'll introduce into the conversation, now on hindsight, we look back at Desert Storm and it was a turkey shoot in hindsight because going into it, we expected 25 % attrition. So of the 40 pilots that we took to the desert, 10 of them weren't coming home. And war gets really personal when the voice on the radio is your friend.

56:42Michael Makatura:And so it's under this mental gymnastics of we're not going to be flying low level over Germany. We're going to be flying high level over the desert. And by the way, 25 % of us are probably not coming home. That's the tenor in which the Fighting Tenth entered Desert Storm. And did the pilots know about that potential attrition rate or not? It's really interesting because even now after writing the book, that's somewhat in question. So in talking with Julio, he tells me that he did not make that known, but in talking with other guys, they knew it. And things like that tend to filter through even the tightest operational security and get down to the guys who are flying the jets.

57:31I guess if the Cold War went hot at the Foulder Gap, there would have been an even worse attrition rate than what they were expecting in Desert Storm. Now, you take on this role. Is it an unofficial role of squadron historian?

57:47Michael Makatura:I think it is an unofficial role. It is certainly an unofficial role, yes. Okay. You capture these stories, and the last part of the book has some of these stories. And I love the call signs here. We've got Captain Bill Psycho Andrews, Lieutenant Joey Boohoo Booha, I presume his last name. Yes. Lieutenant Colonel Terry Ragin Bull. Great call signs. But I think, Bill, I can't say these with a straight face. Captain Bill Psycho Andrews is a really interesting one because he describes being shot down over Iraq and taken prisoner. Can you just explain what happens to him? Yeah, you bet. And starting with the nickname or the call sign, most of us referred to Bill as BA, his two initials, Bill Andrews, BA.

58:42Michael Makatura:Somehow he got psycho. I think Bill had a lazy eye that sometimes looked like he was looking cross-eyed. And so I don't know if that's how he got psycho or not. But I talked to Stacey Andrews because I used Bill passed away from cancer, I think, in 2016, if I'm not mistaken. And so I contacted Stacey Andrews and she gracefully allowed me to use Bill's war journal to talk about the anecdote where he got shot down. And I asked Stacey, I said, so how do you want me to refer to Bill in the book? Is it psycho or is it BA? And she said he preferred BA. And I said, absolutely. So I still, for the most part, refer to him as BA.

59:22Michael Makatura:The situation, it was Bill was the flight commander. He's an Air Force Academy graduate. He was the flight commander of Mutt Flight. It was Mutt 4-1, 4-2, 4-3, and 4-4 was his four ship. Joey Boer was his wingman, so he was Mutt 4-2. Joey subsequently became a two-star general in the Air Force. And then Pete Abner McCaffrey and Evan Ivan Thomas, so Abner and Ivan, were numbers three and four. It was towards the end of the war. I think there were about 10 days left in the war. Of course, at the time he was shot down, we didn't know that. But it was towards the end of the war, and the fighting on the ground was still hot and heavy.

1:00:03Michael Makatura:And BA and Joey dipped below the clouds. It was an active battlefield. And as they were starting to say, okay, we need to get out of Dodge here. We need to get out of harm's way. Bill got hit by a surface-to-air missile. And so he ejects from the airplane. And as he is floating down to the ground, they're shooting at him. which is a violation of the Geneva Convention. But they're shooting small arms fire at him. When he finally gets on the ground, he breaks his leg. And so he can't really move. And they are closing in on him. He's still communicating with his flight mates and telling them what's going on.

1:00:44Michael Makatura:But they're closing in on him. And what he notices is that the troops around him and the weapon systems around him look like they're still aiming for his flight mates. He gets back on his survival radio and tells them that you're being targeted, break right, break right, probably saving somebody else from getting shot down. Bill then gets captured and treated roughly and gets taken to Baghdad. while all of that's going on, Mark Hebein, who also has two nicknames, Gandhi the Firewalker and Hebes, and mostly we referred to him as Hebes. Hebes goes down below the clouds to see if he can help rescue Bill.

1:01:34Michael Makatura:They start shooting at Hebes. Hebes in the book, I relate this story part of it, he thought he was a goner too. He thought he was going to get hit. Providence said there was a different plan. And so he was able to escape up, but Bill gets captured and taken prisoner. Of course, back at the command center, we don't really know exactly what's going on. We don't know if he's dead or alive. We don't know where he is. We're hoping for the best, but we just don't know. They subsequently sent in a rescue helicopter to try to recover Bill, to rescue him. That helicopter got shot down. Five American troops lost their lives and the other three were taken prisoners and treated horribly as prisoners of war.

1:02:17Michael Makatura:And then, so as you might expect, it's really interesting when things like this happen to military units, because there is a somber nature that takes over, let's face it, one of our own, shot down, and we don't know if he's alive or dead. The flip side of that coin is we still have a job to do. And so while it's somber, it is not overly emotional and it is not in any way crippling. So we're professionals and we're going to do our jobs and we're going to hope that, that hope the best for Bill. Eventually the war was over just a few days, 10 days later. And there was an announcement that the Red Cross was going to bring the POWs out of Iraq.

1:03:02Michael Makatura:And we were hoping that Bill would be one of those and lo and behold, he was. And that's the first time, 10 days later, that we actually knew that Bill was alive. And so he was evacuated on the hospital medical airplane to a launch stool back in Germany, where they patched up his leg, and then he was taken out to Andrews Air Force Base in the United States for a reunion with his family. Wow. Wow. Were there any fatalities with the squadron? Not in our squadron. Not in our squadron. So Bill was really the only casualty. We were one of three squadrons at Aldofra. It was the 363rd Tactical Fighter Wing Provisional.

1:03:43Michael Makatura:There were two squadrons from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina and Hahn, the 10th from Hahn. One of the pilots from one of the Shaw squadrons was killed in the middle of Desert Storm. But it was a spatial disorientation thing. And his jet crashed on the approach to the field and he was killed. His name was Dale Cormier. Right. Because I think it's something that I've mentioned in other episodes, but the number of pilots or military service people who are killed during the Cold War by accidents on exercises or flying, I imagine is quite a large number. I've yet been able to try and find a quantification of what that number is.

1:04:31With the 10th, were there any accidents or fatalities there?

1:04:36Michael Makatura:Yeah, there were five midair fatalities in my time in the 10th. And you're right. You know, what's interesting in today's world, we're connected and communication seemed to go around the planet within seconds that didn't occur back then. A lot, there were just two, there were just two Navy F-18s that had a crash out at Mountain Home Air Force Base last week during an air show. And we knew about that almost instantly. Back in the day of the 10th that I'm writing about, that didn't happen. So a lot of that was shielded from the general public's knowledge. They just weren't aware that it was that kind of danger.

1:05:12Michael Makatura:But yeah, there were five midairs during my time at Haan. Tom Popeye Doyle was killed. Sonny Sundstrom was killed. Mikey Crandall was killed. There was a German glider pilot, civilian glider pilot that was killed because of a midair in the 10th. Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, it's an inherently dangerous business. Yeah. It is indeed. It is indeed. There is literally loads more in the book. We've just dropped in and out of various sections of the book. Ian, you've been very generous with your time and your engagement, and I appreciate that. And I don't want to belabor the point. I guess what I would add is the reason I wrote this book is because the stories are fading and we're getting older.

1:06:00Michael Makatura:And I think that these stories need to be told. Wagering the Cold War and ultimately being part of it as it ended is something pretty special. And the men and women that I had an opportunity to serve with are the very best people that I've ever met. and I really wanted their stories to be told before they fade away. And so I would just encourage your listeners, if you're interested in reading about ordinary people who did extraordinary things when duty called, pick up the fight in 10 and read the story of those sabers. Absolutely. There will be links in the episode information. You've been listening to Michael Makatura.

1:06:45The book is called The Fighting Tenth Cold Water Desert Storm. It's a fascinating read. I learned a lot from it because it's almost like behind the scenes at a fighter squadron. There will be links in the episode information so you can buy the book and help support the podcast. Want to learn more about this episode? Don't miss the extras such as curated videos, photos and other content just look for the link in the episode information special thanks to the generous efforts of our financial supporters who keep the show on the air if you'd like to join this select band go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate the cold war conversation continues in our facebook discussion group just search for cold war conversations on facebook thanks very much for listening and see you next week

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