Coming to Colorado: A Young Immigrantâ??s Journey to Become an American Flyer

CHAPTER 28. A Dream Come True

A Dream Come True CHAPTER 28 { 329 } A DREAM COME TRUE On a hot Mississippi day in early July 1962, Deanne and I loaded up our new 1962 Chevrolet Impala hardtop and headed north for Topeka, Kansas. The car had no air conditioning —we couldn’t afford that—and it soon became miserably hot when the sun got up high in the milky white sky. Deanne, seven months pregnant with our first child, incessantly dabbed perspiration off her nose with a small linen handkerchief. Sweat rings formed under her arms, attesting to her discomfort with that big baby inside of her. She made the tan top and the matching skirt herself, to save us money. She was proud to have made her own maternity clothes, never before in her life having used a sewing machine. There were moments when she wanted to just throw her arms up in the air and give up, but she didn’t, and she was wearing what she had sewn with such determination. We arrived in Topeka two days later. I reported to my squadron and immediately was entered into a training program more hectic than anything I had ever experienced. There was little time to settle in. We found a small two-bedroom apartment in a fourplex apartment house, which, we were happy to discover, included most of the appliances we couldn’t yet afford to buy. Our next stop was the base hospital, a big red brick building that Deanne was to visit frequently over the next eight weeks. The officers’ wives of the 343rd Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron, my new unit of assignment within the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, extended a warm welcome to Deanne and quickly made her feel as one of them. The women cautioned her not to ask too many questions of the men—where they went and what they did. Deanne also learned about men who died flying for their country, and she met the widows they left behind. If I, a motivated and enthusiastic young lieutenant, felt privileged to serve my country, so did Deanne in her role as an air force wife. I was one of a dozen newly assigned electronic warfare officers, EWOs, to arrive at Forbes. On August 20, 1962, soon after our arrival, I flew my first training mission in an RB-47H north toward the Canadian border, over the empty and barren northern states. Lumbering F-89 Scorpion air defensefightersvainlytriedtopracticeinterceptsonusasweslicedthrough the cold, blue northern skies. It was a daytime mission of eight hours’ { 330 } A DREAM COME TRUE duration in a downward firing ejection seat which, someone whispered to me in confidence, was a seat designed not to work. Apparently the knowledge we EWOs possessed was too sensitive to allow us to be exploited bySovietinterrogatorsshouldwebeshotdownandcaptured.ThreeEWOs sat in a sealed capsule in the aircraft’s former bomb bay. Our sole mission was to glean the secrets from enemy electronic emissions; our only window to the outside world, the electronic equipment we had been taught to operate—direction finders, search receivers, pulse analyzers, recorders. “These are short training flights,” my Standardization Board evaluator informed me after administering a no-notice Emergency Procedure Test, “especially designed to give you new guys the most training in the shortest possible time. Once you’re checked out and certified you’ll rarely fly during the day, and your missions will frequently be up to fourteen hours long,” he paused, “and take you to places where the bad guys will be waiting for you, waiting to shoot you down. Enjoy your short eighthour missions while you can.” He laughed at me as if he had just let me in on a private joke. Our training program was hectic—fly, critique, plan the next mission. Fly August 20, fly August 23, fly August 24, fly August 27. Fly, critique, plan, fly, critique, plan—day after day. I had no idea why the pace was so hectic. I would have liked to have had a little more time with Deanne, who was growing bigger by the day and had to cope with her new life as a flying officer’s wife all on her own. She never complained, instead busying herself settling into our new home, buying what she needed for the baby’s arrival. On Wednesday, September 12, 1962, I sat at the end of the Forbes runway in my RB-47H...