Thursday night
30 Oct. 1969

Another long boring day is past, and am I ever sleepy! After being on the hot pad last night and not sleeping well, I’m beat.

Flew my fourth mission today and did my first real bombing. A FAC(A), Forward Air controller (Airborne) is what we work with on most of our bombing missions. Anyway, this guy usually flies in a small propeller driven airplane or helicopter. The one we worked with today was called “Hostage Duke”. he had found an enemy trench line from which he had been fired at with small arms fire (rifle and machine gun). So he had us bomb them! We know there were VC there, but, of course, they were in the trench line, so he couldn’t tell if we killed any. All our bombs (ten bombs on each of two F-4s, twenty 500 pound bombs) were on the target and he gave us credit for destroying 150 meters of trench line! Well, sounds gruesome I suppose, but this is what we are doing over here.

I used to like for it to rain, and I liked to drive in the rain. Well, when I get out of here I don’t think I’ll care if I never see rain again!! The way its raining, there is no way to keep dry, really. When I got home from the hot pad this morning, there was a large puddle of water in my hooch.

O.J. Riddle and John Haynes left today to go to Clark AFB, Philippines for ten days of survival school. I still haven’t heard when I’ll be going, but I hope it’s soon.

They pair up pilots and RIOS [radar intercept officers] in this squadron and I’ve been assigned to fly with a Major Gibson who just became the squadron operations officer yesterday. He hasn’t been a Major very long and is a real nice fellow. I flew with him today and we seemed to get along pretty well. Actually, I’m glad I’ll be flying with him because since he’s the ops officer, he’ll fly (and me) practically everyday. Of course I’ll fly with other pilots too, because they have many more pilots than RIOS. After I’ve been here awhile I’ll probably start flying with a new pilot.

Major Gibson is from Corpus Christi and he said his wife is living there now and teaching school.

Photo - F-4B Phantom