Chapter 4: Fatherhood and Then Gone

While in California, we finally could become parents. We had a son, named John Patrick Stickler on March 29^th, nine days after our fourth anniversary. After losing eight, he was a godsend to us. Did we spoil him, I guess we did, but he has turned out to be a very decent and kind human being. I guess John was about four months old when I had to go TDY to Okinawa with the Habu. That was six months that in some ways was nice because I got to see an awful lot of South-East Asia, and very hard not seeing my wife and son for so long.

When the Blackbird would fly and then have some problems, or because we needed to collect the data from it, we would take off in a KC-135 Tanker and fly to where it was and recover the aircraft. That meant we would remove film from the cameras and film from the radar, reload everything, and get it ready for another mission over Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China, and North Korea. Once we had everything we needed, we would fly to Japan where the PI's (Photo Interpreter or Radar Interpreters depending on which was being viewed) would go over everything and send the info on up the line to update our troops and upper-echelon commanders to plan further missions. At this time I racked up a record, (at that time) 27 TDY (Temporary Duty Assignment) continuous orders. That means I had my original TDY from Beale to Okinawa, then orders to Clark in the Philippines, to Tachikawa Air Base, Japan, to Clark, back to Tachikawa, to Guam, to Clark, etc. So I went 26 places TDY from Kadina, getting new orders each time before I could come home to Kadina and then go home to Beale.

I survived the trek and lived to tell about it later. One day when we were going to work at Kadina, we ran over a mother Habu and several of her babies. One was still alive and we captured it, got an aquarium, and put him into it. I'm not sure we knew or cared if the snake was a he or she, but it was our pet. We fed it insects and then mice when it got bigger. After I left it got too big and had to be released. It was funny that when any of us guys in the shop fed it or just watched it the snake was fine, but when our commander, a bird colonel came in it would rise up, hiss, and try to strike the glass to get at him. I think that is why he was returned to the wild when he got to be about two feet long. The snake resembled a cobra as it had a large head that expands when striking or waiting to strike. The snake can strike up to half its body length and is as quick as a cobra.

I went through an earthquake one afternoon that walked my bunk across the room in the barracks. I was on the top bunk at the time. This was the Tokachi-oki, Japan earthquake (May 16^th) that measured an 8.2 at the epicenter. I think we only experienced a six-point something there at Kadina.

Then about a little over a month later we had a category 3, Typhoon Lucy (June 28-July 2 1968) came through and blew everything around that wasn't nailed down tight. The earthquake didn't bother me since I had gone through several smaller quakes back in California. The typhoon was different from the twisters I experienced in Lincoln, only because water was involved instead of just wind.

I came back home flying on a KC-135 from Kadina to Hickam AFB, Hawaii, and then to Beale. Kadina has a 97-second runway, and the KC-135 had 102 seconds of water alcohol to help boost the thrust of the engines. If you took off over the water, then you could watch the waves, and they looked like five feet away, but were more like twenty-five to thirty feet away.

However, if you took off over the jungle, then the trees were about fifty feet from the end of the runway and started at about twenty feet high and went to about fifty not much over fifty yards in from the edge of the trees. Needless to say it was always a scary flight taking off toward the jungle. In fact, I think one fighter, an F-105, or maybe it was an RF-101 did just that, he went into the jungle of trees and didn't come back. There were also B-52's stationed there during the time I was there, and I run across some friends I knew from the old B-47 days.

The first flight over the big pond was miserable for me. We all got GG shots (Gamma Globulin). This is a shot of approximately two inches in a horse syringe and a dull needle that is about as big around as the lead in a number 2 pencil. So you have this lump of serum about two inches around sitting just under the skin of your butt. It takes about three hours for the serum to dissipate into the body. During that time, you have this huge lump on your ass, and it's hard to sit still. I ended up with the seat that had the bar on the right side of the canvas seat, and that was where the shot was too. After about twenty minutes of extreme agony, I talked the boom operator out of his position laying face down in the pod where the boom for refueling aircraft was located. After about ten minutes, I was asleep and comfortable for the first time since getting that damn GG shot.

The flight back seemed to take the longest time. We always joked around about strapping one of the J-58 engines from the Blackbird, and we could get home in no time at all. About a year after I got back from Kadina, I had orders for Udorn AFB, Thailand. That is a base in northern Thailand about 50 miles straight south of Vientiane, Laos. The local town was Udon Thani, and the base is called Udon Thani Royal Thai Air Force Base (RTAFB) and was built jointly by us and Thailand for our use in Vietnam. However, initially, I had to go TDY to Shaw AFB, South Carolina for school on the cameras on the RF-4C. I left the first part of September of '69 after getting Kathy and John back home to Lincoln where Kathy had found a home to rent while I was gone.

I went through school and got my second taste of good white lightning. There was a guy who made moonshine in the woods about three miles from our trailer park. That was some smooth stuff, but the stuff I found in a little country store outside of Oakland, SC was the best I have ever tasted. It was on the shelf in a mason jar, with no label. Because the jars were the old light blue color and capped, no one could tell what was in them. I happen to see an elderly man buy a jar, and I said I wanted one too. The old man said he wanted me to try some before I could buy some, so I took a sip and smacked my lips and said, 'That's good shine, better than back home.' Since I didn't choke or react badly, I guess they thought I was alright. Part of it was my accent. Wherever I went in the military, I quickly picked up the accent or language of the locals. I had been at school about four weeks by then and talked with a somewhat southern drawl like the locals. My roommate was from Georgia so that helped too. That jar lasted me and my friends until we finished school in December.

We could barely make it home before Christmas, but I had to leave early, and my flight was supposed to be on December 23^rd. Some friends and I were at the NCO club at Travis AFB, CA, and they called our flight ahead of time due to weather over the pacific, and we didn't get the call. So we missed the flight and had to wait until the next flight on December 28^th. So I spent Christmas at a friend's house at Beale. I didn't have enough money to make it to Lincoln and back, plus the time involved was too tight.

We finally made it to Bangkok, the capital, and had to wait again for a flight up to Udorn. We spent two days in Bangkok waiting. I got to immerse myself in the culture and started learning the language. I got settled in at Udorn and worked hard. I was the ranking NCO as a Technical Sergeant (E-6) so I ran the night shift, actually swings (i.e. four to midnight) until I came in one day and had a message to contact a Colonel Logan. The next day I went to report to his office, and he sat me down and asked if I would please qualify again for marksman. I asked why as I had qualified at Beale before I went to Okinawa in April and then in October at Shaw.

He said he wanted to see me shoot, I said sure and reported to the range the next day. I was handed a Mauser Karabiner 98k bolt action, with a Zack scope and several five shell clips much like the M-1 Garand. However, unlike the Garand that held eight shells, the Mauser only held five shells that were loaded from the clip into the internal magazine. The gun could was a single-shot rifle. This Mauser was not converted to the NATO 7. 62x51mm rounds and used the original 7.92x57mm round from the late forties. The effective range with a scope was 1000 meters plus or 994 yards plus. The longest shot I had to shoot at the range was about 500 yards. In actual real-world action, my furthest shot was probably just under a thousand yards, or almost ten football fields. I was to shoot ten clips or fifty rounds. I ended up with all fifty shots within the nine ring of a seven ring target with the ten as center and five as the outer ring. The nine circle was five inches across and the ten at two and a half. The ten ring was obliterated and there were about six holes in the nine ring beyond what would be the ten ring.