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Top Secret
Top Secret
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- Oct, 04 , 24
Below is a lighthearted excerpt from Glory Days: The Untold Story of the Men Who Flew the B-66 Destroyer into the Face of Fear by Wolfgang W.E. Samuel. The book is a great read, featuring a large selection of first-person accounts. Glory Days was published in 2008; an oldie but goodie!
Ronald Darrah was an A/2C crew chief from the 16th TRS. He and his friend A/2C Jim Aspel, also an RB-66 crew chief, slept in squad tents on folding canvas cots.
“I don’t know what the aircrews did,” writes Ron Darrah, “but we enlisted men stayed in a tent city set up alongside the Incirlik flight line. We had left Shaw AFB on a C-130, refueled and ate lunch at Kindley Air Base, Bermuda, then pressed on to Lajes in the Azores. There we stayed overnight before continuing on to Chateauroux, France, then Wheelus Air Base in Libya. We finally arrived exhausted at Incirlik. The temperatures got to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day, then dropped at night into the thirties."
"You could not touch the bare metal B-66s during the day without blistering your skin. We had to leave all the hatches and access doors open to keep from cooking the electronics. Yet nothing really went wrong and the airplanes flew just fine. The RB-66s flew over Lebanon nearly every day. Some came back with bullet holes in them. The holes in the wet-wings we patched with bolts and sealant. The worst thing for us was that there was little drinking water. We had to drink reconstituted milk, and it tasted awful. We dug a hole next to our tent and buried a 55 gallon fuel drum. We then went to town and bought big slabs of ice to fill the drum. A couple of cases of soft drinks went in last. It turned out to be a pretty good refrigerator, even on blistering hot days. We spent our spare time watching U-2s take off and land. We didn’t know their missions were Top Secret. When we got home we told everybody.”
The book remains in print and is available to order on our website, ShifferBooks.com.
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