TBT...

Gah, it really was 50 years ago...

Way back this time...

1976, and a fall/winter deployment to Northern Japan...

I think I’d made E-6 a couple of months earlier. And was still trying to figure out the airplane, as I’d gone from a P-3B squadron to a P-3C squadron without benefit of going back through the RAG... Fun times...

Back in the day, you put pins on your hat for every country visited on a deployment.The wings on the back were traded with a Taiwanese radar operator during a stopover down that way...

Lots of hard flying, between the Panmunjom axe murder incident, which raised the WESTPAC DEFCON, and the possible responses, we went something like 120 days launching at least the ready one every day!

Three memories that stick out from that deployment are the amount of snow, Belenko’s desertion with his Mig-25 and the day we had to do TWO different medivacs down to Yokota in a blinding snowstorm, because the USAF didn’t want to fly their C-9 in bad weather. That was a LONG day...