I notice a couple of older gents (well, MY age, alright…) and they are also circling the place too.  I realize one of them is watching me, and I keep thinking I’ve ‘seen’ him before somewhere…

I finally ‘think’ I’ve placed him, so I walk up behind he and his friend and say, “Flight, Radar, do you have ANY idea where you’re going?”

He snaps around, looks at me, and says, “Dammit, I ‘THOUGHT’ that was you! I was waiting to hear you say something to somebody!”  We shook hands and ended up pounding each other on the back, and probably had the gun store folks wondering what in hell was going on!!!

He was one of my pilots 36 years ago, out in WESTPAC back in the day.  He’s also retired and still consulting to ‘various’ organizations, the ‘little ones’ are now grown, married and he’s a 5 time grandpa!

We spent about 20 minutes just going back and forth on folks we’d served with and who was where, and what they were doing.  And then he brought up ‘the flight’…

We were deployed to Misawa AB, Japan on a 6 month deployment.
In August of 1976, two Americans had been killed at the DMZ in Korea during a tree cutting, so all the American forces were on higher alert, and we were pretty much restricted to the base…

September 20, 1976 was a routine patrol flight, up around the North end of Hokkaido, chasing bad guy submaines… “Gene” was the PPC, and we were minding our own business; sitting on a sonobuoy pattern and basically boring holes in the air, when a rather ‘interesting’ radio call came in to ‘warn’ us of a possibility a MIG-25 headed our way…

Truly a WTF moment…  Since we were well outside USSR airspace, minding our own business, etc…  Flight decided to descend, figuring we’d be below the cloud deck and we didn’t think they would try to shoot us down. 

We finished the mission and RTB’ed, only to find out a MIG-25 had landed at Hakodate airport not long after we’d received our little message…  Track reconstruction and later interviews with LT Victor Belenko confirmed he had,  in fact, probably passed within 5nm of us, and was at or below our altitude!!!

We never saw him, and he apparently never saw us…

Of course that racheted up the tension as the Japanese refused to give the MIG back for something like 60 days, and allowed US intelligence folks to basically dis-assemble the airplane (If I remember right, they finally gave it back to the USSR in 30+ crates).  There were all kinds of threats made against American flyers, and the Soviets said they were going to capture a US crew as ‘hostages’, etc…

Made for a rather ‘interesting’ rest of the deployment, and pretty much screwed us out of any good deals (like the Osan trips), and pretty much kept us flying our asses off… sigh…

His friend is a retired Marine Col, and he was just shaking his head, and commented he’d been III MEF at the same time and he was on alert to ‘go’, if things got any worse.

We both had to do other things, but we exchanged phone numbers, and I’m sure we’ll be having a drink and or dinner pretty soon!

36 years… Damn how time flies…