Digging WAY back in the vault…

Of memories, and the few operating brain cells that remember…

Setting the way back machine to 1974-5 thanks to a conversation last night with an old shipmate, he sent me a picture of the bar map from Olongopo, RP from 1973 (note- These were probably good for two or three days… Then somebody would change their bar’s name, and the Shore Patrol would have to go re-do it)…

Clicken to embiggen

There were over 100 bars and ‘restaurants’ in about 4-5 blocks of Magsaysay… interestingly, ‘our’ bars were on the first street to the right, Gordon Avenue, and NONE of them are listed…LOL

The picture below is from the cruise book from 1975, kinda says it all… The Mayaguez rescue, Jenny the donkey in Diego Garcia, and a monkey in the BOQ at Cubi eating popcorn it had stolen from a room…

The donkey loved beer, and would actually drink it from the can (until she got too drunk, then she’d go lean against the Butler hut that was our ‘hangar’)…

A ‘normal’ road trip was 6 weeks, 7 countries and about 11-12,000 miles of just transits, not counting the operational flying…

Fun stuff, and good memories (the bad ones have been long forgotten)! An interesting side note, we never called ourselves ‘combat’ air crews, just alpha crews (You had to complete multiple qualifications to meet all the requirements to actually be certified to perform all the P-3’s missions).