Text 2773, 50 rader
Skriven 2009-02-15 06:46:20 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
   Kommentar till text 2698 av John Massey (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: MORMONS
===============
Replying to a message of John Massey to Bob Ackley:

 JM> Bob Ackley -> God Dan wrote:

 BA>> April '65 to April '71 I was on Okinawa, in a theater level
 BA>> intelligence processing  center.  My area of primary interest was
 BA>> North Vietnam's air force, specifically its transports (mostly LI-2
 BA>> - DC-3s built in the Soviet Union under license from  Douglas
 BA>> Aircraft - and AN-2 - a *huge* single-engine enclosed biplane that
 BA>> can carry up to 15 passengers).  In the course of my duties I
 BA>> developed a passing familiarity with civilian air traffic in and
 BA>> through Southeast Asia. AFAIK, the International Control
 BA>> Commission's B-307 aircraft (callsigns FBELX, FBELY and FBELZ) are
 BA>> still sitting at Tan Son Nhut Airport, they're the last 3 of those
 BA>> aircraft in existence; the B-307 is the civilian airliner version of
 BA>> the B-17.

 BA>> I was assigned to Da Nang, RVN, on temporary duty from September to
 BA>> November,  1965.  From July of '71 to July of '72 I flew as a back
 BA>> end crew member on EC-47s  flying out of Nakhon Phanom RTAFB,
 BA>> Thailand.  In the course of that last assignment I  flew *over* a
 BA>> lot of northeast and eastern Laos, and my area of interest there was
 BA>> North Vietnam's General Directorate of Rear Services (GDRS), which
 BA>> is the outfit that ran the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail' in eastern Laos down
 BA>> into Cambodia and South Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA)
 BA>> operating in northeast Laos (the 372nd and 373rd NVA Infantry
 BA>> Regiments were based east of and on the Plain of Jars (Plainne des
 BA>> Jarres) in northeast Laos all through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, in
 BA>> 1975 one of the was moved  back into North Vietnam and down to the
 BA>> border with South Vietnam and participated in the 1975 invasion of
 BA>> South Vietnam, we watched it move all the way).  Those NVA regiments 
 BA>> were the muscle behind the Pathet Lao 'guerillas.'

 JM> Did you ever fly into Uborn or Udorn Thailand?

Not on missions.  I flew over to visit our unit at Udorn shortly after my
arrival
in Thailand on an 'orientation visit.'  While I was there I met another Robert
L.
Ackley, too; he's from the Minneapolis area IIRC.

I've flown by Ubon but never landed there.  After I left in 1972 my unit moved
down to Ubon to make room at NKP for our sister outfit that moved up from
Saigon.  The last large aircraft lost in the Vietnam war was one of my unit's
EC-47s flying out of Ubon in March of 1973, two months *after* that peace
treaty
was signed.

--- FleetStreet 1.19+
 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)