War Stories 43

[ikar]

When I arrived the 3rd T.F.S. were losing their shoarmouths:

After our Connies headed home, we received new aircraft, the 16th S.O.S.

Not long after that we acquired the F-111s from Takli. Because of this the reventment area for the fighters had to be re-designed to accomadate their swing wings.

One day on the flight line I noticed that some of the F-4s were missing their sharkmouth markings. The A-7s had gone plain earlier and now this. I started asking the maintenance guys what was going on and they said orders came down from PACAF to take them off. There was some resistance as sharkmouths turned up on the F-4s , this time on the top of their AIM 9 rails. They were removed when spotted by supervisors and replaced by someone else. Soon the Varks got involved as a sharkmouth started to show up on the leading E.C.M. pods. They weren't too big but could be seen under the belly if you looked. Eventually they all disappeared for good.

The next blow came when the 34th T.F.S. was told they were going to ferry their "E" models to another base and start flying their "D"s instead. Not a lot of happy pilots there. Having no choice and being the dedicated pilots we know and love they flew their ships north to Ubon and picked up the Wolf Pack aircraft. I managed to get a camera to one of the pilots who had his back seater who got some decent photos. When he got back he said they spotted a Mig cutting across the border. He was well below them and they were unarmed so all they could do was watch. He also told me that he had seen another F-4 when they arrived mounting three guns but by then had run out of film.

After they arrived the "JJ" tail code was applied and the 34th carried on as usual, with a few ops changes because of their model differences.

The next to be hit was the A-7s of the 3rd T.F.S. their tail codes started changing from white to black:

They also continued to stand by on Sandy Alert: