Publication: Air Power History
Publication Date: 22-MAR-07
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Van Orman, Edward William
Article Excerpt
God, it was big! No, that's wrong. It was enormous! I stood beneath what I thought was the nose entrance hatch. It was the hatch to the radio compartment. What did I know? I looked back toward the tail and all I could see was a wing. It could have been measured in acres or time zones. Where to begin?
It was late April 1954. I had spent a year and a half in the Air Training Command, trying to get to where I now stood. In those eighteen months I had jumped through every hoop the Air Force had set before me. Unknowingly, it had jumped through a few of mine. On this warm spring day, we had reached an accord. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) had cut orders sending me to the 436th Bomb Squadron, 7th Bomb Wing, 19th Air Division, Eighth Air Force at Carswell AFB, Ft. Worth, Texas. I was happy to oblige. I had achieved Nirvana.
In August 1952, two months shy of my eighteenth birthday, I had finally broken my mother's will and obtained the needed parental consent to join the Air Force. I was enraptured by flight. I cannot remember a time when I did not look up at any passing airplane. Now in my seventies, I still do it.
Slowly, the first sergeant and I walked toward the aft end of the colossus. I had only a "visitors" ramp pass. He was doing me a kindness in escorting me out onto the flightline so I could see up close the object that would fulfill my boyhood hopes and dreams. The number 5707, painted in four-foot-high numerals proclaimed her identity. We passed under that great wing and I gazed up at a vertical stabilizer measured in stories rather than feet. She had only recently had her more expansive heraldry removed. But the shiny, un-weathered portion of the tail still showed a giant triangle with a block "J" in the center. A patina of time would erase this declaration of belonging. I could not enter the aft compartment, which was invitingly open. "No ramp pass--no touch." I could wait.
"We better get back." The first sleeve broke my reverie.
"Yes sir," I answered, instinctively.
We turned and retraced our steps to the gate. All the while, I looked about at acres and acres of concrete covered with B-36s.
My Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC) was that of an aerial gunner. I no longer recall the numbers, but mine ended with the letter "B." That made me rather unique at that time, in that fraternity. Not only did I not hold a gun, no one did that anymore, but neither did I manipulate a remote control sight. I operated a gun laying radar set. In the early fifties, we were a new breed, and soon to be the only one of the species left. Just as the ring sight had been replaced by a circular reticule, it in turn had given way to a blip on a cathode ray tube (CRT) screen.
I had come to that job by a route the Air Force was determined I would not take. Had the service had its way, I would have become a bombing and navigation radar technician. But, "no good loophole goes unexploited." I found one, and to borrow from Robert Frost: "Took the road less traveled."
Lowry
As I stood before the clerk's desk to pick up my orders at the end of basic training, he ran his finger down the page until he came to my name. He stopped and began to underscore those lines that pertained to me. He paused and looked at me. "Lowry, you lucky bastard. Best duty in the Training Command." He shook his head.
I spent fifteen months at Lowry AFB, Colorado, attending three schools. Much, but not all, of that time was wasted, learning things I would never use. That is not just my opinion. When SAC began training B-52 tail gunners, they cut the Air Training Command completely out of the loop. I did learn to speak "electroniceze" and to identify all of the component parts and sub-assemblies of the two radar sets I would be using. But, I was not going to do what I had trained for. I left Lowry never having turned on, much less operated, either an APG-32 or APG-41 radar, or firing a 20mm cannon. Everything that I really needed to know would come as an unbidden gift from a man I would come to know and admire greatly, but not at Lowry.
The buck sergeant at Parks AFB, who effused over my assignment, had been right in one respect. He had just used the wrong proper noun. Lowry wasn't great, Denver was. Today, most seventeen and eighteen year olds have traveled. For all practical purposes, I had not. In the truest sense, I was a small town rube. To me Denver was a metropolis and many of my barracks mates were worldly.
I spent all of 1953 in the nether reaches of Lowry, being thoroughly disillusioned by the base and the two schools I attended. The entire year was spent on Lowry II. The main base, called Lowry I, was a permanent facility. During World War II an annex was built on the Eastern side of the North-South runway and was designated Lowry II. The atmosphere was from a John Steinbeck novel. We were not on the wrong side of the tracks, but that runway was pure metaphor. Even worse than the schools and the ambiance was the time between schools. When not assigned to a class you were a "casual," a benign term for "indentured servant." For three dreary, seemingly endless months, I pulled casual duty: KP, laundry detail; KP, furnace guard; KP, and every other crummy job that came up. All together, I was a casual for more than five months. Of course, this did not go un-avenged. In the first course I took, "Basic Electronics," I managed to outfox the system, using its own rules.
The course was twenty weeks long, with a test on the last hour each Friday. If you passed, you went on to the next week. If you failed you "phased back," that is, repeated the past week's syllabus. Fail in the same week twice and you were gone. The tests had twenty questions; worth five points each. Four of them were "key" questions. If you missed a key question, you also phased back. So, you could score 95 on the test, and still have to repeat the previous week. Your grade point score stayed high, but you did not advance. This becomes important. By about the seventh week the key questions started to jump out at me.
The Basic Electronics course led to about a dozen secondary schools. The largest of these was the one on bombing and navigation radar systems. On average, seven out of every ten graduates went there. (All of those B-47s coming on line.) Of these secondary schools, only one led to a possible flying billet: B-36 tail radar and possibly B-36 gunnery. Long odds, but there was nothing to lose.
In the seventeenth week, we were apprised of the school choices open to...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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