Echoes of War

A non fiction story line of how it was lived with emotions of becoming a crew member, as a C-130 Flight Engineer. To bring together family life and Air Force life, with some joy and some sorrow as it unfolded. Written with hopes of going into high schools to inspire the young and give them the urge to want to be able to fly the planes and travel the world. This goes into some depth on maintenance fixes and problems in particularly C-130 aircraft. This could be good reading material for aircrew personnel. It also gives some understanding as to what politics has to do with service life, like getting fired by the First Lady of the United States. Except for not including "Elvis" (Which occurred before the start of the story) this book could just about be the "Forrest Gump" of the Air Force. To write about some of the events that happened, the author had to go back in time in his mind to relive some bad times. Aircraft crashes and the trauma of the ongoing war or wars, he had to put himself back there and through some of the nightmares that would follow these experiences that had to be relived again and again, as if they were just echoes. Only these echoes brought with them the smells and screams as if they just happened again, only with fresh tears. This story I suppose actually started back about 1948. I was so fascinated with aircraft when I was 14 years old; I would ride my bike nearly two miles over the top of a hill, that over looked the Birmingham, Alabama airport. To park the bike, and sit on the ground for maybe an hour or so, just to watch the planes land and take off. At that time most of the planes were the war-birds that had survived the war. The passenger planes had been converted from military cargo planes. There were some new planes coming on the scene too. I had just turned seventeen when I went with my friend Raymond to the Air Force recruiters for him to sign up. Sitting in the car got too cold so I went in to get warm, and I signed up too, for four years. Four days later, I was strapped in a converted C-47, and leaving the runway that I dreamed of, some three years before.{As a passenger) After basic training, of all things, they assigned me to the aircraft maintenance field. The first school lasted six months, but it was just basic maintenance, but there was more to come. For each aircraft you worked on, you had to go to further schooling for that particular type. So it went, from C-54s, to C-119s, then to C-130s. This latest bird was the Queen of the crop. It also put me stationed at Ashiya AFB, Japan where we were getting brand new planes. This story takes up here, where my whole squadron was going to be in training, not just me.