AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2014 - 75

6908th. "The main target of Compass Flag
was the NVA GDRS-General Directorate
of Rear Services. This was the command
responsible for the movement of troops and
supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail."
Later, a four-engine EC-130 replaced
the QU-22B on this mission. "The QU-22B
broke the ground on this remote-receiving
technology-25,000 feet, single pilot, singleengine, unpressurized, no weather radar,
IFR over hostile territory. Now that is one
hell of a tough mission," Bernard said.
THE MEN

Life at NKP was pretty good, Pucilowski
said. The pilots had air-conditioned
hooches, or quarters. "I happened to tap
into the base phone line, so I jury-rigged a
phone into my hooch, where I was able to
call my wife on the HF radio."
He would pass the time on orbit by
reading. "Most of the time I read a book a
mission. One of the neat features of the airplane was they had music-you could tune
to a channel and listen to music over your
headset. It made the time go by." With the
pattern programmed into the autopilot, all
the pilot had to do was correct for wind
drift and monitor.
Takeoffs in the airplane could be scary,
he added. "The takeoff roll would roll, and
roll, and roll, and finally it would lift off the
ground." The large hump on the cowl made
climbing out a challenge; it blocked the
pilot's view and induced vertigo. "I know
I got vertigo quite a bit over there. The only
thing that saved me was the autopilot."
"NKP, including flying, was the most
fun I ever had in the Air Force," Martine
said. "We were very close. Our squadron
commander did a great job of keeping up
the camaraderie." They often played volleyball, pilots versus maintenance guys.
"We had a party hooch, we had full-time,
24-hours-a-day Thai bartenders. There
was always something to do."
On missions Martine read, worked
crossword puzzles, and listened to the
music. Sometimes he would talk with a

ground controller in Quang Tri, Vietnam. "He was bored silly
most of the time at night, and he'd be happy to talk to you if
you wanted to talk."
One night, Brightbill fell asleep on orbit. "It was pitch dark
when I fell asleep and when I woke up, the sun was up, and I
was scared to death that I would run out of fuel and not make it
back to the base. I looked at my watch and I'd only been asleep
for 15 minutes, so it didn't affect my mission."
WEATHER AND MECHANICAL

"The weather would pop up so fast-you could see it while
you were flying." Pucilowski said. "It would be a beautiful day,
and those thunderstorms would come up over 35,000 feet in
the matter of an hour. Then you'd see a line of thunderstorms
between you and NKP, and you'd wonder how you were going
to get home.
"We were always concerned about thunderstorms, flying
into a cloud with no radar or any ability to tell if we were flying
into a big cell or not." Pucilowski was caught in a thunderstorm

"We had a few real-time strikes called in from
our information, but for the most part it was
intelligence gathering."
-Jim Brightbill

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2014

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