Barnyard96 said:

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Duck and cover for the win!

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Don't joke, we did that exercise on a monthly basis. At home we had enough spam to last at least a year.

Yawn. We live under the same threat today. As does everyone else in the world

BudFox7 said:

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Yawn. We live under the same threat today. As does everyone else in the world

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No. That was different. Now we are prepared in case something happens. During the missile crisis, we were right on the brink. One wrong move by the Russians or us and the missiles would have been flying, and as one poster described, the Russians came scary close to that wrong move at least once.

We are far far far less prepared both immediately and for the aftermath.

BudFox7 said:

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We are far far far less prepared both immediately and for the aftermath.

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Agree.

This was pre-conception for me. But from what I recall...

wildcat08 said:

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BudFox7 said:

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Yawn. We live under the same threat today. As does everyone else in the world

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No. That was different. Now we are prepared in case something happens. During the missile crisis, we were right on the brink. One wrong move by the Russians or us and the missiles would have been flying, and as one poster described, the Russians came scary close to that wrong move at least once.

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We also came scary close in 1983, due to a malfunction in a Soviet missile warning satellite.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident

I was on alert for that one. Twice I got real messages to get ready to go, that was one of them.

BudFox7 said:

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We are far far far less prepared both immediately and for the aftermath.

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I wasn't clear in what I was trying to say. I meant now we are effectively "standing guard" in case something happens. During the Cuban crisis, we were eyeball to eyeball and very close to war.

doubledog said:

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Barnyard96 said:

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Duck and cover for the win!

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Don't joke, we did that exercise on a monthly basis. At home we had enough spam to last at least a year.

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So I cant look back on those days and at least smile?

Was a junior in HS. We all just assumed we were going to be drafted and headed to the island. Too soon, we thought we'd all be frying in a nuclear holocausts. First intro to our mortality.

My dad was a U-2 pilot at Laughlin AFB in Del Rio. He was killed over Cuba one year after the missile crisis ended. His mission was "continued U-2 overflights to make sure Castro wasn't re-arming." He earn 5 Air Medals and 1 DFC flying this missions, although he was in Australia when the oct 1962 Cuba missions were flown. The USAF U-2s were primarily used in the "High Altitude Sampling Program" or HASP, and I believe my dad was in Aussieland sampling some Chinese nuclear explosions.

Anyway, the 4080TH Strat Recon Wing operated the U-2 at KDLF until July 1963 when the whole unit moved to Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, AZ. Still, for years, the unit held semi-annual reunions at Laughlin AFB. I was there for most of them as I was stationed there as a T-38 IP. In 2008, I interviewed all of my dad's old buddies for the issue of LIVE! we published in Aug 2008.

"Remembering the Dragon Lady" was the lead story of the magazine. Of the night the U-2s launched from Laughlin for Cuba to photograph the MRBM missiles:

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U-2 pilot Charlie Kern remembers launching five aircraft on a dark, stormy early morning on October 14, 1962 for Cuba. Kern was working the mobile that morning launching his buddies.

"It was the worst storm I've ever seen. Torrential rains. There was lightening all around," he says.

One of the pilots that launched from Laughlin was Buddy Brown. "In the headlights of the mobile [car, that lead them to the runway,] you could see the rain blowing sideways from the left. It was one heck of a crosswind. I didn't think there was any way they [higher headquarters] would execute this mission. But they said 'takeoff!' and off we went," he says. "Somebody was looking over us that night." The aircraft took off in five-minute intervals.

Once out of the thunderstorms, the pilots all flew successful missions. "We went to a common point west of Cuba and split up. Some of us went over Havana, others went to the central part, and more on the eastern side of the island. We covered 90 percent of that island," Brown recalls.

Brown recovered his aircraft at McCoy AFB in Florida (now Orlando International Airport). The others returned to Laughlin. Heyser's sortie from California was the first to land and had the first film downloaded and developed identifying the SOviet SS-4 MRBM offensive nuclear missile site. Kern and other pilots followed them to McCoy the next day in a C-124. Eventually the entire Cuba mission was being operated out of McCoy.

(Cols. Kern and Brown died several years ago)
The full article is here.

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My dad's story runs congruent with the Cuban Missile Crisis. His U-2 went down the day before JFK was assassinated in Dallas.

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By 11 a.m., the pilot completed the zig-zag flight plan over hostile territory taking classified pictures of areas assigned his mission and was approaching Key West, with the coast of Florida becoming larger and larger in the mid-morning sun. Earlier in the mission, in a required radio position report back to the SAC command post, the pilot indicated that his autopilot had failed.

Flying the U-2 was hard enough with the aid of an autopilot. Flying the U-2 without an autopilot is dangerous, especially at high altitude where the air is extremely thin. The airspeed indicator allows for only three knots (about 5 mph) of deviation. If you fly too slow, the U-2 will stall and lose altitude quickly. If you fly too fast, the U-2 will enter a regime called "mach tuck" where the aircraft will exceed the speed of sound and probably break apart. This regime is referred to as the "coffin corner" by U-2 pilots.

More of "The Sky Still Burns in Your Memory"

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This is also a tangent story about the Cuba saga. In 1998, a top dog in the CIA sent me an email to my work computer when I was a CCTS B-52 IP at Barksdale AFB. The email invited me and my mom to Fort Meade in Maryland. He said the CIA was declassifying all of the U-2 (A-C) mission data up and until 1972. It was an all-expense paid TDY for me.

Of course, the focus of the symposium, that was televised on CSPAN, was the CIA U-2 operations in the 1950s until 1961 when Francis Gary Powers was shot down near Moscow. FG Powers, Jr., his son, was there and on stage were all 8 CIA U-2 pilots. FG Powers, Jr., stood up and requested they inform him if his father was a coward, or did not follow orders, by not killing himself with a coin that had a hidden cyanide needle in it -- in case of capture. All 8 CIA pilots said the cyanide coin was "optional" and Gary Powers was a hero for standing trial and etc. Powers founded the Cold War Museum in the DC area.

FG Powers, JR. and I became good friends at that symposium. At around 2000, an American ex-pat in Cuba informed me that there was a U-2 wreckage in the backyard of some "museum" in Havana. We paid the guy to take pics and to get some pieces of the U-2 sent back to us. We believe the wreckage was of Maj. Rudy Anderson's U-2 that was shot down by Castro himself during the Cuban Missile Crisis--Castro actually pressed the launch button at a Soviet SA-2 site in Cuba. We mounted the pieces onto bases. In 2002, the USAF renamed the Laughlin AFB operations building "Anderson Hall." FG Powers JR brought the mounted U-2 pieces and presented one to the 47 FTW to display in Anderson Hall. Another piece was presented to Robyn Lorys, the daughter of Maj. Anderson.

Finally, Communist Cuba weighed heavily in secret U-2 operations in the '60s as the Chinese were making and testing H-bombs. Maj. Robin Yeh was a Taiwan Air Force pilot who came to Laughlin AFB in the 1960s to learn to fly the U-2. The CIA furnished Taiwan with the U-2 to spy on the CCP nuke program. Yeh was shot down, captured, and was a prisoner for 20 years in Communist China. After release, and the last half of his life, he was a jeweler in Houston. Here's Robin's story:

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In February 1963, Major Changti "Robin" Yeh of the Republic of China (Taiwan) Air Force arrived at Laughlin AFB to learn how to fly the U-2. It was the start of a 20-year journey that would take him from the top of the military aviation in Taiwan to captivity in Mainland China to being refused by his own countrymen in Taiwan upon his release from captivity.

"I probably had over 100 missions over Mainland China," Yeh says. He was a fighter pilot, the best of the best. He started his career in the T-33 for training, flew the F-86 "Sabre", RF-84F, and then was selected to fly dangerous low level photo reconnaissance missions over the Mainland Chinese coastal airfields in the RF-101. This was a supersonic, single-seat fighter designed to penetrate enemy territory alone, unarmed, and unafraid and shoot them with nothing but a camera mounted in the nose.

"When you takeoff, you had to stay low, about 80 feet over the water" Yeh says. That was to avoid detection of the Communist Chinese (ChiCom) enemy radar. "You can see the sailboats. The men stand up [on the sailboat], and then when you pass by, they all lay down!" he says with a laugh.

More: Communist China's POW for 20 Years

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My Dad was stationed on the USS Longbeach in the middle of it all. Said it was an intense and dangerous time. He thought we were going to war. He helped design the propulsion system for the USS Longbeach (the world's first surface nuclear powered warship.) He passed away almost 7 years ago. Hell of a man!