Oregon vs. Nebraska

Insulted again. Oregon beats Nebraska in football right on national television for all to watch. Your old columnist hasn’t much cared for Oregon football since they beat Air Force in the first game ever played at the brand new Air Force Academy Stadium beautifully located at the foot of the Rockies.

I was lucky enough to attend that first ever game in the Academy’s new stadium back in 1962. At the time we (includes my Grannie Annie, who stayed home with our year old daughter and pregnant with our son to be born in December) were stationed at Otis AFB, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I along with some other Academy grads had hitchhiked to Colorado on an Air Force C-121, Super Connie. The Connie crew just dumped us off at the Colorado Springs Airport as they had been recalled due to some kind of a national emergency. Then at the brand new stadium proudly paid for by personal donations (mostly) from Air Force personnel and built with zero government funds, Oregon insulted by beating us in a hard fought contest. Not at all courteous I thought. Just like last Saturday when Nebraska came from way back and almost made it to victory. We lost!

That hinted at national emergence just happened to be what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Somehow we ex-cadets, by then rated officer pilots and navigators, caught a ride back to our home bases on an Air Force C-54 same as a civilian DC-4 airliner. A miserable trip that was as I suffered a blocked sinus and experienced severe pain on descent for landing. Medically grounded but no problem, next day I crawled on another C-54 and rode to Sondrestrom AB, Greenland for several weeks of alert duty as a KC-97 copilot. For sure Ann and our children were closer to the action in Cuba than I was up north of the Arctic Circle.

The Cuban Crisis came and went but my own experience illustrates the plight of military personnel and their families. Had nuclear war kicked off over Cuba my family surely would have been wiped out by a USSR bomb on Otis AFB. Our orders in Greenland would have been to launch, meet a nuclear armed B-47 from somewhere in the States on his way to drop on a target in the USSR. It would have been expected that we in our tanker aircraft give our receiver all the fuel he needed even if that meant we could not get back to a recovery base. Dead stick landing and survival in the Arctic, not a very good prospect for long life.

Now as I write this our nation is observing the 16th anniversary of what we call 9-11. Followers of that peaceful religion of Mohamed hijacked American airliners and then flew them into the Twin Towers of World Trade Center, the Pentagon and probably tried for our US Capital building. It was one of those stupendous moments in time when everyone remembers exactly what they were doing when they heard the news.

I was just approaching Kansas City intending to land at Lees Summit Airport on the east side of the City. Then in urgent language that I’d never heard before Kansas City Approach Control directed a business jet ahead of me to land at Kansas City Downtown Airport. The jet pilot didn’t wanted to land there and the controller sternly directed him to land immediately due to a “national emergency”. He let me continue to Lees Summit.

On landing my five or six truck driving passengers skedaddled to their semi-tractors and headed back to Oberlin. I walked into the FBO to find a TV dragged into the lobby and a small crown including several flight instructors watching. Together we observed the second airliner fly into the second tower and I knew that our world had changed! My fellow instructors were upset because they suspected that one of the hitchhikers was a Saudi Arabian national that had just gone through their flight school at Lees Summit. Their former student had been arrogant and hard to work with and they didn’t like him very much!

I should have caught a ride back with one of my truck driving passengers as it was four or five days later that twin engine aircraft like mine were cleared to fly again. Yes our world changed that memorable day some sixteen years ago.

That is how I saw it.

Dick Trail