Vicious dog

I was living in a place in St. Mary subdivision in Balibago, right outside the main gate of Clark Air Base.  It was a row of two-story apartments.  At the end of the row, about four or five doors down where the road turned, there was a German shepherd that they kept in the front atrium.  Each place had a fenced off car park area right in front of the entrance. 

This damn dog would bark, all night long.  Not at anything in particular, it would just lay on the front porch and bark, bark, bark. . . . A couple of times I dosed a balls of hamburger to knock the dog out, but the suspicious bastard never touched the meat I threw him.

So one afternoon I was walking home from an early bar hop.  I had a few beers in me and was feeling a bit jaunty.  As I passed the gate of this place the dog comes screaming up to the fence, barking and snarling and threatening all kinds of bodily harm.  Well, I happened to be in the mood to argue with a dog as it happened, so I stopped and bent down to his level and yelled back at him, stirring him up to a murderous frenzy.

It got old after about a minute so, mission accomplished, I sauntered on towards home.

Behind me I heard a gate open and a female filipino accent said, "Get him!" There was a low growl and the sound of claws on concrete.

I grew up around dogs.  German shepherds.  They don't scare me the least bit.  I turned around and this dog was coming at me low and fast.  I yelled at the top of my lungs and charged him with my hands out.  Friggin' dog suddenly saw Jesus, realized in a flash that maybe I knew something that he didn't, and decided that discretion was the better part of valor.  I chased him all the way back to his porch with his tail between his legs.  His female mistress was standing there open mouthed at how ineffective her attack dog was, and I decided to yell at her for a little while. After berating her for sic'ing her dog on me, I told her that the next goddamn time that dog was barking at 3:00am I was going to come over and kill the sonofabitch. Neighbors were coming out to see what the commotion was.

That was the last time I heard from or saw that dog.  I think they ate him.

FOD'ing the Pods

FOD - Foreign Object Damage - the anathema of jet aircraft, and something to continuously be on the watch for if you work anywhere around anything that goes on, in or near a plane.

Herbert Brink, also known as Herb Drink, Staff Sgt. U.S. Air Force RAF Bentwaters.  Herb had been in the Army where he'd been shot twice - by his own troops. He decided to join the Air Force because they don't issue Air Force people with guns.  Herb was basically  incompetent, and once that I realized that he was also functionally illiterate I realized I could do whatever I wanted around him and because he simply could not write me up since he was incapable of writing.  One time I even call them chickenshit right to his face. He was a thin man of medium build, smoked like a chimney, lived in the barracks and got drunk a lot. He wore little thin glasses.

One night I was working night shift and we had an exercise kick off at about 4 AM.  When we had an exercise we had to bring in all of our training pods.  Normally we kept about eight pods programmed with training settings so they could practice actually using the pods on training flights.  When we had a war exercise we had to pull those pods in and reprogram them with combat settings, which was about a two-hour evolution that involved pulling panels and circuit cards, then reinstalling them and giving everything a quick check.  

When the balloon went up at 4 AM, we started reprogramming pods.  We had to open the panels for cards, physically change quaternary word settings, and then put them back together.  Herb was running around making himself useful, putting pods back together and inspecting them. Herb was our nightshift seven-level inspector, and had to sign off each pod as it left the shop as certified for light. We got all of these pods generated in record time and sent them out to the flight line to be loaded onto the aircraft.

As the recall went out and the day shift showed up, we prepared to hand the shop over to them.  Part of this was a tool inventory.  There was a missing screwdriver.  We searched everywhere in that shop for that screwdriver, under all the consoles, went back in the pod barn and inspected all of the storage racks.  We finally came to the realization that that screwdriver was not in the shop, which means that it probably got buttoned up inside one of those pods.

This was not going to make the Colonel happy.  Here he's trying to generate aircraft as fast as he can and we come around behind him and red X his aircraft, because we don't know where a screwdriver is

We checked the expediter; four of the pods have been uploaded onto aircraft on RAF Bentwaters.  That was easy.  We just walked out on the line where those aircraft were and pulled the panels.  We pulled the panels off of all four of the pods on base and didn't find anything.  The other two pods that we had turned that morning had been sent over to RAF Woodbridge.  After the branch chief and finished his hysterics in his office, he sent us to the sensor shop to borrow their truck to go over to Woodbridge and looked for the screwdriver.  John Turner (JT) and I went.  JT was driving.  We got over to Woodbridge and JT said, "I know my way around the Bentwaters line, but I don't know anything about this place.  How do we start looking for where these pods are?"

I noticed that the truck we were driving had a radio in it.  ECM shop didn't have a radio so we didn't have a call sign, and I wasn't about to use sensor's call sign.  I grabbed the radio mike, made up a call sign on the fly and said,  "Red one, Weasel one."  JT choked with laughter at my audacity.

"Go ahead."

"Yeah, lookin' for an ECM pod number 640, can you tell me what aircraft that's uploaded on?"

"Roger that's on tail number 441, tab 20, uh. . . .whoever the hell you are."  JT busted up laughing.

We went over to 20 and pulled the panels off that pod. JT pulled the really long panels over the high band section off  and that screwdriver fell out.  My jaw hit the ground just about the same time the screwdriver did.  I was speechless.

Later that day the shop chief called me up.  Wanted to tell me that one of the pods I had worked on hadn't had the low voltage power supply connector screwed down.  Big fuckin' deal, I thought.  But still, it was a screw up.  I told him that as long as I get judged on the same metric as Herb was, I didn't have a problem with whatever disciplinary action they had for me.  That was the last I heard of it.