(Sept 30, 2022) “Mama Walker” (Big Walker Mountain) is a fickle lady. One day she can take you to incredible heights, other days a hard smack down to earth. With Covid and other things in life, my visits to her have been rare in the last few years. Last weekend was the Big Walker Fly In, and I paid her a visit to see what she might offer me. At my age I am no longer interested in the often rock and roll rowdy thermals that can take you to the incredible heights (and sometimes severe pucker when coming into a turbulent LZ at the end of a flight). After over 40 years of flying, and a body that is slowing down, I am more than happy to experience the magic of stepping off a mountain again, but into gentle evening conditions. If one is lucky, a Wonder Wind will kick in as the sun is sinking - a gentle and widespread lifting of the last warm air as the valley below cools.
For younger and bolder pilots, mid-day thermals can be wondrous things - finding the center of one and turning tight, high banked circles can take you to great heights at 1000 or more ft/min. In a matter of minutes the mountain you launched from can seem to flatten as it recedes below you. But what goes up must go down, and where there is rapidly rising air, there must also be rapidly sinking air, often very close by. Flying out of one into the other can result in “going over the falls”, which is exactly what it sounds like, as you find your glider nose suddenly pointing at the ground (modern gliders will recover quickly). Or encountering turbulence that leaves you feeling weightless while you hear the sail being smacked down on the frame above you. Modern gliders are built to safely handle this, [Read more…]
(April 4, 2018) Last October I wrote about the events of 50 years previous (October 1967) that had resulted in my sudden departure from the boonies of Vietnam ( 50 Years Ago Today - Vietnam ). This event is also now 50 years in the past. After a month or so in the medical facilities in Japan, I made it home just in time for Christmas. I had 30 days of leave upon my return, but still had nearly a year of time left in my 3 year enlistment. Before my injury, I had gone to the Public Information Office to see about being a combat photographer. I had done a 6 month extension to get into the Recondos, and I was considering another 9 month extension (in Vietnam, but not the Army). That would bring me back to the states with less than 90 days in my tour, which would have given me an Early Out. If I had to be in the Army, Vietnam seemed preferable to the spit and polish of being on stateside duty. It would be hard to get used to that after the more relaxed discipline of a war zone. But spending months on end humping the boonies was already losing appeal. As a photographer I could still spend time in the boonies, but only for shorter periods with the opportunity to sleep on a real bed between times. I was going to sign the extension papers the next time we came in from the field. Except I found myself on the way to Japan on a medical evacuation before that could happen.[Read more…]
(Oct 26, 2017) Fifty years ago today, October 26, 1967, my time in the boonies of Vietnam came to a sudden end.
I don’t remember feeling anything other than the sensation that a gray wall had hit and surrounded me, followed by a sensation of flying. There was no sound. It was the first time I learned that a sudden violent death would be painless – you only feel pain if you survive. Three of us were put on the Medevac chopper out of the boonies on that day.[Read more…]
Way back about 30 years ago, when I was a passionate and dedicated hang gliding Instructor, (with passionate and dedicated students), I only had an East facing training hill, which limited the number of days we could get out.
One of the ways we increased the number of training days was to get out very early and set up the gliders before the sun rose enough to hit the hill (which was a little bit later than actual sunrise). Then, when the sun first hit the hill, there would often be a little bit of upslope flow that would allow for a few flights before whatever the prevailing direction for the day set in.
The flow was so light that often the windflags would not stir enough to give any reliable indicator of direction, so I used soap bubbles to find suitable launch windows. Yes, Virginia, it is harder to launch in “still air” when the bubbles are going down the hill than when they are going up the hill.
As it turned out, the soap bubbles provided a fair amount of entertainment beyond the flying activities of the day. They allowed new students to better visualize air flow. Blow bubbles upwind of a glider wing and watch the ones above the wing speed up while the ones below slow down - to provide an excellent demonstration of the Bernoulli effect. Or watch the airflow (and turbulence) around obstacles and terrain features. And then there were other surprising things that were pretty cool - like a bubble hitting a dew-drenched thistle. Instead of popping the bubble, it would often come to rest with the sharp thistle points inside of, or even poking through it.
As it also turned out, we ended up blowing bubbles on some very cold mornings, which brings us to the point of this long winded post. When it was well below freezing, the newly blown bubbles would transition fairly rapidly from clear to milky and opaque. When one popped it did not disappear as they normally do, but simply deflated, like a balloon with no air, and would then flutter to the ground.
No longer being a dedicated instructor (neither part any longer applies :-), it has been a long time since I have seen, or even
thought of, frozen bubbles. Fortunately, Jean thought about them on this cold morning, and a balcony off of a warm living room gave ample opportunity to play and take photos of frozen bubbles, as you can see in this collage.
(Written late at night to some younger friends while my wife was out of town) I was sitting here going idly surfing before bed… Came across a movie sound track and one thing led to another. It (Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket) had one track that played a key role in my (mis-spent) youth (high school version). And that led me to a couple of others that also figured prominently. Not all that sure why you’d care, except perhaps as a glimpse into a long-ago time ;-)
Anyhow, in high school (’65) I had a ‘56 Chevy convertible, which I thought was a pretty cool set of wheels. There were no tape decks (or even FM radio) then, just a few Top 40 AM stations to listen to. Sears had a car record player that played 45 rpm records. It actually did a pretty good job and didn’t skip unless you hit really big bumps, like rail road tracks. There was also no stereo then, but you could ‘enhance’ the mono tracks with a ‘reverberator’ (basically a tunable-delay echo track).
I imagine today that would be done electronically, but back then it got the delay by vibrating one end of a spring, then picking up the signal at the other end of the spring. It also had it’s own amplifier, so between the player and the reverb you could generate some respectable (for the time) volume. Although the same railroad tracks that would cause the record player to skip would also cause the reverb spring to hit something, adding some extra loud echoing twangs to the noise.
In case you have not yet gotten the idea that these were different times, perhaps this pic of yours truly from about that time will help clarify ;-) On weekends there were about 3 or 4 of us that would regularly get together to ‘raise hell’. We were still trying to figure out exactly how to do that, but we were getting some pretty good OJT by investing in large quantities of beer and then sort of letting things work themselves out from there.
(Written August 16, 2010) Jean and I just got back from my 4th Viet Nam reunion. We had attended my first-ever reunion in 2004, which was also the first reunion of my Recondo platoon in over 20 years. That was a memorable event ( http://wind-drifter. … Nam/ReconReunion.php ). In 2006 the first reunion of the 2/502 Infantry Battalion (101st Airborne Div) was held, and we went to that too (the Recondos were part of the 2/502). They had been having yearly reunions through the early 80’s, then the guy who had been organizing them died, and his wife had thrown out all the records (which were simply index cards back then) - and no one had tried to put things together again until a couple of guys organized the one in 2006. That was held in conjunction with the larger 101st semi-annual reunion. It was also where I agreed to take over setting up a new web page ( http://2nd502.org ), and so became much more involved. This was the second reunion since then, both of which were held together with the 101st reunion.
Our numbers have grown, and there were 190 guys from the “O Deuce” alone signed up for this reunion, with many more on our roster who didn’t make it. Together with the other 101st vets, there may have been close to 1000 guys at this Indianapolis reunion, including a number of vets from World War II and Korea. These two guys were from the Easy Company that was featured in Band of Brothers:
They were a hoot - the guy on the right was a tiny little shriveled and bent gnome of a guy - and they both were running around looking like trouble searching for a place to happen. They had a lot, if not all, of their meals paid for by other vets at the local restaurant.
This was a year that a lot of loose ends and stories came together. Late Friday night, all seven of us from the Recondo platoon that were sitting at a table figured out that we had all served together for at least a few months in the summer of 67 (the Recondos typically operated at ~40-50 guys total). [Read more…]
