Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition.
It's retired US Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Bill Walter. He served as a
gunner aboard an AC one thirty gun ship and was part of Operation Eagle Claw,
which attempted to rescue US hostages in Iran. He was also highly involved
in Operation Just Cause in Panama, specifically at Rio Hato Airfield. He also
served in operations in Granada, El Salvador, Desert Shield and Desert Storm,
Somalia and Bosnia. So a lot to get to, Sarah, Thank you
very much for being with us. Thank you. Where were you born and
raised? I was born in Olivia, Minnesota and raised in a farming town
in Minnesota, Burn Island in Fairfax. A graduate from Fairfax High School.
Very small farming community up there. Any history of military service in your family.
Yes, my dad was in the Navy, was a CB in the
early fifties and he did four years and then got out. Why did you
join the Air Force? Well, seventy six. It was post Vietnam,
the Vietnam warri I just entered about a year prior to that, and I
was looking for something to do. And there was this high school counselor that
said, don't discount the military. Guys should think about joining the military,
and I thought that was something I wanted to do. Was not a real
popular thing. Joined the military in seventy six, let me tell you,
But that's what I want to do, and I'm glad it's probably the best
decision I ever made. How soon were you with the AC one thirties.
Well, I went to basic training and all that stuff, as as everybody
knows, I went. My first job was actually weapons loading on F four
fighters in Germany. For two years, I volunteered for gunships. In nineteen
seventy eight. I arrived on Herbert Field for AC one thirty duty in November
of seventy eight. You've literally written the book or books, i should say,
about the history of the AC one thirty from nineteen seventy three to twenty
ten. Why did you love it so much? Well, it's really kind
of hard to explain. I guess the gunship community is pretty well connected,
and once you get in it, you pretty much stay in it, So
I'm not to an outlier. Most people, once they get in a gunship
community, they stay there for their entire career. I was lucky because I
started out at such a low rank and I made rank, went all the
way through, managed to stay for twenty six years, which is not common
in the military, but it certainly was common for us. Why did I
I like being part of the crew AC one thirties as a crew airplane.
Everybody on an airplane has an important task to do. And it might sound
a little bit cliche of this year only as good as your weakest link.
That's absolutely true. On the AC one thirty, everybody does their part.
It's fourteen person crew. It takes a lot of coordination with that. There's
two pilots up front, flight engineer, fire control officer, navigator, the
electronic warfare officer and illuminator operator, and five gunners. So it takes on
the two censors excuse me, I our censor and television sensor. So a
lot of stuff going on on a gunship. Is there a particular because there's
different caliber guns? Of course on the gunship, was there one that you
preferred or were assigned to most often? Well, we're all trained on all
the guns, although and then there's always one person that's called the lead gun
that is like the floor supervisor that coordinates all the gun crew activities. My
favorite gun actually was the forty millimeter because it's World War Two vintage and we
were still running it and it's just a whole lot of fun. It's mechanically
complex. So the gunner's job on the gunship is, believe it or not,
not to shoot the guns, but to maintain and load and clear the
guns. Now, granted, we could fire in manual mode, and we
have done that before, accuracy suffers, but really who shoots the guns on
the original gun ship is the pilot and what we call the pylon turn It's
people can research that if they want. I don't think we need to get
it into too heavy on this interview, but it's a very crew coordinated effort.
These later models, the sensor operators could fire the guns with pilot's consent
through the fire control system, which is basically a computerized fire control system that
compensated for errors. Bottom line is a very accurate system, and our altitudes
ran from anywhere when I was flying anywhere from fifty five feet on up to
ten thousand feet above ground. Let's talk about some of your missions now,
starting with Operation Eagle Claw, talking about the role that AC one thirties were
supposed to have in that mission. Right, there's a lot of people.
I guess it's common knowledge now that AC one thirties were involved, but it
was tamped down for many years because it was a rescue mission. We were
Night two. For those that study history know that the infill infiltration was Night
one and the accident at Desert one, but they don't really follow what was
supposed to happen on night two and Night two was the actual rescue. And
there was well over a thousand people involved in that operation all told, and
a lot of that activity was to happen on night two. I was on
crew number four, which was the backup spare that filled in for any of
the three primary airplane, so we had to know all three different missions we
had. The first, Pappy Gallagher's crew was supporting Delta Force at the actual
Embassy compound fire control or excuse me, a fire support for Major then Burris,
who was our Delta fires guy. Then we had Bubber young Blood that
was at his crew was at the Mayor bad the Extraction Airfield, which is
about thirty forty miles outside of town. Then we had another Colonel Cara,
then Captain Cagle had the downtown airport, so we had pretty much everything covered.
Our job was to support Delta Force for the rescue, use minimal force
necessary. We didn't want to go in there and just mop up on anybody.
That wasn't the intent. The intent is to keep these big crowds that
are obviously not going to be happy with us being there once they find out,
to keep them away from our rescuers and the hostages until they were extracted
to the soccer stadium and then out to the extraction airfield. So that was
the task of the AC one thirty. Lots of moving parts in that mission,
lots of moving parts. But as we say, we never got tonight
two because the crash at Desert one. But how do you practice for something
like that, I mean, being ready to do what you just described.
Is there a way to simulate that effectively? Well to a certain extent,
the physical aspect of doing it, like climbing up to the altitude and so
forth. We first trained for a different mission. We weren't on the rescue,
but we were the first US Air Force aircraft that were assigned to the
at that time called Operation Rice Bowl. And they named it Rice Bowl on
purpose as a deception tactic, so nobody would really put together that we were
going training up for retaliatory strikes on Iran, which is what we really we're
doing. We were to attack the cracking towers of the Aubadon oil refinery there
on the border between Iraq in Iran, and they had some troubles of their
own at the time, so there's some really weird tactics that we had to
use because they didn't want to fly and over Iran. Well we didn't want
to do that either, so we had to do partial orbits and so forth,
and it didn't work out too well because we knew one thing for sure
that if that mission was to go, there was probably no hope ever to
rescue the hostages. Was that was retaliatory had they begin to kill off any
of the hostages, That's what that was about. It never went either.
So let's move to nineteen eighty three and Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada. Eight
missions. You were part of and support of that action. What did that
involve? Well, that was a surprise. Grenado was something that was supposed
to be an in and out we call a milk run that really we were
going down there to rescue the American and some other foreign students that were being
held against their will in the college campus down there grand As. It's a
medical university, And yeah, we went in. It didn't The planning cell
was so short because they had a blood coup essentially that happened on the island,
and nobody was prepared. Nobody expected anything was going to be happening in
that part of the world. And also it was a big surprise. So
we had less than ten days to do planning and execute the mission. And
I would say that things didn't go really well, but I can tell you
from the command and controls perspective, it was very difficult because nothing was put
together very accurately. It was all ad hoc, it was all temporary,
and there was not a lot of communications. The people that made that mission
work were the snuffies, the grunts, the airmen, the sailors and marines
on the line, the people that were doing the mission adjusting accordingly, and
the mission was a success. Two of our aircraft, to be very beginning
to suppressed the Triple A and aircraft artillery sites. That was Kuban's crew and
Clem Twyford's crew. I was on another crew that came up later on that.
We had support missions on night two and three, and by about day
five or so, everything was pretty much back to normal. And then maybe
five or six days after that we went back return to her word, so
not much resistance by the time. Now, pretty much after that first couple
of days, it was pretty much done and all the students were evacuated.
When we come back, Retired US Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Bill Walter tells
us about his reconnaissance flights of our Central America up and then we'll focus intently
on his service at Riojato Airfield in Panama during Operation Just Cause in nineteen eighty
nine and the role the gun ships played in that military action. I'm Greg
Corumbas and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus.
Our guest in this edition has retired US Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Bill
Walter. He served as a gunner aboard AC one thirty gun ships in operations
ranging from the attempted rescue of US hostages in Iran to Grenada and eventually Desert
Storm Somalia and Bosnia. In a moment, he will take us into great
detail about his role and his gunship's role in Panama at Riojato Airfield as part
of Operation Just Cause in December nineteen eighty nine. But first he tells us
about his work flying reconnaissance missions over Central America in the night eighties and how
we saw conditions for Americans deteriorating in Panama. That actually that mission started just
a few months before Grenada. At the time, there was not a whole
lot of night vision capability in the US. We the gunship were kind of
cutting edge. I look at it now and I go wow, it almost
seems like dinosaurs stuff that we had back then compared to now. But it
was cutting edge technology then we could see at night. We could videotape everything
we do. We videotape. When we're shooting, it's videotaped. When we're
surveilling, it's videotaped. And as the old tax three quarter inch videos that
used to be real calmon And so our job was to go down there and
monitor guerrilla activity FMLN gorillas in El Salvador. And I guess it's okay to
say it now that we were actually monitoring both sides, the friendly side and
the gorilla side to monitor the activity. So we would fly these missions out
of Howard Air Force Base in Panama. They're ten to twelve hour missions,
all nighters. We'd take off about the time the sun went down, and
we'd fly three hours to get up in country, tank up on fuel,
aerial refueling prior to going in. We go in there, we had these
well they call targets, they're actually just surveillance points, and we'd have to
hit usually five, six, maybe eight total of those surveillance points, video
record activity, monitor activity, and then fly back to Howard about the time
the sun was coming up. And then once a week, unless they had
something really important it was going on, they'd sent it up immediately and the
videotapes should then be edited and then sent up right directly to Joint Chiefs of
Staff. It was a JCS directed mission, so we weren't even technically working
for the Air Force. We were working for JCS, and that mission lasted
for seven years. I got like forty five missions over El Salvador, and
some of them were very boring. Let me tell you, you're in the
dark and the perfect environment to sleep and there's been a couple of times that
guys in the back would go up on the flight deck and find the pilots
and the engineer both sleeping, or all three of them sleeping passed out on
autopilot, and the nav would be the only one that was awake and had
to wake him up. Usually this is on the on the return leg,
not when we're over country. Everybody's pretty keyed up over country because periodically we
draw fire, but never really anything that was that was significant. You mentioned
Howard Air Force based in Panama, but there were also missions you were on
in Panama prior to just cause explain what those involved and why they were necessary.
Yeah, there was. We were kind about eighty late eighty seven or
early eighty eight. We're kind of dual hatton missions. We split the missions
going up into All Salvador with the missions Panama Canal Security missions, and it
was part of the treaty. There's a whole bunch of different agreements. Who
really need to get into that too much, but I can tell you this,
the Noriega's Panama Defense Forces were infiltrating US facilities such as the air Han
tank farm and the ammunition supply points over at various places on Panama and they
would go in there and they'd fire up the Marines or the army, whoever
the security force was. So now it's always done at night. Again,
who's got the night surveillance capability gunship? So we actually armed our airplanes because
when we're doing all Salvador missions we were not armed. It was considered peacetime
special reconnaissance. So we armed our aircraft for the Panama mission, and we
would go over whenever there was a firefight or any kind of action at all,
and there were some and there actually was one marine killed in one of
the firefights by friendly fire, but there was a whole lot of activity going
on, and people wouldn't believe that there was. We would go and video
record the activity and turn it in. As a matter of fact, Chuck
Frye was Colonel fry was running that operation for a while. He lived in
town here. He recently passed away, but Chuck had a lot to say
about that mission. So all kind of secret squirrel stuff as we call it.
But it was necessary to protect not only our military installations in Panama,
but to remember, there was a whole lot of civilians and dependence and other
people that lived down there in Panama, and Noriega had old problem would letting
his goon squads, that's what I call them, beat up anybody that was
downtown that would get in his way. And there were several confentrations with Panama
Defense Forces and what they call the Dignity Battalions towards eighty eight eighty nine,
where if you got downtown and you got in trouble, they would beat the
crap audio and you're lucky if they didn't haul in and try and hold you
for I wouldn't say a ransom, but you know, like they'll hold you
for as a prisoner until they get what they want and they'd let you go.
So we were banned from going downtown about mid eighty eight or so.
Nobody was going downtown to base on lockdown. So as eighty nine unfolds,
things are getting worse from from the perspective of what Noriega is doing, the
threat he poses. When did you start getting wind of an operation and when
did you start getting involved in the planning? About early eighty eight there was
there was a whole bunch of different plans that were set in place. To
one we evacuate. We call a NEO a non combatant evacuation operation to pull
out all the family members of non essential personnel. There was a bunch of
them. They had a bunch of different code names, with the one that
we focused on as the gunship community was called Blue Spoon. Operation Blue Spoon,
which was the military takeover and overthrow of nor Riga's forces on Panama.
So nobody really thought it was going to happen for real, because that's a
pretty major thing when you're taking a sovereign country and you're actually overtaking it without
a declaration war. So we trained and trained all through nineteen eighty eight,
even to the point of building mocked targets here on Egland Reservation, specifically the
Muse Rest Kurt Muse, which is a whole different story in itself. We
trained up for Blue Spoon operations over and over and over again until December of
eighty nine, we had the biggest rehearsal to date. Prior to that,
it was just piecemeal kind of Okay, we're training and you're segmented, and
all of a sudden, we're going to have this full scale dress rehearsal right
before Christmas. So that everybody could go home for Christmas and have a good
time, and then we would plan on rehearsing it again in six months or
whatever. So in other words, we built the plan, executed the plan
real time, and basically checked out the plan and said, boh, yeah,
it looks pretty good. And I think we finished what we call the
Mod four. We finished it around the fourteenth or so of December, and
as you look at it and say, well, I think it was the
seventeenth of December when the lieutenant got killed down there by Noriega's goon squads,
and right away we didn't expect it at all. I think Noriega really,
if there was a prize for bad timing, he deserves that. Because we
were cocked and locked and ready to roll, and we slipped out of Hurlbert.
We sent four airplanes down there. Already we had four A models and
two H models for the Muse rescue, and then we had five more here.
I was on one of the five that left Hurlbert. Everybody thought it
was a continuation of the MOD for exercise. I had no idea that we
were actually going down there to actually take over the country. So it was
a pretty wild ride getting down there. We left Hurlbert. We had an
Army Fire's officer on board with us, Captain Joe Adams, and we flew
six hours down there through some really hairy weather. Didn't think we're going to
make our ar. We were the last ones. My pilot was Mark Transu
at that time of captain, and we had a lot of weather problems.
There was a sandwich of clouds. There was about an eight or nine hundred
foot clear space in between these two cloud decks, and that's what we wound
up refueling in. Otherwise we wouldn't have made it. And the tanker people
were great. I mean they hung with us all the way. We're way
late in our refueling track, and it was we had to We had to
toboggan. It's a basically go downhill. You can imagine a toboggan the way
it works. When you do that, you put the nose down and you're
falling behind the tanker. And we went from about seven thousand feet down to
about five hundred feet above the deck above the water to clear the Yucatan Gap
because everybody was afraid that the Cuban radars would to tech this large formation of
airplanes going down there. So that was probably the scariest part of the whole
mission, was going through that tobogganing episode and we were pumped up fat on
gas and then climb back up to Althode after we got that and arrived at
our whole point just outside of Riojado. What our assigned task was to support
elements of third Range of Battalion and second Range of Battalion direct fire support.
We were there fire support along with the Age six Little Birds out of Task
Force one sixty one sixty sore at the time, I remember right, So
we were the primaries. There was two F one seventeens that were supposed to
drop two thousand pounders at the very beginning to Their idea was to shock and
stun the PDF. But as we found out, that really didn't have a
great deal effect because well, for one thing, they missed their targets.
And like I said, they can say all day that they were supposed to
miss the targets, and I'm like, you run with that, okay.
So the PDF was already awake and out and at their positions when those bombs
went off. Anywhere, there's nobody there in the barracks, and that's where
the targets were. Sixty four apaches were hovering off the coast and their job
was to suppress these two AN aircraft guns that were up on the beach.
Our job was also to take out two AN aircraft guns in different locations.
And all three minutes prior to the rangers five hundred US Army rangers dropping in
and thirteen C one thirties coming in from the south. So very well planned
and rehearse mission, but very time compressed, is a good way of putting
it. So we were rolling in two or coming inbound to the target,
and we had our first target is supposed to be a ZPU four aircraft gun
right between the runway and a taxiway on the southern end. So we go
there and our navigator, who is very very good navigator, who's a very
careful guy, saying, you know, these F one seventeens are going to
drop these bombs right through our firing orbit and there's a possibility they might actually
bomb us out of the sky. Well, that's not things that you want
to think about. So, being the clever nav that he was, he
just held us back about thirty seconds because we're in a geometric orbit anyway,
it's not gonna matter. So we made sure we were on the northern part
of the orbit. When those bombs went out directly on HRR. They drop
right on time, thankfully. Two bombs go off, bang bang, just
like that, and right away we're looking for the an aircraft gun, couldn't
find it. It turns out it was a little bit further south than what
the intel people said fired on that. Nobody was there because I believe that
that was one of the guns that the Apache had fired on and the crew
had already left. The Apaches fired on another gun and then they left.
So now we got the only fire support platforms that are remaining at this point
is one one thirty. My crew air pop is there four and the little
birds the aged six helicopters. So we wound up I say, throughout the
night as the air drop continued, and just tons of activity going on at
the same time. Obviously, the Paytamenians didn't like that we were dropping in
on our airfield, so they reacted and some of the after we shot the
first gun, we moved on a second gun and there were some vehicles there.
We engaged that gun and which I can talk about a little bit later.
And then just stare stepping through the different targets while the rangers assembled at
their points. And rangers are really good at what they do. There are
all about breaking things and moving swiftly, and so as they're assembling moving into
the compounds. The third bat was to take the north and the northwest the
Panamanian Defense Force schoolhouses, if you will. And second bat was they were
to take the compounds. Now, the compounds had two different divisions down there.
One on was the seventh Infantry, which was the Panamanian Special Forces,
the real badasses. They called them Macha de Monte, and we knew they
were going to fight. Everybody knew they were going to fight because that's what
they do. And then the sixth Mechanized Infantry was more like a line army
unit, and we were pretty confident that most of them were not going to
fight, that they were gonna they were going to move haul ass, if
you will, And that's the way it turned out. For the remainder of
the evening, we fired on a couple of vehicles, one of the V
one fifties coming out across towards the runway when the rangers still in their parachutes.
We engaged that, and then I think the army one of the rangers
engaged as well, but it was it stopped pretty much in its tracks.
We went to the south and we worked a couple more targets. Look found
on an Ambos site, fired on it because our objective was not to just
go in there and just mop up on people. Our objective was to keep
the PDF, especially the Masha de Monte, away from our rangers. So
there's a lot of things that we did that even the rangers weren't aware of
because we were leading ahead. But thankfully we had Captain Adams on board that
was coordinating with his rangers at the same time, so it was very well
orchestrated mission. We had a few gun malfunctions we had to clear along the
way, but generally it was really a good mission. We later on,
right before we left, there was a vehicle about three kilometers to the west
that was making an end run to go north and they were all armed.
We tracked them with our television set. We're at fifty five hundred feet so
we could see everything. The sensors were good at fifty five hundred feet and
you could see they had their weapons protruding out the back of this deuce and
a half truck that was without without a canvas cover, and so they were
were cleared to fire on them because that was under the rules of engagement.
They were making an end run. That was a pretty nasty attack. I'll
put it. I'll just leave it there. It wasn't it wasn't friendly,
but it did break them up. They scattered. The ones that could still
get away got away, and they weren't really a concern of ours anymore because
we had interrupted their plans. And as we're firing on those, we get
called back to the compound because there was a ranger element that was entering the
Macha de Monte compound was taking fire from behind this building that the PDF was
using as a defalaid. You know, Panama, they don't have a lot
of glass windows. They have like open windows, airflow and everything. They
were shooting through the building at the rangers. We got called in by a
lieutenant then Dave Hate, who I've met actually and told me all about it,
and well we went up there, our television operator. We go rolling
in behind there's a ZPU four gun sitting there. Static and there's somebody that
was near or on the gun. We couldn't really tell. So we started
to fire one oh five high explosive And now I'll tell you, one oh
five is pretty mean, thirty two and a half pounds with five pounds of
high explosives and a lot of fragments. So we started fire one oh five
on the back side of this building, hoping to splash the fragments up on
these three individuals that were behind the building. Well, the three individuals,
we're not really sure what happened to them because there was a little bit of
dust kicked up, but I can tell you this. There was one of
the one guy on the gun and he when we fired the first round,
you can see sparks splashing off the gun because it's pretty high speed stuff,
and somebody comes running off the gun, runs about twenty feet and just drops
straight on. They're kind of like the fight or flight instinct. We didn't
really even notice it until we're reviewing the tapes later on because I'm back there
in the dark. I'm not seeing any of this stuff. We're looking at
the videotapes. So when we get back in analyzing how battle damage occurred and
somebody said, hey, what was that We see this guy running And it
was for boon, maybe two or three seconds that you could see the guy.
He runs, he drops, and the very next round we fired hit
him directly right in the back, and the next after the dust cleared,
couldn't see him anymore. We found out from the rangers the next day that
his torso was hanging from the tree and there was pieces of bone, frag
and there was everything everywhere. It wasn't intentional, but that was sure.
He didn't suffer. So in any case, that was our last mission for
rio Hodo. That night, we had I think engaged twelve or thirteen targets.
I'd have to go back and look and see exactly what it was.
During about a four and a half, well actually closer to five hours on
station supporting the rangers, we had to leave to get fuel. Another guns
came in after us to support the rangers, and by about six thirty or
so, the field was relatively secure. They had swept through all the compounds
and that was pretty much they had control of the field well executed basically according
to plan. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, there was a few few errors
that occurred. There always is a complicated plan like that. They had a
really unfortunate accident with the little birds, the Age sixes that fired on friendlies
and I met a couple of guys build on him. Great guy, I
mean, he's lost part of his leg. And we went down there for
the thirtieth anniversary of just Cause, and I'm here it is. I got
an invitation from a ranger friend of mine to go down there on a thirtieth
but prior to that, let me go back up a little bit there.
Right after that mission was done, and on the twenty sixth, I believe
it was of December, our squadron commander, when we're analyzing all the BDA
bomb dama's assessment of tapes, my commander says, you know, we really
like to get one of those gun barrels from a ZPU four that shot at
you guys, because we had an instance where we had a gun that was
shooting at us and we were shooting at him. Well, it turns out
we won, but the gun was a catastrophic kill. The gunner was a
catastrophic kill. Such as warfare, that's the way it works. So I
went out there. Commander says, okay, Bill, send you out there.
You're gonna get a barrel, and said, how about they take Steve
Hicks with me. Now you're going out there by yourself, okay, great
MH fifty three. One of our helicopters took me out there in the afternoon
at the twenty sixth and dumped me off in the middle of the field.
And this Army lieutenant or lieutenant or captain that was seventh ID. The Rangers
had already pulled out. Seventh Infantry Vision was out there, and he met
me at the center of the runway, says, what the f are you
doing here? I said, well, I got sent out here by Colonel
Soon made up a big story and I said, you can call them,
and you know I'm authorized to be here, and so I basically I b
asked him, and I wasn't supposed to be there. I was just going
on a lieutenant colonel's direction. So he bought it, and he actually had
his guys give me a ride down onto compounds. And I can tell you
what I it was a weapons and tactics. I was a tactician, so
I was very interested in analyzing our effects that we had put down when they
were still fresh and they were still fresh. And I tell you when I
was walking through the compounds, especially the seventh compound where the guy that was
hit with the one oh five, it was just got awful smell there still
because you know, the blood got all down in the dirt. There's bone
fragments everywhere because they didn't pick up everything. The Ranger recovered team didn't pick
up anything or everything, just the big chunks. So walking down there was
very eerie because the whole compounds were abandoned at that time. They had a
few observation points that were out there, but I had first, you know,
pretty much a run on the compound. It was spooky as the word
I'd use. And one of the sixth Infantry building was barracks building was burned
out. Little birds did that, So yeah, it was a very spooky.
I went out there a couple more times, and then in I guess
it was February of nineteen ninety, I was down there again because we had
a regular continual commitment down there, and I went out with a couple other
guys and that gun sight that we had that was firing at us and we
were firing at him and we won. Like I said, they actually had
a memorial built for the gunner there, which was really kind of freaky and
it kind of brings things too more of a human aspect. Next to the
gun site was this giant tree, and it was probably a fifty sixty year
old tree that all the fragments from a one h five h because we fired
about five or six rounds on that gun before we finally got our catastrophic kill.
And so there was this tree just absolutely peppered with fragments, and branches
are broken off, they're laying on the ground. It was just a real
mess. The gun itself had already been cleared off and disposed of at that
point, so I remember that big tree, big tree. Wow, interesting
how that all works. And I found some other areas where we had shot.
So here it is thirty years later, getting back to that point when
I go down there to meet my ranger buddies, and I'm by this time
the whole real Hotto compounds have been bulldozed away and they built an actual resort
there, rolled the Cameron Resort, And so I was staying right there in
one of the rooms that was not too far from the gun sight that I
described earlier. But you'd never know it by looking at it, because you
only had terrain features to follow. So what do I do as a tactician.
The very first thing I do when I hit the ground down there after
I meet everybody, I go looking for our target sights. And I remembered
from where I was before, and I remembered that big tree. And I
said, surely I can find that big tree. And I looked all over
the compound, couldn't find it anywhere. Finally, i've up and down the
road. It must have died because of all the fragments. So I saw
a table full of rangers and their wives were sitting inside a lobby number three,
and I said, well, let me go join them, have a
beer, relax. I go walking in the lobby and as soon as I
cleared the entrance, there's that tree. They had built the lobby around the
tree. And it was very surreal because I'm in there, I'm looking.
I'm like, holy cow, there it is. And you could see the
fragment marks on the side of the tree that were healed over, and they
were kind of black marks. And it was to make it more bizarre,
as they had like a bunch of Christmas decorations in the tree and everything,
because it was right before Christmas, and right where that gun was, right
where that guy lost his life, there was little girl rolling around on the
floor. They're just having fun, maybe three or four years old or whatever,
and right in front of her then was the registration desk for signing into
the hotel. And I'm just looking at that thinking, I am the only
one here that knows what happened here, because it's very clear to me that
nobody in that resort knew what level of violence occurred back in eighty nine.
So I'm not going blabbing about this, but I did tell some of my
arranger friends. I said, you are you're not going to believe this,
but you know, Comma and I took and I showed them all that,
and I actually got pictures of me stand in front of a tree and everything,
and it's just a very, very the word i'd use, surreal experience.
But then again too, you know, people say, well, don't
you feel bad about, you know, killing that guy? Well, this,
these sort of things happen in war, they do. And I think
that this guy had was defending his country and we were defending ours, and
it was a fair fight. There's a fire exchange on both sides. So
now do I carry any golt for that, not that I'm aware of.
This is just the things that happened. This is what we sign up for,
and this is what we do. In just a moment, retired US
Air Force Chief Master's Sergeant Bill Walter takes us into his service in the Gulf
War, Somalia and Bosnia. I'm Greg Corumbas and this is Veterans Chronicles.
This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest in this edition has
retired US Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Bill Walter. Just a few months after
the major combat activity in Panama, America was once again bracing for war,
this time in the Persian Gulf, following I racks invasion of Kuwait in early
August of nineteen ninety. And that's where Walter picks up his story. Yeah,
we had just got from Panama, like only for a couple of months.
It's like we were all busy through the eighties. I mean, we
never were home. So this was kind of a surprise because we thought when
the when when the balloon went up so to speak in August and then we
deployed in September. We thought we weren't going to go because this really isn't
a special operations mission. This is something that the fighters, those F one
seventeens that dropped their bombs in uh in Rio Hoto, which really was kind
of out of place. Well, this was their game. This is the
stuff that they do, and this is the stuff they're good at. Uh.
We are not good at radar threat environments. We're not. We're still
a C one thirty, so you really got to be kind of careful.
So uh. Nevertheless, we were deployed as rear echelon security for the bases
over there. That's what it was supposed to be. Turns out that through
the time that I was there, uh during Desert Shield, which is some
of the most miserable conditions that anybody could ever imagine. I named the rats
in our compound. My favorite one was Big Red. I tried to kill
Big Red and never got them. But I can tell you this, Big
Red wouldn't even eat the number two MRI corn beef hash. Big Red says,
oh now, I ain't taking that. So by and large, we
held together pretty good as a squadron because we're all in the same situation.
Everybody supported everybody else. We had a rotation schedule that brought people back home
for training, so we took advantage of that. But in the end we
put a lot of effort in. Once the balloon went up and the war
kicked off, our crews put in a great effort under great, how can
I say, under very challenging situations. We almost lost two airplanes on one
night due to radar threats, but thankfully they both escaped. And then January
thirty first, on the day of or the second day of the Battle of
Kafji, we lost an airplane and all fourteen crewmen. My old roommate was
on there, Tim Harrison Barry Clark, who was my gunner. I was
a league gun during Rio Hato and he was my twenty millimeter gunner during just
cause Paul Weaver the pilot. Everybody knew everybody because, like I say,
we're all joyfully inbred in the gunship community. Everybody knows everybody because we stick
around forever. So it's a very tragic event. Again, it was these
sort of things happen in war. We understand that, but they're never really
easy to digest, and every year we still do a memorial for them,
as well as all the crews we lost in Vietnam, and also Jockey Won
four which was lost in Somalia. So very very much a sense of pride
that you can honor your friends mentioned Jockey one four that's connected to the mission
in Somalia. Tell me a little bit about where you were and what you
were doing in that situation. I first deployed to Somalia in October of eighty
three, and just to back up a little bit on that, I get
the question all the time, why weren't gunships in Somalia's supporting task Force Ranger,
And I got the easy answer for you, because we were blocked out
by General Horror, and General Horror was the sent Com Commander, Central Command
commander at the time. And the general consensus all the way through the political
aspect of A two is that we had been there in June and July of
the same year and shot up Id's infrastructure. And this is what the planners
and the UN is not very good at planning things. It's evident to me.
So we're there, we shoot up his infrastructure because they thought, well,
as soon as we shoot up his infrastructures, his tanks, his munition
supply yards. It's worth that. He'll just give up. No, no,
he's not going to give up. He went underground. So that's what
prompted the deployment or the saddling up of Task Force Ranger, which at that
time the exercise is called Crafty Caper. Okay, we played in and trained
with Task Force Ranger. I'll just use that term because it's easier and em
pretty can follow. We played in with them for during the dress rehearsals pre
deployment training, but then we got yanked out at the last minute. So
instead of going to Somalia, guess what, I got sent to Bosnia.
And we were working out of out of Brindisi, Italy, flying missions over
Bosnia. Kind of the same kind of missions that we were doing in Panama,
the security missions, but it was actually supposed to be for close air
support for the UN forces. Pretty bad threat environment as well. Well.
One day we get this. One of our sensor operators comes out of the
command centers. Pack up, boys, We're going to Somalia. What happened
to Somalia? Well, the Rangers got little trouble, so we redeployed to
Somalia. It was the seventh or eighth of October that we got there and
actually fired on to announce our return. The Somalis were not particularly affectionate with
us. They didn't like us so especially I did right away when we started
firing on them, firing on intersection. Micrew fired on an intersection road intersection
next to this place called a cigarette factory. This is one of IDD's main
bivouax was all his people that there were there as his gorillas. So another
crew fired on target down by radio Mugdishu right after we finished firing. The
next morning, Ided calls for a ceasefire because he knew better, he knew
that we were going to come back with a vengeance. We also could not
fire on any anything, any structure or facility or anything because we didn't know
where our durant was and we might wind up injuring or killing Durant if we
target anything. So from that point on it was like just pure, pure
boredom. We flew over there every night, and they wanted twenty four hour
coverage, but we only had four crews and four airplanes, and we're bringing
over a fifth crew as a backup. But you can't fly twenty four hours
a day. My crew flew like two hundred sixty hours and forty five days
were like walking zombies. So that's a lot of time in the air.
It doesn't sound like a lot of but the flight environment, especially unpressurreized like
that, will take a lot of audio, believe me. I rotated out
in December, right before Christmas, and the crews that came in replaced us
were there. They were supposed to run through the end of March and doing
the same mission. Nobody shot at anything basically loose overhead surveillance, turning jet
fuel into noise, because all the people by that time, the Task Wars
is long gone, the rangers were long gone. It was Tenth Mountain,
and they wanted us there because they'd like to hear those engines because whenever those
engines sounds are up there, the Somalis think that we got them. Well
yeah, now not with the u N. So in any case, things
got really fast and loose, and we wound up having an accident with Jockuen
four on the fourteenth of March ninety four, and one of my best friends
was killed bomby Daniel and it was just a horrible accident. That things.
Guys got complacent, and that's what happens when you get a mission with no
real direction. You're just there and you know you're there. And I can't
blame them, it's just the way things fall out. When you're dealing with
explosives every day, you can't get complacent. Well, Bill, we've talked
about some of the most excellent execution of the American military, especially through the
special operations of the Air Force that you've been a part of on a number
of occasions. We've also talked about the tragic loss of American heroes, both
in the Gulf and with Jockey one four, and so I know there's more
we could discuss, but what we've covered today I think helps to inform folks
a lot about Air Force special opera rations, the AC one thirty in particular.
And I can't thank you enough for your time and especially for your many
years of great service to our country. So thank you very much for being
here. Thank you. Sir. Bill Walter is a retired US Air Force
Chief Master Sergeant. He served as an AC one thirty gun ship gunner,
was part of Operation Eagle Claw, also highly involved in Operation Just Cause in
Panama, specifically the seizure of the Rio Jato Airfield. He also served in
operations in Granada, El Salvador, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Somalia and
Bosnia. I'm Greg Corumbus. This is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is
Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the
American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veterans Center dot org.
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