Transcript of Oral History Interview with Robert Clyde Hanson

Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project

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Version 3 August 20, 2018 Robert C. Hanson Narrator

Douglas Bekke Interviewer

January 26, 2018 Barnum, Minnesota

Robert Hanson -RH Douglas Bekke -DB

DB: Minnesota Historical Society Vietnam Oral History Project interview with Robert Hanson in Barnum, Minnesota on 26 January, 2018. Mr. Hanson can you please say and spell your name? RH: My name is Robert C. Hanson. That’s R-O-B-E-R-T, C for Clyde, my father’s name. Hanson H-A-N-S-O-N. DB: And your date and place of birth? RH: Seven May 1937 in Wausau, Wisconsin. DB: And what do you know about your ancestry? RH: My ancestry is pretty much European, with overtones of Danish and German. DB: And when did they immigrate to the United States? RH: In the 1880s for the most part although I did have a German relative that came over during the Civil War era, about 1865, 1866. DB: They came over after the Civil War then? RH: They did not fight in the Civil War. DB: Did you know your grandparents or great grandparents? RH: Oh very definitely. DB: And what kind of activities did you have with them and did they influence your life? RH: There were five children in my family and during the summer time I used to spend the summer with my Hanson grandparents, who also lived in Wausau. Whereas as my sister, one of my sisters – my oldest sister stayed with our Ahlman family grandparents up in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. DB: And what kind of things did you do with them?

RH: My grandmother was very interested in educating me. She always took me – my grandfather worked on a railroad so she had – we always had railroad tickets. They carried me on their railroad pass until I was 25 years old, so we always used to take trips at least once a summer we’d go to Chicago and she would take me to the museums down in Chicago and we’d go to a Cubs game because she was a big, big sports fan. She loved the Cubs and the Green Bay Packers, but she just wanted me to be educated and encouraged me to read, encouraged me to make things and she was – she was very, very proactive in that regard. DB: And she was successful? RH: I think so. I still read at least three books a month and you know, after I retired I became a teacher and I taught industrial ed and math so. I built half this house were sitting in and so I think so. DB: You’re industrious? RH: Yeah I’m industrious. DB: And your grandfather, do you have many memories of him? RH: Oh I certainly do. He would take me to baseball games and he was a big bear of a guy. He was – he became a qualified engineer on a Chicago Northwestern in 1917 and the seniority was so strict and so full on that particular railroad that he didn’t even get an engineer’s slot until 1950s. He was a fireman the whole time and he used to shovel coal. He would stop his switching engine right in the middle of Wausau and I would ride my bike down to a pre-agreed spot and I’d jump up in the switch engine and sit there while he switched trains – while he switched cars back and forth. It was wonderful. All the little kids would be sitting in the car watching and pointing at me while I’d look at them. DB: You were a big shot? RH: I was a big shot (Laughter). DB: So you were born in 1937. Do you have memories of World War II and things that were going on? RH: I certainly do. The men and women that fought in World War II were my heroes. And we had relatives that went in. I had a second cousin who was – who went into the navy and tried to get his pilot’s wings and he washed out and so he went into the air force and became a navigator and was in the 8th Air Force over in England during World War II. And I had another second cousin who was a WAVE. But no direct family in the service at the time. But we watched, you know, the news. Watched the news – listened to the radio and read the papers and stuff and it was a very patriotic time and very patriotic city. I remember we even had air raid warning where we had to go in the house and duck and cover and that kind of stuff. And they were very, very proactive to the military and to supporting them. DB: Talked about a lot in school? RH: We did, we did we had. We sold the little stamps, the war-saving stamps and we brought in tin cans and things like that I distinctly remember. DB: Scrap drives?

RH: Scrap drives. DB: And do you know how your parents met? RH: My dad graduated from high school, it was during the depression. He tried to get into University of Wisconsin. We’d had some relatives, second or third away from close relatives, and he even slept in the hallway, tried to get in to the University of Wisconsin and couldn’t. So he came back and he started working for my grandfather Ahlman who was an electrical contractor, one of the first ones around there. And my mother was, of course, his daughter and they became close friends shall we say. And he had been a boy scout, he’d never – never was an eagle scout he was one rank under that but he was sitting around boy scout headquarters one day when the phone rang and it was the Minnesota Mining Company, which had an office in Wausau, and they said, We’ve got a job opening and we would like to offer it to a boy scout and we’re looking for one of your better people and offer him a start and if he works out we’ll give him a job. And my dad said, “We’ll send our best guy to you.” And hung up and walked right over there and he worked for the Minnesota Mining Company for 45 years after that. DB: And what did your mother do? RH: My mother was a homemaker. DB: Okay. And can you describe your home growing up? RH: My earliest recollections were – I was about four years old and I was sitting on the stoop. We had a rental on West Street in Wausau and there was right in back of the fence was a railroad switching line and my grandfather used to ride by and he’d toot the whistle every time he rode by, but my dad built a house along with a few other people to help him and he built it on 917 Broadway in Wausau and it’s still there, I’ve been to it several times. In a little bungalow house that was fortunately close to the airport and that kind of warped and changed me for the rest of my life because I became fascinated by airplanes, I really did. And when I finally grew to the point where I could ride a bicycle and stuff like that I used to ride to the airport every once in a while just to watch the by planes fly, they were wonderful. DB: And as – your mother being a homemaker, did she keep a garden? RH: We had a garden all the time, yeah. DB: Was it an essential for eating or was it something that was just done on the side? Supplemental? RH: It was pretty much – I would say it added to the family but it was not a subsistence thing, you know, we didn’t – she canned and did all that other stuff but we had relatives that were farmers and we got – and we would buy vegetables and my grandmother the same way, that was a big, big activity during the summer time was you know, canning cherries and canning pickles and doing all that kind of thing. It was typical homemaking in the 30s and 40s there’s no question about it. DB: And you describe your home situation as urban in Wausau it wasn’t —? RH: Yeah. The town was, at that time, probably about 20,000 people. DB: But you weren’t in the country outside of Wausau?

RH: No we were on the edge of it. DB: On the edge? RH: Yeah. DB: Okay. Did you get involved in hunting or any of that living on the edge? Did you go out in the woods? RH: I always ran out in the fields and it was close to the Wisconsin River and my dad told me to stay away from it and that’s like a red flag, oh I’m going down there. And I did a lot of times and he caught me a couple times and was very unhappy about it. DB: Worried about you drowning or just a generally unsafe place? RH: Yeah, just worried about it period because there was also, what we called the poor farm, which was I guess kind of a welfare building up at the end of Sturgeon Eddy there where that – I don’t know if indigent people went there or I don’t have a feeling for what the qualification was for the people that stayed there but he was a little worried about them anyway. DB: And what did you do for money-making activities for a kid when you were growing up? RH: Didn’t – DB: Or did you get an allowance and that was taken care of? RH: No, I didn’t; get an allowance for a lot of long time. You know I had my chores and everything else but pretty much I depended on my parents for – if I was going to a movie or something that I would get some money from them occasionally and my grandfather would always drop me a few nickels here and there. It was something he liked to do, you know? Treat me a little bit to it. I was – money was not a big thing in those days we didn’t have a lot and with five kids my dad kept getting children, my dad and mom, kept getting children because every time they would get another kid they would raise it up one for this draft system so we kept having children right up until the end of World War II. DB: Oh you mean for your father’s deferment? RH: My father’s deferment. He wanted – he had a deferment with the mining company but the way things were in the draft in World War II that wasn’t always going to carry it through. So he was a family man, he really was, and he wanted to stay with the family and I can’t blame him for that. They’d come – just come through the depression and really worked hard and tried to put things together so – DB: You talked about the educational influences from your family and were you a diligent student? RH: I’m fairly intelligent and I didn’t have to work too hard to carry myself through. DB: Came pretty easy? So school wasn’t – you didn’t consider it very challenging? RH: It wasn’t much of a challenge for the most part. DB: But you had good teachers?

RH: Pretty much, yeah. I went to John Marshall Grade School in Wausau and it was about three blocks away and we’d walk it every day and the principal actually lived about four houses down the way from us so we’d actually walk in with the principal most mornings. DB: And junior high? Was junior high and high school combined? RH: That wasn’t a factor. My dad got order to go to St. Paul when I was 10 years old, 1947, and so we moved to St. Paul and he went to work at the major headquarters there for 3M in St. Paul. I did not follow immediately because I had been playing football with the kids next door and I tried a flying tackle and ended up breaking a collarbone and I was carrying a cross taped to my back for about 10 or 15 days and stayed at my grandparents’ house and they took me to St. Paul for the first time. DB: And was moving, losing your friends, going to a strange place, a big city, was that – I don’t want to say traumatic but was it a positive or a negative or no big deal? RH: It was kind of an exciting thing you know because it was such a different lifestyle change, you know, being in a big city. I’d been to big cities before, you know, Milwaukee, Chicago, with my grandparents but it was in a way a little bit exciting. And the school in St. Paul was only about three blocks away – DB: Which school was it? RH: Erickson Grade School it’s been torn down a long time ago now. But it was about pretty much on Payne Avenue. We lived on the east side of St. Paul. Payne Avenue had the nickname ‘Snoose Boulevard’ because it was entirely Scandinavian all the way for eight blocks in any direction where we lived at the lower end of Payne Avenue it was all Italian and we didn’t have exposure to the Italian kids until we got to junior high and high school. DB: And did you get along across ethnic lines? RH: Sure, oh sure. Not a problem. Not a problem. DB: So which high school did you go to? RH: Johnson. Johnson High School which was, once again, it was pretty much white bread. There was no question about it. We had, I think, two African Americans in the whole school but it was, you know, it was kind of different because, like I said, we learned to live with the Italians at the same time and we became friends with a lot of people. It was a good school. DB: Good growing up experience? RH: Good growing up experience. Johnson was a very active school at the time. We won the state hockey championship in ’55 which was the year I graduated. It was a nice neighborhood. I became active – my dad was a Mason, a Freemason, as was my grandfather, and they encouraged me to get in to the order of DeMolay, which was kind of an enfranchised youth activity more than anything else and I got exposed to a lot of older guys. I hung around mostly with older people, a year or two, I’m not talking about 20, 30 or anything like that. But because of that I always felt like – DB: You were one of the big kids.

RH: The big kids. And I worked my way up in DeMolay, and became the Master Councilor and all the rest of that, so I had some good activities and I was not an athlete in high school. The primary sports, of course, was hockey, on the east side of St. Paul and most of the kids that played hockey had been playing it since they were about four years old together. I played in another league in hockey but I did not play at the high school level. And I got in with a couple of the guys who were in the organized reserve while I was in DeMolay and you know, one of them encouraged me to join the navy reserve out of Wold-Chamberlain, which I did, as a senior. DB: At 17? RH: At 17, yes. DB: And your parents had to sign for you? RH: My parents signed for me, yes. DB: I don’t want to go to the military quite yet we’re going to go back a little bit and talk about other things, about the era, and putting you in a place and time and your family situation. You mentioned that you got railroad passes and were able to use those travelling around the country. So your family had vacations regularly? RH: My dad and mom used to love to go places. They really did, but, they kept the younger three kids and they farmed my older sister out to the Ahlmans and me to the Hansons during the summer time. But my grandparents took me all kinds of places. They took me right to Duluth one time and all the way up the North shore to Winnipeg and we went to the Badlands in South Dakota and we took some wonderful trips, we really did. DB: You think that at the time with your peer group, the other kids, were they taking vacations or was that unusual for you to be able to do that in 1950 – what, ’52, ’53? RH: This would be in ’52, ’53 around in there. Yeah, just about everybody would take some trips, even if it was over the woods and to grandmother’s house, you know, in Kenosha or something like that. They would take trips but I was happy with the trips that I went on. And when I became 16 I wanted to start working so I could get some money and I got an allowance from my dad for doing things around the house but it was, believe me, not a very spendy allowance. It would cover a movie a week and if I didn’t eat too much popcorn. DB: And how much did it cost to go to a movie in those days? RH: 15 cents or so. I started – and I’ll never forget – I started my allowance at a quarter, a quarter a week. And then it went up to 50 cents a week, oh I don’t know, about the time I was 14 or so. So I started working just as soon as I could. DB: And what were your working options? RH: Pretty much lying my age and doing things that I could find to do. Shoveling sidewalks in the winter time and I set pins in a bowling alley until they found out I was only 15. And then they fired me from that – DB: How old would you have to have been?

RH: Sixteen. Had to be 16 to work. But then I went to a different bowling alley and they didn’t question me as much there and so I continued to do that. And when I became 16 I – well I also had a paper route when I was 14 which I kept for a couple years and then when I was 16 I got a job at the Paramount Theater in St. Paul, which was the biggest theater in town as an usher. DB: Downtown? RH: Downtown, yeah. And I was an usher there for about a year, two. And after that I applied at Schuneman’s Department Store and I got a job my last year in high school as – in the paint department as a stock boy. And there were only two salesman, the manager, a secretary and myself, the stock boy. And oftentimes there would not be enough people waiting on other people so I learned very quickly how to wait on people and how to talk the talk about painting and stuff, I’d ask questions and gathered a lot of information on one thing and another and I would wait on people and one of the regular salesmen who worked on a percentage basis would take the sales as his – he’d split them up between his, which was fine with me because I was getting – I think it was 75 cents an hour as a stock boy there and finally got a raise to a dollar an hour which I thought was Tall Cotton [Southern term meaning good] at the time, you know, this was – DB: Good money in those days? RH: Well, you could get by as a high school kid. That wasn’t a big thing. But I kept that going through my first year at the University of Minnesota. DB: And your father had a car? RH: Yes. DB: And that didn’t seem like anything unusual in the neighborhood? RH: He had a Chevrolet – the ’53 Chevrolet. DB: Most people around you had cars? RH: Oh yes. DB: One car? RH: One. DB: Did your mother drive? RH: She did. DB: Did your father take the car to work every day? RH: Yes, pretty much. DB: Okay, but when your mother needed it and the car was there on the weekend or something, she could drive? RH: Yes. He traveled a lot, he worked in the roofing granules and they would go troubleshoot if they had a complaint so he’d have to go to the – the places he went the most were Little Rock, Arkansas, which had a major 3M plant, and Corona, California. He had one trip, one summer trip, my grandparents took me on was my dad was down in Little Rock and we drove down to

Little Rock and then drove back instead of him taking the train back. So I got a trip all the way to Little Rock, Arkansas. That was just about the time that he discovered that he was going to be moving to the Twin Cities, so right after that, after we moved to the Twin Cities. DB: Christmas, birthdays, special events in your family were all celebrated? RH: Oh, oh we kind of split between the Ahlmans and the Hansons. They didn’t get along well together for some reason and one winter, I mean one Christmas, we’d go one place or have that family over to our place and the next we’d do the other’s. But if we did Christmas with the Ahlmans, we did Thanksgiving with the Hansons, it was like that. In the summer time we would always have a family get together up at the Ahlman’s cottage. They had a cottage on Crescent Lake, outside of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Name of it was “Linger Longer” and there was a chair right out on my deck, right out there that came from that cottage. But we would go up there for the weekend, which was always good because I only have one cousin and I would get to play with my cousin when we went up there. DB: Christmas time or for a birthday did you usually get practical gifts? RH: Practical for the most part. DB: Not so much toys? RH: Once you get past 11 years old or so, they’re pretty much practical. DB: And that was fine with you? RH: That was fine with me. DB: Nice events? RH: Yes, yes. Always. DB: Big meals? RH: Always. My mom would ask me, “What do you want for your birthday?” And I would say, “A steak and French fries!” DB: And that was a good treat? RH: That was Tall Cotton. DB: Go back to the car. You’re 15 years old and you can get a learner’s permit. How did your parents feel about you driving? What did you feel about driving? RH: My dad did not want to teach me how to drive. He was – he wasn’t good at that, let me put it that way. DB: He wasn’t good at teaching? RH: He wasn’t good at teaching, yes. He was very over-corrective and you know, protecting his assets. I learned from most of my friends how to drive. They would – most of them had cars at that time. I didn’t have a car all the way through high school or the first two years at the University of Minnesota. My first car came after that.

DB: But did you get your license when you were 16? RH: No. I didn’t get a license until later. DB: Did they have any kind of driver’s ed programs in high school? RH: They didn’t. DB: Not at that time. DB: Okay, and so what was for you the process of getting your license. Did you go with a friend and use that car or did you father relent and help you? RH: No, actually it was when I came home from Naval Academy plebe year, he all of a sudden was so proud, you know, that, “I got a kid at the Naval Academy,” “Here! Here’s the keys to the Plymouth out there!” I didn’t even have a license at the time. So I drove it. And then he said, “You’d better get a license while you’re home.” So I practiced a little bit, you know, parking and all the rest of that kind of stuff and went out there and took the test and passed it. DB: So you got along without a car for a while? RH: Well, yeah. DB: And you could do that in those days. RH: Yeah, you could. DB: If you wanted to go someplace – RH: You had the rapid transit. Well you had, you know, public transportation but you always had friends you were planning on going out with and doing that kind of thing. DB: And when you went out with your friends what kind of things did you do? RH: Dates. DB: Which consisted of? RH: Going to the movies, going to dances, going to out every time there was dance at high school, you know, you’d go. You would just go out there, just put yourself out there amongst them. DB: And was there a lot of peer pressure to participate amongst your friends and everything, it was – RH: Oh sure. You want to – always wanted to. DB: Wanted to partake? RH: Yeah. DB: But good relations with the kids and everybody got along? RH: Sure. DB: Favorite subjects in high school?

RH: I always liked shop, I always liked English – DB: Any particular type of shop? Just in general? RH: I took wood shop and took metal shop. You had one, or two of the other ones, but my electives were pretty much that and I liked my English classes. Mostly because I had wonderful English teachers. I was reasonably good in math and the sciences. Although I never really cared much for chemistry. But the physics I enjoyed. I didn’t have any problem with that. DB: Growing up did you have a television in your house? That was kind of a new thing. RH: We got one in the ‘50s, probably about ’52, I would say. DB: You were 15? RH: Yeah. DB: Beyond ‘Howdy Doody’? RH: Yes. DB: But do you remember early programming? RH: Oh certainly so. “Captain Video” and “Howdy Doody” was always on, remember I had two – three younger siblings and you know, I used to like the comedy shows, you know, “The Red Skeleton”, “Milton Berle”, that kind of stuff was always fun. DB: Any restrictions on watching the TV in those days from your parents? RH: You didn’t stay up past 10 o’clock that’s for sure. DB: Well there wasn’t much on after 10 o’clock either. RH: I think it went off after 10 o’clock. DB: Do you remember how the programming started and ended? End of the day, beginning of the day? RH: Oh with the test patterns? DB: And? RH: And the raising, lowering of the flag with the National Anthem. DB: National Anthem, yeah. RH: I remember that very well. DB: Those days are gone. RH: Certainly are. DB: You got out of high school in ’55? RH: ’55. DB: Okay. And the Cold War is going on.

RH: Yes. DB: And the Korean War has ended. RH: Yes. DB: And were you very aware or was it an interest of yours to pay attention to foreign affairs, world events? RH: I always listened to the news. I’ve always listened to the news. Since I was in the reserve at that time I particularly paid attention to what was happening. DB: Did you join while you were still a high school senior? RH: Yes, yes I did. DB: No problems with that? RH: No. DB: And what kind of things do you remember specifically, were there things that troubled you, or just a curiosity, just an interest? Did you think about the Korean War as you were a kid and distinct to those things – you’re a couple years before but – before you graduated, but still it was there? RH: I knew some Korean vets and I used to hang on their stories and stuff. Always interested in the military. One of my good friends, who was a neighbor, and I decided we were going in the military as careers, you know, everybody, “Ohh, ahh!” You know, you’re going to go to college, you’re going to go do this. DB: So your parents? RH: Yeah. And I decided that, well, I was pretty much going to do what I wanted to. But I decided that I was going to go in the military, I decided I was going to be a pilot if I could. And I paid very much attention to that kind of thing. And I educated myself about what was happening. DB: While in high school? RH: While in high school and my first year at the University of Minnesota. DB: But you saw the university through ROTC as your pathway to the navy? RH: The first year I was not in ROTC. The second year I was at a regular meeting at Wold- Chamberlain, my weekend at Wold-Chamberlain – DB: With your Naval reserve unit? RH: Yes. And I was standing in ranks and they were reading out the plan of the day and one of the footnotes was anybody interested in going to the Naval Academy to see the education officer? Well I had taken a qualification test, upon getting in the navy reserve, and I’d scored fairly highly. I’d scored very highly compared to the run of the mill that I was going through their ‘boot camp’. And I thought, Well, maybe I’ll take a look at that. And I was kind of dreading the fact that I was going to have another lecture, sitting in the lecture hall as a young sailor that is kind of boring. So I went to the first class, petty officer who ran the class and I said, “I’d like to

42 talk to the education officer if I could.” He said, “Yeah, go ahead.” So I went down there and the guy brought up my record and he looked at it and said, “Wow,” he said, “You’ve done really well as far as your qualification test and everything, let me get you started here.” So we went through the paperwork and I did my application and one of the things was an interview by the captain in the air station. And I thought, Wow, this guy’s a full bird captain. DB: Walks on a cloud. RH: Here’s airman apprentice Hanson, you know, just standing there about 19 years old. 18, 19 years old. So I thought well, I’m going to have to be ready for this and I found out when it was going to be and I actually had to take the bus all the way from the east side of the St. Paul over the Wold-Chamberlain and I went in uniform and I made sure that uniform was four-o squared away, shoes shined and everything else. And there were four other guys that were waiting to be interviewed and none of them were in uniform they were all in teenage clothes, let me put it that way. And we went in there one at a time and he says, — DB: Were they reservists too? RH: They were the reservists too, yeah. He says, “You’re the only one who’s in uniform here.” And I said, “Yes sir.” And he said, “Tell me what you want to do?” And I said, “I want to be a professional naval officer, sir.” “Good!” He said. And he recommended me. DB: Yeah, and what about the other ones? RH: I think I was the only one that got recommended out of that, but, you know, he questioned us and I was pretty up to speed as far as things – DB: And this is towards the end of your first year after high school? RH: Yeah. DB: And you’re going to the U? RH: Yeah. I applied at the U for – you could get into the ROTC in two different ways. You could become a day student in the ROTC or you could get a regular ROTC appointment which was kind of like getting an appointment to the Naval Academy, but it did pay a stipend, it paid for your books and tuition and a stipend. But you got the same uniform and you did the same things as a day student. So I did the day student because I didn’t have an application and at the end of my second year I had been accepted in the regular ROTC and he said, “You’re class is going to be cruising on the USS Wisconsin for your summer cruise going down to Valparaiso, Chile. And I thought, Well, hey! That sounds good! DB: Which was going to be how long? RH: Well a typical summer cruise is about four weeks. And I said – this was the commander that was running the ROTC program, and I said, “Yes sir, but I have a conflict here because I’ve also applied to go to the Naval Academy.” He said, “Oh yeah,” he says, “Well let me check on that.” And he sent some messages and called me in about two days later and said, “You got your choice boy,” he says, “Where do you want to go?” You want to go to Valparaiso, Chile? You want to go in the Naval Academy?” I said, “No offense sir, but I think I’d like to go the Naval Academy.”

DB: You mentioned when you went for your interview for the Naval Academy that you wore your – RH: No, no. That was to get a recommendation for the Naval Academy. DB: Right, and you were wearing your uniform on public transportation, all across town, and I assume it was a similar situation when you went to drills and I assume that in ROTC you were wearing your uniform around campus? RH: Yes. DB: How were you regarded? RH: In those days mostly with amusement that, “Oh, look at the sailor!” Kind of thing. DB: No hostility just teasing? RH: No hostility in those days. This was in ’56 – yeah ’56, early ’57. DB: Good-natured teasing? RH: Good-natured. Good-natured, yeah. They didn’t bother you much, nobody paid much attention to you as far as – especially being a target or anything like that. DB: What did you parents think about you, a: getting into the naval reserve, and b: getting into the Naval Academy? RH: They supported me going into the naval reserve because, quite frankly, they didn’t want me going in the army. I said, “Well I want to get into a branch of the service,” I said, “And I’m not sure which.” I said, “I’ve got a couple of friends that are in the National Guard and they’ve been after me to come in there.” “You ain’t getting in the National Guard!” DB: That was your dad? RH: That was my dad. And I said, “Well, okay, but they Air Guard has got a program for pilots and everything.” He said, “I been asking questions and in order to avoid the draft and going in the draft,” – at that time everybody had a draft card and everybody was going to get drafted sooner or later, he said, “The best thing for you to do is go in the Naval air reserve. Go in the reserve.” And I talked it over once again with a friend of mine and who was in the navy air reserve and he said, “Hey, come on in.” And it sounded good to me, you know, I listened to what he had to say about it and he said, “You can get my squadron.” And they were flying P2Vs at the time and he said, “You can get up, you can be flying within six months after you get in there.” DB: And did you? RH: Well, once I got in the reserve, I found out that if you wanted to fly – I had never been in an airplane before except on the ground – you could go flying if you put your name on the list and some pilot were going up, getting flight time, you know, logging it for flight pay purposes, so I did that a couple times. DB: As a passenger? RH: Well yeah as a passenger but they were in SNBs. You know what an SNB is?

DB: No. RH: It’s a beach craft twin engine 1930s kind of airplane. When we talked about it to the girls, we’d say, “I went flying in an SNB.” And she’d say, “Well what was that?” And I said, “A secret navy bomber.” But you know, I was sitting in the back looking at all the lights and everything and this guy looked bored up there, you know, boring holes in the sky. He said, “Anybody back there want to fly?” And I was right up there and I said, “Yes sir I’d like to fly.” And he put me in the chair and let me drive that thing for a while. And I was just thrilled to death. First time I’d ever been in an airplane and he let me drive for a while. You know, he kept giving me little hints on what to do and he trimmed the airplane for me so I wouldn’t get crazy anything else – but boy, I just made me feel like I was walking on air. DB: You were hooked? RH: I was indeed. DB: You had picked a path – RH: I had picked the path. DB: And that night you found out that it was the right path. RH: The right path indeed. DB: So your naval reserve experience was a good one? RH: Sure. DB: But you got accepted into the Naval Academy and – RH: Well there was one other experience with the reserve. I did get the two week summer in the reserve and we went to Sand Point Naval Air Station. And okay, being one of the younger – DB: Sand Point was where? RH: In Seattle. Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle. And being one of the youngest of the enlisted types, you know, they had to provide people for various duties and I ended up going to mess cooking for about two days while I was there and I distinctly remember one day as I was up to my elbows in this big, enormous kettle that they made soup in and you know, scrubbing it, I said to myself, “Boy I really like this navy stuff but I’m not going to do this forever, I’ll tell you that.” And that I think was when I really started thinking about how can I become an officer. But I had fun. I had fun, you know, and go out in town on liberty just like a real sailor with a couple of my mates there and we just had a ball. DB: Yeah in those situations you’re not the kid that you were back home on the neighborhood, now you’re a man. RH: No, no, now you’re a man. Now that – you know, the sailor bars were open for you. DB: And you’re away from mom and the community restrictions. RH: Yes sir.

DB: Okay, but you did come back and what was the whole process of leaving home and getting to the Naval Academy and starting there? RH: I didn’t even tell my dad for a long time that I was trying to get into the Naval Academy. DB: And why was that? You thought he might be against it? RH: I didn’t want any confrontation quite frankly. DB: You thought he might be against it? RH: I didn’t know. But – DB: So what about your mother? RH: My dad was a very – was strict. I found out later that he had been a little too adventuresome on a few occasions and he was bound determined that his son was not going to make the same mistakes he did. DB: Getting in trouble, you mean? RH: Yeah. So I had to play it pretty close to the vest on a lot of occasions so I said, “I’m going to keep this to myself for the most part.” DB: Did your mother know? RH: No, I didn’t tell anybody. DB: Okay. RH: Until it got to the point where I had to go take the test for it. You know, you don’t just go to the Naval Academy on somebody’s say so, you have to take all the tests, you have to take a battery of intelligence tests. If you’ve got a congressional appointment it’s only two days but going through as a recommended enlisted person I had to take four days-worth of tests. You know they wanted to make sure that you were of the caliber that you would get in. DB: And that you’d be able to graduate when you started. RH: Yes. Yeah and coming from the reserves you didn’t have the option of going to what was called ‘NAPS’ which is a Naval Academy – what is it? It’s preparatory school. DB: Something of a basic training? RH: Yeah. It enlisted from the fleet that go to the Naval Academy go to NAPS, they get assigned to NAPS for, I think its six months, where they give them refresher courses in math and science and that kind of thing. Whereas coming from the reserve you don’t get that. I didn’t have access to that. So I had to show that I was, you know, capable of starting out plebe year on an academic level that was consistent with the people coming from the fleet. And since I had already had a year of college, I did reasonably well in the preparatory tests. And I passed them all, went to a Great Lakes for physical, by that time I told my dad and he was pretty proud of me. I was flabbergasted, well, okay! DB: And your mother?

RH: She went along with it, she went along with it really good. She was very proud of me. I got along really well with my mom. She’s a wonderful lady. And anyway, I went down there and I had a few dental issues that I had to get taken care of but I passed the physical and then once again I waited to find out whether I was going to the Naval Academy or going to the Valparaiso with ROTC. DB: Because you’re still waiting for final approval from the Academy at that point? RH: Yeah at that point they had to winnow through all the applicants and you know, being nominated is a wonderful thing, but being chosen, from that nomination, is a whole lot better. So that happened and I found out that I could go and I said, “I can go! I’m going to go to the Naval Academy there 1st of July, 1957.” They sent me orders right through the telegram orders and I think they’re in here as a matter of fact. Right there. “As a scholastically and physically qualified candidate for a midshipman you are authorized to report on 1 p.m. to superintendent Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, for admission from naval reserve papers follow.” DB: And this is 1957? RH: 1957. And my dad says, “We’re going to take vacation and take you there.” And they did. And we had a wonderful trip on the way out. We went – I remember we went we drove to Milwaukee and we went to a Brewers game and they took me to Meyer’s German Restaurant after that and in Wisconsin you could drink at age 18 of course so I got to have a few beers with my sauerkraut and it was wonderful. And we had a really nice trip out there and they looked through the Naval Academy and then I had to go in and they immediately ran us down and shorn our heads and gave us a set of white works – DB: After your parents had left? RH: No, no they were still there and then we went out and got sworn in. My parents were still there. And we had about 10 minutes to say, “See you!” “Alright, get back in the barracks!” Kind of thing. DB: And was this an eye-opening experience for you with the training situation? RH: It was exciting, it was exciting. DB: Not terrifying, exciting? It was an adventure? RH: It was an adventure and there’s a lot of good sense of humor and that carries you through it as much as anything. DB: There’s kind of a fine line with the drill sergeant or a training officer. If they can balance the line in between terror and humor, they can be extremely effective. RH: That’s true. The cadre that actually handled us for that summer were second-class midshipmen. They had to volunteer to do this program. And you know, they’re the people that are going to be there with us. And they treated us, you know, they treated us like we were boots. We did everything. It was the hottest summer that Annapolis had had in something like, 30 years and we would be out there marching, marching, marching, you know, people were falling like flies and it was quite a summer. But one thing about the Naval Academy, we always said you know, it’s like trying to take a sip from a firehose. It’s coming at you pretty fast, it really is. And

47 you just – you have to concentrate, you have to focus, you have to – if you’re going to stay with it you have to work at it, you can’t coast ever. DB: What were your quarters like? RH: Oh the regular rooms that – DB: Dormitory rooms? RH: Yeah – DB: How many people in a room? RH: Two or three. There were only very – depended on the wing and how old the wing was that you were in but the regular rooms – DB: The wing of the building? RH: Wing of the building, yeah. Most of the fourth classrooms had three people in them. DB: And you had good roommates? RH: I had two Andersons. Two Andersons and a Hanson in there. One Anderson was an army brat, and he’d come from Oklahoma and the other one was a 17 year old from Ogallala, Nebraska. DB: Congressional recommendation? RH: Yeah, they were both on congressional. And the 17 year old, Lonnie (?) he turned out to be a really, really, great guy. Just – I treasure him to today, there’s plenty of pictures in the pile over there of them with me from the reunions. But the guy from Oklahoma he went because his dad wanted him to go and he had a girlfriend back in Oklahoma and he said — he just flunked out. He could have done the work but he just flunked out. DB: His heart wasn’t in it? RH: It heart was not in it. DB: How typical was it for people to leave for one reason, either washing out or deciding to leave? RH: We started out with over 1,200 people in my class and four years later where we graduated 787. And the first one went the next morning after being sworn in – DB: Oh excuse me, “the first one went”, what do you mean? RH: He dropped. DB: Oh, oh. Upon arrival as a cadet? Not after graduation? RH: Yeah, midshipman, not cadet. DB: Oh, okay.

RH: That first morning, you know, reveille – he was already sitting in front of the main office in his white works, this little white sailor suit, and he says, “I quit.” His dad had made him come, you know, his dad had worked — (phone rings) Pause in recording DB: Ready to go? RH: Sure. DB: So during your first year, your plebe year, how many – what was the attrition rate like that year? RH: It depended pretty much on the company you were assigned to because – DB: Was that because some were stricter than others? RH: Much so. Much so. I was just going to make that statement. I got one of the penal colonies. DB: You got one of the tough ones? RH: Yeah. We called ourselves the zoo. It was the 24th company we were the farthest away from the main office and the hazing was harder than – the two battalions that were farthest away from the main office were the two that were the hardest and the 24th company was in the 6th battalion which was the hardest. We started out with 45 plebes during the academic year, the first year, and we ended up with 27 after the plebe year was over. DB: And who was doing the hazing? The senior midshipmen? RH: The first and second class, yeah. The seniors and juniors. DB: Did you have a commissioned cadre that was supervising? RH: There’s a company officer assigned but he’s only there during the day. There’s a watch officer, an officer of the day, who circulates throughout the whole brigade but that’s a pretty big place for him to cover, you know, and he’s – most of these guys are a little older and they don’t walk upstairs as easily as – DB: So the upperclassmen had something of a freehand with you? RH: Yes they did. Yes they did. And you had what was called a “come around” if you did something that was not what they wanted you to do, whether it was, you know, anything military, dropped a professional question, which they could ask at any meal and you would have to have an answer for them if you didn’t right away by the next meal or something like that. If you performed inadequately in their gaze you could get a “come around” and this “come around” happened between reveille and formation for breakfast or it happened for a half hour before evening meal. You would get a “come around” and you would report, you would knock on a door, and you’d come in, sound off, you know, “Midshipman Hanson 4th class sir!” And then they would start hazing you. There’s such things as uniform races for example, okay, you’d be in the regular uniform of the day, which doesn’t sound like much but the regular uniform for the day for evening meal is service dress blue bravo where you’re wearing coat, tie, and hat, the whole thing. And he’d say, “Get undressed alpha!” And you’d run back and different first

49 classmen had different ways of doing this thing. Some of them had different reputations if it was going to give you a uniform race, typically you would lay out all kinds of uniforms on your rack so you could run in and start ripping things off and your roommates would start handing you things and you’d put them on because you had to be back there in two minutes with a complete different uniform on. And you’d go from something like service dress blue bravo to infantry dress alpha or whatever, delta, or whatever it was, where you’d have leggings on and bayonet belt and rifle and everything else and you’d come running back and come in and sound off. “You took 10 minutes and 30 seconds! Get out of here now! Get back here in yada-dress alpha!” Or something like that and they would make up things, you know, that you had to do. And you would run back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Or typically they would – some of them would do physical hazing. DB: Which consisted of? RH: Which consisted of – just about to say that – some of them would make you do push-ups until you couldn’t do anymore. Some of them would make you say, sitting on the green bench, which would mean you would put your back against the wall and you would slide down to where you would look like you were sitting in a chair only there was no chair there. And you would hold that as long as you could and at first, you know, when your legs weren’t used to it you could only do about 15 seconds until your legs were shaking like a leaf. But by the end of plebe year you could probably do that for a full minute. It was just, you know, some of it was – it depended on the person and it depended on how they felt that day. Some of them were a lot of fun to go to, you know, they were good humor, like they would make you dress up like an Irish chieftain with your bed spread over your shoulder and your leggings on and you’d make a kilt out of something else and you’d have your bayonet stuffed in here. They had a record player of a bagpipe and you’d have to march around the hall, stuff like that. It was just funny and silly but some of it was downright mean. There’s no question about it. DB: And the point of a lot of it was? RH: You never really figured that out until much later. The point of it was to teach you how to think under pressure. And that was the entirety of plebe year, was to make you think under pressure. When you, as a young officer, go to relieve the officer of the deck, and you’re in the middle of an operation, he’s going to tell you the general orders, the specific orders, what power plants are on the line, what coursing speed is, run through the whole iteration there and he’s going to do it fast and in about two minutes. And you have to suck it all up. And you have to – when you say, “I relieve you, sir.” He’s out the door and you got it now, you got this ship so you have to be able to respond to that kind of pressure. It’s been likened to your mind should just be like a clock ticking in a thunderstorm. Don’t be bothered about all this stuff that’s happened there just do your job. DB: Focus. RH: Just focus. And you find yourself being able to do that kind of stuff. It’s remarkably effective but it’s a hell of a way to learn, let me put it that way. It really is. It’s – a lot of people can’t do it. We had a lot of people that just – I mean we had people – we had a youngster from, I think he was from Puerto Rico, Negron Frerrer was his name, and he finally got to the point where he would wake up about an hour before reveille and get full service dressed blue bravo

50 and just sit in his chair and shake until the time came that he had to go out and perform. And he just – DB: Didn’t graduate? RH: Oh no, he didn’t get through plebe year. DB: But that’s the point of the weeding out. RH: That’s the point of the weeding out in a lot of ways. It’s a tough way to do it but they did it that way. DB: But it’s a tough business that you’re heading into. RH: Tough business. DB: So after your first year, training changed? RH: Oh yeah. It did. DB: Becomes more academic? RH: Youngster year had the – youngster that’s third class year the sophomore year had the reputation of being the cruising year, you’d relax a lot. You maintained the standards of dress and all the rest of that kind of stuff. The academics were not terrifically hard. They restored some of the privileges they had ripped away from you for plebe year. For example, plebe year you couldn’t even wear a ring. Plebe year you couldn’t have a radio in your room. Plebe year you couldn’t date. On and on and on, you had – you could be outside the gate on Saturday between end of noon meal until formation for evening meal, unless there’s a sporting event in the yard and then you were at the sporting event in the yard. DB: Yelling “Go navy!” RH: Yeah. So you could date, you could actually do that and almost human things. And here I was, I was a 21 year old plebe by the time it was over with. DB: That was unusually old? RH: I’m one of the older ones and I’ll tell you a little story. On my 21st birthday, May of 1958, it was an ugly day. I had a “come around” in the morning and got all chopped up and I had to watch. I was on the watch bill for – because we had to stand in military watches while we were even in academics. You didn’t go to the class that day, you stood military watches. And so I had the evening watch and which get me up about an hour longer than normal. You didn’t get much sleep anyway, you know, and I’d gotten chewed out by somebody else along the way and just an ugly way to have a 21st birthday. Not what you want if you had your choice and as I sat there and waited for the watch to be piped down about 10:30, I thought to myself, You know, I’ve got a bottle of G.I. gin in my medicine cabinet. G.I. gin is the elixir of terpin hydrate for coughs and it's got codeine in it. So I thought, Ahhh. And they piped down the watch and I smoked it all the way down to the basement, because they had a coke machine down there, and I got an orange pop out of that and went all the way up fast, because I didn’t want to get caught out in the hall by an upperclassman going to the head or something, and snuck into my room and I opened that bottle of orange and got my glass and poured about two stiff fingers of ETH, G.I. gin, and filled

51 it up with orange and said, “I’m 21, I’m an adult.” (Laughter). And I put that thing down and I found out that night and since I found out one time since then, that I don’t react well to codeine. I had many tooth monsters chasing me and everything else for about half that night. DB: You were hallucinating? RH: I had bad, bad experience with it. But that’s how I celebrated my 21st birthday. So – DB: As you’re progressing through, you have to get more and more focused on what kind of a military career – Naval career you’re going to pursue. RH: You don’t choose until first class year. DB: But also you’re in the summer, you have activities. You’re going on cruises or – RH: The summer is designed to give you exposure to just about all arms of the military, especially the navy and the Marine Corps. So you will have exposure enough to choose what you want to go into. Not everybody has to go into navy line, which is the regular naval officer going to a ship, USS boat. Doing your thing – DB: And the Naval Academy is also training future marines. RH: Well at that time you could even go in the air force because we had a naval officer, a blackjack, oh what was his last name? I forget. I’ll think of it. But he was a submariner and that was our company officer the first year. DB: What is a blackjack? RH: That was his nickname, Blackjack. DB: Oh that was his nickname? RH: Yeah. He was a very swarthy fellow. And the next – after plebe’s cruise, plebe’s summer cruise, or youngster cruise it was called, where I went on the USS Lake Champlain, to Edinburgh, Scotland and Vigo, Spain and Copenhagen, Denmark. Really nice cruise. We came back and I went on leave for a month and then came back to the Naval Academy and we had a young air force officer as company officer. And he was a West Point graduate too. And so we had a little exposure to the air force there as well. DB: On these cruises, what was your status? Were you treated like a sub-ensign – or? RH: (Laughter) pretty much. DB: You were expected to show young leadership and do some regular duties? RH: Well youngster cruise you were expected – you were assigned to duty that was commensurate with enlisted. And I helped run the elevator on the Lake Champlain. DB: You’re learning from the bottom up? RH: Yeah you’re learning from the bottom up and you hang around with the sailors and I also did some engine room watches which was very enlightening and you know, you work, you swabbed decks, you did all kinds of stuff like that but you got in with the fleet. You got exposure in the fleet.

DB: And it’s an adventure. RH: Yes, it was and you went on liberty out in town with you know, you didn’t have a whole lot of money but that’s to choose – you can survive without a whole lot of money you can get out there and do some things. So anyway, when we came back from that you went to youngster year and you started out in youngster year with pretty much mid-range of academic stuff. Not a whole lot of military stuff per say, but it was still academic. You had to take a foreign language. I took Italian because it was the easiest, I’ll admit it. It’s phonetically correct if you can say it you can spell it and all the rest. And it’s an easy romance language. You take elementary physics and you still had mathematics and you know, so it was still – you still did the same things. You still marched in the same parades, you did all the other stuff that was doing there. You stood watches, but pretty much an easy year and you’d get through that pretty easily. DB: Did you get to go home in the summers too? RH: Yeah you always had just about 30 days leave in the summer. You know, came back from the cruise we had 30 days before we had to report in for academic year, but now we had fourth class that drew the ire of the upper class so you would – it’s a year to stay kind of in the background, you know, just observe and not be too involved in anything because if you are you’re probably screwing up. DB: How was your time at home? RH: Oh it was wonderful. Like I said my dad threw me the keys to the Plymouth. DB: No dread going back? RH: Not as an upperclassman. Coming back from Christmas leave the first year there was dread coming back because from Christmas until Easter you don’t really get off – you know there’s no football games to go to or anything like that. It’s called the “dark ages” and it’s pretty grim but coming back as a youngster it wasn’t too bad. DB: And what was your experience when you’re an upper classman dealing with the lower classmen? What lessons had you learned and were ready to implement? RH: What lessons had we learned? We actually got the first class together at the beginning of the year and we said, “Look, this is a tough company and we want it to stay a tough company, but we don’t want it to be a penal battalion, the way it was when we came through here. So let’s hold down on the chicken shit.” Basically. “Let’s not be having all the physical hazing and all the rest of that kind of stuff. Let’s keep a sense of humor about what we’re doing but let’s make sure that they live up to the standards and do whatever.” And it went pretty much that way. I was quite proud of the way we handled first class year. DB: Hard but professional? RH: Yeah, it was. It was. And it’s, you know, there’s a lot of things that go on – I didn’t tell you anything about 100th night. 100th night is when the first class and the fourth class change places for dinner. Okay so, that’s 100th night from graduation so you come up to that point and for weeks before that the first class are just all over the fourth class, just making them do stuff like “crap on the rack”. Guys running around they have to take everything they own and put it on

53 their bed, emptied everything out. Rifles stacked on there and every overcoat and laundry bag and – DB: And it has to be stacked just so? RH: Yeah well it has to be stacked on there and you look at it and say, “Put her back now.” And walk out (Laughter) kind of thing. Just really, really, really, pumping up the fourth class. And then the fourth class on 100th night you switch blouses with them so they got the one with the gold stripe on it and then the plebe says, “Hanson get in here!” “Midshipman Hanson fourth class sir!” You got in there and they do the same thing to you. DB: Their chance for revenge? RH: It’s a chance for revenge. And it’s good, it’s really good in sense of humor and the first class after that pretty much leave you alone because they’ve got other important things to do. They’ve got service selection to do, they’ve got getting ready for graduation, uniforms to get, and arrangements to be made and all the rest of that kind of stuff. They’re working pretty hard at this point in time. DB: It’s also kind of a way of saying welcome to the Academy, you’ve made it? RH: Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. But the second class don’t leave you alone. DB: Now as we mentioned earlier, as you’re coming up in the system you’re getting more focused on what you think you want to do in the navy. RH: Sure. DB: And you still wanted to be an aviator? RH: Well after youngster year, you have aviation summer. It’s a combination summer. The first two weeks are amphibious. You go to Little Creek, Virginia, and you learn all about amphibious operations to the point where you climb the nets in the boat and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And you make a landing and do the whole smear. Then some of them will go on leave and come back and do aviation summer, some of them will go to aviation summer and then go on leave, they split it up. But you go all over the place you go to Philadelphia for fire-fighting school you go to Jacksonville for their de-engineering stuff down there and for multi-engine things. You go to Pensacola, you go to the air force base down there where they do a lot of testing. Surprisingly it’s cold weather testing. They’ve got a building that’s bigger than any building you’ve ever seen before. It’s 50 below zero in there. You walk across that in your regular uniform and Pensacola you’re sweating. The armpits are wet, they’re frozen by the time you get to the other side of the building. But you do this and they run you through a short flight syllabus and our regular instructor take you out and you end up shooting landings and doing all that kind of stuff and you know, it gives you a real feel for what’s happening and then you’ll go on a training carrier down there which was the Antietam in that day and you take a short cruise over to New Orleans, so that’s where we went. And in that cruise you will get in the back seat of a T-28 and the instructor pilot will do a carrier landing with you in there. And there’s a picture of that cadet kind of thing in there. DB: We’ll come back to the picture later. RH: Okay. 54

DB: But what did you think of your first carrier landing? RH: Well, actually it wasn’t my first carrier landing because my first carrier landing was done in a helicopter at the Lake Champlain. And it was once again, “Anybody want to go for a ride?” Got up front there and I got up there front faster than anybody else. He said, “You get in the right chair – or the left chair, because in a helicopter it’s a right chair that the pilot flies, so I got to be right up front without anything – DB: You had to be the co-pilot? RH: Yeah I was co-pilot. So he made a landing on it. But that was my first one and then this was my second one in a T-28 and I thought it was a pretty exciting – but a daytime carrier landing is like the E-ticket to Disneyland: it is adrenaline and it is, “Ah ah ah!” You got a lot going on at the same time, it’s exciting. It really is. Night is different. And I’ll talk about that later. DB: So graduation’s approaching? RH: First class year, yeah. DB: And what? How does that proceed? RH: And what? I had a girlfriend by then. DB: Who was from? RH: She was from Annapolis. She was, as we called them, a “yard engine”, which meant that her father was a captain and a department head there. And she lived on the station. DB: He was a naval officer? Cadre? RH: Yes. He ran the navigation department. He was a World War II ace, Hellcat ace. Great guy. Just fantastic. And he knew I wanted to go in aviation and so I did. And I decided that with the influx of people in the training command from all sources – DB: All sources being ROTC, the Academy? RH: Yes. In June that there would be a backlog built up and they had the reputation of making you do work, you know, all these SLJs as they were called, shitty little jobs. DB: But before you go to flight training let’s stay at the Academy for just a little bit. RH: Okay. DB: As graduation’s approaching you’re getting more time off? RH: You had reasonable time off as a first class. I mean you didn’t have to be bothered. You could go out on town any time after your classes and be back by evening meal formation and stuff. DB: So having a girlfriend was doable? RH: Oh yes. And from two months prior to graduation you could go out and get a car. My first car.

DB: Oh you did? RH: That’s my first car, a ’55 Chevy hard top. Red and white, the one that – DB: When you’re going to the Academy, are you paid as an E-5 or how are you—? RH: When you go to the Academy at that time you were paid $110 a month. You were given a stipend. As a plebe it was $5 a month. DB: For uniforms? RH: No the uniforms were issued to you and they charged you against your account. DB: But maintenance, cleaning was taken care of? All those things were taken care of? RH: Yes. Laundry and all that stuff was taken care of. And the second year you got $7 a month, guess you could date then. And you got $9 the third year. And you got the magnificent amount of $11 a month as a first class. DB: So this was in addition to the hundred and some dollars you – RH: Not this is what you got. This was money that you got. DB: Oh this is what you got? And the other money went? RH: Into your account. DB: Oh they had a forced savings account then? RH: Indeed. DB: Okay. So by the time you were getting ready to graduate you had a nest egg put away? RH: Yes. DB: And were you able access that? RH: Well you were able to access it on the way through for things you needed from the ship store, from the Naval Academy store. So if you wanted to buy any other uniform stuff or if you wanted to buy a present for mom for Christmas you could do it but it would come out of that account. DB: But that was monitored pretty closely? RH: No, not really. DB: It was accessible? RH: If you spent the thing, you know, you couldn’t overspend it. DB: It was accessible then? RH: It was accessible. DB: So you bought your first car? RH: Yes.

DB: You had a girlfriend? RH: Yes. DB: And you’re planning to go to flight school? RH: Yes. DB: And graduation comes, did your parents attend? RH: They certainly did. My parents and my brother and my younger sister. And my aunt and my cousin. And we arranged housing for them and all and got a wonderful time. Partied a little bit. You know you still couldn’t drink. See you couldn’t drink inside the seven mile limit as a midshipmen. You couldn’t go outside the seven mile limit. DB: The seven mile limit was the area around the Academy? RH: Was from the chapel dome, a radius of three and a half miles – seven miles. So that’s the way it was. Now that was violated a lot, let me tell you, especially when you had a car and in first class. DB: Were you required to wear your uniform at all times? Or did you have civilian clothes that you could wear? RH: If you were on an authorized weekend, you got one authorized weekend a semester as a second class and two a semester as a first class and you could wear civvies at that time. DB: Go to the beach or something like that? RH: Yeah, yeah you could. DB: So you had your graduation ceremony, it was a nice event, you had a number of family members who came? RH: Yes. DB: And then you were going directly to flight school? RH: You didn’t ask me who spoke there then. DB: Oh okay. RH: John Fitzgerald Kennedy was – addressed us as graduates. DB: And this was 1961? RH: 1961. DB: So he’s the president? RH: He’s the president. And I’ll show you the picture and I’ll show you how close I was to him from here probably to that T.V. set over there during the whole ceremony. DB: About 20 feet? RH: About 20 feet, yeah. The man.

DB: Inspirational speech? RH: Yeah. I’ve got a copy of it here if you’re really interested in seeing what it was. It was fairly Pro Forma kind of thing, it was reasonably good. DB: Still a big deal to have the president there? RH: Oh yeah. I hadn’t voted for him but that’s okay. I thought – I was impressed by him. I really was because he was youthful and what’s not to like, you know, at that particular point. But yes, he spoke. And we graduated and I had volunteered to stay on to train the new plebes went they came in. It’s called a plebe summer detail and if you volunteered you would find a place to stay out in town and they had it for different things there were some in the academic community, some of them were in the physical things like one of my classmates and company mates was a world-class gymnast and he stayed and he took the new plebes that were coming in that were pretty much designated as – hey these guys are, you know, have the talent that we could bring them in as gymnasts. And they did recruit, you know, for football, for baseball, just like any other college does. DB: Got to beat army. But at this point you’re a commissioned officer getting paid as a commissioned officer and everything. RH: Yes, at $222 a month but I had been in the reserve for two and a half years and that counted for longevity so everybody else was getting their $222 a month and within six months I was getting about $400 a month because I had three years longevity and that’s the big jump, was $300 – the three years, because that’s when the average was thinking about getting out and they wanted to keep them in the service, a little enticement there. DB: And your new car in 1961 cost you about? RH: It was a ’55 Chevy. DB: So it was a used car? RH: Used car, yeah. The ’55 Chevy hard top, red and white. It cost me $600. DB: So it was very manageable, pretty affordable? RH: Very manageable, $50 a month were my payments, I remember that. DB: And so you have that summer? RH: That summer I taught sailing, on the knockabouts, which were a 26-foot at the water line and then – really a nice sailboat. And it was fun. On the water every day, you know, and we’d have races and everything else. And I taught the YPs, which were yard patrol boat set up like a small destroyer, you know, completely with all the controls and equipment and everything else, you know that – you would use the same commands and the same ship handling skills you would do it with a destroyer. And I taught those and you know, anything to do with seamanship. And it was a piece of cake. And the instructors that stayed there, because of one thing or another, treated you like, “Well, you’re one of us now!” And we’d have baseball games with them and parties and all kinds of fun stuff. It was a just a real nice way to break into it. Go out in town and have spaghetti and a glass of wine, you know, that you couldn’t do before. It was like being a

58 human again. But I was 24 years old and I had to be in by 10 o’clock at night before bed. So I was pretty happy to be welcome back into real life. And it was a good thing. DB: And now the time comes to go to flight school. RH: Yes. And that was in late August and I drove down to Pensacola and stopped at a friend’s house and spent a few days with him and went and got a BOQ room and checked into Pensacola and at first, about three weeks you’re down there, you’re at main side Pensacola going through flight theory and stuff like that. Pre-flight is what it’s called. And you know, you do a couple of tours and just know where all the facilities are and whatever. But you get theory of flight and also some other skills things like engine starting and things like that, you know, just the real basic stuff. And then you go to an outlying field for primary flight. Saufley Field was our primary flight and we were flying a T-34 otherwise known as the teeny-weenie. DB: Did you take to flying pretty easily? RH: Yeah, it required some – I had an instructor pilot who was – left a little bit to be desired. If you did something wrong he would sit behind you and he would snap the back of your helmet with this – the strap on his kneeboard. DB: Wasn’t a classy guy? RH: No (Laughter). But many a naval aviators aren’t. There’s no question about it. But I got along with him reasonably well. And got through the flight syllabus without any downs in primary. You know, unsatisfactory flights were you had to take it over again. And let’s see – it took about six, eight weeks. Just before Christmas I finished primary. And you know had my solo, they cut my tie off and the whole thing. And then when I came back on Christmas leave I checked out of Saufley and then went to Whiting Field, which is an outlying field about 20 miles outside of Pensacola. And I did South Whiting and North Whiting. And at South Whiting was introductory to the T-28. And a T-28 actually at that time was quite an airplane. It was on par with a World War II Hellcat. It was a handful of airplane to fly. There’s no question about it. DB: Powerful? RH: It was very powerful and very versatile, they used them in Vietnam. A lot of people had jobs teaching, flying the T-28 to Vietnamese pilots and they used them for missions over there. We had the Bs and the Cs, the A’s had only a two-bladed prop, the air force used those for a while. The Bs was the best because it was very powerful and it had a three-bladed prop. The C had a shorter prop because it was carrier-qualified. And because of that, because of the nose down on a trap on an arrested landing, you didn’t want to have a very long prop blade, you’d start chewing up the deck and that’s not very good. DB: But at what point in your aviation training did you – were people starting to be divided out to go to one type of aircraft or another? And how was the decision made? RH: Right after primary they made the split. And at that time you either split into jets or you split into props and I wanted to fly props. DB: So it was your choice? RH: Yeah it was my choice.

DB: And that would be respected? RH: Yeah, pretty much. DB: As long as you were qualified? RH: As long as you have the standards, you know, they obviously wanted the aces of the bases to fly fighters and that kind of stuff. So anyway, I went to Whiting and there they – you continued on. Now you started flying in the T-28, the aerobatic syllabus was much more stringent, I mean, you were doing high-g turns and you were doing loops and, you know, the chandelles and all the acrobatic stuff in the primary stage and then when you got out of that you went into the trainers, the instrument trainers, the squeeze boxes we used to call them, you know, where you couldn’t look outside you had to fly on basic instruments. And we did that. The basic instrument syllabus we did in a T-28 was just that. It was timed to sense, it was timed turns, it was that kind of thing building up toward the point of making simple instrument approaches into outlying fields and pretty much you’re route checking as far as getting in the back seat of the T- 28 they had a cocoon kind of thing that pulled over the top of you so you couldn’t see outside and the instructor pilots sat in the front. He would take off, take the airplane off, and he would turn it over to you and he would give you outbound headings and altitudes and you had to fly strictly on instruments and do that – do the instrument flight to the point where you would fly point to point – at that time we were using Omni stations and I’d fly into an Omni station, pick up a different heading – going out from it flying to an air field that had an instrument approach using Omni and then you would fly the approach right down to minimums where you would take off the aircraft and say, “Pop the hood.” And you could see how you’d done as far as where the airplane was and whatever. And it was challenging, it was challenging to start out. You have to really keep your scan going and you know, it’s – you’re juggling a lot of things at the same time, you’re flying the airplane, you still have to keep it trimmed and you have to keep the power going and if you have to climb and descend you have to adjust the air speeds accordingly and you know, it’s a little busier but it’s something you have to pick up. You have to become basically qualified to fly. You have to become instrument qualified to fly. And we finished that syllabus and then we went into a pre-carrier syllabus and that was actually in VT-5 and it was a small cadre of people who would teach you how to make a flight approach to an aircraft carrier. This is entirely different business. You’re flying on the back end of the power curve, you’re about 1.05 or 1.1 times stall speed, which means that you have to be very careful you don’t let it fall out of the sky. You have to fly a visual glide slope. At that time they just used a mirror which had a light source that shone in the mirror and you would fly down the glide slope that was on the mirror, you couldn’t let it go high, you couldn’t let it go low, you had to fly it down on the field which would land you in the vicinity of the wire supposedly. It’s called field carrier landing practice. You would go out and do this over and over and over and over again and you would get critiqued by the LSO or the landing signal officer for every approach you made whether you were slow, whether you were high and fast, you know, and some of it got quite colorful. You would get comments like, “You’re higher than an elephant’s ass on that one,” or, “You keep coming in that slow and you’re going to be all over the round down.” So, you’d have to basically put it in the box that you had to fly – a typical carrier landing has to be made in a 20 by 20 foot box as you come over the round down of the aircraft carrier. You have to be on plus or minus five knots. If you’re not in that set of restrictions right there you’re going to get waved off because they cannot take you if you’re not going to be in there. If you’re going to be

60 low you’re going to hit the round down, especially on the World War II carriers that we were flying to at that time. Even the training carriers were all World War II carriers. The deck was angled, but the modification was put in there after World War II, they were called 27 Charlie decks and they were a little more forgiving in that if you missed wires you wouldn’t go into the pack forward like you would on a straight deck carrier, you were able to put on the power and go around, it was called a bolter. You did not get a wire but you had to still meet the requirements and then one day it came time and you would go out in a flight of however many because you were formation qualified by that time and you would go and do your six carrier landings. DB: And were you feeling confident by this time? Maybe after the sixth one? RH: I’m feeling Banzai, let’s go! I didn’t know what to feel. I really didn’t. DB: But you were ready for it? Ready to try? RH: Well, ready yeah. But things can go bad real fast. Now in the approach you fly down the starboard side of the ship at 300 feet in formation, you get ahead of the carrier deck and you start breaking and getting – building up your interval like that. And I was tail end Charlie out of a flight of four so by the time I turned, I started to turn back and I couldn’t see the carrier because there’s always haze out at sea and I had not been focusing on what my – the flight course, which is the heading, the flight heading, and I would fly the reciprocal to come back to the carrier of course. So I looked and I couldn’t see it out there and I thought, Oh boy this is it. And all of a sudden I picked up an airplane turning back there, he was above the haze layer and I said, “I’m going there.” And I headed back and I picked up the carrier and no problem. DB: The sixth landing went okay? RH: Well, the first two you make you don’t put your tail hook down. You know so you’re flying in and you’re going to bounce on it and you’re going to take off and go around. That’s to give you confidence that, hey, I can actually put this thing on that carrier. It’s a good thing to do. And by the third one I was ready. I dropped a hook on there and I hit six in a row. I didn’t get waved off at all. I felt – I was on top of the world there’s no question about it. I am a carrier pilot now. And everybody who gets their golden wings does this, including the coasties who don’t have any carriers, the marine pilots, who don’t have any carriers but they do deploy on navy carriers on occasion, marine squadrons. DB: So you got your wings, you were a fully qualified pilot? RH: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This was only the – this was basic command here. DB: This isn’t the graduation requirement? Okay. RH: No, no, no, no. DB: Still in the early phases. RH: This is to get you out of basic into advanced flight training command. Now, so, okay we finished that, we went back, we wrote our critiques and everything else and we made our request and I made my request to get into S-2s. At that time, and anti-submarine warfare was a real live specialty because the Soviet fleet of submarines was many, many times the subs we had. And it was a completely different subset of the navy, you know, you had your attack carriers but you

61 had your anti-submarine carriers as well. And I wanted to fly ASW because it was a real career- enhancing thing to do at that time. This is 1962 we’re talking here. DB: Now, to digress just a little bit, this is the time of the Berlin crisis, this is the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. RH: Cuban Missile Crisis came shortly after that because I was in an advanced flight training when it came. DB: Okay so maybe just mention that when it’s appropriate, okay? RH: We’ll get to that. So anyhow, I got through the basic command and I was sent to New Iberia, Louisiana, which was a really interesting naval air station. Lionel Hebert was a senior senator from Louisiana and he was always on the lookout for some government pork to come back to Louisiana so he decided with the new rules they were putting out, because of all the noise that jets were making, they made master jet bases at different places around the country that were way out into the country. They weren’t anywhere near urban areas that would bother people, you know, because jets, especially at that time, made a lot of noise and they fell out of the sky with alarming regularity on occasion. So he got one in New Iberia, Louisiana, right out there in the middle of all the sugar cane fields. And the sugar cane fields were all around, all around the base. So what happened here is that they built the runways and they built the base and the next thing they looked and they said, Wait a minute, that runway looks a little funny what’s the matter with that? And they checked and it was sinking slowly into the mud, the Louisiana thing, so they couldn’t use it as a master jet base so they turned it over to the prop community, which had had a whole lot less heavy duty effect on the runways. So I went to fly S-2s and got into S-2s and went through a familiarity syllabus where we went up and did all the normal operations and all the emergency procedures, flying single engine, you know, and that kind of thing, to get yourself safe for solo and from then on two of the students would fly the airplane unless it was a particular part of the syllabus that required an instructor to be on board and we would get to go out on cross countries and do all kinds of other things. And then we went into the instrument syllabus and the instrument syllabus at that time was a complete instrument syllabus. You had to do everything: you had to fly airways, you had to make approaches, you had to do everything you could on instruments. Takeoff and landing and the whole thing. And when you finished the instruments syllabus successfully you got your instrument card, your first instrument card, which was a white card, it said you’re instrument qualified. I think there’s one in here someplace. And then you could go, you could take the airplane and go places and do things. And right after we finished the instrument syllabus, I was out with a young mar-cad, a marine cadet, who had just finished his instrument syllabus as well and we were out doing something and they burned the cane fields and when they burn the cane fields it’s zero zero. You know, zero ceiling and zero visibility. And there we were, stuck out there, and all of a sudden, “Okay, that’s alright, just use an instrument approach to get in.” And you suck up a little seat cushion, you know, and this is for real now. This isn’t some instructor in the right chair. And you know, a hood over me and this kind of thing. But I shouted, “GCA going in there!” Ground-controlled approach. I could do it, I did it. I went rolling out, I wanted to throw dollar bills at the GCA unit but I was proud of the fact that hey, I can do this for real. DB: It works.

RH: It works, it works. And that’s half the battle is building up confidence. Half of bravery is having done it before, it really is. So anyway, and then we started going through tactics and everything else and you know, flying ASW patterns over the water and going out over the Gulf of Mexico and doing that kind of thing. And rockets and bombs dropping and shooting and using the airplane the way you’re going to do it operationally, as much as you’re able to do it at that particular time, it’s certainly not current tactics but its basic stuff you’re doing. And then you go into the same carrier syllabus and you go through the same thing where you would shoot the field carrier landing practice over and over and over and over until you’re comfortable and you’re comfortable with you and then you go out, one of the last things you do is you carrier qualify. Go out and get six carrier landings in the Gulf of Mexico. Went out, shot my six landings and felt pretty good about that. We came, landed, and taxied up and, “Let’s go get a beer!” And unfortunately there was a – one of the instructors was standing out there and said, “We just got order on you guys.” Now this was 1962 and it was before Vietnam and the navy had a lot more pilots than they did seats for them and this is something they didn’t really warn us about is the fact that just because you got that gold moth on your chest now, and just because you’re qualified, doesn’t mean you’re going to go to squadron and you’re going to get all kinds of, you know, adventures and that kind of thing. A lot of pilots going out didn’t get any seat at all, they were assigned to naval air stations and they had to get their time in the station aircraft, you know, that’s what it was. DB: What is getting your time in a station aircraft? RH: You have to have a minimum of flight time to keep current. Okay so – DB: You just maintain your flight status? RH: Yeah you maintain your flight status and each air station at that time had station aircraft, it could have been your SNB, it could have been the C-1, it could have been something like that — DB: But not flying operationally? RH: No you’re not flying operationally. DB: So what was going to happen to you? RH: So I got one that said, “You’re going to AEW Baron PAC.” And my jaw dropped down. AEW Baron PAC was the largest squadron in the navy, over 500 pilots in it. And it’s called Airborne Early Warning Squadron Pacific and it flew Willy Victors which were super constellations that had a tower radar on the top of it that was used to establish altitude and a very large dome radar on the bottom of it which was used to pick up things at distance. And they’d had a crew of 28 people on board. Had a crew of 28 people on board – DB: Big plane? RH: It was a big plane. Four engines and the only good thing was it was stationed in Hawaii. DB: And you’d never flown anything comparable to the size? RH: I rode in one once, but I’d never flown anything like that. And I was just really disappointed that that was going to happen to me because I was just going to become a cypher in a major sized squadron like that, you know, talk about instant Ensign Junior Grade – somebody 63 like that. I was the JG by then but – at that time I had been engaged to my first wife and right after that, right after I got my wings, I went back to Troy, New York, where her father was professor of naval sciences at the ROTC unit and we had a military wedding complete with the sword arch and the whole thing. And we drove back across country and stopped at Minnesota and stopped at Wisconsin so my grandma could meet her and we drove across country and drove up to San Francisco and put my ’55 Chevy on the ship and we rode the ship across to Hawaii, which was an adventure because it was five days of storms going across. It was a troop ship with berthing for dependents and stuff on board. So I had my dependent there. They didn’t have enough Os, officers, to take care of the troops that were on board so we got delegated to go down and make inspections in the troop quarters and with five days of stacking G.I.s one on top of each other, five deep in some of those berthing spaces — DB: It’s a classic World War II style — RH: Wahhh! It was a studying in projectile vomiting let me put it that way. Oh it was horrible, those poor guys. I felt so sorry for them. DB: And how did you deal with the storms? RH: I didn’t have any problem (Laughter). DB: And your wife? RH: I’m a sailor! DB: Yeah, but – RH: My wife had some problems. And anyhow we made it across and we got off and the squadron had somebody to meet us there and my car was there already, it had been shipped across pretty much simultaneously. So we had wheels and there wasn’t any navy housing available so we had off station housing allowance and we stayed in a hotel in Pearl City for a period of time until housing became available – well until we decided whether we wanted to wait for housing or we wanted to rent. If we rented, we got a housing allowance and we chose to do that. We moved to Haleiwa Hawaii, over on the backside of Oahu, which was right on the beach and it was kind of a typical Hawaiian home which means it’s just one board between you and the great outdoors. And when a car drives by on the street outside you can see – you can follow the lights as it goes by. It was kind of interesting and I got into the routine of flying super connies, they put us through syllabus, a ground syllabus, to get used to the airplane and to get – because at first, there’s so many pilots in that squadron that each one carried, each aircraft carried, carried three pilots on each flight which means that you had first pilots, his co-pilot, and a third pilot and before you could become a third pilot you had to be qualified as a navigator on those things. So my first three or four months I was a navigator, a second navigator behind a real navigator so I had to learn how to take star shots and I had to learn how to read Loran lines and I had to follow all the celestial navigation and any other stuff. PLOP lines (Pressure lines of position. A method of navigation using pressure deviations of frontal passage which cause offset from the intended course.), pressure line up positions and it was a real study in navigation. I had navigation at the Naval Academy and I was pretty good at it but this was an entirely different animal, it really was. So I got to the point where I could navigate reasonably well and sooner or later you could take your third nav. check and if you passed that, which I did, then you’d get –

64 even though I had to take it twice the first time, we lost everything on the airplane and had to ask for a radar vector someplace but you still had to navigate for a while until the third pilot position came open and I finally got a third pilot position and got with a crew and flew with that crew for a long period of time. And worked my way up to second pilot and actually took the syllabus and became qualified as an aircraft commander in the super Connie when I was still a JG. But at that point there were so many reserves that had come back from airlines careers and things like that that there was so, so many senior pilots in the squadron, you weren’t going to get a crew, you weren’t going to get to take out a crew and have that crew on the line and do the flights. We used to fly from Barber’s Point in Hawaii to Midway Island, out in the middle of the Pacific and we flew out of Midway Island for about fourteen days, about nine or ten flights in those fourteen days and every 71 hours, that’s how it worked, we were rolling down the runway. And by that I mean we had done a three hour pre-flight, where the navigator’s going in and got all the complete navigation and weather that kind of stuff, the pilots had to start at the nose wheel and end up at the tail and completely pre-flight that aircraft. The crew had been in and checked out all the electronics in the aircraft. We loaded everything on board, loaded the fuel on board and it takes about three hours to do all that stuff. So we take off – DB: You’re flying real world missions now? RH: Yeah, but we had to fly to Midway first. So we would fly out the chain of island and then go out to Midway and land at Midway. And the next day we would start with our first real mission, which we would go through the same pre-flight and everything else and the same thing. Only this time when we took off we climbed to 7,000 feet because we were very, very, very heavy. We had a full fuel load. We went to max gross takeoff weight on the airplane every time we went down the runway. And you know it handled like, you think it would, which was not very well when it got airborne. And we would stay that way for about two to three hours before we climbed up to 9,000 and finally up to 11,000, feet. Just to get some gas off the airplane so we could operate it at a real altitude. But we provided a radar barrier between Midway and the Aleutian Islands to stop any Russian flights coming through the barrier on the way to the America. That was called NORAD, we were part of NORAD the North American Defense System. DB: So your radar mission is against aircrafts not submarines? RH: Yes, yes. DB: Okay. RH: They had two destroyers on station on the track so you would go over them, you know, to provide extra positioning but you probably knew your position better than the station ships did, especially out in the winter time because those poor guys were in semi-submersibles out there. They had a rough ride the whole time. But you would switch off. There’d be a full crew taking off until you got established outbound and everything else and then one pilot would be on duty at a time, you’d stand two, three hour watches. And they had racks on the ship, on the airplane, so you know, the pilot making the landing of course would get some sleep and you’d hot bunk the racks so the one navigator would get some sleep and they had some racks in the back for some of the radar operators as well to make sure that everybody was getting you – you’d take rations on board, we had a full flight kitchen and you know, it gave us opportunities to do some neat things, you know, like we had a flight engineer who made tacos – it was really good! We’d have some

65 good meals on the way around the track. And the morale was reasonably good, it really was. It was a tight crew. DB: You mentioned earlier the Cuban Missile Crisis. RH: Oh I’m sorry we didn’t – DB: You’re in the Pacific though. RH: Yeah. No the missile crisis was when I was going through New Iberia, Louisiana. And boy they brought all kinds of airplanes through, you know, to – they mostly went to Florida. They had – they loaded all the runways around Florida with operational aircrafts ready to go. DB: Looked like the real thing was going to happen. RH: Ready to go, especially when they put the blockade in effect they thought, Well, we’re going to go shoot some ships up. But as you know it, cooler heads prevailed and they said let’s take it down a notch, and they did. DB: You’re in the Pacific, this is ’63 now? RH: I got there in ’63. DB: And what are you hearing about Southeast Asia? RH: Just mutterings. DB: Not much? RH: Not much – DB: Just another problem area in the world? RH: Yeah a little problem area, one more. And not much happening there. DB: So how long did you stay with this squadron? RH: Actually about two years. It was normally a three year tour but when Vietnam started rearing its ugly head, they said, Hey, we’re going to have to cut back some things here. And we’re going to have a lot of troops in the Pacific anyway so NORAD was getting better with long-distance radars and it was time to fold the squadron up and my marriage was going down the shoot about that time. She was in the navy as a captain’s daughter just fine but as a JG’s wife she didn’t handle it very well. And I had – we had a daughter together – DB: And you’re gone a lot. RH: Yeah I was gone two weeks out of four. And she just wasn’t having any of it. So I ended up sending her home and we checked out of the – by that time we were in navy housing – I checked out of navy housing and I actually had to wait until it was two years in Honolulu because that was the minimum to get a divorce in Hawaii. And we got divorced, which hurt me a lot, because I didn’t get into a marriage for – it was a one-woman person and it hurt me a lot that I’d failed or that we had failed, let me put it that way. So anyway, I was back to being a bachelor again and when they started to fold the squadron they said, Where do you want to go? And I actually put in for a transfer to Operation Deep Freeze, which was down in Antarctica.

DB: Now this is ’65 now? RH: This is – yeah this is ’65 now. And they said, No, we’re going to split you back into ASW. And I thought, Well, that’s what I trained for. So we’ll go back to ASW. And I got orders to a VS squadron in San Diego and I flew back home and had the leave and then went to San Diego and went through, the RAG it’s called, the Replacement Air Group, which had up-to-date S-2s with up-to-date equipment in them. And pilots that had just come from S-2 squadrons that were instructor pilots and they were instructing us in the way that the S-2s were being used right now in the fleet and with all the tactics and that kind of thing. And we went through the syllabus there and went out and did our six day carrier landings to become qualified – actually it was ten carrier landings and then we went into night carrier landing practice. Now I had not done night carrier landing ever and there’s, you know it sounds funny to say, but there’s a night and day difference between night carrier landings and if you don’t believe it just hit the YouTube and you can pick out a day carrier landing and then say give me a night carrier landing and you’ll see the difference. But the weather system when we hit – when we were ready to go out on night carrier qualify was really, really ugly and we went out there three, four nights in a row and did not meet minimums and finally they said, Get out there and landings. I don’t care if they’re minimums or not. And I scared the hell out of myself for six night carrier landings. I was really, really concerned about making a night carrier landing to the point where, after I finally finished, I spent a long time at the local watering hole in Coronado that night wondering if I was doing the right thing here. But I said, “Well, I got to stick with it now.” So we got ready and we went to our squadrons and we were absorbed in the squadrons and I was given a job of avionics weapons divisions’ officer and I became a co-pilot to an African American by the name of Lou Williams, who later made admiral. Hell of a guy. Really a wonderful guy. And he was the maintenance officer and I worked for him as well as flew with him and we stayed together for the entire time I was VS-23, the world famous Black Cats as they were called. So we were getting ready to go to Vietnam and we did a tremendous amount of preparing. We were really reasonably certain that we were going to be used in a light attack capability on the beach so we did a lot of weapons stuff. We did a lot of rockets and bombs. DB: Ground support missions? RH: Yes, ground support missions. We did those over at Fallon, over in Nevada. And we did a lot of weapons down in the Chocolate Mountain range. East of San Diego we operated out of El Centro, over there. Did a tremendous amount of those things. We developed some techniques which were really kind of cutting edge at the time, especially for S-2s. The S-2 was limited to 60 degrees angle of bank, (angle the wings make with the horizon in a turn) so what we did we used the Mark 25 para flares on the wings – wing racks, along with the rocket pods on the other wing racks and we would fly at 10,000 feet. We would fly over a suspicious area and we would drop the para flares – now they had two settings: one for drop parachute deployment and the other one for light off after the parachute deployment so if we wanted to drop it down to about 3,000 feet, which we would probably do, we would put about seven seconds on that until the parachute deployment and then at 3,000, which was in about four, five seconds, it would come on and those things had magnesium flares in it and billion candle power kind of things, they really lit up. And we would do a wing over 90 degrees and we would come back right straight across down our track that we had been inbound pointing at the ground, armed and ready to go with the

67 rockets and bombs as those things popped on, as they popped on, so if there were any troop deployments or anything down there – DB: Catch them in the open? RH: We would be ready – in the open – we would be ready to pickle off as soon as the lights came on. And we did it with all kinds of – they’re like trucks and things like that on the ranges out there – you know its fun. We got good at it. We really did. But when we got over into Vietnam they would not even talk to us about that. McNamara ran that war and he didn’t want us doing that kind of stuff. He did – came right from headquarters, you will not do that stuff. So we ended up flying market time operation over there. DB: And what does that mean? RH: That means that we used our ASW sensors – for example, we had a stinger on the back of the S-2, actually it would come out on a track, on a tube, it looked like a big stinger, and it had a very, very, very sensitive magnetometer on it. We used it for ASW. We’d fly at 100 feet and that magnetometer would have a field of about 1,000 feet around it that would pick up any concentration of metal, iron, metal. So if we’d check out the junks going by and if we got a big magnetometer thing like that we would vector a destroyer in on it because they were probably smuggling arms into South Vietnam. And we did a lot of that kind of stuff. And search and rescue and armed recon kind of things. DB: But you were not allowed to attack? RH: We were not allowed to attack. DB: Was that really frustrating for you? RH: Very, very frustrating for us. Very, very – DB: Hurt the morale factor? RH: Morale factor was – DB: You would find targets, you would see them, you would know the enemy was there, and you couldn’t do anything about them. RH: Yes, yes. Take pictures of them tracking us with guns sometimes. Couldn’t fire back. You were not allowed to fire unless you were fired upon but you were still not allowed to fire if you could get out of there, basically. That’s what they told us, you couldn’t do it. DB: And you were flying against or towards targets in North Vietnam? Or the south? RH: Right up to North Vietnam. DB: Right up to the DMZ? RH: Yeah we were right up to the DMZ. And a little bit north. And we also flew over close to Hainan but we didn’t get too close to that because that was Red Chinese. And we had a couple airplanes, they weren’t ours, but a couple airplanes were shot down that got too close to Hainan during that time frame. DB: During ’65 were you over there when they had he Gulf of Tonkin incident? 68

RH: No. That was after that. This was actually mostly in ’66 by the time we got over there. DB: And how long was your cruise in the Gulf of Tonkin? RH: It was nine months. We did 30 day periods and then we would go into port for a while. At – DB: Ports would be at Subic Bay? RH: Subic Bay for the most part, although we got into Hong Kong. We had to go to Subic Bay first because the rules said you couldn’t go directly from Vietnam to Hong Kong, so we’d go to Subic Bay and then we’d go to Hong Kong and then we’d come back to the line. Things that happened on that cruise – there were a couple things that stick really deeply into my mind. The weather because we were there in monsoon season. And I got trapped out one night making a night carrier landing in a monsoon and I have never been in a mix master like that in my life ever. I shot a CCA, which is a carrier-controlled approach, radar approach down to minimums, finally got the carrier in close and got waved off foul deck and had to go climbing out again and then go back out and come back and do that same thing over again. I got it down there the second time, finally found the carrier, and wave off, foul deck and had to do it a third time. I came back the third time. By the third time I was sweating so badly that if I had turned my head very fast I’d have been looking out the earhole on my hard hat. You know, it was just so stressful it was just unreal and I finally came back and got aboard the third time and trapped and when I came out of the arresting gear – he started waving me forward, I tried to put on the brakes and my legs were shaking so bad I could barely get the brakes on. It was really, really, you know, it was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare. But I got through it, I did it. DB: What was life like on the carrier? RH: That was my next thing to say because we had an engineering casualty on the ship while I was there. It was the last un-air conditioned aircraft carrier to go to Vietnam. I took the temperature in my state room at 105 degrees at midnight one night. I had bought a fan at the navy exchange in Yokosuka on the way down there. DB: Now which carrier was this? RH: Yorktown. CVS-10. The Yorktown. It was a 27 Charlie. It was a converted World War II carrier, Essex-class, and very – it was, you know, small for twin engine aircraft. It really was. So we didn’t have a whole lot of extra room but we had an engineering casualty and we almost lost all of our freshwater. And for a whole half a line period, which is 15 to 20 days, you couldn’t take a shower. I couldn’t – didn’t get a shower because the flight crews weren’t there. They ran the showers maybe an hour a day and the ship’s company got them but a lot of the flight crews just couldn’t get them. So they ran out of deodorant down in the ship’s exchange and it was genuinely ugly, you know, you were just – you were given yourself a little wash out of the wash bowl in your state room. That’s all you had. And it was right after that we went to Hong Kong and that’s the first thing I did was check in, you know, check into a hotel and I went to the bar and I ordered three drinks and I carried them to my room and I sat in the shower the whole time I had them outside and I’d just have a drink and sit in the shower (Laughter). It was wonderful. DB: Peeling off all the crud.

RH: Oh lordy. And also I went down and ate three salads in a row because the supply chain was not nearly what it is today, you know, we weren’t supplied with the regularity or the quality. DB: Was the ship’s laundry working? Were your – RH: Well you had two sets of everything. DB: Yeah but when you’re sweating like that and its 15 days you go through two sets pretty fast. RH: No I mean you had one set of inspection stuff that you didn’t put through the ship’s laundry and you had a set that came out as gray or brown as that shirt or cloth by the end of it. And you stayed in your flight suit most of the time. It was easier, you know, the bag it just – it was as cool as anything and everybody stunk. You could stand yourself but boy I wouldn’t sit this close to anybody else at that time. DB: So your cruise comes to an end? RH: Yeah we came to – we did that. We went back to Yokosuka and we turned it over to Hornet which was the follow on carrier to take that. DB: So it’s ’67 now? RH: I believe it was late ’66. It was either late ’66 or early ’67. DB: Okay. RH: But we came back and got off the ship and I called home and I said, “I’m back. I survived it.” And all the rest of that kind of stuff. DB: Called your parents? RH: I did yeah. Right from the dock. It flew off and we off loaded the ship when it came in and being a bachelor by then I stayed. The married guys got to go home and do their thing and couple of us bachelors stayed and did the maintenance things that had to be done about turning aircraft and that for a couple of days before we got our chance to go do our thing. And I stayed in the squadron for another couple months after that and then I got orders to post-graduate school. I had applied for post-graduate school. DB: And where was that going to be? RH: Monterey, California, which is where navy post-graduate school is. DB: And that school as a navy school would involve what course of study? RH: Various. I went into operations analysis which I thought would be a real career-enhancing thing but I found out rather quickly I was not mathematically prepared for ops analysis and I requested a change and I got into computer systems management and stayed in computer systems management and finished in that. So I was there for let’s see – post-graduate school I was there for ’67 to ’69. Two years of post-graduate school there. We had Christmas leaves and we had you know, summer kind of thing. It was four quarters a year we were going but we did have a week or so – DB: While you were in school Vietnam’s really cranking up. 70

RH: Yes it is. DB: And what are you – what’s the topic of discussion amongst the naval officers? RH: Vietnam came up real often, came up real often. DB: And was the situation of your restricted missions and similar situations often discussed? RH: Yes. Yeah I know several people that got out of the navy because of it. And of course the civilian community was picking up. The peace movement was getting very strong, especially in California. I flew home on Christmas leave both years and so I guess I was there for two Christmases and for me to get the military discount rate I had to fly in uniform. And at one point on – going through the airport in San Francisco, which was the closest major airport that I could fly to get back to the Twin Cities, I was set upon by a bunch of young people and spit at and called baby killer and all the rest of that kind of stuff, which – it was funny because there was a chief petty officer there that had a group of people he was taking some place and he saw this guy come up and spit on me and I got out of my chair and he says, “Don’t do it lieutenant! Don’t do it!” He said. “My god he’s not worth it he’s a piece of shit!” And I looked at him and I said, “Thanks chief.” Because I was ready to hit him, I really was. DB: You would have been in big trouble. RH: Yeah I probably would have. But post-graduate school we were in civilian clothes, you know, so it wasn’t really a factor out on the economy for the most part and I flew – they had S-2s for station aircraft there and I flew — DB: Stay in status? RH: Yeah, just to stay in flight status. DB: But after school? RH: Well, like I say, I was in computer systems management and we did programming and we did – we worked on an IBM 360 which was a major, major computer at the time. DB: It didn’t fit on a desktop probably. RH: No it didn’t. It fitted in a gym, an air conditioned gym and you filled out punch cards, you know, and if you were lucky you could get an appointment on the card punch of which there were probably 30. You could get an appointment sometime during the day, otherwise you were in there 2 o’clock in the morning punching cards for your programs. But when it came time for orders after post-graduate school they said, Congratulations, you’re going to sea. You’re going to be a Catapult and Arresting Gear Officer on the USS Constellation. DB: And describe what that is. (Robert laughs) DB: Doesn’t tie in with computers very much, does it? RH: No, the navy in its infinite wisdom had taken me from the space age to the – back to the galley. The flight deck of an aircraft carrier has been described as the most dangerous four and a half acre spot on earth. And there is really a YouTube out with that name on it. Even out of flight

71 ops you can get hurt, you can get maimed, you can get killed on a flight deck because you take a major airport complete with all the airplanes on that airport, you throw in two big fire trucks, you throw in 10, maybe 15 “huffers” as they’re called, which are large yellow tractors that have jet engines on them, used for turning up – spooling up the jet engines so they can start, you complicate it by putting a full fueling station or three on that ship along with a bomb farm, because all those things have to have bombs, and they have an area on the flight deck that is a bomb farm, that’s loaded with as many as 50 to 100 bombs at one time. You compress all that onto 1,000 feet. That’s what you got. DB: Lots of volatile materials is what you’re saying. RH: Lots of volatile materials. And the fire hazard is measurable. I have been through a collision at sea. I’ve been through a dead in the water for four days on a carrier at sea. I’ve been through 100 or more fires at sea. DB: Fires caused by? RH: Well, I’ll get into one of those. The ones that we handled most were people that had fueled aircraft that were strapped down in the ship’s motion, whatever — they had fuel spills that drained down into the cat tracks and it would take about two days after that before the heat down in that cat track would vaporize enough of the jet fuel to the point where it’d burst into flame. And they were not hard to take care of, we had a steam smothering system on there. If we knew about the fuel spill we could predict within an hour when that thing was going to cook off. And we’d have somebody there, standing by with the – to exercise the steam smothering. DB: This is the area it would seep through the deck into an area below the deck? RH: The cat track has an opening that goes down for the cat shuttle that the aircraft is hooked onto to take it down to the other end, so it goes down about eight feet and of course the – no it’s not that far, it’s about four feet – it goes down to the bottom and this constant steam in those cylinders and it would, as I say, it would finally vaporize it enough that it would cook off. So we did that. That became just another occurrence every day. “Hey we’re going to have a fire on cat three.” “Okay.” Kind of thing. But the Constellation was very, very knee jerk about fires anyway because they had a major fire on Constellation as she was being constructed and burned – lost a lot of lives. It was in the Brooklyn shipyard. Lost a lot of lives on it. And they were worried about it whether the ship would even get commissioned because of that, but they were able to save it and it went back to work. But, like I say, they were very knee jerk about it and we had a lot of small fires for one reason or another. Alongside in the catwalks all the way around our fully-charged fire hoses. They have to be there, you know, in case there is a fire. And we have fire on engine starts occasionally and things like that. But – DB: So what exactly – say again the title of your job and talk about exactly what your responsibilities were. RH: I was Catapult and Arresting Gear Officer to start out with. The air department is organized with that’s called V-1 through V-5. V-1 are the blue shirts, they’re all color coded, the blue shirts, and they’re responsible for moving aircraft on the flight deck. On the elevators, they are responsible for moving aircraft, because you have to move aircraft out of the way to land aircraft, you have to move aircraft up to where they can be launched so you can make space for incoming aircraft. So they’re always moving aircraft on that thing. And they do that with these

72 huffers too. And you have a crew standing by. They walk with their blue shirts and they’re carrying CHOCKS, chains and you know, if the sea starts – if it starts to heel going into a turn, they’re ready to throw those CHOCKS on there and crank chains on there. There’s tie downs all over the place. The deck is covered in what’s called “non-skid” in the area where the arresting gear wires go, that non-skid is impregnated with aluminum. Outside of that it’s impregnated with that granite kind of stuff, you know, the very abrasive things with very abrasive things. And that makes a difference if you get blown down because if you get blown down in the aluminum area you don’t get to come up nearly as much as you do out there among the abrasive stuff. And I’ll talk to you about that in a minute. The deck is laid out as you come over the round down from the back you’ve got four arresting gear wires and then you have a barrier, a 15 foot barrier that’s buried that has arresting gear engines on it that lifts up that can be attached with a nylon net for trapping aircraft that come in without a tail hook on that will stop the aircraft that way. Right in the barrier, I’ve seen it happen I’ll talk about it in a minute. DB: They come in without a tail hook because of malfunction or something? RH: Yes. DB: Okay, not by design? RH: No, this – DB: In an emergency situation? RH: It’s one you practice three times a week because everybody on the flight deck has to do something with that. The V-1 people have to bring out – there’s a ramp that goes right on up to it because you don’t want to – you have to get the aircraft up into that net, okay? You have to raise – there’s lines that come up that have to be cranked to raise this big net and it’s a heavy thing. It’s a really heavy net, you have to get all the aircraft out of the way, the Catapult and Arresting Gear Officer has to be in the back, you know, making sure that it’s set for the exact weight of the aircraft and on and on and on. Everybody has the job, okay? The carrier’s laid out with launch safe lines, with land safe lines, with – you’re dealing with the whole lot of things in a small space, you know, and you’re dealing in inches clearance – DB: That all have to work together. RH: It all has to work together. DB: As do how many people for something like this? DB: That’s what – it’s split into three things. The fly one which is up from the brow to the island. Fly two which is the waist. And fly three which is from the waist down to the round down. The catapults, or catapults one and two, are up and a bit forward the island. They are straight shooters. They don’t interfere with each other. The catapult three and four are in the waist and they lead into each other by 10 degrees which causes some real problems, okay? So what it is, is you’ve got all these people out there all wearing different color clothes, you’ve got V-1 in blue, you’ve got V-2 in green, V-2 is catapult in arresting gear, you’ve got V-3, they also wear blue because they’re on the hangar deck, they stay down on the hangar deck and move aircraft there. You’ve got V-4, which is in purple. They are the grapes, we call them. They are the re-fuelers. And you’ve got the V-5 which is the administrative part of the air department. Other than that you got red shirts up there which are from the ordinance department. You got

73 white shirts up there which are safety people. You got white shirts with checkers, the black on them, they are safety squadron checkers. You got white shirts with red crosses on them, they are medical personnel that are on the deck. You have, I would say, 150 people on deck during a major launch. We used to shoot 20 airplanes, 20 to 25 airplanes on a regular launch and it would start a half an hour before with people walking and checking everything. Checking the weight on the aircraft, configuration on the aircraft, checking the arresting gear, shooting no loads if they’re necessary, which are low energy shots just to check the functioning of the catapult. Walking down and checking on and on and on, getting the wind over the deck and everything else. When it starts people have to get in – the air officer will say, “Get ready to launch!” You know, and, “Get your hard hats on! Get your goggles on! Check your radios!” And we had radio with pri-fly. We had a communication with pri-fly – DB: What is –? RH: Primary fly is your air boss. He sits up in the tower. And he’s our guru up there. He’s the one that tells us what to do. And you know, there’s a 07 up there, there’s a 07 kind of a balcony that’s called “vulture’s row” by everybody, but that’s where people go to watch all this thing. And if you look at it, it looks like the most disorganized, Chinese fire drill you’ve ever seen in your life but it is so highly choreographed – I mean it’s so highly set up to the point where everybody just goes – everybody knows what’s happening here. You got the yellow shirts, I wore a yellow shirt that means that you are qualified to conduct aircraft, to move aircraft to say, “Stop.” To say, “Bring them on.” That kind of thing. You can move aircraft. But since I was an arresting gear officer, catapult in arresting gear, I not only had a yellow shirt, I had a green helmet. That says I’m a catapult officer. And it says catapult also right on my shirt and I have a couple of them downstairs. But we would start engines and we would, as a cat officer I would go through entire flight in the back and check the configuration of the aircraft because I would know okay, this is an F-4, he’ll have a full fuel load, he’s got a full bomb load on there. I’ll know that he will go at 475 or thereabouts. Okay? And I would check that it was pretty much the same load as they had forecasted it was going to be. The weight board operator would go to the squadron and they would give him a weight sheet that listed the – by aircraft and what the weight is on that thing. That’s what maintenance says the weight is on that aircraft. When that aircraft gets forwarded to me I have to look to make sure that I’ve got the right hook up system for it, there’s a pennant which is just a single wire with an eye on each end. Only one type of aircraft used that, we didn’t normally carry it so I didn’t worry about it. The bridle, which is two eyes that hooked on catapult fitting underneath the aircraft then went around the shuttle, that’s what pulled it down, or the nose tow which dropped a bar down in between two and it would hook onto that bar and just on the nose to take it off. Now that’s what almost all the new modern aircraft nose tow launches. Okay? And if something showed up that we weren’t ready for we’d either have to “a”, send them somewhere else, or “b”, we would have to change the configuration of the catapult to deal with them. But when that aircraft came forward to it my weight board operator would be right there, he'd show me the weight on it, he’d show it to the pilot, the pilot would roger for it. He could raise it 1,000 pounds, but that’s all. He couldn’t lower it. Because that was a certified weight that was in the aircraft. I wouldn’t launch him if he was out of there. I would set the steam for the catapult in the receivers’ down below based on the type of the aircraft, the wind over the deck and the weight and it would go anywhere from 300 pounds for a C-1 or something like that but up to as much as 600 pounds for a fully loaded F-4. And they – a yellow shirt would taxi him

74 aboard over the shuttle and we’d stop them and my greenies would – one would take one eye and he’d put it on the catapult fitting, one would take another eye. There’d be a hold back man back there, there’s a hold back fitting that comes out of the deck, fits in a notch on the deck, comes up and there’s a highly machined hold back fitting that goes in there and it attached to the aircraft and then as soon as he came over the shuttle he’d put them in tension and my deck edge operator would switch onto tension and it would hydraulically move that aircraft up so he would be like, you pull back a bow, now it’s ready to go, now it’s ready to go. It’s being held back but this one is going to let it go, you know? And as soon as I give the fire signal and when he went into tension like that, then I would give him one finger turn up – one finger for prop, two fingers for come to full power. Okay? He would be in a configuration, I would check his configuration, that his flaps are down the wing locks are locked, everything’s looking good, you know, and that one of the those checkers would be in the back with his little checkered vest would be giving me a thumbs up saying that he’s got a good light on both engines back there and everything else. I would check the deck edge operator because he’s got a white light which means that it’s electrically and hydraulically hooked up. Another white light which means he’s in tension, okay? Another – then a green light and the green light says that it’s – that the catapult is hydraulically, electrically, and steam power all as they should be, you know, that they’re all hooked up.

And I would look at him, you know, and if it was a burner launch at that time I’d put him in burner, and, “Brrrrrr!” As he came onto that thing right behind him is a jet blast deflector. If it didn’t have a jet blast deflector it would blow everything off the deck but that JBD holds – it goes up and he would check his gauges and anything, he would not raise his hands above the cockpit until he was ready and then he would give me a salute and it wasn’t until that salute that I would begin to check him again through, I would check the deck edge to make sure the lights were going, I would look up forward to make sure that no mess cook had come out of the catwalk up there and was walking across the deck, which happened to me one day, and I’d shoot him. I’d go down on one knee and it was when I touched the deck and went up that the deck edge operator would press the fire button and, “Pshhh!” off he’d go. DB: So let’s use an F-4 launching as an example right now. RH: Okay. DB: You’ve just gone through a detailed list of things, procedures, teamwork, cooperation, things that have to be done. RH: In about five seconds. DB: That was my question. (Robert laughs). DB: How fast could you launch – let’s say three F-4s? Four F-4s? What would be a typical mission launch? RH: When you start shooting you bring them up one at a time. When you’re a real shooter you go like this, which means I can shoot them faster than you can bring them up and you’d go from bouncing from one cat to the other to the other. Now remember what I told you at the end, that on the deck they actually go together by 10 degrees, okay? There’s a little problem there on the

75 front they don’t interfere you can just shoot them, shoot them, shoot them, shoot them, shoot them, but you have to wait to make sure that the bridle, which has been arrested down at the end of the track, has been retracted out of the way because if you shoot them too fast you’ll go over that bridle and you’d probably tear the wheel right off the – DB: So, let’s just pick a number, tell me if it’s unrealistic; you’re launching four F-4s. RH: Four F-4s? DB: How much time would it take? RH: Two and a half minutes. DB: That’s a tremendous amount of training and cooperation. RH: It depends on some things, you know, it takes time to bring the steam back up and – DB: But let’s just say in a tense combat situation you got to get aircrafts in the air quickly. RH: You have a five minute alert from dead stop, that’s start and shoot, like five minutes. That’s the way it is. The catapult officers I had – I took over the division right after the cruise. I was on that cruise for about nine and a half months and then when we got back we went in the yards and I took over the – up in Bremerton, Washington, and I took over the division and took it through the yards. And then took it out to sea, worked it up again. I had five officers and about 150 men and 155 spaces on that ship that were my responsibility. You know, that means anything from catapulting tension rooms to the five arresting gear rooms and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And safety and stuff and supplies and administration – it was a big job. I also had the PLAT lens, the PLAT is a pilot’s landing attitude television, which is on and shows with the cross-hairs, you know, that aircraft coming in. You’ve probably seen that on TV sometime. And the lens is the Fresnel lens that gives you – it’s gyro-stabilized. For Fresnel lens it gives you a glide slope indication, set for that type of aircraft because they are different. Some will have a steeper descent than others. DB: You were a pilot. RH: Yeah. DB: In the world of hot shot navy pilots, the position that you had on the carrier deck was highly respected, trusted? RH: We had open invitation to every squadron party there. DB: Okay. RH: (Laughter). And, you know, we used to catch some crap from them once in a while, “One of your guys give me this rude hand signal. I went to every ready room, you know, and I would give them a brief on how we operated or we had, off times, we had a whole air group there and we’d give a brief and I’d give them a good show, you know, and I’d say – I’d give them a couple of very homey things. I’d say, “Remember when you’re ready to go I want a clean salute. Don’t adjust your visor on your helmet when you’re sitting on my cat. If you pick your nose on my cat you’re going flying.” And I actually had, one day, I had a commander in an A-7 up there and he was at 100 percent, I’m waving him, and he reached up like that and, “Pewww!” He went down

76 the track. He came back afterwards and he was spitting mad. And I said, “What’s the matter commander?” He said, “I was just adjusting my helmet and you shot me.” And I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll take you up to talk to the air officer right now and he will explain to you that you do not adjust your – fill in the blank with the ‘F’ word – on my catapult because I will take it as a salute and you will go flying.” DB: No room for misinterpretation. RH: No room in misinterpretation and he just turned around and walked out of the office. DB: Procedures exist for a reason. RH: They do, they do. DB: And you had two tours doing this? RH: I had two cruises, yeah. DB: Two cruises. RH: Two cruises? RH: Two cruises, yeah. DB: And so this cruise was ’69? RH: The next cruise was – let’s see that was ’69 to ’71 that I was – 27 months I did as a cat. Officer. DB: Okay. Now, what are you hearing from the pilots of all the missions into Vietnam? RH: We would get results from a lot of the stuff, you know, every time there was secondary explosions like they did a truck park or something, they’d come back with it. We didn’t lose, hardly any aircraft. Either cruise, while I was there on that particular ship it was remarkably safe from that aspect. I did have a couple of really important incidents that I would like to talk about. DB: Sure. RH: One was I was on the waist – they used to call it ‘Bobby’s barbeque’ because that was the hot spot and I loved the waist it was really an adrenaline-producer. DB: This is the waist? RH: The waist is cat (Catapult) three and four that’s on the waist of the ship right by the – every aircraft getting launched has to get through the waist so there’s heavy traffic and there’s, you know, it’s busy, busy, busy and I used to love it. It was fun. But I picked up – at night you have to sequence the launches. You do it by phone you say, “Ready on one?” If he’s ready you got somebody in tension and ready to go. And if you’re not ready you say, “Go one.” And he shoots number one and they say, “Ready on three?” He says, “Go three.” You sequence them otherwise if you have people coming off together at night, boy, it really turns into a fur ball because you can see the big shooting star and everything coming right next to you and your eyes get very big when that happens. In the daytime it’s not quite so bad. DB: The ‘shooting stars” is coming out of the engine.

RH: Yes. But anyhow I picked up the A-7 and I said, “Ready on four?” Which was the out board cat, the one that went straight, not the one that goes in it – he says, “Go on, go four.” And picked it up and you do it with wands at night, you show them the wands. You got a red wand, you got a green wand. They’re lit but you put the red one behind your back because that means it’s suspension if you got the red one out there and you give them the stroke for 100 percent and when he’s ready instead of giving a salute, he turns on his wing lights. Okay? So he turned on the wing lights and I went down and shot it and he went off flying and I headed back to set the steam for the next aircraft and one of my guys came running up and – he wasn’t wearing a Mickey Mouse so he couldn’t talk to me he’s just pointing and starting, you know, he came up right next to me and said, “Problem! Problem!” And I went over and ran over and it was on the cat walk and I looked down and I could see liquid all over the area there and I thought, Ohhh crap. DB: Jet fuel? RH: No it was blood. And what had happened, was there’s a faulty up lock on an out board wing rack on that A-7 and when the shock of the shot, it dropped a 500 pound bomb right down on the deck, flipped over and hit my deck edge operator in the head. He was wearing a plated helmet and knocked him right down and I called up, you know, I said, “Boss we got a problem. Cancel the launch we got a casualty up here. He was hit with a bomb.” And it just – it crushed his head, I mean, his helmet and actually shattered his, we didn’t know this at the time, shattered his skull up there and we got him into a Stokes litter, you know which is the wire litter kind of thing, and we got him up and we were going to take him through the waist down to sick bay and we found out we couldn’t get the Stokes litter around the corner. So we had to bring it all the way back up on deck and we had to call the launch off and bring it across to the bomb elevator and take him down in the bomb elevator to the second deck to get him into sick bay and they stabilized him and they actually flew him off in the ship’s C-1 on a deck launch because he couldn’t take a catapult launch and they flew him into Subic and flew him from there to Japan and three months later he met us at the dock when we got back to San Diego. They had cut off all the broken part across and he had some kind of metallic dome in there now and they’d sewed them up over it. I talked to the guy, I said, you know, “Geez, what do you remember about that night?” And he said, “I don’t remember a thing about it.” He said. I said, “Good for you, I’m glad you don’t remember anything, it was pretty horrible.” I was so worried that I had killed one of my men. But we got him through that and he said, “It’s okay except I hear radio stations now.” (Laughter) that’s what he said. And one other thing that happened. We were going off the line and we were going up to Yokosuka in Japan, going up on one side of Taiwan and there was a C-1 that was coming down there – no, the USS Hancock was going down the other way. They have TAC-AN stations onboard, tactical air navigation stations. And ours was 21, channel 21. His was 12. Okay? Do we see something here? His C-1 was leaving the Atsugi Air Station and going to fly down to the USS Hancock to catch him on the way and he said it in 21 instead of 12 because it was one of these things over his head, you know, he said, “Okay, two and a one.” Set it up there instead of 12 he got 21 out of it so the next thing you know he can’t make Hancock anymore, he sees us down there and he says, “Aircraft carrier below, this is —!” And gave his call sign and whatever he says, “I’m running out of fuel and I need a place to land!” So I was the standby officer. What we used to do is we had one, two guys one would go six in the morning to six in the evening and the other one would do the opposite and we’d do half of the launch and the rest of it would be,

78 you know, we’d be doing the paperwork, wind over deck requirements and that kind of thing. And I was sitting there going through some stuff and he said, “Standby to recover aircraft!” Over the five MC which is the air broadcasting and I thought, What in the hell is going on? So I grabbed ahold of my Mickey Mouse and my life vest, my flight desk life vest, and I went pounding up there and got up on deck, you know, putting it on got my Mickey Mouse on and says, “What’s up boss?” He says, “We got a Charlie 1 out there who needs a place to land!” So we took him and we brought him in and his ship was out of sight going the other way, you know, and he said, “We can’t refuel you and get you to them by the – we’re going to have to fly you back. We’ll have to launch you some other time because we got a foul deck here we got all kinds of aircraft forward we’d have to move every aircraft on the place to shoot you.” And oh god, the kid was really – it was a young aviator and he was really, really turned on about all this. He thought he was going to get hung by the short hairs when he got back to the ship. So the next day we had to fly off a couple aircraft to go into Subic Bay and we put him third in the launch. There was an A-7 and right behind him was a whale. You know a whale was an A-3, a very big aircraft, and then was the C-1. And once again I was on – the only cat officer that was on and the – what we used to call them, the “baby boss”, the junior air officer, was on the control and he says, “You ready to go Bob?” And I said, “Yes sir I am.” And he said, “Go ahead and shoot.” So I picked up the A-7 to get him out of the way, and I shot him and his tail hook came down on the shot. It was a faulty up lock on it and so it came down on the shot and it dragged across until it hit the shuttle and then went bouncing up right through the tail pipe coming out of the engine, you know the float tube coming out of the engine, the exhaust. And all of a sudden he’s got the compressor and nothing else, you know? He’s not getting any thrust to speak of. And just pieces are coming all over the damn place. DB: Nothing of any fault of his. RH: No, nothing at all. DB: It’s just a technical malfunction. RH: But he went off the deck and sunk down and got it the ground effect. That was the only thing – the kid was good. That was the only thing that kept him going he was down in the ground effect he had a two blocked, you know just trying to stay airborne and he made one big sweep and during that sweep we cleaned off all those pieces, I shot the whale, we had to taxi the C-1 forward and they rigged that – what I was telling you about that net? Everybody on the flight deck came in and rigged and raised the barricade, I finished it off, went running back, grabbed the pickle on the arresting gear and he made one pass and came abroad and I gave him a green light and he came abroad, lifted up over the deck, and went into those straps. And they’re sewn together to make a nice flat place but they give because of all – those threads give way when he comes in and he hit that thing and it looked like a snowstorm all of a sudden, but he – it was all over in less than two minutes. DB: Wow. RH: And we just sat and looked at each other and said, “Wow.” DB: Did this really happen?

RH: That really happened, yeah. That really happened. But that was really something. But those two things stuck out from the carrier. DB: When you have a damaged aircraft like that, what do you do with it? RH: Well – DB: Below deck? RH: Hangar bay queen. Yeah, you put it down in the hangar bay. And that was a whole engine change and they finally – they flew off the aircraft by the time we got back to CONUS. DB: So this tour ends in 1971? RH: Yeah, ’71. DB: And you’re a career officer by this time, you’re determined to stay in the navy? RH: By this time I’ve got – I married my second wife when I came back from the long cruise and she went through Bremerton with me and became my navy wife and after we left Bremerton we put all – we drove all the cars from all the crew on board the aircraft carrier and I took her down to my state room and we – let her ride the ship all the way down to San Diego which was a real adventure for her you know because she got to really see how the ship worked at sea and the navy and they held some drills on the way down there and everything else. DB: So this was just a kind of a family cruise? RH: Yeah it was a family cruise, yeah. Yeah as a matter of fact she got a ticket or a certificate for a family cruise. And we went down there and we moved into a place in Coronado and we lived in Coronado while I worked the ship up again for the crew. We went in and out and in and out and in and out doing – they were so short of decks because of the amount of carriers that had to be over in the Pacific that when we came back off the long cruise, after 11 months, we had one week in port and we went out and started carrier qualifying again, which is unheard of. DB: Carrier qualifying means bringing in new crew members? RH: Means bringing all the people that needed to be qualified on carriers before they went overseas – had been sitting there waiting for a deck availability to do that. DB: Just integrating the new people and bringing everybody up to the team members. RH: We went out for a week and that last day I shot airplanes for 27 hours. And at the end of 27 hours, I had one of my guys walk right into an airplane, “bump.” And I grabbed him and pulled him back and I came on the five MC and I said, “Boss, I just had one of my people walk into an airplane we do this 10 more minutes and you’re going to kill somebody.” And the last thing I heard right after that was, “Shoot them, they’re out of here!” That were through and just to make sure that it didn’t get called back again we started pulling up all the plating around the catapults because it had to come up by the time we went into the yards anyway. So we crippled the ship on the way out there to make sure that they wouldn’t make us go back. You know they could have done it to make us put it back but at least we made them think about it. DB: So now this is 1972?

RH: Now it’s 1972, yeah. ’71! ’71. DB: It’s still ’71? And what are your ambitions? Vietnam is winding down and you’ve been to computer school, you’ve had – RH: Now I got to use my computer skills. DB: And were you glad to be away from the catapult work and arresting gear officer work on the deck? RH: Yeah, can’t be a cowboy forever. DB: Must have been an adrenaline rush while you were doing it, but exhausting. RH: Exhausting. It was. DB: So you’re ready for a change? RH: I came back ready. I came back from that long cruise and I was smoking two packs a day, you know, I had one burning and one in the ash tray was burning. It was just that much stress, just appearing that way. DB: And the navy recognized that you needed a change? RH: Oh yeah, so they sent me to Hawaii. DB: And your rank at this time? RH: Title Lieutenant Commander. And they sent me to Hawaii to a staff. The staff I went to is called COM-ASW four-Pac which is Commander of Anti-Submarine Warfare Forces in the Pacific. And we actually had control over anything from CONUS, west of Hawaii. DB: This has been accompanied tour? RH: Oh yes, oh yes. It was on Ford Island and we stayed in off station housing for about a month and we bought a house over there. We bought a house up in Pearl City and I went there and I thought, Well I’m going to run the computer thing. And the first thing they did is say, “Well, not so fast.” Said, “You’re going to be a watch officer in the op-com center.” The Operational Command Center. And I said, “Oh my god.” You know, because being in a fleet command center is a tremendous responsibility. You have to make a lot of decisions and you have to be – you have to stand up for your decisions you have you be comfortable in the fact that I did this because you don’t do anything without thinking because it’s 24 hours a day and you know, at least nine of those hours you’re going to be there alone. And you’ll have a KY3 which is a communications telephone that you can communicate with any other KY3 and discuss up to and including secret stuff on that cellphone because it’s cleared for that. And not only that, you have a hotline right to the admiral’s bedroom and he wanted you to use it if there’s anything that came up. But I learned how to do that and I went on the watch schedule and the admiral, this was VADM Peter Aurand, USN, who was kind of a hot dog anyway, he used to – he lived very close to the building we were in and he would sometimes come down there in his – in the middle of the night he’d wake up and say, “Well I’m going to go have some fun.” He’d come down in his slippers and jammies and his bathrobe, smoking a cigar, and he’d just give you a wave and that means he wanted you out of the chair so he could sit down and he’d take that KY3 and he’d start

81 calling other commands about – around the countries that we had to deal with and he’d say, “Hey this is the watch officer at COM-ASW four-Pac. Did you get that thing about —?” You know and some operation that was going on and the guy would say, “Yeah, we got that.” Says, “What’s your admiral think about that?” (Laughter). He’d play watch officer and had his own little intelligence service going on, just to stay in front of everybody. DB: This is the end of the Vietnam War. RH: Yeah, it’s the end. DB: And much of the military was having a hard time. RH: Yeah. DB: Vietnam had been a very traumatic experience for them. The nation as a whole, but the military especially. RH: Yes. DB: How did you see that affecting Naval operations? RH: Well, I saw it affected a whole lot because operation funding was down low. Yeah, people were starting to make big complaints about the fact that we don’t have enough operating funds to keep our people qualified, let alone get them advanced, you know, and this kind of thing. DB: So training suffering? RH: Training suffering, yeah. DB: So training suffers what does that do to morale? RH: In some ways it’s kind of nice to have the time off but on the other hand you’re looking at it and saying, yeah, I don’t feel comfortable with this because we’re losing our edge. And I saw that on a lot of places. DB: What about the mission focus of the navy in the post-Vietnam years? RH: Well we still tried to cover all the bases – DB: You still have a real world mission? RH: Yeah we did, we did. DB: Did the mission shift to dealing with the Russians again? RH: Yes, especially around what I was doing because the Russians had a Yankee boat that was not far off. DB: And describe what a Yankee boat is just briefly. RH: A Yankee boat was a – DB: Intelligence boat? RH: No, no, it was a ballistic missile submarine.

DB: Oh, okay. RH: That was built on our George Washington class submarines. The Revel Company put out some remarkably beautiful plastic models of the George Washington class and the Russians bought many of them, took them back and built them and say, “Look, they’ve got six blades on here. We don’t have six blades. Why did they have six and we don’t?” And all of a sudden the sound level dropped measurably on our ability to use the secret underwater systems we had to detect Russian submarines because they got measurably quieter. And it made some real, causes some problems. DB: Where did you see among enlisted people drug, alcohol becoming a problem? It became a major problem in the army. RH: Alcohol was always a problem in the navy. It’s always a problem in the navy. It was – you know I’ve been in squadrons where we had a squadron party you did shooters just to get in the door, you know, that’s how it started and it’s a high stress environment, especially in the squadrons if you’re carrier operating and stuff like that and you party hardy, you do. And – DB: But you didn’t see the kind of drug problems that the army was dealing with at the time? RH: We had drug problems. Marijuana. Marijuana especially. We would find it on the ship, we would find it on Constellation. I had a guy that – he’d been on the ship for a long time and he was not performing well and we found some marijuana in his locker but there were limitations really what you could do. DB: It wasn’t – it never got to the point of being a severe problem? RH: I don’t think it did. I knew that some – see the catapult people were all aviation boatswain’s mates and this is a rate that’s – doesn’t require a great deal of intelligence, you know, it requires a stronger back more than anything. DB: And a lot of teamwork. RH: And a lot of teamwork, surely. But because of the draft and everything else we were forced to take a whole bunch of category four people, you know, that came out of boot camp that had been drafted and they were down in the low IQ – DB: Not up to the standard you would have wanted to have. RH: No, exactly. But I had some good petty officers and they turned into real cheerleaders I was just so proud of them I’d say, “We’re going to be the best in the whole damn fleet! And this is how we’re going to do it.” And they went out there and they had those kids running around the deck and loving it. They’d really take one for the team kind of thing. DB: So you probably didn’t see the kind of morale and discipline problems that the army saw? RH: No as a matter of fact in Hawaii when we lived on the economy I had an army officer right next door move in and he got RIFed. And boy I’ll tell you, the family fell apart right after that. DB: RIF is a reduction in force. RH: Yes it is.

DB: Cutbacks. RH: And he’d been career, you know? He just – he was not a newbie. DB: And how did your career progress then after the Hawaii assignment? RH: After the Hawaii assignment I went back to another VS squadron. DB: Flying again now? RH: Yeah flying again. I was the ops officer now in the squadron which is right behind the skipper and the XO. DB: Was this a happy assignment for you? RH: It was in a lot of ways. It was a good squadron, we had good morale. I got passed over for commander but I had such a checkered past, you know, I didn’t stay in any one warfare specialty for – DB: Checkered past meaning a lot of variety? RH: Yes. DB: Not a negative factor as far as discipline or anything like that? RH: No, not really. But that’s not how they promote. If you’ve got that kind of checkered past – DB: You didn’t have the proper career progression is what you’re saying? RH: Yes, exactly. So – and it was not a real surprise to me, but it was a disappointment. Because I had a lot of fitness reports that glowed in the dark but I also am fairly outspoken and I’m that way, what can I say? I’m not a politician, I never have been. And so, anyway, that’s what happened. But in VS-38 I went on one cruise to the Pacific and it was a good cruise but a couple things happened. I mentioned the fact before that I’d been adrift on an aircraft carrier for four days with no power on the aircraft carrier. DB: It’s the mid-‘70s now? Mid to later ‘70s? RH: We’re in the mid-‘70s, yeah. Yeah, we – my roommate was the admin officer and I was the ops officer and we were down on the third deck which was below the flight deck and below the hangar deck even, and all of a sudden we got, “Fire! Fire! All hands, fire!” You know, and then they went to the general quarters and everything else and what had happened is that we had been so shortened for yard time, for maintenance time, that they went to sea with only two out of four fire rooms that were available. They were working on a third and were going to get the fourth done when they got to the Philippines, from the Philippine yard. And they were – they had a salt water intake that cooled the fire room down there and they cracked – for some reason the intake cracked and flooded the fire room and shorted out about half the electricity on the ship and when they tried to bring up the one that they were working on they got an overheat on it, it started on fire so when it came down to it all they had was just one fire room that could only provide minimum ships power and that went finally to the point where all they had was emergency power on the ship. They actually had to destroyers standing by to take off survivors because they thought that we’re going to lose the ship. It was touch and go, it really was.

DB: Which ship was this? RH: The Kitty Hawk. DB: The Kitty Hawk, okay. RH: And you know, it even started to develop a starboard list and this may not mean something to a landlubber you know, so what starboard list, so what? An aircraft carrier is built to have a one degree port list. Why you say? Because we have to drain all that plumbing. Okay? So if you go to a starboard list it’s all coming back at you. Everything you flushed, everything you put over the side is coming back at you. Okay? And it’s messy to say the least. So they had to load aircraft and even put Tilly – they have a big crane called Tilly – I forgot to mention that before. Besides the two firetrucks, big Tilly. They put her way out on the angle deck just so they could get that one degree back and we floated out there for two days, they didn’t have any way to make hot food or anything else we had nothing but sandwiches. Couldn’t go to the state room because the state room, since we were down on the third deck, was so hot on floor that you couldn’t walk in bare feet across it. I got into flight gear, I took my wallet and put on my flight boots and when they started talking about standby to abandon ship and went up on the hangar deck where our ready room was and we waited up there and then we couldn’t get back to our state room for two days. No toothbrush, no nothing. We were up there. DB: How did they move the ship eventually? RH: They eventually got it pumped out, got one of the fire rooms pumped out and they moved it – they brought one fire room back on – DB: They got some power going? RH: They got some power on and we proceeded to the Philippines at about six knots and we got in there and we were down in there for two weeks while they re-bricked and did whatever. If they had gone any further on that one fire room and flooded out the electric on that side it’d have been a lost ship. But nobody heard about that back in the states. DB: Yeah, yeah. You retired in what year? RH: ’83. Actually I retired mandatorily in ’81. 20 years, you don’t make 05 it’s a mandatory retirement. So I – at that time I was stationed in VRC 30 which was a composite squadron and I ran the C-12 program for the navy from there. The C-12 was a Beachcraft King Air 200 and we had an opportunity to take charge of that aircraft. I went back and was factory-trained at the beach factory and at flight safety in St. Louis and then brought the first one back to the west coast and we started the training syllabus for the C-12, for anybody transitioning into C-12s because the navy was getting them for a lot of their stations, and I was the first pilot to get 1,000 hours in the C-12, by the way. Beautiful airplane. I loved it. I just loved it. But that’s what I did after that and – DB: Now – RH: And the navy said, “Well you have to retire at ’81 but you can stay on active duty in a retired status should you request it.” Because they couldn’t order me to do it. And it was at a situation where we had to sell the house in California if we moved back to Minnesota and the

85 real estate was very depressed at that time and I said, “This is going to work out good for me.” So decided that we would stay an extra two years, and we did, and then I retired in May of ’83. DB: Going back a little bit, the incident with the seizing of the American embassy in Iran and Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Desert One Operation, the Russians invade Afghanistan, on the army side, a lot of things started to change. President Carter got a new awareness of foreign policy issues, started beefing up the military budget. Then Reagan is elected president and things started to change. Did you see noticeable differences in the navy or was the navy always doing its missions and they had real world missions to accomplish? RH: I saw a big change when Reagan came in, in morale if nothing else. Because – DB: Funding, budgets, equipment? RH: Yes. All of that. Pay scale, the whole thing. And it was – I enjoyed it a lot, you know, that last couple years. I really did. I thought it was wonderful that he had been elected. DB: And just real briefly, post-military retirement occupations plan? RH: Well, we bought – we had been looking for a place in the woods, my wife and I always wanted to live in the woods and we wanted to come back to Minnesota because we had family here. We had been coming back — DB: She’s a Minnesotan? RH: Yeah, she was raised in Minneapolis. We’d been coming back for years on our leaves and spending some time of it at her family’s cottage up at Gun Lake up in Aitkin and we’d been doing a daisy’s search around the area all the way over to Walker all the way up the North Shore, everything, looking for a suitable place to retire. And the year before I retired we actually came into the Barnum-Moose Lake area and it was during county fair. And we said, “Oh, let’s go look and see what county fair is like.” So we went over and we started talking to people and they were so welcoming and, “Why don’t you come live here! Boy, its great!” And we actually talked to people we know now that we – that have become friends of ours. And we looked around and we found this house that we’re sitting in right now. It was much smaller then and it had just come on the market and it was just beautifully put together and everything but he only wanted to sell five acres with it and I said, “Well I want more land than that.” So we didn’t put any money down on anything. And when we came back a year later the house was still on sale, only FDIC had it then. And the whole 40 was for sale and we had just sold the house in California then so I was able to move in here pretty easily and since then I’ve added 10 acres to the north from the farmer who owed that and another 22 acres across the way so I’ve got 72 acres now and the house originally – I’ll show you here – ended right here in the third beam and I put that whole 24-foot addition on the house. DB: That doesn’t work on the tape very well, but the bottom line is you’ve got a fantastic place in the woods and you can watch the deer and the eagles and everything else. RH: Oh, yes. I have seen more wildlife in my yard than most people see in their lives. DB: So you look back, you had a successful career in the navy – RH: I did.

DB: And you’re proud of your service. RH: I am. DB: And thank you very much for that. RH: Well, thank you. Thank you for yours. DB: Thank you for the interview. RH: I enjoyed it. DB: Okay. RH: Doug, thank you.

End of Interview