Here Today Guam Tomorrow

In case your brain automatically changed Guam to gone as the original quote stated, I meant Guam. It was fall of 1964 when a group of fine young men (as fine a sailors as I ever served with) were training at Barber’s Point Hawaii for duty with a weather reporting squadron stationed on Guam. Someone, I remember not who the revised statement “here today Guam tomorrow.” By the time we got to Guam, the Vietnam War was in full swing and the outfit was spending more time providing overnight low-level radar coverage for the Seventh Fleet off the coast of Vietnam than providing weather coverage for the entire western pacific. The fleet had much better radar than we did back then, but radar is a detection system that works line of sight due to its high frequency of operation. A ship on the surface of an ocean can detect a high flying plane at 250 nautical miles away, but a target on the surface or a low flying plane cannot be detected until it is nearly too late for a surface ship or entirely too late for a low-flying plane. We provided coverage for the fleet as a radar platform operating at 1500 feet in the air, able to cover the surface threat for the fleet. It was fun, exciting, a little dangerous and a lot of long nights. We would leave the Philippines just before dark to arrive on station in the Gulf of Tonkin before midnight and then provide radar coverage until eight in the morning when we would head back to the Philippines and arrive around noon. Another crew would fly out the next night, giving us a day of rest before we would be up all night again. As old as I am, if I could join the navy again with guaranteed duty as part of a flight crew in a patrol squadron, I would do it, as long as it didn’t involve flying into hurricanes or typhoons again. You see I am older now and not as dumb as I used to be.