: Did you have the same or
: similar flight duty time and rest
: requirements? I don't ecpect it would be the
: same, but there should have to have been
: something, wasn't there? That would have
: required ops to maintain those records?

Nah, no duty time or rest requirements, Shoo. If they could find us and wake us up, we flew. When it really hit the fan, I slept on the way to and from wherever we staged. There were days I was afraid I would fall asleep and fall out of the ship.

If our own ship was down for maintenance, we usually flew as CE or gunner on another one. I seem to recall they pulled the plug on pilots at 110, maybe 130 hrs in 30 days? Something like that?

By 1969, things in general were starting to turn pretty sour. Among other things, there was all kinds of crap going on with the records. The fat lifers begrudged the crews recognition they got. Not all of them, but some.

Some of them cooked the books to get themselves and their cohorts flight pay without ever going outside the wire. They traded hours to other fat lifers at other units for supplies and other "considerations." That meant that hours had to be taken from the guys who flew them and logged instead to cowardly slime who did not. As long as the company and monthly totals cross-footed, nobody was the wiser, and if some young crewbum figured it out, he was already gone or out of the Army.

Flight hours meant flight pay, and Air Medals meant promotion points back in the World, lots of them.

They screwed a lot of good guys and got away with it. And they still are screwing the good guys, because now it comes time for guys like Paul to file claims and they don't have the important, substantive evidence that would immediately legitimize their claims and separate them from the posers. All we can do is help however we can.

Bob