Jammer Races

[Oscar]

Brethren, I started my "pattern of Aerospace Ground Equipment abuse" in the 33 MMS at Eglin. In '75 we actually flunked an ORI! You know what that means, 6 weeks of 12 hour shifts 7 days a week. About three quarters of the way through this punishment slog, on a weekend when everyone was a wee bit punchy, I had been invited to my first and last jammer football game. (Remember when the jammers were 3 speed MJ-1’s and all yellow?) The football game was four on four, we started with 6 on a side but 4 guys chickened out. They also had the slowest horses. It was great fun screaming between all our F-4’s, catch a pass and haul all 3 balls.

It was “Game over” when the MMS Sq. Commander, Maj. Somethingorother (the guy whose 16yr old daughter just could not stay away from the MMS barracks...) saw us through his office window and flat out had a litter of kittens. He came running across the lawns, through the red line flaying his arms and screaming a la Barney Fife. That was one ‘amazing race’ to disappear. We fled to AGE, hung up our jammers, and waited "for the heat to pass" down in the Molehole.

At Kadena in ’76-’77 we had some terrific horses. WL19 was my favorite; not the fastest but fast enough and with great hydrastics. Our fastest jammers were WL38; (-amazing-) our line truck clocked me at a shade over 50mph with muscle to spare (but I had no more nerve), and WL33 which had one of those 'balanced' engines. It just hummed. It could have been faster than WL38 but no one for sure knew how fast it could go because the steering got squirrelly over 40. Even from 'the zone', you couldn't anticipate which way it would fishtail nor could you over-correct.

We'd take 'em up to Kunsan and spank those guys, except when a really good driver wasn't zonked on SoJu or too stoned, while driving their WL22. It was a very, very good horse. In all humility, out of all the #4 man jammer drivers, I wasn't the best or even close. Just halfway decent is all I wish to be considered. I won one and lost one zipping from C-Pad to Thunder Road.

(You know, our Sq. Commanders were all for this morale booster! Officially they turned a blind eye, but sometimes you could catch them in their trucks cheering us on. We did after all, have the coolest CC in all of PACAF in Maj. McCarthy. He had a pintle hook welded to the back of his POV Toyota Corolla and hauled AGE around for us on weekend duty. Funniest thing I ever saw when Spanky ralphed mahkli and jungle juice all over Major Mac’s date at the Oscar Club while TDY to the Kun during the “Tree War”.)

My #3 man at George ‘85-‘86 was way better than me. Too bad Rodney never saw a 3 speed, because he took to a jammer the way Charlie Daniels took to a fiddle. Atsa my boy!

Sliding in the snow was a blast at Kunsan.
Once I was TDY for Team Spirit '77 and got my jaws really torqued off. One week prior, the idiot wenches at the AAFES Massage Parlor offered a steam and cream to the base Chaplain (yet again), essentially shutting down a favorite 24hr cat spot.
On the heavily snowing eve of a big jammer race, mad ol' uptight Oscar searched for the Wolf Pack prize horse. WL22 was at the rear of their AGE; alone, tuned and pristine.
I signed it out (under a different name and number of course. Oops, sorry!), played power toboggan with our #2 man sitting on a gun pod pan and grasping a boom chain, and did doughnuts, whiplashes, and popped wheelies all over C-pad and the Tree area. I didn't have to race the next day and WL22 shouldn't have. Our guy smoked 'em.
Too danged bad; I really wanted a massage, dag nabbit!

No matter what you may hear, I deny driving a jammer at Kadena whilst asleep. Didn't do it!

“If you can remember, then you weren’t there!”
-Oscar

[weasel48]

I remember all to well the races at Kadena and the jammers mentioned, i was there also i'll never forget the night my 4 man was chaseing birds headed to Red section with a suu-16 on board and we were waiting for him and he came in the shop (yea i was a wild weasel loader) and had the good jammer stuck out by silver section in the mud with a gun pod on board. Or the time he out run the cops by the tower and they came looking for him cause they couldn't catch him.

[Oscar]

Har-dee-har-har, I dumped one too. The ripples in the ramp going down the hill to Red (before they officially became the 418th Sh*ttin' Chickens) caused my gun pod to rock in a menacing way. It certainly had nutin to do with speed, oh heck no! The same time I applied brakes, the tie-down popped off. [Remember, there were some gun pans fatter than others, so I always looked out for the trimmer, better fitting ones without the flared lip or no speed could be applied.]

Very embarrassed to face my crew daddy as we all grunted to hoist it back on to the pan. Blakeley took so much flak for me on a regular basis, he was one guy I didn’t ever want to disappoint. He also could have kicked my backside over Hwy 58, and so far out into the East China Sea, the splash would’ve scared away the Soviet trawler!
Nobody heaved a heavier sigh of relief than I, when it funct ck’d good.

I had a blast with the know-it-all nabobs for initial cert at George in ’84 when they denied the existence of F-4C’s as Weasels. These knuckleheads actually believed the Aero Club went from 105’s to G’sels and as a newbie in the 563rd, what did I know? I showed them a LAU-34 shear pin I kept from a download on that lower ramp on the Rock in ’76 or ’77. Turns out we likely loaded more SHRIKE’s than those Load Barn sissies did! They also had no idea how to identify the FMU-26 pin I kept on my key chain. Humorous.

“The hard part about being a bartender is figuring out who is drunk and who is just stupid.”
— Richard Braunstein

[Oscar]

Here's a tool story from Kadena. We had to improve our CTK accountability. For our toolboxes we ordered rolls of that thick, grey felt and cut out each tool to fit in each drawer.
It worked real spiffy, until....IT RAINED!!

That dad gum felt soaked up gallons and took four of us to hoist that badboy back into the truck. After changing places in the church choir, we ordered, in our new Mickey Mouse voices, some blocks of a stinky resin.

We had to melt this stuff and pour the goo into our drawers (the toolbox drawers, wise guy...), then quickly press a tool onto it. It made a beautiful imprint, steady and the gunk was oil-based and slick. So that was a godsend, if you know how 'The Rock' can be on metal.

We had to be real careful on the load pad though; drop a tool and everybody looks. Drop it twice and you've got yourself a shadow for the rest of the load. No biggie; sometimes we'd purposely clank something so the rest of the crew could cut their corners---you've got to know how to do this stuff---we're pro's right?

This was 1976, and I probably missed a flash message on the carcinogenic or other toxic properties of that jazz. Anybody ever hear of it, know its name??

Yeah, don't get me started on payday poker games on the pool table in Bks. 717 of the 18th MMS.... Watched a lot of folks' lives take radical turns. Motorcycles, cameras, and stereos going across the table; two guys re-enlisting and taking their $2000 bonus to pay back a huge pot. (The idiots bet huge on a full house!) One fool brought down his roommate's stack of saved green monthly paychecks! Lunacy!

"I could have done this job myself in twenty minutes, but as things turned out I had to spend two days trying to find out why it had taken someone else three weeks to do it wrong."
- J.L. McCafferty