Military

A former Vietnam prisoner of war encouraged Juneau and Hoonah youth to make their own choices and take advantage of challenges and opportunities presented by adversity.

Capt. Charlie Plumb (Ret.) was a Navy fighter pilot who served as an adversarial pilot at Navy Fighter Weapons School at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, now known as Top Gun.

He was later based on the carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk, flew an F-4 Phantom jet, made over a hundred carrier landings, and flew 74 combat missions over North Vietnam. But Plumb and his co-pilot were shot down over Hanoi just five days before the end of his eight-month tour. He was tortured and spent the next six years in a prison camp.

I’d like for you to try your best to smell the stench of that imaginary two-gallon bucket in the corner I call my toilet. I’d like for you to feel the baking heat of a tropical summer in a tin roof prison cell ten-thousand miles away from Juneau. I like for you to taste the salt, the annoying taste of salt in the corners of your mouth from the sweat, the tears, and the blood. Not that you’ll ever be prisoners of war, God forbid!”

During the last installment of the Pillars of America speaker series on Wednesday, Plumb described the lessons he learned as he and his colleagues survived and supported each other.

Plumb said his fellow prisoners, usually in darkened cells or separated from each other, communicated by code that was based on tugs of a wire pushed through cracks in the walls.

Wearing a khaki garrison cap and flight suit, Plumb started his talk Wednesday in near-total darkness, pacing off the three steps that he could take in his eight-foot by eight-foot cell. Sometimes he would hold out his hand and move it forward and back quickly to demonstrate the pull of the wire as he communicated with his fellow prisoners.

This silly, archaic, cumbersome code became our language. No, more than that. It became our lifeblood. It was absolutely vital; It was life or death that we communicate with each other. And the interesting part was (that) it wasn’t the words, it wasn’t the phrases, it wasn’t the meaning of the sentences that was the important part. The life saving value of communication in a prison camp was the simple validation of another human being.”

He used the story of eventually coming home and meeting the seaman on board the Kitty Hawk who packed his parachute and knew exactly who Plumb was.

The best I could do was stagger to my feet, reach out a very grateful hand of thanks. He came up with just the proper words. The guy grabbed my hand, he pumped my arm, and he said ‘I guess it worked!”

‘Parachute packer’ was Plumb’s metaphor for those who gave of themselves, passed on important principles in life, and asked for nothing in return. They were those who youth could look to for support in time of need. Plumb said some of the more-important parachute packers in his life included his middle school basketball coach and the superintendent of the Naval Academy.

If adversity is a horrible thing to waste, how do you waste adversity? Well, you start by blaming other people for your problems. And when you do, you give away control of your life. You start wasting adversity by feeling sorry for yourself and crawling over in the corner of your little mental prison cell and wait for something better to happen. You waste adversity by expecting somebody else to make it fair in your life. And what you find out is — once you’ve worked yourself through this is — that the person in control is you.”

This was at least Plumb’s second visit to Juneau as part of the motivational series organized by the Glacier Valley Rotary. His first visit was in 1995.

Six students from Hoonah were flown into Juneau to eat lunch with First Lady Sandy Parnell during Plumb’s hour-long talk.

At the onset of World War II, the territory of Alaska was seen as too big, too remote, and too sparsely populated to defend. That is, until it was attacked by Japanese forces.

In response, a few thousand residents came together to form the Alaska Territorial Guard. Once the war was over, the guard disbanded, and those who served went back to their daily lives.

But they were never formally released from duty. Decades later, these guardsmen are now finally getting their discharge papers.

When Dennis Egan opened up some official looking mail before heading into work last week, he wasn’t expecting to find his late father’s discharge papers.

“It was this formal U.S. government, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been summoned to jury duty,'” Egan says. “So, I open this box, and there it is. And I just broke down, in fact, I didn’t even come in.”

Egan, a state senator who represents Juneau, knew that his dad Bill was part of the Alaska Territorial Guard. Before serving as delegate to the constitutional convention and then as the state’s first governor, Bill Egan had flown planes during World War II. He even earned a medal for making it through a kamikaze attack. Dennis figured his dad had been released from service when the war ended, and that the papers had just been lost back in 1964.

“I didn’t have a clue,” he says. “I thought all this was just destroyed in the earthquake in their home in Valdez.”

Bill Egan isn’t the only member of the territorial guard not to have his discharge papers. He’s one of 6,000. After the war, the guardsmen were thanked for their help with the war effort, but there was no formal paperwork documenting that their service had come to an end.

“They were busy,” Dennis Egan says. “They weren’t worried about – they were trying to protect us. They weren’t too worried about fancy medals and crap back then. And things were just overlooked.”

Back in 2000, Congress passed a bill to rectify that. It requires the Secretary of Defense to issue discharges to everyone who had served in the Territorial Guard. Those papers let living guardsmen apply for benefits available to every other veteran of World War II, and they also carry a lot of emotional significance for family members of guardsmen who have already passed.

Verdie Bowen directs the Alaska Office of Veterans Affairs, and he’s in charge of the effort. With so much time since the war, it’s been tough tracking down every member of the guard. He says that often, relatives of deceased guardsmen don’t even realize their family members served.

That hit home at one ceremony he was involved in last year.

“What caught me off guard was the crew chief, who was on the Black Hawk helicopter that is currently serving the Alaska National Guard, stood there and did not realize that his grandfather had served in the Alaska Territorial Guard,” Bowen says. “He didn’t know we were presenting that medal to his grandfather when we flew in.”

Brown says the Territorial Guard was critical to the war effort, and that there’s no reason to treat them differently from veterans in other states. They came from a hundred different communities, stretching from Ketchikan to Barrow, and they served without pay. They picked up downed pilots, they reported on the movements of Japanese ships, and shot down fire balloons.

Dennis Egan wishes he knew more about that history and his father’s time in the Territorial Guard. Bill died in 1984, and he didn’t really talk much about the war when he was alive. That’s part of why it was only this year that Dennis learned his dad had never been discharged.

He says that even though it’s been so long since the war and so long since his father passed, he’s glad to have these papers now and thankful for the connection.

“I had an enormous sense of relief. An enormous sense of closure,” Egan says.

The U.S. Navy is inaugurating its first squadron that mixes advanced unmanned drones with conventional aircraft.

The Pentagon’s intelligence arm has “moderate confidence” that North Korea may have developed the technology to create nuclear weapons that are small enough to fit on a long-range missile.

 

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North Korea May Have A Nuclear Warhead To Put On A Missile, Says Pentagon

North Korea’s next provocative move — the test firing of a medium-range ballistic missile — could happen at any moment, according to South Korean officials.

 

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‘Very High’ Chance North Korea Will Soon Test Fire Missile

The Air Force has grounded the 18th Aggressor Squadron at Eielson Air Force Base due to federal budget restrictions.  The Squadron of F-16s is the same one the Air Force has considered relocating to Joint Base Elemendorf Richardson near Anchorage.  But the Air Force says the groundings have nothing to do with the potential relocation.

According to the Air Force, the F-16s will stand down for the remainder of this fiscal year, which ends September 30th.  Captain Joost Verduyn is the Chief for Public Affairs for 354th Fighter Wing at Eielson Air Force Base.  He says federal budget cuts eliminated over 40-thousand flying hours across the nation.

“Flying hours that were originally assigned to the 354th fighter wing have been cut and reassigned to pilots preparing to deploy and would need those hours more than we would,” he says.

The 18th Aggressor Squadron is a training squadron. No jobs will be lost from the groundings and Verduyn says the economic impact will be minimal. The pilots will use flight simulators, conduit academic training, basically they’ll do a lot of things to make sure they’re ready to fly when it is time to.  As a part of it, maintenance on the aircraft just doesn’t stop,” syas Verduyn.

“You can’t just let them sit, the same way you can’t let your car sit and expect it to turn over six months later.”

Because the F-16s won’t be flying, support operations for a squadron of F-22s based at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson outside of Anchorage will also end. The Air Force is currently working on an Environmental Impact Statement related to the military’s plan to relocate the 18th Aggressor Squadron to JBER, but Verdyn says the grounding is unrelated.

“They are two separate actions,” he says.  “One doesn’t have much of an effect on the other because you have lots of other bases being grounded as well.  It’s not only us standing down flying.”

The announcement comes a week after the Air Force announced the cancellation of the Northern Edge and Red Flag training exercises both based at Eielson.  Those operations draw thousands of military personnel from outside the state and nation.

Both Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski are weighing in on the news.  Senator Begich recently left his seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.  The Senator’s spokeswoman says it’s unlikely maintaining his seat would have made a difference, because the grounding is the result of Congress’s federal budget sequester.   In an email, Begich says he is “working with the Department of Defense and colleagues on better ways to address [the] country’s budget crisis without compromising military readiness.”

On Tuesday, Begich introduced a bill he says would reallocate funding from what he calls the military’s “bloated and inefficient missile system,” known as MEADS, to “necessary operations like Red Flag and the 18th Aggressor squadron.” Both Begich and Senator Lisa Murkowski supported federal sequestration. Matthew Felling is a spokesman for Murkowski. “We think that not all buckets of money are created equally,” Felling says.  “So, we think this creates a vaccumof capacity and readiness in the entire area.”  Via email, Senator Murkowski says she would have like to have seen “sequestration implanted in a less harmful way.”

 

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F-16s at Eielson are Grounded