I'll tell one more story before the wife drags me by the ear to the living room to watch a movie.
In early April of '87 I had just gotten off work, stopped at the post office to check my mail and then headed back to my barracks. As I came in the door a young airman was standing there and informed me that I, along with everyone else was to report back for duty. I didn't believe him at first because this was a Thursday and exercises NEVER kicked off after 4pm on Thursdays. They ALWAYS kicked off at 0-Dark-Thirty early Monday mornings. He finally halfway convinced me that he wasn't just pulling my leg. So I headed back to work.
When I got there, F-15's were being 3 bagged with full loads of missiles and HEI ammo into the gun systems. Nothing unusual there......until.....the 5th bird. Understand that during an exercise we would load the first 4 birds with 4 Sparrows, 4 Sidewinders and 940 rounds of HEI and then send 2 to Galena and 2 to King Salmon. Then the planes at those two air bases would be sent back to Elemendorf for systems reliability checks.
The 5th bird also got 4 Sparrows, 4 Sidewinders and 940 rounds of HEI, so did the 6th, 7th, 8th and so on. Another thing that wasn't normal was the planes in the hangers for the really hard core phased inspections (1200, 1800 and 2400 hour phased inspections. ) were being put back together and eventually pulled out on the flight line where they also got 4 Sparrows, 4 Sidewinders and 940 rounds of HEI.
Obviously this was not a normal exercise.
Missiles in crates were being pulled from storage and palletized, then sent to the cargo terminal and loaded onto C-130's. 20mm cannon ammunition was also being palletized and sent to the cargo terminal to be loaded onto C-130's. While pulling the munitions from storage and palletizing and sending them to the cargo terminal was normal. Loading them onto the C-130's was NOT.
Maintenance personnel were processing to deploy to King Salmon and Galena and were informed that the C-130's they would be riding in would also be carrying munitions. That is a big no-no during normal peacetime operations. The Deputy Commander for Maintenance signed the waiver that allowed this to happen.
We had already launched 8 F-15's to King Salmon and another 8 to Galena (normal exercise would be a total of 4 to each site) and maintenance personnel were in a C-130 that was in the middle of it's takeoff run when the order to stand down came in.
Due to the huge numbers of rumors that were flying around about what caused this *exercise* we were informed the next day about the incident that sparked our mobilization and the mission that was to be carried out.
Apparently a US electronics surveilance ship got caught in the ice inside the 12 mile zone off the east coast of the USSR. A-10's from Eilson AFB at Fairbanks were going to sink the spy ship and F-15's were going to fly MiG CAP for the mission with support for refueling coming from KC-135 tankers. Fortunately for the crew of that spy ship they were able to break free of the ice and get out of the 12 mile zone before our planes could get there.
Good thing that has been de-classified or I would have to kill all of you just to keep it secret.
