Suzanne Rice

The “Tales from Nick’s FARRP” series are a fictionalized version of real events and are dedicated to the memory of friends and classmates from the Class of 1969.

“HEY, NEW GUY!”  I felt every eye in the bar focused on me.  “Gimme a beer!”

*       *        *        *        *

My Uncle Nick used to be a helicopter pilot in the Army.  All I know is, he was in Vietnam for a long time when I was growing up.  After the war was over, he got too sick to stay in the Army, so he was medically retired from the Army.  So he opened a bar in Fayetteville, NC, which he called “Nick’s FAARP” – why I never knew.  It’s right next to Fort Bragg, where he had been stationed at the time.

Last month the cancers finally took him.  To my complete astonishment he left me his bar!  Don’t know why he did, because I really never knew him very much.  Maybe he just felt sorry for me, after I flunked out of college in my first year.

By the way, my name is Gil Edwards.   Anyhow, I had just arrived in Fayetteville, and only about ten minutes before had walked into Nick’s FAARP, the bar I was now owner of.  I had been warmly welcomed to the establishment by Miss Peggy.  She was Uncle Nick’s bar manager, now mine, who had been with him since the day he opened the place.

Miss Peggy had written me a letter after his death, telling me that her late husband and one other guy had been Nick’s best friends, ever since they had all finished Army flight school together in the early 1960s.  She had lost her husband in Vietnam in 1972, and had been struggling to raise their son as a single mother.  So when Uncle Nick offered her the job as bar manager, she had jumped at the opportunity, and was fiercely loyal to him.  I had been surprised when I met her, although I guess I shouldn’t have been, to see she had a lovely milk chocolate complexion.

*        *        *        *        *

“Gil.” Miss Peggy startled me out of my shock at being called “New Guy.”  “I told all of the regulars here at the ‘FAARP’ that you were arriving today.  And that short, fat rude bastard who just walked in and yelled at you is Chief Warrant Officer Rod Jordan, your Uncle Nick’s other oldest and best friend.”

I noticed he wasn’t really very short or fat either, but rude certainly fit.  I also saw now that there was an amused twinkle in his eye.  He sat down between two other guys in Army uniforms who were at the curve of the bar, looked me over, and said, “Well??”

I gulped, and figured I’d better do something, so I reached in the cooler and pulled out a can of the classiest beer brand I knew, Mitchell “Great Life!”  Popping the top, I poured it into a frosty mug and set it in front of him.

All of a sudden the whole bar went silent.  The look on this Jordan fellow’s face got icier than the mug I had handed him.  He stared at me, then at the beer, then me again, growled “FNG!” and stomped out of the place.

I looked helplessly at the guys at the bar, then at Miss Peggy.  “What the hell just happened?”

Miss Peggy shook her head sadly at me and said, “Now, you’ve really done it.”

“What?” I asked.  “What did I do?”

“Kenny, maybe you’d better tell him,” she said to the younger of the two men at the bar’s curve.  “By the way, Gil, this is Captain Kenny Wayne, one of our regulars here at the FAARP.”

The soldier called Kenny looked me in the eye and slowly said, “You gave him Mitchell beer in a can.  You don’t ever do that to anyone who served in Vietnam.”

“Why not?” I implored.  “What’s wrong with that?”

Captain Kenny patiently began to tell me the story:  “It seems that during the height of the Vietnam war, when we had over half a million troops in country, the US government was awarding huge contracts to supply everything the troops needed.  Every major American company was getting their ‘fair share’ of the government business.  It seems the Mitchell Brewing Co. had a batch of beer that spoiled on them in their process.  Instead of dumping it, they decided to can it anyway and send it over to the troops.  Guess they figured, what the heck?  They’re just a bunch of GIs, so who cares?

“Back in those days canned beverages came in steel cans, not these new aluminum pop-tops we have today.  As soon as that Mitchell beer started getting distributed in country, the troops who tasted it began puking their guts out.  Very soon the word went out, that stuff is bad, bad, BAD!  The units quit issuing that brand of beer to the troops, so it just sat in the PX warehouses, corroding in the steel cans and getting nastier and nastier.  Anyone who ever tasted that rotten stuff will never again in his life touch Mitchell beer from a can.  And that’s what you just gave to Chief Rod Jordan.”

“Wow,” I said.  “I guess I’ll never make that mistake again.  Thanks for telling me, at least.”

“The tale of the Mitchell beer doesn’t end there,” said the older guy sitting there beside Kenny.

Miss Peggy introduced me. “Gil, this is Major Williams, another of our regulars.”  I just now noticed some kind of gold leaf on his uniform.

“Gil, I’m Tony Williams,” he said, reaching out his hand to me.  “We all loved your Uncle Nick like a brother.  Kenny,” he continued, “let me tell Gil the rest of the story.”

“Yes, sir, Major Williams, sir!” said Kenny.

“Oh, cut the crap, Kenny.  You know we don’t have rank in here.”  He turned to me and pointed to Kenny’s collar.  “You see those two silver bars?  They mean that Captain Wayne here is still a probationary officer in the US Army.  He is a company-grade officer, as we field grade officers refer to our juniors.  After ten or twelve years of exemplary service, he might be selected for promotion to major, like I was.”

“I’m Gil Edwards,” I said, shaking his hand.  “Guess I don’t know a thing about the Army.”

“That’s ok.  We don’t mind –” and he turned his head and made a spitting sound, “– civilians.  Now, as I was going to say, here is the rest of the story:

“By the time I got over to Vietnam for my second tour at the end of 1971, the American forces had been drawn down so far, there were more Korean troops in country than Americans.  I was still a captain then, fresh out of flight school.  My first tour had been with Special Forces, and I had been so far back in the boonies we never saw beer of any kind, so I hadn’t heard about the bad Mitchell.

“I had just arrived in Saigon for a few days in-processing before going up-country to my flying assignment.  In the PX there I noticed that beer was $2.40 or $3.60 a case, depending on the brand.  But they had Mitchell ‘Great Life!’ for only a dollar a case.  Sounded like a bargain to me, so I took a buck’s worth of beer back to my temporary hootch.  But when – “

“Wait a minute, Tony,” I interrupted.  “Hootch??  I thought that means rotgut liquor.  What are you talking about?”

Captain Kenny interceded, “Gil, ‘hootch’ is Army slang for living space.  It can mean anything from an infantryman’s tent in the mud to the fancy apartments the Air Force guys have, even in a combat zone.”

“As I was saying, thank you very much, Kenny,” resumed Major Tony.  “When I punched a can opener, what we called a churchkey, into my first can, I almost vomited.

That’s when I noticed the can was corroded, as were most of the others in the case.  I took the case back to the PX and demanded my money back. The cashier showed me the asterisk on the sign, which said, ‘Absolutely no refunds on Mitchell beer.’ I just walked out, leaving the case behind.

“It seems the PX system still had tons of this nasty Mitchell beer in their inventory.  With all the American units standing down and going home, the PX was desperately trying to get rid of this stuff.  Under government rules they had to clear it off their books.  They could write it down and sell it at a discount, or else they had to ship it all back to the US.

“A month later, Mitchell beer was going for a quarter a case, then a dime a case, then a nickel a case, but still no takers!

“Finally, in the spring of 1972, at the giant PX warehouse in Nha Trang, they got a great idea:  ‘Let’s let the little people steal it!’  That way, they could write off the beer as stolen and be finished with it.  So one evening they moved all their pallets of Mitchell beer just outside the PX warehouse yard by fork-lift.  Then they instructed the MPs to stay completely away for the entire night.  That should take care of it!”

“So, what happened?” asked Captain Kenny.

Tony Williams continued.  “Next morning, when they came in, the little people had been there in the night, sure enough.  They had broken down the pallets of Mitchell beer and stacked the cases to build a ramp over the fence.  Leaving the Mitchell beer behind, dang if they hadn’t gone over the fence and stolen all the Coke and Pepsi in the whole PX storage yard!”

IN MEMORY OF BILL AND TERRY AND EDDIE AND JERRY

 

 

The “Tales from Nick’s FARRP” series are a fictionalized version of real events and are dedicated to the memory of friends and classmates from the Class of 1969.

“SO, MISS PEGGY, what does FARRP mean, anyway?”

“I was standing behind the bar at my uncle’s cozy watering hole for Army guys in Fayetteville, North Carolina, just outside Fort Bragg, which I had only recently found myself the new owner of.  My Uncle Nick, whom I barely knew when I was growing up, opened the bar after he had to leave the Army several years ago because he got really sick after all his tours in Vietnam.  Two weeks ago, I found out he had finally died, and to my astonishment he left the establishment, called Nick’s FARRP, to me.

I had just arrived here a couple of days ago, to learn that it was being run most effectively by Miss Peggy, widow of Uncle Nick’s long-time Army buddy Miguel, who died in 1972 when his Cobra gunship was shot down in Vietnam.  Because of her deep affection for my Uncle Nick, Miss Peggy has really taken me under her wing.  Knowing nothing about the Army, I have to ask lots of questions in order to try to understand what these Army guys are talking about.

“Well, Gil,” Miss Peggy replied [my name is Gil Edwards], “the best person to answer that question is sitting right in front of you.”  She nodded to a stout fellow sitting at the bar.  “Rod, can you explain the term FARRP to Gil?”

“Sure, New Guy, that’s really a good question,” he began with a twinkle in his eye.  He always referred to me as New Guy.  “Your Uncle Nick was a master Army aviator, right along with me and Miss Peggy’s husband Miguel, that we all called ‘Mikey.‘  We three all entered the Army in 1961, then went through flight school as Warrant Officer Candidates, and served together from time to time in aviation assignments over the years.  We were known as the Three Musketeers.

“Your Uncle Nick came down with cancers while we three were all serving here at Fort Bragg in senior aviation positions.  The Army gave him a medical retirement, because he was a few years short of the twenty years’ service it takes to earn a regular Army retirement.  Because his cancers were caused by exposure to Agent Orange during his three flying tours in Vietnam, he received full disability health benefits.  He decided to open this bar as a watering hole for his aviation buddies, as well as any other guys who wanted to hang around.

“Several years ago, the Army’s battle doctrine evolved to apply maximum use of the aviation lessons learned from Vietnam toward the Soviet threat in Europe.  They established stations to refuel and re-arm combat helicopters as far forward toward the battle zone as possible.  These stations were designated as Forward Area Refuel/Re-arm Points, or FARRPs for short.  When your Uncle Nick opened this bar, he chose that name to represent a refuge where his aviation buddies could relax and recharge themselves from the stresses of duty here.  Hence, Nick’s FARRP.”

“I get it,” I replied.  “It’s a helicopter pilot’s refreshment place.  But all the guys in here aren’t helicopter pilots, are they?”

“Good point, young lad.  Sitting next to me here is Captain Kenny Wayne.  Kenny, tell this New Guy what your connection to aviation is.”

“Right, Chief,” spoke the fellow in starched Army fatigues.  “I have the distinction of having over 65 more aircraft take-offs than landings.”

“That’s crazy,” I replied to Captain Kenny.  “How can you take off in an aircraft but not land in it?”

“What Kenny is trying to say, in his clever way,” spoke the man on the other side of Chief Rod, “is that he is a master paratrooper, what we call a Master Blaster.  The mathematical difference between his take-offs and landings is the number of successful parachute jumps he has made.  And as you have seen in these past few days here, paratroopers are really proud of those silver wings on their chest.”

“Okay,” I said to Major Tony Williams, “I know about the parachutist wings with the wreath on Kenny’s chest.  But you have two types of wings on your chest.  What are they, anyway?”

“Sure,” replied Tony.  “My upper wings that go out long and narrow are aviator wings.

You see mine are plain, but the aviator wings Chief Rod wears have a star surrounded by a wreath on top.  That’s because he is a master aviator who has been flying for 16 years, since 1962.  Below my flight wings are my parachutist wings, with a star on top which means I am a senior parachutist.  But you see the big insignia on top of Captain Kenny’s jump wings?  That long rifle with a wreath wrapped around it is the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, known as a CIB.  That means he served in combat in an infantry role.  That is the most highly esteemed award you see around this bar.”

“But, Kenny,” I replied, “I thought you are an engineer.  How did you get your CIB?”

“Well, Gil, it might interest you to know that all Army engineers have the secondary mission to fight as infantry.  However, I did not get this CIB as an engineer.  Originally, I was commissioned as an Armor lieutenant, and served my first two years in armored cavalry.  In Vietnam I served in the armored cavalry unit in the 173^rd Airborne Brigade, E Troop of the 17^th Cavalry.  Armored cavalry units, even at the platoon level commanded by a lieutenant, always contain an infantry section, along with their scout sections, tank sections and mortar sections.

“We were organic to an infantry brigade and we had infantry troops in our command, and we operated primarily with modified infantry armored personnel carriers.  The brigade headquarters assigned all the officers in E Troop the secondary specialty code of mechanized infantry and awarded us the CIB after we had served a few months in combat.”

“So, Tony,” I asked, “you wear a CIB too, over your aviator wings.  I thought you told me you are in Military Intelligence.  So how did you get that?”

“Well, Gil, when I graduated from Texas A&M in 1965, I was commissioned an infantry lieutenant and assigned to a mechanized infantry battalion in the Panama Canal Zone, the 4^th battalion of the 20^th Infantry (Mechanized).  It was pretty neat in the Canal Zone, because the Army element of the Southern Command, the 193^rd Infantry Brigade, contained our mechanized infantry battalion, plus a straight leg infantry battalion and an airborne infantry battalion. On top of that, the 8^th Special Forces Battalion in the Canal Zone operated a jump school plus the Jungle Operations Course, known as Jungle Warfare School.  I spent almost two years down there, and went through both schools, earning my jump wings and ‘the coveted Jungle Expert tab.’

“It was while hanging around those Special Forces guys, the Green Berets we called ‘snake eaters, ‘that I decided SF was what I wanted to do.  I completed the Special Forces Officer Qualification Course here at Fort Bragg in 1967 and served two years in 5^th SF Group in Vietnam.  They awarded me my CIB.”

          I was puzzled.  “But why did you tell me you are Military Intelligence?”

“Gil, in Special Forces everyone on a twelve-man A-team has specialties, besides their language qualifications, such as medical, explosives and engineering, weapons and communications.  As the senior officer on the team, my specialties were operations and intelligence.  After Vietnam, while still an infantry officer, I served in several intelligence roles in various places.  When the Army created Military Intelligence, or MI, as a new officer branch toward the end of the Vietnam war, it became a magnet for duds and turds who weren’t competitive in their own branch to get a fresh start.  MI branch had a bad name, so I avoided it like the plague.

“After I made Major and completed Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in 1976, the Army sent me on an exchange assignment to the Mexican National War College.  I could never have performed that assignment if I had been in MI, because the Mexicans would have regarded me as a spy and never let me in country.  But once I completed that assignment and became a fully qualified Foreign Area Officer for Latin America, MI branch finally won me over.”

“But why do you have aviator wings too?” I had to ask Tony.

“Well, Gil, in 1971 I applied to go to flight school before returning to Vietnam for my second combat tour.  So, I flew Huey helicopters in Vietnam from January 1972 to January 1973.  My last day in country was the day the North Vietnamese finally agreed to sit down at the peace table, so I have always told people that I am the guy who won the war.”

“Wow!  So, you’re the guy!  But I am really puzzled.  ‘A lot of you guys are helicopter pilots, but you keep saying the word ‘aviator. What is the difference between a pilot and an aviator?”

“All right, New Guy!  That’s the best question you have ever asked,” replied Chief Rod.  “The Air Force has pilots.  All those guys do is operate aerial machinery.  An Air Force pilot colonel does exactly the same thing that an Air Force lieutenant does – fly an airplane.  The only difference is that the colonel is at the front of the formation and the lieutenant is flying the last bird.  The Air Force does their own thing pretty much, sometimes supporting the Army with airlift or close air support.  But they never know the people they are supporting.

“In the Army, aviation is integrated with the ground forces.  Major troop units all have their own organic aviation assets, guys they eat and sleep with and know face to face.  A pilot is a machine operator, but an aviator is a pilot who is primarily focused on the troops he is integrated with.  In fact, for commissioned officers like Tony here, who we Warrant Officers like to refer to as RLOs, meaning real live officers, being aviation rated is considered an additional skill.  Tony started out as a combat arms officer, was still a combat arms officer when he was flying in Vietnam supporting combat troops, and remains primarily a combat arms officer, if you want to consider MI a combat branch.  That is the difference between a pilot and an aviator.”

“Yes, Gil,” concluded Miss Peggy.  “We have a lot of aviators here at the FARRP, but we hardly ever see a pilot.”

IN MEMORY OF BILL AND TERRY AND EDDIE AND JERRY

 

The “Tales from Nick’s FARRP” series are a fictionalized version of real events and are dedicated to the memory of friends and classmates from the Class of 1969.

“SO, KENNY.  What does that castle on your uniform mean?”

I was speaking to an Army guy, working on his beer, at the bar I just recently inherited from my late Uncle Nick, called the FARRP.  Uncle Nick had opened the place in Fayetteville, NC, just outside of Fort Bragg, after he got cancer and had to leave the Army.  He had spent many years in Vietnam flying helicopters, and his friends here in this bar told me his cancer came from some chemical he was exposed to while he was there.

By the way, my name is Gil Edwards, and I know nothing about the Army or Vietnam, which is why I keep asking these guys questions.  I had learned that Kenny was known in the Army as “Captain Wayne.”   He always sat at the same place in the bar with a couple of his Army buddies, who were all very patient with my endless questions.  Guess it was because they had really liked my Uncle Nick.

“Well, Gil,” Kenny replied.  “That castle is the insignia of the Corps of Engineers, which is my branch in the Army, just like Major Williams here is in Military Intelligence and Chief Rod there is in Aviation.”

“But I thought you told me you were Cav,” I said, puzzled.

“I was commissioned in Armor branch and spent my first years as a lieutenant in Armored Cavalry assignments, where my branch insignia was crossed cavalry sabers.  After I branch-transferred to the Engineers, I changed my cav sabers to this castle.  But once you have been Cav, you’re always Cav,” he replied.

“Hey, Peggy, bring us another round of beers, would you, please?” he asked.  Miss Peggy was my bar manager, ever since she had opened the FARRP with Uncle Nick.

“Kenny, now I’m confused,” I responded.  “So can you just change around whenever you feel like it?”

“Kenny here is a ring-knocker,” interrupted Chief Warrant Officer Rod Jordan, who had been my Uncle Nick’s best friend.  “West Point grads get to do anything they want in the Army.”

“Oh, knock it off, Chief,” responded Tony, better known to the Army as Major Williams.  “You know that’s not true.  Besides, not every officer in the Army can be lucky enough to be a Texas Aggie, like me.  And since we’re on the subject, I’m a branch transfer myself, from Infantry to Intelligence.”

“Thank you, Peggy,” Kenny said, continuing to me: “Well, my request for branch transfer to the Corps of Engineers came through when I was still in Vietnam in 1971.  They wanted to send me to Germany to command an engineer company, but I protested that I needed to get branch training as an engineer first.  So they sent me to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, home of the Corps of Engineers, for the Engineer Officer Advanced Course.  The branch advanced course is a career requirement for all officers.  I wound up there in 1972 as a young captain in a class with mostly more experienced captains getting prepared supposedly to serve as engineer battalion staff officers.

“A huge portion of both my class and the one behind me were aviators who happened to be in the Corps of Engineers.  All through the Vietnam war, aviators in every branch were so critical to the war that they were centrally managed by Department of the Army.  Even though these guys were in Engineer branch, they had mostly spent multiple combat tours in Vietnam flying helicopters, and between tours they were working as instructor pilots training new aviators, or other critical aviation assignments.  Engineer branch had no control over their assignments, because they were required to focus on flying duty.

“When the war finally started winding down in 1971, the Army allowed control of the aviators to revert back to their branch.  These guys were all getting to be senior captains, so they were overdue for the advanced course, and made up the majority of our class.

“That’s when the first huge post-Vietnam reductions-in-force, or RIFs, began.  The Army gave each branch their quota of officers to declare excess and throw out of the service.  Engineer branch always considered all their aviators to be over-paid deadwood who had never done anything for the glory of the Corps of Engineers.

“So they knew just what to do.  They handed down RIF notices to almost all of the engineer aviators who were attending the advanced course, nearly wiping out my class and the one behind us.  When I began the advanced course, Engineer branch had 384 captain aviators on their rolls.  When the dust settled, there were only 77 left, and they were mostly the Regular Army officers that couldn’t be touched in that RIF.  Those RA aviators got wiped out in the next RIF the following year.”

“Engineer branch did the same thing to their Special Forces officers,” added Major Tony.  “In that RIF, we lost dozens of Green Beret engineers who had tons of years of service in Vietnam, many with combat valor awards and multiple Purple Hearts.  Most were good buddies of mine and didn’t deserve to be treated that way.  But the hyper-parochial Corps of Engineers figured if their officers hadn’t been running a rock-crushing detachment or commanding a dump-truck company, like engineers are supposed to do, their service was all bad time.”

“I had never realized how parochial the Corps of Engineers was,” Kenny continued, “until I became one.  They really don’t think of themselves as part of the Army – they even have their own distinctive uniform, with special engineer buttons.

So, in my class, besides me there was just one other branch transfer, a former artilleryman, getting remolded into an engineer like I was.  When I asked him how he happened to switch branches, he told me his story:

 

“He was in the right place at the right time a few occasions in Vietnam, and picked up some impressive awards and decorations, so at the end of his tour in 1969, his Artillery assignments officer offered him what was considered the most prestigious assignment in Field Artillery, in an Honest John battalion in Europe.  Honest John is a truck-mounted giant missile designed to carry tactical nuclear weapons.  For the assignment he had to get a super security clearance for nuclear weapons and go through special schooling for handling, securing and deploying nukes.  He said arriving in the unit was like joining some special exclusive fraternity, where everyone knew the secret handshake.

“All the Honest John firing batteries in Europe went through a rigorous year-long training regime, with continual inspections for nuclear weapons security, operation, assembly and arming, targeting, and procedures for every imaginable scenario.  It was a really high-pressure environment, where everything and everybody had to be absolutely perfect.  At the end of each annual training cycle, the most outstanding firing section of the most outstanding Honest John battery got the greatest honor available – the chance to fire the single live missile that was allocated for launch each year, obviously without a nuclear warhead.

“It was a gigantic big deal, with all the Honest John units from across Europe gathered to watch.  Every field artillery group commander throughout NATO was there, along with all the Army’s division commanding generals and the two Corps commanding generals and their staffs.  Dignitaries came from all over Europe and the Pentagon and joint staffs.  This was the high-prestige annual demonstration of how the US nuclear umbrella would defend Western Europe from overwhelming Soviet invasion.

“So, my buddy had been in his new battalion about six months when it came time for the great annual gathering at the special range for the Honest John demonstration.  Another unit, not his, had won the competition for the honor of firing that year’s missile.

“The Honest John missile is mounted on a firing rail angled over a giant truck called a transporter-launcher.  It is aimed simply by parking the truck facing the direction of the enemy target.  You don’t have to be extremely accurate when you are launching a tactical nuclear weapon, since presumably the invading enemy is so thick you can’t miss.

 

“So, the big moment finally arrived, and they had the suspenseful count-down:  THREE, TWO, ONE, LAUNCH!  With a giant whoosh the missile shot away from its launcher, climbing and heading downrange.  But as it flew away from the truck, two big objects went flipping away from the missile, tumbling back to earth.  They were two of the four tail fins of the rocket, which had not been correctly secured for launch.  Lacking half of its fin stabilization, the Honest John continued climbing but began to arc around, heading back toward the cantonment area behind the demonstration stands.  Finally, as it was passing overhead en route the family housing area, someone hit the self-destruct switch and blew the missile to smitherines.

“Needless to say, it was an enormous embarrassment to all concerned.  Everybody from the Secretary of Defense and the Supreme Commander of NATO on down vowed that would never happen again.  So, for the entire next year, every section of every Honest John battery in Europe drilled, and drilled some more, on securing the stabilization fins to the missile before launch.  That became the most important component of the training and inspections and evaluation for the whole year.  So finally the annual honor firing section was selected, and all the customary dignitaries gathered again for the famous Honest John demonstration firing.

“First, the firing officer made a big show of inspecting the fins, testing the torque on the attachment bolts.  Then the battery commander climbed up and gave his check, followed by the battalion operations officer, then the battalion commander, then the artillery group commander, and lastly the aide-de-camp of the Corps Commanding General.  Everyone gave their approval for the launch, so the countdown commenced:  … FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE, LAUNCH!

“With another gigantic WHOOSH, the missile ignited, building tons of thrust….

“In all the attention paid to attaching the stabilizing fins, they had forgotten to unbolt the missile from its launch rail.  As the thrust built, the missile lifted the entire truck transporter into the air, landing about thirty yards downrange.  It bounced back into the air again, then tumbled end over end twice and blew up with a giant explosion that scorched the faces of everyone in the viewing stands.

“My buddy said to himself, ‘They want to put thermonuclear warheads on this thing???’  The very next day he requested a branch transfer to the Corps of Engineers.”

IN MEMORY OF BILL AND TERRY AND EDDIE AND JERRY