I was going through some important documents that I had saved from my time in the U.S. Air Force and stumbled on some interesting things.  In the picture above, I show the cover page for our base newspaper at RAF Bentwaters in England.  I was there from 1991 to 1993 and my youngest son was born while we were there.  If you click on the image you will be able to go to Flickr and see the entire paper.  It was called the Forum and this one was dated November 13, 1992.  The title story was “Farewell Buzzards”, a reference to the departing of the 510th Fighter Squadron.  The base closed down in September 1993 and units were leaving one at a time and this was the time my unit was leaving.  The 510th went to Spangdahlem AB in Germany.  I have heard they have since moved to Aviano Italy.

I was assigned to the 510th Aircraft Maintenance Unit (AMU) of the 81st Aircraft Generation Squadron, of the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing.  It was this squadron that I was assigned to when I was deployed to Operation Desert Storm at King Abdul Aziz AB in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.  We stayed in the Khobar Towers housing facility before the bombing there.  This was a very stressful time for our family since we were very low on income as an Airman First Class with a newborn.  We do have some nice memories there.  At the time I was a three man on a weapons load crew for the A-10A aircraft.  I also worked back shop weapons release work while in the 81st Equipment Maintenance Squadron’s Gun shop and weapons release.  I loaded many variances of the MK-82’s, CBU-87’s, CBU-89 bombs, AIM-9, AGM-65 missiles, and the GAU-8/A gatling gun.  Below is a video of the gun in operation.  By the way, this video was made at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona, which was my first base.

I have some pictures of me loading MK-82 500 pound bombs on a B-1/B later at Dyess AFB in Abilene, Texas in 1998 here.  There are also some pictures of my Operation Desert Storm in 1991 here.

We will always have some wonderful memories of the Air Force and I thought finding this paper would be a good way to share some of those memories.  I scanned the entire paper so I could upload it on Flickr.

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