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I decided to share some more of my posts from Face Book. I enjoy sharing and teaching. Enjoy.

Los Angeles Racing Team

Science and life taught me to never give up on a rider who was still trying. If they were still trying, they were worth my time.

Every men's rider EXCEPT ONE who did what I told them was placing in the money and usually on the podium in Cat 3 by their third season.

That one rider was about half way through his third season and still had not finished top 10 in Cat 3. He was one of those guys you all saw in PE who was ALWAYS chosen last for team activities we used to call a "super geek".

One night, after a class, he came up and asked me some questions and I gave him my time to answer his questions. I help everyone who wants it. After he left, a number of my better riders came up to me and asked me why I was wasting my time on him because he would never do anything.

I told them that as long as he tried, I tried.

You should have seen the look on those riders' faces a year later when, half way through his 4^th season, he already had half a dozen trips to the podium and a number top six placings. They knew I was a very good coach.

Anyone can take the best and win races but only the best can take the worst and win races. I never gave up on one rider who didn't give up on themselves.

Prove how good you are by not giving up on riders who are still trying.

I loved to say that "my job was taking nobodies off the street and turning them into somebodies on the podium" and I did that a lot.

If you can put a super geek on the podium, you are a good coach.

Listen, as a coach, if you recruit the 10 best riders in the nation and you don't win most of your races, you are an idiot. If you recruit the 10 worst riders in the nation and you win races, you are one of the best.

In 1990, when I was coaching men, women, juniors, and masters, all on the nation circuit as the only coach in LART, I was told by a number of people that Len Pettyjohn, Eddy B, and I were the top 3 men's coaches in the nation. They both recruited the best money could buy and both had internationally ranked men's teams, I recruited beginners off the street or the worst I could find, and still won races against them. I won more than my fair share of races and they both told me and showed me that they respected me.

The greater the challenge, the greater the achievement.

Here is a funny story. The way I trained my riders up learning to use professional team tactics was to modify those tactics to work for their fitness level.

For example, for the "sprint line" or team lead out for the sprint, for beginners or Cat 4s, I taught them to start their sprint line about a quarter of a mile from the finish line, for Cat 3s, I taught them to start their sprint line about half a mile before the finish line, and for pro/1/2s, I taught them to start their lead out about one mile from the finish line. That was all based on how long their fitness made it possible for them to hold a sprint line and keep the pack driven back behind their sprinter.

At one race 4 of my Cat 4s thought they could run their sprint line for a full mile like the big boy pros and talked to me about it before the race. I told them to stick to the plan for Cat 4s.

They went off, discussed it, and decided they could handle the one mile plan, you know, they knew better than the coach.

So, one mile from the finish, they hit the front of the peloton with their magnificent sprint line, stringing out the Peloton just like the pros.

The first rider drove the pace hard to keep the pack strung out until his legs blew up and swung out so the second rider came through and continued to drive the pace hard until his legs blew out, swung out so the third rider came through and continued to drive the pace hard to keep the pack strung out until his legs blew up and swung out leaving the team sprinter leading out the pack with half a mile to go. A quarter of a mile from the finish line, the pack blew by him like he was standing still. "Hey, who chained my bike to the road?"

They told me what they did after the race, they had learned their lesson, and ye ole coach knew what he was talking about. After they left, I had a good laugh to myself. Riders, especially beginners can be funny.

It was more important that they learned how to win that day than that they won that day because then they could win future races better.

Losing is learning, winning is to have learned.

Oh, I realized that I might need to explain something about that story for some people because not all of my friends are bike racers. They probably noticed that the Cat 4s managed to hold their sprint line for half a mile instead of a quarter of a mile. You have to understand that they did the sprint line in the first half mile of the last mile, you know, when no one would be in a hurry to go around them. The last quarter of a mile is the fastest part of the last mile so, to hold their sprint line with everyone trying to come around them, they would have to ride much harder, which would blow their legs out faster so they wouldn't be able to hold the sprint line as long. That is why I had the Cat 4s only do their sprint line for a quarter of a mile.

There is no shame in losing as long as you learn and use it to improve yourself.

Dyslexia

Having things like dyslexia has taught me to laugh at problems and keep right on going as long as it doesn't kill me.

When I was in about second grade, I think somewhere in Colorado (we moved a lot), I was having trouble reading as well as the other kids so they tested me and called my mom in with me to tell us about the results.

They told us that I was reading at about 125 words per minute and the average for other kids was about 400 words per minute. They didn't tell us why. Maybe they didn't know about dyslexia in the Dark Ages, when I was a kid.

It wasn't until after I had become a senior in college that I heard about and read up on dyslexia, realizing, yep, that was my imperfection. You know, proof that I am human just like everyone else.

As I grew I adapted so my reading got better. One trick I learned was that, when I got a word wrong to use the sentence to tell me what the word really was so I didn't have to keep rereading the word and could read faster. Therefore, my reading kept improving until I started getting sick a few decades ago.

You see, when you get tired, the dyslexia gets worse. Because of my prolonged illness, I have been diagnosed with SEVERE chronic fatigue syndrome, which has made my dyslexia worse than ever, much worse and my life much more interesting in a funny way.

Every now and then, I will be whizzing right along reading when my mind will change a word with another word that starts with the same letter and my first thought is, "It says what?!" So I have to reread the word for the sentence to make sense.

I regularly get some really weird sounding sentences that make me laugh because I have learned to make the best of a bad thing.

"Why, I didn't know that" or "I didn't know that could do that". I have learned to use it to make my day a little funnier and better. You learn to make the best of bad things. Hey, my mind likes to play tricks on me and it keeps me on my toes.

One thing that does frustrate me that didn't bother me before I got sick is that my dyslexia is so bad now that it also affects my typing. My fingers regularly get the letters out of sequence so I have to correct the word spelling, which really slows me down. It is pretty common for me to spell something like "word" as owdr. I don't always catch typos when I proof read them now.

Another trick for both reading and typing is to replace a word like "card" with "candle" because they both start with the same letter.

Sometimes, my fingers will start typing one word and finish typing the next word I am thinking of to catch up with my mind, making for some really weird words, you know, like I will be thinking "word spelling" and will type wospe.

If I get too tired, it gets so bad that I just quit until after I get rested.

It definitely makes life more interesting because you never know what you are going to read or write.

Note that, with all of those problems, I still got an M.B.A. with an A average and studied all of the hard sciences. If I can do it, so can you.

Just think about how much longer I had to study than normal people to read the same books. It is called determination and persistence.

Internet

I love the Internet because it is so very funny.

I love seeing videos about this secret weapon, that secret weapon, or some other secret weapon, though I don't watch most of them.

People, let me give you a hint. If they know about it and are telling you and the world about it, IT AIN'T SECRET NO MORE!!!

That is just too funny. And people fall for it.

One really funny thing I keep seeing is videos about "the US's new sixth generation stealth fighter."

None of them look the same so which one is it?

None of them. It is just good click bait.

Why did I study all of the hard sciences?

When I studied nuclear physics, it taught me what causes that motion and I think I may have taught you that. If you want me to teach that, let me know and I will teach it.

I found that, by studying all of the hard sciences that I learned things that none of the hard sciences teach of their own. If you combine different hard sciences and their knowledge, certain things they don't teach in any of the individual hard sciences become obvious.

Therefore I studied ALL of the hard sciences to learn things that even most college science professors apparently don't know and that makes science even more interesting. Science is fun.

BTW, science isn't data and data isn't science. Science is the study of how and why things work. We do use uncompromised data in science to help us learn how and why some things work.

Fauci doesn't teach science, he teaches data because data can be manipulated to make it say whatever you want it to say so you can tell any lie you want.

If you don't believe me, study statistical analysis and they will teach you how to manipulate data, which makes it fraudulent and compromised.

When I got so sick my health began to fail, I was considering getting Ph.D.s in both nuclear physics and molecular biology. That would have been fun but then my health failed too much. Hey, such is life. Very few of us get to do everything we want to do. Life happens to all of us.

Near Death

About 20 years ago I decided to take a break from working my online site, Coachcarl.com, and surfed TV to see what they talk about on day time TV. I came across Oprah and it was a bunch of spoiled rich housewives having an international pity party on TV because they had all had ONE near death experience.

I was stunned and my first thought was, "They only almost died once? They need to turn off Oprah and go get a life."

I am sure some of you got a laugh out of that because you have also probably had dozens of near death experiences.

Since then, I have tried to count my near death experiences dozens of times and I can't remember them all.

Tonight I remembered one I had when I was 7 that I thought I would share with you. It was in 1956, I had just finished 1^st grade, it was summer, and we were moving back to Clovis, New Mexico from Riverside, CA. My dad took our trailer ahead with a truck and my mom took me, my older sister, and my younger brother in the family car through Death Valley.

The car broke down in Death Valley and we were there for 3 days and nights getting it fixed and my mom said later that it was 125 F in the shade with extremely dry air. As soon as we got the car fixed, we went on and caught up to my dad in Clovis.

After we got to Clovis and before we could start school, my sister and I had to take a TB (tuberculosis) test because the disease was pretty common back then. I was the only family member who tested positive so I had to get a chest X-ray.

I had a spot on my right lower lobe the size of a US silver dollar and they told me and my mom that it was cured and healing. The doctor told us that, at that time, there was no treatment or cure for it but God took care of it.

It turned out that I probably contracted the infection within the last year in California and me breathing that hot, dry air for three days killed all of the bacteria and the wound started healing and we didn't even know I was sick.

In those days, it could have gotten bad enough to kill me and at least damage my lungs bad enough so I could not have become a marathon athlete later.

To this day, I still have that calcified scar on my lung lobe but it has never affected my breathing or health and didn't seem to adversely affect me being a marathon athlete.

I forget exactly when but in either the 70s or 80s, a doctor checked me, saw my TB scar on an X-ray, found out I had never been treated and they now had a medical cure so he had me do that treatment just in case even though there was no sign it had grown or of any activity. It was just taking pills as a precaution for a while.

God and Carl take care of Carl but mostly God.

I have sometimes wondered how many times I almost died, God saved my butt, and I never found out about it. You never know.

When I was living here on this lot in the summer of 1966 just before finishing high school, my brother and I were standing in our front yard one night when we suddenly turned and saw a small meteor streaking down towards the ground about 100 feet from us, across the street in the desert. We only saw about the last 40 feet of its fire trail before it blew up about 6 to 8 feet above the ground. It was probably about the size of a softball. The next day we looked for pieces but it probably just turned to dust. It could have very easily blown up right next to us and injured or killed us. How many people just barely get missed by a meteor?

For Christmas of 1968, my dad paid for me to fly to Moline, Illinois to visit him for Christmas. I caught a plane from Albuquerque, New Mexico, got to Kansas City early enough to catch an earlier flight than I was scheduled for to where my dad was supposed to pick me up, and, when I got there, I called my dad to let him know I got there early so he came down and picked me up. We got to his house, he unlocked the front door, I followed him in as he turned on the TV to breaking news, and we stood there and watched the plane I was supposed to be on burn. Everyone got off OK but it was still an interesting feeling having just missed being in a plane crash.

I am sure I told you about the time I was flying into Korat, Thailand in August of 73, when I almost got shot down by a SAM6 but the Wild Weasels saved my butt and I didn't find out about almost landing in a big ball of fire until after I landed.

Here is some fun. How close was I to death with that SAM6?

Being an ECM wienie, I know how they worked. From the time a 6 radar detected a target, it took 10 minutes to get enough information and to lock the missile onto target for the 6 to fire the missile. Once that missile was a safe distance from the tracked launcher, if the air craft didn't have significant maneuverability and adequate ECM, it as toast. The C-141 Star Lifter I was on didn't have either. That baby was like shooting fish in a barrel with a cannon.

Therefore, the Weasel missile had to take out the 6 unit before it could launch its missile and, if you look at the sequence of events to stop the 6, it was very close.

First, the technician had just finished fixing the APR46 receiver and started warming it for testing to make sure it worked before returning it to the plane.

Second, he saw the signal and had to make sure it wasn't just the APR46 malfunctioning telling him it was a real signal and the plane that was landing was "being scanned by a 6", you know, me.

Third, he called out the warning to the shop supe who got on the red emergency phone to the Weasel commander and relayed that intel to the commander.

Fourth, the commander called an emergency to the alert pad where they had two F-105 Thuds armed and fueled with two crew chiefs and their crews who started the engines and turned on the instruments to warm up, while the flight crews based in emergency temporary housing next to the alert pad, a pilot and EWO or "Bear" per plane, got their gear, and put it on while running to the plane.

Fifth, after the crew got into their planes the crew chiefs and their crews fastened them into the planes while the plane crews started working with their instruments for launch and to get intel on the 6 for targeting with their radiation seeking missiles.

Sixth, when the crews were secured in their planes, the crew chiefs and their crews pulled the chocks from under the wheels and withdrew from the planes a safe distance while the canopies lowered and the pilots stomped their brakes to hold the planes in place while lighting the ABs (after burners) for maximum acceleration because, instead of wasting time taxing to the runway, which would have definitely gotten us killed, they used the long, straight taxi way for takeoff to save time and save our butts.

Seventh, the pilots released the breaks one at a time (the taxi ways were too narrow for more than one plane for takeoff) and those babies jumped like cannon balls because, at that time, the F-105 was the fastest accelerating plane we had. You know they pulled some interesting Gs. Mean while, in the back seat, the Bear was working his instruments to get the intel he needed to fight the 6.

They were in a hurry and moving as fast as they could because they knew it was our C141 landing that was being targeted and they had to get that 6 before it got missile lock.

Eighth, while those planes were rocketing down that narrow taxi way, the Bear was telling the pilot how to fly the plane to fight the 6 so the pilot had to know direction and altitude to get that bird to very quickly for a clear shot at the 6. As close as that 6 was to the base, each plane would only get one shot before they had to turn around to fire again, which would have gotten us killed.

It was quick draw gun fight time to save our butts and they couldn't miss. As soon as those planes got lift off, the pilots told the Bears "wheels up" so the Bears took over by giving the pilots instructions. You know they did some fancy flying.

Ninth as those planes climbed to altitude and turned towards the 6, the Bears worked to get lock on with their radar seeking missiles for one good shot.

Tenth, as soon as they got missile lock, the Bears fired their missiles and started setting the pilot up for a second shot.

At the shop, the supe very proudly told me (they were monitoring the entire fight electronically from the shop) the 6 "never got lock" meaning those professionals did ALL of that in less than 10 minutes and I was within seconds of turning into a fire ball in the sky.

Hey, at least I would have gone out with a bang.

BTW, a little later, the US Air Force and Thai Army went to the site of the 6 to gather intel. The SAM6 was a tracked vehicle like a tank (it used the Russian tank body) and that one had traveled all of the way from North Vietnam to central Thailand to shoot down planes landing at one of our six air bases in Thailand. They didn't know it but they picked the only base on the planet with the relatively new SAM hunting and killing Wild Weasels. If they had picked any of the other 5 bases, they would have probably succeeded at shooting down at least 2 or 3 planes and getting away. They played Russian Roulette and lost with the first pull of the trigger.

Here is a fun fact.

The F-4 was the first plane with a "zero-zero egress" or ejection system. That meant the plane could be traveling at zero altitude and zero miles per hour (sitting still on the ground) for the ejection system to punch you high enough for your parachute to get you safely to the ground.

Before that, all ejection systems had a minimum speed and altitude for punching out or it wouldn't save your butt.

Before you can work on any Air Force plane, you have to take an "egress class" that teaches you about the ejection system for that plane.

For example, at Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, TX, an ECM wienie like me got into the EWO seat on a B-52D without checking for the egress safety pins that keep the seat from punching out to work on something. That seat punched up but first there was a hatch that had to blow just above the seat.

That ECM wienie accidentally activated the egress system but the hatch didn't blow so he got his butt crushed against that hatch. He didn't survive.

Just before I got to Korat AFB, Thailand, a crew chief was installing the safety pins in the ejection seat for an F-4 inside of a two story hanger when he accidentally activated the ejection system with him standing in the seat looking backwards. He hit the roof of that building so hard it broke every bone in his body and he didn't live long enough to make it to the hospital.

You have to be careful working on those military airplanes. They can kill you.

I ALWAYS checked the egress safety pins before I got in any plane seat, ALWAYS. It just takes a few seconds.

I scared the crap out of an ECM wienie one time because I followed him up into the top floor of a Buff D and saw him get into the EWO seat without checking the pins. I saw the pins were in place and then saw a pile of those pins right next to me so I decided to teach him a little safety lesson. I picked up one of the pins next to me and said, "See what I have." I thought he was going to crap himself looking for those pins. I laughed my butt off. He ALWAYS checked the pins after that.

Note that his irresponsible actions were not just a threat to him because, if he had activated that seat with me being that close behind him inside that plane, the flame from the ejection rocket would have killed me.

On a tandem seated plane like an F-4, the rear seat has to eject first or the flame from the ejection rocket in the front seat will cook the person in the rear seat.

The F-4 had a little quirk that, if both engines "flamed out" or quit working, the crew only had 10 seconds from "flame out" to punch out before that plane turned upside down and you would be punching into the ground at low altitude.

The A-7D had a nasty little design flaw (none of the planes were perfect) that, if you punched out, you better pull both your legs back as far as you could because the instrument panel protruded far enough back it would take off both legs just above the knees.

You would find yourself trying to walk out of the jungle on stubs. Actually, you would probably bleed to death before you reached the ground but the walking out of the jungle on stubs sounds funnier.

In planes with crews of more than one, the crew members other than the pilot all have an ejection light activated by the pilot telling the crew to eject right now.

In the movie with Gene Hackman about the EB-66 that got shot down over North Vietnam, it had a crew of the pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and 4 EWOs (Electronics Warfare Officers). No, the real plane had 6 EWOs and they were based out of Korat, Thailand. (Most of what you see in the movies is bull crap.) The 6 EWOs punched out down towards the ground the 3 flight crew punched up.

Just about a year before I got to Korat, they had an EB-66 doing a fly-by 100 ft over the concrete runway when the egress light system malfunctioned causing the 6 EWOs to punch down into the concrete runway, which destabilized the aircraft causing it to roll so that, just as the rest of the crew started punching out, they also went into the ground.

The Pilot and co-pilot crashed into a private Thai house just off base, killing both of them, and the owners didn't rebuild the house because they believed it was haunted by the pilot and co-pilot.

Be safe. And people wonder why I am so safety conscious. There is a lot of stuff in this world that can get your butt killed.

Pot

I keep seeing crap about pot not causing any problems and some idiots, especially academe, saying that being stoned on pot or other drugs increases their ability to work. They work so much better on drugs.

Bull crap. The problem is that their drugs screw up their minds so bad they can't tell how bad they are doing. Just like being drunk when people can't tell they are drunk.

If your brain ain't working right, it can't tell how bad it is working.

All of those pot heads need to video themselves doing anything while stoned, watch those videos straight, and cringe at what they see.

I know better because I had to work with pot heads in Udorn, Thailand and they were very scary. They could get you killed.

You have to understand that the draft was in effect and they were drafting a lot of doper hippies and, if they had enforced military laws concerning drug abuse, they would have arrest at least 20% of the people in the military.

In our barracks, we had a guy who stayed so stoned that he was confined to the barracks and chow hall. We called him the carrot because he was almost as smart as a carrot and he was using nothing but pot.

We had a vehicle for lifting heavy pods up under the wings of F-4s we called a "jammer". It was a hydraulic lift.

Just our shop alone had 4 members who were reassigned to sorting mail in the base post office because they had caused damage to F-4s with those jammers while on pot. I talked to them and they joked about it like it was funny.

One of them had stuck an ECM pod into the wing of a plane and another had knocked the nose gear out from under the plane. I don't know what the other two did.

We had a guy in our shop on the midnight shift who always came to work stoned on pot so the shop supe had him spend the entire shift, every night, sitting in a chair in the middle of the floor near the supe where he couldn't cause any damage.

After that supe left, we got an idiot who "was going to make that guy earn his keep just like everyone else."

We panicked because those pot idiots could cause damage to an F-4 that could get us killed too. We tried to talk the idiot supe out of it but he was too stupid to realize that, if he sent that doper to work on F-4s, knowing he was stoned, and the doper caused damage to the F-4, the supe could be court marshaled for dereliction of duty.

So we very quickly did some think tanking to save our own butts and it was decided that the most dangerous thing was for the doper to get control of the jammer. We had to have control of the jammer at ALL costs.

Guess who got sent out to the first plane with the doper stoned on nothing but pot?

Yeah, me. I ran, jumped on the jammer, and drove off towards the F-4 we had to load an ALQ-74 ECM pod on, which was normally a 15 minute job or less. With the experience we had, we normally did it in 10 to 15 minutes.

By the time he got there with the blue step van, I had grabbed the pod off of a pod rack on the flight-line and parked it perfectly under the pylon on that bird's wing and turned the jammer engine off but remained seated so he couldn't jump in the seat with me under the wing of that F-4 and kill my butt.

To attach that pod to that wing, all you had to do was attach two electronic quick connects and turn two nuts on the pylon with a 16 inch crescent wrench to cause two hooks to go through the eyes on the pod to hold it onto the plane. The two electronic quick connects you just pushed the plug down onto the connection on the pod, one of them, you turned it a quarter of a turn and the other one you had to screw it down a little.

You should be able to do all 4 of those things in less than 5 minutes because I had already done the stuff that required the most time.

I timed it and it took us 1.5 hours to complete a 15 minute job (by tech order) because I sat there protecting the jammer, plane, and my butt by not making it possible for him to get control of the jammer with me under the wing of that plane. I sat there for about 1 hour and 20 minutes watching him fumble around, dropping the wrench again and again and again.

The next night he decided to come to work straight because he had been on the flight-line the night before. When he walked through the shop front door, we yelled, "Oh look, he isn't stoned!" and he was surprised we could tell. It was blatantly obvious he wasn't stoned just by his appearance and the way he walked.

Hey, when a drunk ain't drunk, you can tell.

My first job that night was with him doing the exact same job on another F-4 that he and I did the night before and it took us only 15 minutes. When I told him the difference between the two jobs, he was stunned because the thought he had done really great the night before. He had done the worst job I had seen anyone do in the Air Force in 4 years.

See, he couldn't tell how horrible of a job he did because his brain was screwed up on pot so his perceptions were way off.

Don't ever tell me that dope doesn't adversely affect your performance because 1) I know the biology and 2) I have worked with dopers and know how horrible their work is.

BTW, most of that 1.5 hours was spent watching him drop the wrench and he only had to turn two nuts a quarter of a turn each. Those four tasks were so simple that a 5 year old could have done all four of them in less than 5 minutes. And the stoner thought he did a good job.

Those task were designed to be so simple so we could quickly do uploads and downloads for very quick turnarounds to get those birds back in combat.

Yom Kippur War 1973

In 1973, the Muslim countries of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan started an invasion of Israel called the Yom Kippur War. Every one to four weeks we got a briefing on the war by a major or colonel from the Pentagon just in case we might be need to fight there.

We regularly got briefings from the Pentagon about what was going on around the world, usually about every month or two because we could be called TDY anywhere in the world in a moment's notice.

Israel was being beaten pretty badly and I have seen a number of YouTube videos saying things like it was because the Egyptians got a new Soviet anti-tank weapon but that is bull crap.

You have to understand that Israel is ALWAYS outnumbered in tanks by the neighboring countries so Israel uses their superior air force to seize air superiority and then bomb the living crap out of the enemy tanks to level the playing field for their army.

The problem was that Israel couldn't get air superiority because of one SAM system that kept shooting down their planes.

In early 74, I got to work in Udorn one night and was waiting for work orders for the flight-line so I picked a new Time Magazine that had an article about the war in it. The clowns said Israel was being beaten because of 3 new Soviet SAM systems Israel and the US knew nothing about, you know, trying to make the commies look better than us capitalists. They said it was because Egypt was using the new SAM 3, 6, and 8 systems.

The trouble is it was all bull crap. I laughed my butt off and showed the article around the shop to the other ECM wienies, who also laughed a lot. You can't believe a thing the media tell you.

The SAM8 was a shoulder fired piece of junk. Out of the first 50 missiles fired at and hit the Israeli aircraft one actually shot down an airplane behind Egyptian lines, 6 forced airplanes to emergency land behind Israeli lines and, after a few hours of work, they got the planes to fly back to the bases, fixed the planes, and they were back in combat within just 2 or 3 days. The other 43 did minor damage so the planes made it back to their bases and, within a few hours of maintenance, were back in the fight. It was, at best, a nuisance.

We had been fighting the SAM3 in Nam for years. Just a year earlier they developed a counter to our counter for the SAM 3 and I got to help with us developing a counter to their counter to our counter. Such is counter measures. It is an electronics warfare chess game.

We had already had counter measures to the SAM3 for years and so did Israel so the SAM3 wasn't the big problem.

Israel's big problem was the SAM6. You know that thing I almost got shot down by in August of 73, just before Yom Kippur started and our Wild Weasels destroyed it? Yeah, I told you about that, didn't I? And we still didn't know about the 6 months later? Really?

Yeah, the US had been fighting the 6 in Nam for several years but, according to Time Magazine, we didn't know nuttin' about it. That ALQ74 I told you about uploading on an F-4 in a recent post was that counter measure.

The US already had that countermeasure but Israel didn't so the 6 is what was killing Israel and causing her to lose the war.

In our shops, we had a red phone to connect us directly to either the base commander or the Pentagon to bypass the chain of command and save time in emergencies.

Two weeks after I read that bogus article in Time Magazine, the shift before mine got a call on that red phone directly from the Pentagon for an emergency mission. They didn't get the call until just a few minutes before my shift got there 15 minutes early to debrief their shift on what they were doing, which was standard operations. Their shift supe decided to wait a few minutes for us to get there and he worked with my supes to put together the operation, while his people went home and missed out on all of the fun. Hey, we didn't need no help.

We got a shopping list for ECM equipment that probably at least a dozen other TAC bases got. The mission was so important that they closed the flight-line to everyone but us and that was fun. We were told we had 8 hours to complete the mission, you know, on an 8 hour shift.

Our job was to round up ECM pods from the places we kept all over the flight-line for quick installment on planes, while leaving plenty at every location for our planes, back to the shop to be serviced and ops checked, and then loaded onto special transport trailers to be carried to Israel on a C-141 Star Lifter, you know, like I almost got shot down in 6 months earlier.

About 80% of the pods we had to send to Israel from my base were the ALQ-74 pods for the SAM6 and the rest were to replace Israeli pods for the SAM3 that had been lost when their planes were shot down by the 6. The US was also giving Israel new planes to replace the ones that got shot down.

There was no speed limit on the flight-line for our jammers that night and we had a ball. On the way out for our first pickup, four of us had the pedal to the metal running in a line when we got to a left turn on the flight-line and the guy in front of me fell off his jammer, which kept going straight, because he didn't lean enough for the turn. He rolled, got back on his jammer and we laughed our butts off at him.

We busted our butts that night and finished our special mission 2 hours early or in only 6 hours. I remember standing with some other ECM wienies next to the shop waving bye to the last pod trailer heading for the C-141 and Israel.

We got to kick back for the last 2 hours of our shift and play cards because everything concerning the flight-line was shut down until the next shift and we didn't have any work orders.

3 nights later our shop got a call from the Pentagon on our red phone telling us that, when our C-141s got to Israeli bases, the Israelis took our stuff off those planes and put them straight on their fighter planes. We were told that within 3 days of the time they got our equipment, the SAM6s were beat and the war was turned around.

We saved Israel's butt that night and kept her from being invaded and you are now among very few who know about it.

SAM6

One of the really stupid things Time Magazine said about Israel losing the Yom Kippur War and Israel not being able to kill the SAM6 was because it was mobile and hard to hit. We got a lot of laughs out of that stupid statement.

Remember that I told you that the way Israel won her wars was to obtain air superiority and then quickly hunt and kill enemy tanks with her planes?

The Israeli pilots were trained and known to be the best tank busting pilots in the world at that time, the 6 was on a tank chassis, and the Israeli pilots couldn't hit the 6 because it moved just like a tank, right?

We got some of the biggest laughs out of that one. You can't believe the crap the media tell you.

Why was the SAM6 so deadly and hard to beat?

Up to the time of the 6, all electronic jammers were manually tuned by the EWO (electronics warfare officer) by turning a frequency dial with your hand.

The Soviet SAM6 was designed to beat that by being a triple frequency auto tuned radar system so that, if frequency A got jammed, it automatically jumped to frequency B WITHOUT LOSING ANY INTEL for locking the missile onto target. When frequency B was jammed it jumped to frequency C and then back to frequency A.

Another very important thing about the 6 was it could change frequencies faster than any manually tuned jammer so it could get to the next frequency and gather a little more intel before the manually tuned jammer could so that, by gathering little bits of intel quickly, it could get lock for its missiles and shoot your butt down.

But then the inferior capitalist US engineers created the ALQ-74 jamming pod as a "triple can auto-tuning pod", which meant it had three canisters that, by the strangest engineering coincidence created by our inferior engineers, covered all three of the 6 frequencies so that, as soon as the 6 began transmitting their radar on any of those frequencies, that can jamming that frequency started jamming that frequency.

The ALQ-74 could change frequencies faster than the 6 could so the 6 couldn't get any intel for missile lock while our EWOs got missile lock on their radar signal, fired that missile, and the missile followed their signal down to the 6 and kaboom.

That is why, when Israel got our ALQ-74, it turned the war around.

By Desert Storm, the Soviet Union changed the SAM6 from a radar detection and missile lock system (an "active system") to an infrared system (a "passive system") so it was much more difficult to find and destroy because it didn't send out a signal telling us it was there and where it was.

For every measure, there is a counter measure and we had to use other technology to beat that baby. That is why they called us "electronic counter measures" or ECM.

When I was trained in ECM, I was taught that, if the Ruskies and US went to war against each other, especially with nukes, the first half hour of that war would probably determine the outcome because, during that half hour, both sides would be both gathering intel for targeting the enemy and denying that intel to the enemy. The side who won that battle would probably win the war because they would hit more enemy targets and get fewer of their targets hit.

Also, I had classes on dealing with Soviet KGB agents (we had classes about everything, especially in SAC) because the Ruskies had to beat our ECM stuff before they could attack our air, ground, or naval forces and we were at the top of their intel gathering list for their KGB. If their KGB agents found out we were an ECM wienie, to them it was intel gathering time.

That is why I pretty much never told anyone I was even in the military, much less told them what I did until I found out about a decade ago some of our stuff had become declassified so I could talk about it. Some of that stuff is still classified secret and probably will be for the rest of my life. I can only tell you what I can tell you.

Because of me being trained to deal with the KGB, when I found out that Putin was a Soviet KGB officer, it peaked my interest and I have been using my training in espionage (more classes), watching and studying him ever since. He is an interesting and complex man, much smarter than our political leaders and the media are lying to you about that man or they are just really stupid. Probably a combination of the 2.

A major rule in the military is ALWAYS respect your enemy.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

You better....