Category: This great Nation & Its People
Above: The Air Force National Trophy winning team at Camp Perry, 1966. Author Arnie Vitarbo is second from the left in the back row.
The beginning
The beginning
In early 1951 a plan was put into motion whereby the Air Force might qualify for the 1952 Olympic Games held in Finland. In addition to the smallbore rifle team, the fiercest Air Force pistol competitors were Alan Luke, John Kelly, LTC Charles Densford and Col. Thomas Kelly. At the time, Col. Kelly was not aware of the place in Air Force history that awaited him.The tipping point
General Curtis LeMay.
Following an attack during the Korean War, General Curtis LeMay went to Kimpo Air Base to take stock of the situation. Learning that fallen U.S. Airmen had perished with M2 Carbines in their hands after their apparent futile attempts to load them with .45 cal. service pistol magazines, the general vowed “never again.” After becoming Chief of Staff of the Air Force, he was able to make good on that promise. The general reached out to Col. Kelly to organize the first Air Force Marksmanship School at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, TX. Col. Kelly’s assignment was to 1) Train and organize competent gunsmiths; 2) Establish a marksmanship school; and 3) Organize and field the best competitive shooters in the world. In typical military fashion, the colonel complied.
Many of the early gunsmithing “recruits” were aircraft engine mechanics, fighter pilots or other maintenance personnel who just liked to target shoot or hunt. From that early nucleus came the Air Force’s Gunsmithing “Shop” with pistol, smallbore and high power rifle, shotgun and subsequently running boar (now moving target) sections. An ammunition section was also formed to find the best loads, using their own 100-yard test tunnel. The shop would test a few rounds of ammunition from every manufacturer and, once they found the best, they would buy the entire lot. We knew when we were issued ammunition that we were getting the best available.
With the gunsmithing program underway, efforts turned to establishing a marksmanship school. The first contingent of Air Force shooters arrived at Ft. Benning, GA, to attend the U.S. Army’s advanced coach class in 1958. [Editor’s note: For reference, the Army formed its marksmanship unit in 1956, the Navy in 1957.] The Air Force marksmanship school “went live” later that year and present-day Air Force “Red Hat” rifle range instructors are the direct result of that original program.
With gunsmiths and a marksmanship school in place, Col. Kelly turned his attention to his final set of orders—making the best shooters in the world. Air Force shooters from 1959 until the program was discontinued in 1969 performed extremely well. I will only cover the accomplishments of the pistol team of which I was a part of and knew from firsthand experience.
Team composition
The majority of the early team members came from within the Air Force but there were some who came from the other Services. The first was Bill Mellon who came over from the Navy, then me, Arnold Vitarbo, from the U.S. Marine Corps. I was a member of the Marine Corps Pistol Team from 1961 through most of 1963, and was an established “2650 Bullseye” shooter for the Corps. In those days, whenever we encountered the Air Force Team at matches we were very impressed by their skill and professionalism, so much so that I wanted to become a part of it. During November of 1963, I completed my 10th year in the Marine Corps and decided to join the Air Force. After my discharge from the Marine Corps, I was turned down by an Air Force recruiter on a normal enlistment and actually was headed to Hawaii where we planned to live.
Not related to the Air Force team, this picture instead shows the author with the Hawaii Marine Pistol Team in 1961. Readers may recognize the young Officer kneeling on the right of the photograph. Jim Land (former NRA Secretary) and Vitarbo shot on the Hawaii Marine Pistol Team for a while together.
Col. George Van Deusen, Commander of the Air Force Marksmanship School, helped get me assigned directly to the team at Lackland AFB. It should be noted that Col. Van Deusen, a former fighter pilot with the “Flying Tigers,” often traveled with us and usually shot well over 2600 himself. When I arrived at Lackland I found that of the 15 shooters assigned to the Pistol Team, seven of them were current 2650 shooters, including the team captain and coach. (Note that all of these scores were fired with open sights, no scopes.) During my first half-year on the Air Force team in 1964, I fired in over 20 matches and had a 2646 match average, but was not able to make the Blue Team until later that year. My first match as a firing member of the Blue Team made me realize just how tough these guys were. From here on, I would like to list some of the highlights of our team’s accomplishments and put them in perspective.
-SSGT John Mahan broke 2650 12 times and never won a match with it. He was the only shooter I ever met who actually had his sights adjusted for a controlled “jerk.” Anyone else who shot his guns always shot high and to the right.
-In 1966, Capt. T.D. Smith III shot his .45 cal. wad cutter in centerfire matches and his “hardball” gun in the .45 stages for the entire year, with the goal of winning the National Trophy at Camp Perry. After 20 matches and an average close to 2650, he was, instead, sent to Vietnam.
-Capt. Franklin C. Green held the bullseye record for a while with a score of 2665. He injured his left hand so he switched and broke 2660 with his right hand. He became National Champion in 1968.
-TSGT Alvin R. Merx was the first man to shoot 300 over the .22 National Match course. (He subsequently equaled that score several more times.) Merx complained all the time because he hated shooting and said it was boring. He used to assemble distributor caps at a Ford Motor plant in Detroit and said that is what he enjoyed doing.
-Myself, Capt. T.D. Smith III, Capt. Frank Green, SSGT John Mahan and a few others also shot 300 in competition in the National Match course on different occasions. The first time I shot over 2660 (2664) I walked off the line thinking I had the match won, but soon found out that I came in second to T.D., who shot a 2666. In 1968 at Camp Perry, the Air Force made a clean sweep of the Nationals. We won the warm up match, all three guns and Frank Green won the Grand Aggregate. SSGT Edwin L. Teague won the National Trophy Individual Match and we also won all three Team Matches. In the American Rifleman magazine, the reporter said that the Air Force won everything except Lake Erie.
One team only
In those days, there were no separate Conventional and International teams. Those of us who could do both, shot in all of the major matches of each. Our Blue Team in Conventional was usually made up of the International shooters that included:
- Capt. Franklin C. Green, 1964 Olympic Silver Medalist in Free Pistol, 1968 National Pistol Champion, 2650 Club and President’s 100.
- Capt. Thomas D. Smith III, 1964 Olympic Team for Free Pistol, World Champion Center Fire and the retired record holder with a score of 599, 1963-64 Interservice Pistol Champion with a score of 2658-140X, (T. D. shot over 890 with the .22 so many times that it became common place for him), 2650 Club, President’s 100.
- SSGT Arnold Vitarbo (author), 1968 Olympic Team in Free Pistol, 1966 World Championships Free Pistol fourth place finish, 1967 Pan American Games Free Pistol fifth place finish, Team Gold Medal and Individual Gold, 1985 and 1968-1970 World Championship Team Member with a 568-match average in Free Pistol, 1969-1985 Free Pistol Record holder with a 571, 1969-1981 Standard Pistol Record of 586, 1985 Air Pistol Record of 584, 1973 National Free Pistol Champion, 1966 National Center Fire Championship, Distinguished in Rifle, Pistol and International, averaged 288 in individual and Team Matches with the Service Pistol for six seasons, 2650 Club, and President’s 100 seven times.
- SSGT Edwin L. Teague, 1964 Olympic Team in Rapid Fire and 1968 National Trophy Pistol Champion. Ed was a tremendous Police Combat Action shooter and had unbelievably quick reflexes. He later became the head of the SWAT program for the Arizona State Police. He was also part of the 2650 Club and President’s 100.
- LT. Gail Liberty shot as high as 2625 in the Conventional Pistol matches and was a member of the 1966 World Championship Team. After she retired from the Air Force, she made the National Team in Women’s Sport Pistol and Women’s Air Pistol.
Something to pass along
We had a large team score board set up at each match and were required to post our scores. The team would always gather around the score board after the match for open discussion. Although there was much camaraderie among the team members, when the match began, it was “dog-eat-dog.” I feel this attitude was very healthy and that it contributed to our overall success. If you were “thin skinned” you would not have lasted very long on the team.
The United States Air Force Pistol Team at Camp Perry in 1964: Front Row (l. to r.) Capt. Green, Bob Day (Gunsmith), MSGT Byers (NCOIC), Col. George Van Duesen, MSGT Dave Miller (Coach), SSGT Scott Wroten. Second Row: MSGT Carter, SSGT Graf, SSGT Mahan, TSGT Crump, TSGT Merx, SSGT Vitarbo, SSGT Teague. Back Row: SSGT Stoltman, SSGT Duett, SSGT Breeding (Gunsmith), SSGT Thyarks, SSGT Kwas, SSGT Legg, Capt. Smith, SSGT Yeager, TSGT Mellon. Photo courtesy USAF Archives.
During team discussions, the subject of how to handle match pressure would always come up. In their own way, each shooter would finally admit they used some form of mental training, including imagery. The mental preparation normally began weeks before a major competition. The closer the “big” match came, the more we would get into our “shell.” These thoughts would include hearing ourselves being called to the firing line, getting our guns ready, etc. The night before a big match, we would try to imagine in more detail actually firing the match, hearing the range commands, the noise and also preparing for any problems that might arise like weather, target breakdowns, etc. When the command was finally given to commence firing, before each shot or string of shots was fired, we would rehearse the entire shot or string in our mind. This mental imagery included breathing, rise of the gun, watching the sights, feeling the trigger pressure and follow through. Immediately after this exercise, we would raise the gun and fire a well-planned shot or be ready for the commands for the sustained fire stages.
I still teach the following techniques to my students in my Coaching and Advanced Marksmanship Clinics. We would try to imagine seeing our sights clearly with our eyes closed. This is normally an acquired skill and takes time to master. It also helps to dry fire in a dark room or closet to get the feel of the trigger and how a smooth break should feel.
Closing remarks
It is my opinion that the reason for the overall skill level that was present during the 1960s was in large part due to the Air Force and its program. We were expected to act like professionals and were treated as such. The performances of the Air Force Team had a snowball effect: As the Air Force improved, the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit at Ft. Benning improved along with the Navy shooters who, in turn, began to be a force to be reckoned with. The Air Force had to improve to beat the Army and Navy, and they in turn did likewise. The overall result was extremely high scores with a very high expectation level. There are record scores that were fired in the 1960s and early 1970s that are still standing.
There are other members too numerous to include in this article and I apologize for not mentioning anyone before 1962, but I was not on the team at that time.
Could you imagine seeing day after day all the gore and nastiness that your fellow man could inflict upon each other? No Thanks says I!! Grumpy
Mike Thornton
Michael Thornton is a hardcore 30 year-veteran of the United States Navy, a founding member of SEAL Team Six, and one of only three SEALs to receive the Medal of Honor in ‘Nam – an honor he earned in blood on Halloween 1972, when he almost single-handedly battled through enemy territory against a swarming horde of enemy soldiers, charged through a naval artillery bombardment to save his commanding officer from certain death, and then swam three hours through North Vietnamese waters with two wounded guys hanging off his back and a half-dozen chunks of grenade shrapnel lodged in various parts of his abdomen.
If that’s not badass enough for you, then clearly you’ve come to the wrong website.
Mike Thornton was born March 23, 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina. He joined the U.S. Navy and served as a Gunner’s Mate on a couple destroyers, but in 1968 he decided to try his hand at making the Navy’s elite Underwater Demolitions Team – the original precursor to the SEALs. Training was brutal, exhausting, and unbelievably intense – of the 129 men who signed up for UDT Class 49, only 16 graduated and were accepted into the program.
One of those 16 was Mike Thornton. Not long after completing one of the most brutal military training courses on the face of the planet, he was assigned to SEAL Team One and deployed to the Republic of Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War.
Thornton arrived in-country in 1969 and spent the next three years doing a wide variety of super-badass over-the-top Navy SEALs stuff. He gathered intel on enemy positions, scouted deep behind enemy lines on daring covert missions, captured prisoners when he could, battled enemy forces on the reg, and basically did all that cool Black Ops classified SEAL stuff that was presumably so hardcore and top-secret classified that we’ll likely never really know the full details of all of it.
Team One was at the heart of many of America’s Special Operations in ‘Nam, and in the fall of 1972 this was still very much the case. In October, 23 year-old Petty Officer Mike Thornton was sent on a mission to the Qua Viet Naval Base in Quan Tri Province on a dangerous mission to gather intel on some NVA positions, capture a few prisoners, and then somehow extract back to friendly lines. Thornton’s team would consist of himself, three South Vietnamese Special Forces operators, and the unit commander, Lieutenant Thomas Norris, a hardcore Medal of Honor recipient Navy SEAL who was already a legend among the SEALs thanks to a wild mission he’d undertaken a few months earlier when he went undercover deep into enemy territory to rescue a downed American pilot. Facing extreme danger, and surrounded constantly by a massive force of NVA soldiers, Norris succeeded in extracting not only the pilot, but also the crew of a team that had already gone in to get the pilot and ended up getting pinned down. The mission was so hardcore that they made a movie out of it – it’s called Bat*21, and Norris was so tough that they got Gene Hackman to play him in the movie.
Needless to say, this was not a crew of guys you wanted to face in a dark alley late at night.
The SEALs deployed first by sailing an ordinary-looking Vietnamese junk boat up a river late at night, then by boarding a small rubber boat and infiltrating enemy lines under the cover of darkness. Well, unfortunately, the mission started to go sideways right away – the map wasn’t really lining up with what was supposed to be there, and it didn’t take long for Norris and Thornton to realize that they’d landed a little too far into enemy terrirotyr. So now, instead of scouting temporary enemy fortifications that had been thrown up days before, these guys were now straight in the middle of a hardened network of NVA bunkers that had been designed years ago to repel full-scale assaults by massive formations of enemy troops and armor.
It wasn’t really the kind of place you wanted to be walking around with an American flag patch on your shoulder.
So, ok, the SEALs were off-course, and were now wayyyy deeper in enemy territory then they would have hoped, but a mission is a mission, and these guys were pros. They immediately went to work – noting bunker positions, troop concentrations, fortifications, vehicles, and radio towers. They Splinter Celled their way silently and stealthily through the heart of an enemy naval base first by boat, then on foot, collecting tons of valuable intel, all somehow without being detected by the hundreds of hardened veteran NVA troops that now surrounded them from every direction.
Then, over one particular ridgeline, the SEALs saw a couple of NVA guards standing nearby. They were far enough away from the main base that they could potentially have been grabbed and taken prisoner without alerting the base, so the SEAL team moved in to try and take them into custody. The two South Vietnamese SEALs grabbed one of the guys, but they weren’t quick enough to grab the second guy – that dude bolted for it and started screaming his damn head off for the NVA to sound the alarm.
Thornton ran him down and capped him with a well-placed pistol round, but it was already too late – the SEAL stopped dead in his tracks as he heard the sound of alarm sirens blaring from a nearby camp.
Thornton ran for it. By the time he’d reached the spot where his buddies were waiting for him, he was already being run down by a group of roughly fifty NVA soldiers, who immediately started spraying AK-47 gunfire into the jungle all around him.
One of the South Vietnamese SEALs launched a LAW rocket into the middle of the attacking forces, hoping that the resulting explosion would buy the SEAL team a little time to take off and run to the extraction point.
The SEALs were now in a fight for their lives. They had to get back to their extraction point before they were completely surrounded and overrun by a force that massively outnumbered them.
Fighting through the pitch darkness, facing down presumably hundreds of enemy soldiers, the five Navy SEALs fought the way you’d expect the most badass military force in the world to fight. They fired, repositioned, fired again, and launched grenades and LAW rockets, constantly changing position in an attempt to confuse the enemy about how many guys they were facing. The SEALs had the advantage of surprise, and concealment, and the NVA couldn’t just charge in there after them because they couldn’t quite figure out how many guys they were actually facing. So, through the darkness of the Vietnamese jungle, the Navy SEALs spent the next four hours (!!) battling their way back towards the water.
Bullets were zipping through the jungle from every direction as the SEALs made their escape. Five men against hundreds. As his ammunition began to run out, Norris (who took up the rear of the SEAL position) ditched his M-16 and took an AK-47 off a dead enemy soldier, using captured ammo to keep up a steady hail of fire back towards the ever-closing NVA troops. At the head of the column, Mike Thornton raced through pitch-black jungle navigating his team to the extract point. As dawn began to break and the SEALs approached the beach, Norris got on his radio and called in for two Destroyers to come in and lay down some covering fire. Shortly after, though, he received a report that heavy fire from fortified NVA shore guns had damaged both Destroyers and drove them back from the coast. A cruiser was inbound to help, but for now the SEALs were on their own.
Thornton continued to the extraction, firing his M-16 in all directions, until suddenly an enemy grenade landed dangerously close to him. It exploded, ripping shrapnel through the SEAL. White-hot shards of splintered steel embedded in his back in six different places, as the concussive force of the blast sent him flying hard into the ground. With his ears ringing, and his back screaming in pain, Thornton still held on to his weapon, and rolled over onto his back just in time to see four NVA troops running up onto the ridgeline to finish the job – despite every muscle in his body screaming in pain, Thornton still somehow had the calmness and unimaginable skill to take out all four of those guys before they could spray him full of 7.62.
One of the South Vietnamese SEALs rushed over to pick Thornton up, and the SEAL asked what had happened to Tom Norris. The SEAL responded, “He’s gone. Let’s go”. The guy said that Norris’s position had been overrun, he was shot in the head and killed, and the rest of the team had to fall back. He urged Thornton to get to the beach to extract, because the window to get out of this alive was very rapidly closing, and a US Cruiser was already maneuvering into position to lay down some cover fire.
But Navy SEALs don’t leave a man behind. And Thornton wasn’t about to start now.
With AK-47 fire zipping around him from every direction, Michael Thornton ran 400 yards through a hail of bullets to reach the body of his good friend. Four NVA troops were standing over the fallen SEAL, but Thornton killed them with his rifle, screaming with rage, and finally fell to his knees at his friend’s side. Norris was bleeding badly from a gunshot to the head, but Thornton wasn’t about to leave that guy behind. With enemy troops ripping shots past his head, and blood pouring from grenade wounds in his back, Mike Thornton threw Tom Norris on his shoulders and started to make a run back for the beach.
It was at this point that the U.S. Navy cruiser reached firing position. And the coordinates the firing teams had were the ones that Tom Norris had given them – at a time when Norris thought he wasn’t going to get out of this fight alive.
The shell landed pretty much right where Norris’s body had been. The explosion blew Thornton 20 feet through the air, slamming him hard to the beach, ringing his ears, and blurring his vision. As he lie on the ground, he heard something amazing. A familiar voice, quiet and fading, but clearly audible even among the gunfire and artillery.
“Mike, buddy.”
Tom Norris was alive.
Surging with adrenaline, Mike Thornton jumped back to his feet, threw Norris on his back, and started running to the shore. With bullets, mortars, and naval artillery chewing up the beach and the trees around him, Thornton ran though the fire, finally reaching the shore, where one of the Vietnamese SEALs also lay wounded from a gunshot to the back.
Thornton grabbed that guy too. Then he jumped in the water, inflated his life vest, and proceeded to swim through salt water with six grenade wounds in his back for four hours while dragging two seriously wounded men.
The American ship that had been sent to extract the SEALs was preparing to go home, convinced that nobody could have survived that mission, when suddenly they saw a dude in the water shooting his rifle in the air trying to get their attention. It was Mike Thornton.
Every member of the mission survived.
When Thornton received his Medal of Honor in 1973, Tom Norris was still recovering in the hospital, and they weren’t about to let him leave just to attend a medal ceremony. So, the day of the ceremony, Thornton went to the hospital, put Norris in a wheelchair, and snuck him out the back door so he could attend.
After Vietnam, Mike Thornton would go on to be a BUD/S instructor in Coronado, where he would train future Navy SEALs, as well as members of the British Royal Marines’ badass Special Boat Service. He was a founding member of SEAL Team Six in 1980, and retired as a Lieutenant in 1992. Nowadays there’s a really badass statue of his rescue mission standing outside the SEAL museum in Ft. Pierce, Florida.
Links:
Mike-Thornton.com
NavySEALs.com
Achievement.org
Defense Media Network
Wikipedia
Suggested Reading:
Collier, Peter and Nick Del Calzo. Medal of Honor. New York: Artisan, 2006.
Dockery, Kevin. SEALs in Action. New York: Avon Books, 1991.
Norris, Tom and Mike Thornton. By Honor Bound. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016.
And honestly it’s bloody cool
These were giant concrete vessels deployed by the US solely for the purpose of making and supplying ice cream to US troops throughout the Pacific Theatre of war, able to create over 5 litres of ice cream every minute.
Just to put that into perspective, this is just the Pacific Theatre that we’re talking about. The US fought a two front war, and chose to primarily focus on the European Theatre of War. Thus the vast majority of resources and assets were sent to that front with the Pacific Theatre getting the(relatively) short end of the stick.
And despite all of that, despite the fact that the Pacific was considered the “less critical” part of the US war effort, despite the fact that they were producing huge quantities of ships and aircraft for the naval battles against the Japanese, they still had more than enough resources to create, run and supply a massive vessel for the sole purpose of feeding ice cream to their soldiers.
And honestly, it’s kind of scary when you think about it.
U.S. Air Force
- In 1935, lava from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano threatened the nearby town of Hilo.
- Responding to a request by island volcanologists, the U.S. Army Air Service sent planes to bomb the lava flow.
- Although the scientist who requested the air strike thought it was a success, others weren’t so sure.
One of the U.S. Air Force’s oddest missions was against perhaps its most formidable adversary ever: Mother Nature.
In 1935, lava from the Mauna Loa volcano threatened the nearby seaside town of Hilo, Hawaii. So U.S. bombers, commanded by none other than future Gen. George S. Patton, bombed the lava flow in an attempt to save the town.
Experts were divided on how useful the air strikes ultimately were, but the bombs weren’t the last ones dropped to prevent natural disasters.
A channel of fast-flowing lava moves through a cooled section of a lava flow. Hawaii, 1984.
Historical//Getty Images
The Hawaiian islands are well known for volcanic activity; the islands themselves were formed by volcanic action over the course of millions of years. The “Big Island” of Hawaii is the home of Mauna Loa, one of the most active volcanoes in the world. It has erupted 33 times since 1843, often adding new territory to America’s 50th state. Indeed, Hawaii is probably the only state in the union that is continuously growing, thanks to volcanoes.
Mauna Loa’s lava flows are closely monitored, but typically harmless. One exception, however, was the 1935 eruption, which unexpectedly flowed north. The eruption started on November 21 and oozed at a rate of a mile a day toward the headwaters of the Wailuku River—the water supply for the town of Hilo. If the volcano cut the supply of fresh water to the town of approximately 20,000 people, the result could be catastrophic.
Keystone Y1B-4 bomber.
Wikimedia Commons
Thomas Jagger, the founder of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, appealed to the U.S. Army for help. Jagger wanted the Army Air Service, forerunner of the wartime Army Air Corps and later the U.S. Air Force, to bomb the lava tubes and channels that fed lava in the direction of the river. Nobody thought American bombers could destroy the lava, but they hoped the bombing would divert the flow to another, non-threatening direction.
The mission was assigned to Army Air Service planes based on the island of Oahu and planned by Patton. The commander of the First Provisional Tank Brigade in World War I would of course later go on to command the Third Army in Europe during World War II.
The Hush Kit describes the air strike:
On December 27, 1935, ten Keystone B-3 and B-4 bombers from Luke Field on Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor flew the 200-odd miles to bomb the Humu‘ula lava flow. The bombers dropped 40 bombs, half were high explosive and the rest were WP smoke bombs to mark the impact points. Of the twenty high explosive bombs dropped, sixteen hit the target area and twelve hit the lava tunnel in question.
Here’s video of the planes involved in the air strike:
Jagger observed the air strike from a telescope at the base of Hawaii’s other volcano, Mauna Kea. “The experiment could not have been more successful; the results were exactly as anticipated,” he later told the New York Times. The lava slowed from covering more than 5,000 feet a day to 1,000 feet after the bombing, and the flow stopped entirely on January 2, 1936.
Not everyone shared Jagger’s optimism. Harold Stearns, a U.S. Geologic Survey who flew on the mission, believed the slowing and stopping of the flow was a coincidence. Jagger’s boss, the head of Hawaii National Park, told the Army the day after the attack, “Though we are as yet unable to determine what effect the airplane bombardment achieved … I feel very doubtful that it will succeed in diverting the flow.”
The U.S. Geologic Survey, writing about the incident more than 80 years later, says, “Modern thinking mostly supports Stearns’ conclusion.”
In 2015, the 23rd Bomb Squadron, the unit that flew the mission against Mauna Loa’s lava flow, returned to Hawaii to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the mission. A B-52 bomber assigned to the 23rd Expeditionary Bomb Squadron flew from its temporary base on the island of Guam to Hawaii, a 12-hour mission. The squadron insignia, this Air Force Global Strike Command article notes, still depicts bombs tumbling down onto a volcano.
23rd Bomb Squadron shoulder patch, 2015.
36TH WING PUBLIC AFFAIRS
The 1935 volcano air strike wasn’t the last time mankind trained its weapons of war on nature. Today, Russia and China occasionally send their air forces to bomb frozen rivers, typically to remove dangerously high levels of ice buildup or to allow nearby communities to reconnect with the outside world. And in July 2018, the Swedish Air Force bombed a wildfire on a military training ground, snuffing it out and preventing it from detonating unexploded munitions.
———————————————————————————– I for one did not know this. That and the man did get around did’nt he? All in all I have to say that the US Taxpayer got themselves a real bargain when they commissioned him into the Army.