Price of Vigilance

One The Shootdown Three a.m. is a miserable time to get up. By three-thirty on September 2, 1958, the crew of the C-130 was sitting in the dining hall. Nothing ever tasted good in the mess halls at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, but breakfast, particularly at that time of the morning, was even worse than the other meals. Powdered eggs, powdered milk, even the coffee (prepared to what they thought were American standards by cooks who were used to a quite different, much stronger Turkish brew) were terrible. The seventeen men, deprived of proper sleep by their strange schedule, looked as if they had been up for days. In those days, duty in Turkey was awful at the best of times. There was nothing to do in the evening but drink and play cards, and the food inevitably gave at least part of the crew dysentery. This group was special, though, so perhaps they didn't yet feel ill. The eleven enlisted men who made up the reconnaissance section on the crew were almost all athletes, members of their unit's softball team, one that had nearly won the Rhein-Main Air Base tournament several days earlier. Because of their hectic playing schedule, they hadn't flown as much in the previous month as the other men in their unit, but they were in excellent physical condition. Maybe they had fought off the local microbes that seemed to have a fondness for American bodies. Though most of them drank, none of them was a really heavy drinker by the standards of their outfit. Besides, even suffered together, a hangover and the runs couldn't keep a man from flying. After breakfast the men climbed into the waiting truck and headed out to their plane parked on the west side of the tarmac, the side of the Turkish army base reserved for Americans. The aircrew consisted of six flight crew members (the "front-enders," who actually flew the aircraft) and eleven recon specialists (the "back-enders," who monitored Soviet bloc communications). The front-enders and their RB-50 and C-130 recon aircraft were assigned to the 7406th Support Squadron, U.S. Air Forces, Europe (USAFE), and the recon crewmen belonged to Detachment 1, 6911th Radio Group Mobile-- a U.S. Air Force Security Service (USAFSS) unit. Both the 7406th and Detachment 1 were based at Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt, Germany. Although the two units flew together daily, their relationship was uncomfortable. The men in the plane that day reported to two different headquarters with different and, at times, conflicting goals. Under such circumstances, cooperation was useful, but hardly inevitable. The small detachment of the 6911th was composed primarily of Russian and Soviet-satellite language specialists who were responsible for aerial reconnaissance of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the Baltic Sea in the north to the southernmost reaches of Soviet Armenia in the south. The 7406th maintained and flew the planes. However, although the flight crews possessed secret or top secret clearances, and the common sense to guess what the back-ender recon crewmen were doing, they did not officially know who their passengers were or why the aircraft flew their specific routes. The front-enders (all officers except for an enlisted flight engineer) had no need to know the details of what the back-enders did, and the back-enders (all enlisted) were forbidden to tell. The two halves of the crew were completely separate, in the air and on the ground. In fact, the men of the 7406th were forbidden even to mention to outsiders the 6911th or its Rhein-Main detachment; they referred to the back-enders simply as "sailors." The head sailor (the NCO who was the airborne mission supervisor) was the "admiral." In reality, Detachment 1's back-enders came by their name logically. When the 7406th and Detachment 1 were being formed in 1955-56, the RB-50 recon aircraft assigned to the 7406th Support SquadronTart, Larry is the author of 'Price of Vigilance' with ISBN 9780345450708 and ISBN 0345450701.