I personally thought the climate in the Takhli area was great. It got a bit soggy at times, and it was the home of the king cobra, but we had driven the cobra back with the noise of our jets and the bustle of approaching civilization. Temperatures topped 110 degrees during the extremes, but at that time of year the humidity was at its low ebb. Generally, the temperatures were moderate, the breezes were cool, the sunshine was bright and there was lots of good fresh air. When it rained, it rained like nothing I have ever seen and it was common to see 6-ihch puddles of water accumulate within a few minutes.
We were fortunate at Takhli in having exceptionally good people, hard drivers who wanted to get the job done properly and rapidly; and the base showed it. We had the finest physical facility in Southeast Asia this side of Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Of course, Clark had about a fifty-year head start on us and I doubt that anyone will catch’up in the next few days, but we were head and shoulders above anyone else in Vietnam and Thailand.
It was not always so. The first time I saw Takhli a few years ago, things were pretty grim. As far as air bases were concerned, Takhli was at the bottom of most anyone’s ladder, anyplace in the world. We had a runway, a taxiway and a bunch of wooden hootches. (A hootch is a long, single-story, stilted wooden building of typical Thai rural design. The stilts discourage the cobra and his companions from sharing the building with you, and the sides are open and screened.) Through the cooperation of the local Thai military, we hired Thai labor, used Thai materials, and supervised the construction and placement of our first attempts at housing and working projects. Our originial hootches were definitely of the low-rent-district type and we had to cram thirty men into each one to give people a place to sleep.
We had nothing resembling roads except the mud trails serving the runway area. The jungle was all around and very much in evidence; in fact, the first time I got there you couldn’t even see the runway lights because of the vegetation around the runway. Snakes were prevalent at this time and nobody with any sense wandered far from the tramped-down area. Other bases in the country had received more emphasis and were in far more promising condition than was Takhli. Korat, the home of the other F-105 wing, was a far better looking base, and Udorn, in my opinion, was the most promising of the whole group. General John Murphy was the big gear at Udorn at that time and he had some fine plans for developing the base. It did not turn out that way. Takhli, on the other hand, was in the soggy jungle and did not look like it would ever amount to anything but a hellhole.
Today, Takhli is first class with a wonderful set of base shops, good housing conditions, good recreational facilities on the way although not fully operational when I left, paved roads, and even street lights and extremely functional and attractive buildings. From an operational standpoint Takhli is far superior to a great many bases in the States.
So how did we get from number ten on the ladder to number one on the ladder? I could extol the efforts of any number of great people who immersed themselves in the growth of the Thailand operation, but I have chosen to tell a bit of the story of two individuals to illustrate the people we had doing the job. I will try and take you behind the scenes with a distinguished combat veteran, Lt. Col. Gordon Atkinson; and I want to show you something of a most distinguished nonflying lieutenant colonel named Max E. Crandall. From their stories you should be able to get a feeling for the support that goes into building and running a tactical fighter wing at war.
I was known around Takhli as Mister Vice. Mister Vice, being the number two colonel on the base, winds up with all the cats and dogs and all the things that the boss does*n’t want, but that must be done. It is more than one guy can do effectively by himself, yet the command section is authorized only a very meager staff. For example, they are not authorized a wing sergeant major, or first shirt as he is known from the stripes of authority on his sleeve, in my opinion an absolute necessity. Who ever heard of running the show without a first soldier? I would have thought that the necessity of this position was an established fact, but not so in the banana and coconut air force. In our case, we took it out of our hide, the same way we solved so many-other manpower problems. The Air Force has an empire known as Manpower and Organization, which supposedly splits up the goodies peoplewise and insures that all necessary positions are justified and properly documented. I am sure that this is a big job but so far as the operating units are concerned, these manpower folks have yet to realize why the flying force is in being. Each of the three separate headquarters that we responded to from Takhli looked like zebra farm from all the stripes, but the tactical units of 5,000 men are not authorized a first shirt. Our assumption was that all of the senior noncoms were working in manpower at the headquarters, but we didn’t fight the problem. We just picked the best qualified man we could find on base and used him where necessary, and the big books stayed balanced. It is the commander’s job to juggle his people and get the job done. The-problem of too much headquarters, too much staff and too little at the operating level has never been properly addressed or solved.
Shortly after my arrival, I began agitating for an unauthorized executive officer. In other words, I was looking for a Vice for Mister Vice, an assistant upon whom I could unload some of the many responsibilities that I had. I wanted somebody whom I could trust to utilize the mature judgment of a seasoned combat commander yet someone who was enthusiastic enough and yet detail-minded enough to be sure that administrative niceties, visitors and physical arrangements were properly attended to. It was not too easy to sell the boss on this concept at first, as he did not feel the weight of detail as much as I did and he was not anxious to spread the badge of authority of the command section over any larger area than necessary. I finally convinced him that we could accomplish my aims in this project and still select somebody who would represent us proudly. It worked like a charm.
I found my boy in a balding, round-faced major named Gordon Atkinson who was operations officer in one of our fighter squadrons. I had not met Gordo prior to this tour but was immediately impressed when I did. At the time I got there he had some eighty missions in the theater and was highly respected by his people. I asked Gordo about going to work for me and at first I don’t think he was pleased with the thought of being Vice to Mister Vice. However, after a bit of serious conversation and some explanation of what he might be able to learn from the position, but mainly by expressing my need for someone of his caliber, I managed to get Gordo to consider extending his tour and coming to work for me, with the consideration that he first be allowed to complete his hundred missions.
About that time I got an unintended assist from the personnel people. We worked on a reassignment system that involved throwing a card into the machine back in the States to determine a pilot’s next assignment after he had been on board for a few months. This piece of paper, full of holes, represents the man; the holes spell out the specialties he has accumulated and are matched with more holes representing demands that have been fed into the same machine. When they matched up, the man was off to his next task. Gordo was an old fighter pilot who had been shanghaied into bombers when there was a large-scale program to that effect throughout the Air Force. He had served with distinction and generated a spot promotion to lieutenant colonel but had never ceased fighting to get out of the big loads and back to fighters. He finally made the grade with an assist from Ho Chi Minh, surrendered his spot promotion—he returned to the grade of major—and fought the battle of retraining and more schools to get his specialty changed back to fighters and to get assigned to our wing.