So this was my new administrative assistant, my exec-—this dedicated combat tiger was about to slip behind a big desk and help me shuffle the papers, and help he did as he was in on everything. He used to irritate me a bit because he worked so long and so hard and carried the complete dedication he had demonstrated in the air into his administrative tasks. I used to order him to close shop and get out of the building at eight or nine o’clock at night and he always beat me to work in the morning. He did more to streamline the administrative effort, the intricacies of serving three separate headquarters, and the cumbersome command structure, than any individual I have ever known.
He did everything from monitoring the recurring headache of housing 5,000 men on the base to wet-nursing the cocktail parties and the hundreds;—literally—of visitors who floated through the Thailand circuit. The instant experts who were constantly with us were one of the larger problems in balancing time and effort. If it had not been for Gordo’s abilities, I personally would not have had an opportunity to balance my time between flying or leading and maintaining my supervisory position as Mister Vice. He was constantly worrying over me about smoking too much and not getting the proper rest, constantly advising me on which problems needed my attention and which were so nit noy they could be overlooked.
When Gordo left, he got the job he wanted. He is now working at Nellis Air Force Base for my most esteemed friend, Col. Chester L. Van Etten, who has painted the name “John Black,” his old fighter radio call sign, on so many of his fighter aircraft that he himself is known to many as John Black. I am sure they make a number one team and continue to do a number one job. However, Gordo was not happy when he left. Shortly before, a new policy was established by our Air Force personnel folks offering regular commissions to some people who were currently on active duty in a reserve-officer status. Once again they managed to miss Gordo’s bracket and he is highly representative of a fine group we have in the business who are not regular officers.
You see, Gordo is a reserve. As a reserve he will be kicked out of the Air Force in less than two years. When he reaches twenty years of commissioned service, this superior gentleman, who should have demonstrated to the satisfaction of all concerned his merit as a leader and a hero, will be unceremoniously booted out to make room for a nonflying ROTC second lieutenant who will in all probability accept a commission in the regular force, play with it for a couple of years and then resign.
We have only so many spaces, so the book says. I will never argue with the fact that young talent is necessary. I will argue the point that we need Gordo Atkinson in this business just as long as he wants to stay, and we need the other capable reserve folks just like him. To dismiss them arbitrarily on a time and space basis makes little sense.
While we grew in combat effectiveness as a well-organized and cohesive unit, we also grew as a physical plant, and if this base was so superior to the others in the country, a logical question would be who was responsible. One man was responsible and that was Lt. Col. Max E. Crandall. The first time I saw Max was a few years ago when he was first checking in at Takhli. He had just arrived and was in a temporary sack in one of the colonel-type trailers and as I had just ferried a bird into Takhli for the wing’s use, I was also bumming a sack for the night. I was most happy to see large numbers of my friends whom I had not seen for some time and did not really spend too much time in the trailer except to note that I shared it with what appeared to be a grumpy old lieutenant colonel. We introduced ourselves briefly and Max advised me that he was just checking in as civil engineer for the wing. Since the place was still a complete quagmire, full of mosquitoes, snakes and jungle, I wished him lots of luck and wrote him off as a crotchety older civil engineer type who would probably leave after a year of nonproductive sitting.
How wrong I was. Max had previously served in the European area and had built the base at Sidi Slamain. He was a bachelor and a glutton for work who apparently took one look at this mess and decided that with his talent and with the things that were available to him, and with the things that he had learned in Africa, both good and bad, this poor excuse for an air base was his personal challenge. His challenge was to make this piece of jungle into the finest base in Southeast Asia. He set forth with this as his goal and he succeeded.
Max was a scrounger, a good scrounger who could come up with materials and get jobs done when nobody else could make the grade. He knew his business inside and out, and he knew which corners needed to be cut at which time. He reminded me of a good motorcycle racer—he operated always right on the verge of losing control. He would be so close to sticking his own neck out past the point of retrieval, yet he was always a winner. That is the way to race motorcycles and that is the way to build bases under wartime conditions. We were investigated and we had people point the finger at Max for doing things in an unorthodox manner when he should have surveyed the situation and sat on his thumb for a few months. But these were all Monday morning quarterbacks who did not have the gumption to do the job that needed doing. Max did the job and he never got himself or his commanders in trouble. You could ask Max for the moon and tell him that it was operationally necessary for the troops who were flying and fighting the war and Max would spare no effort to get the job done—first class. He could come up with the impossible in the middle of the Thai jungle, and he did just that quite frequently.
Max was no spring chicken and he worked so hard that he finally collapsed with pneumonia. We were all most concerned and made certain that the flight surgeon had him properly doped up and put to bed in his trailer. However, a day later Max, the walking-pneumonia case, was right back on the job, refusing to be put down, refusing to quit.
Usually there is a running battle between the fighter pilots and the civil engineers—no matter how good things are the pilots don’t feel the engineers are supporting them well enough. This was not the case at Takhli, and I have never seen a bunch of fighter drivers so sold on a support manager as they were on Max. Everybody on the base sweated like mad when the old man had to go over to Clark Air Base in the Philippines for an operation, with the possibility of malignancy hanging in the background. You would have thought that each of our pilots had bagged his twenty-fifth Mig when word came back that all was well. He infected his own troops with such enthusiasm that long after he left the base they were still carrying on as they knew he wanted them to.