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RememberingContributed by Jerry Williamson When I got to Paddy Control in Jan of 1967 there were three crews with two controllers to a crew. We were operating similar to the way you were...buy the end of March we had a total of nine enlisted guys in ops and three officers plus the commander. Mike Kearney, who I went to Vietnam with from Shaw, and I were the ranking guys (SSgt) He took the day crew and I had the night crew. We worked a 13 hour night shift and an 11 hour day shift, five guys on days, four guys on nights. For the most part the officers took care of all the administrative stuff and stayed out of ops. I think we were able to control the amount of traffic that we did because we didn't know it couldn't be done. It was a bunch of young two and three stripers who were doing something really interesting and challenging and they did it. It was funny to watch sometimes, try to relive a guy on the flight follow scope when it was busy and they would get pissed. My hardest job as crew chief was making sure everyone got a fair share of the duties without pissing anyone off. Well sometimes I would piss them off because I would insist on working. :-) Basically we ran one tactical scope for hooking up FAC's and Fighters and one flight following scope, one scope for the VNAF and a spare. That was all their was. I would do the coordinating with the Command Post, DASC and the TACC and whoever. The other guy would help with comm and piss-breaks...on quiet nights he would nap. This went on until about mid October when we started getting replacements in. By December we were fully manned and Mike and I concentrated on getting the new site built and screwing off, we had trained our replacements and were tired.
Jerry Williamson |
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