Thomas G. Goduto Interview, 20 February 2001
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| TG: | Yeah. It was kind of a tough deal because you had to be a navigator, and then basically you were betting your navigator wings that you'd graduate from electronic warfare officer school, because if you didn't you washed out of all flying. | |
| INT: | I saw a program recently, talking about EWO's—there were these guys in Viet Nam 'The Weasels' I think they were called? But, there were two guys—the pilot and EWO, and they went in, you know, and they drew fire. This guy said he could make a funny noise and the pilot would know what he was talking about. They were that close. | |
| TG: | Yeah, there was a pilot—Will Harkins. I hope that your wife doesn't see this, but Will Harkins, my pilot and I applied for what you're talking about, 'Wild Weasels.' We weren't selected for whatever reason. It was dangerous work. But of course you were in a lot a better performing aircraft than a B-52, a lumbering thing, you know, if you were in an F-4 or F-105 you could maneuver a lot more quicker but there were casualties associated with that. | |
| INT: | Yeah. And some of those guys flew a hundred missions in the face of death. That was interesting to see, you know, one never hears much about the EWO's. | |
| TG: | No. We were back-seaters. | |
| INT: | From Castle you went up to Minot? | |
| TG: | I reported there in January of 1965 as a 2nd Lieutenant. I was commissioned to 2nd Lieutenant in December of '63, and in January of '65 I was still a 2nd Lieutenant. So one achievement in my life was when I got to Minot I did very well at upgrading and doing the B-52H difference training, and when I took my Stanboard I got a 'Highly Qualified,' but I was a 2nd Lieutenant. There was a regulation in SAC that you had to be at least a 1st Lieutenant in order to sit nuclear work, so I received a spot promotion to 1st Lieutenant and 2 hours later I was on alert. | |
| INT: | Give us some idea of what was going on in the early '60s there. | |
| TG: | Minot? Well, it was a 15 UE—unit equipped base, so we had 15 B-52's, 6 people per crew, but 27 crews. Now that was a mix of—select crews, lead crews, ready crews, and unready crews, and X crews. When you got to a unit and became qualified in an airplane you were assigned to a crew, and crew integrity was one way of assuring maximum performance of the manpower to be able to operate the airplane, its weapon systems and defensive systems to get it to a target safely. So you stayed together as a crew as much as possible although there were crew changes. People |
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