Patrick D. McCaslin Interview, 25 February 2001
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| always wanted to fly, so I joined the Air Force on the promise that I would be a pilot, believing that lying recruiter. I came in actually to be a navigator so that I could immediately go to pilot training, which was not true, obviously. | ||
| INT: | You had a four-year degree? | |
| PM: | Yes. Right. Bachelor's in pre-med. And then I went to James Connelly Air Force Base in Waco after going through OTS down in San Antonio for three months. I went to James Connelly and got my navigator training. I got my navigator wings there. It took about a year. It's now 1965. Met my wife there. We were married at the same time I graduated, in February of 1965, and I went to Mather Air Force Base to get trained as a bombardier, and left Mather for Castle for crew training in B-52's. | |
| INT: | In sixty—? | |
| PM: | I left there at about this time, February of '66, and proceeded to Minot Air Force Base. That was my first operational assignment. I went to Minot Air Force Base. | |
| INT: | Did you have a choice in your assignment? | |
| PM: | There were several bases tacked up on a bullet—on a black board and you basically pick by class rank or, you know. And I had several choices remaining to me and I chose that one. | |
| INT: | Why Minot? | |
| PM: | Because, believe it or not, it looked to me like the best choice of the ones that were remaining. | |
| INT: | So why not, huh? | |
| PM: | So why not Minot! So we went to Minot—got there in February of '66, and we left there in '68 and I went to pilot training at Laredo Air Force Base. From the very—I drove down U.S. 83 from 15 miles or so from the Canadian border all the way to the Mexican border on U.S. 83, and went through pilot training, graduated from pilot training in late '69. I selected an OV-10 forward air control aircraft, went to transition training in Fort Walton Beach, Florida—left there in seventy. I went through water survival training at Homestead and then ended up in Southeast Asia in June of '71—or '70. And then I did my tour in Southeast Asia. | |
| INT: | What were you flying in? |
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