Patrick D. McCaslin Interview, 25 February 2001
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| PM: | It's a big deal. That's how the commander is rated. That's how everybody's rated. And my memory is that it happens once a year, but the ORI was one where I remember we had pretty bad problems with our radar. We couldn't see much in the way of—we had almost no returns from the radar, but we had developed some contingencies for operating like that, and we went ahead with the mission. | |
| INT: | What was causing the problem? | |
| PM: | As I remember it, the radar tilt went down how many degrees, I'm not sure, but we were getting—instead of looking out here, the thing was point—it was like a flashlight. Instead of looking out here, you're looking down here and you can't see out. | |
| INT: | Seeing the horizon or something like that? | |
| PM: | Well, you're not even seeing the horizon. Instead of looking out, instead of being able to see out, say, 50 miles, you're only seeing out 10 miles. So you had very little time to react to any returns you see. But we managed to go through the low-level route with the radar being in that condition, and ended up with some of the best scores in the ORI. Meanwhile, there was an S crew who went through the ORI and...and had a terrible mission. Had bad bombs and everything. The wing commander simply grabbed some of the people on my crew and shipped 'em up and took those guys and put 'em down, you know? | |
| INT: | Would that have been considered a demotion? | |
| PM: | To go from an 'S'crew down? Yeah, it would've been considered a demotion. It was not uncommon. They were very performance oriented. If you could cut it, you've got the promotion to a higher-level crew. They wanted the best people doing the training and the evaluating. | |
| INT: | So they were pretty neutral about it? They just kept moving— | |
| PM: | No, there was nothing personal in it. Very much like the mafia, you know. It's all business. And I can understand that. I mean you know, if you're in the defense business, you want the best people doing it. You don't want— | |
| INT: | Sure, especially front line, you know. | |
| PM: | Yeah. You don't want people with poor judgment in charge of nuclear weapons, so. So that's how I came to be on an S crew. | |
| INT: | Okay, did you go right to S-01? |
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