A few things I forgot to mention in the previous article, General Gary E. Luck is a retired 4 star.
Retired Col John AG Klose has passed away, and Chuck Drake who was instrumental in helping me with my writing is on Facebook.
The pictures I took that I'm showing which were published were only the tip of the iceberg. Apparently, the official photographers were not quite used to taking images of helicopters in the air and racing about with a bright sky causing their light meters to, basically, turn the helicopters into black silhouettes.
The head of USAEUR & 7th Army photographers and Video crews told me to send him all my negatives so that he could create a collection of images that he could send with press releases. I did and he picked 12.
Getting slightly ahead of myself, then LTC Gerald E. Lethcoe was responsible for working with me on the REFORGER 76 images that were published in Army Aviation Digest that were shown in the previous article.
So, now that we're up to the point where the combination of all of what I had been able to do was about to be presented to LTC Gerald E. Lethcoe, only he was not seeing the past, he was hearing about me from then LTC John AG Klose.
I felt pretty alone after REFORGER 76 came to an end and the 101st Airborne Division went home. It was like I had to say good bye once again to many people who shaped my life. And that to the fact that the Adrenalin rush you get having hundreds of choppers flying over your head at 100 miles per hour and when all of that fades away and your left standing in front of a tall lanky dude who has the power to tell you your story ends here.
That's pretty scary!
Let's continue into the world of the 3rd Combat Aviation Battalion (Provisional)
THE LEGACY CONTINUES
LTC John AG Klose told me, before he left, that "You need to talk to your boss, I've talked to him. You need to talk to him.
Well, I finally got the nerve up to talk with him. He was down stairs in the wood working shop building a bid house. I told him who I was, what I was doing and why my passion for photo-features was more important to me than running a photo-lab.
He sized me up. I'm not exactly a what you call skinny. In fact I was right at the line where you start thinking about losing 10 pounds to say in the military. Snowball's chance in hell was my thoughts as he sized my up.
"Well, Dick, you don't have to if you don't want to, but we have a training exercise you can go out with us on."
And I was thinking, "WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?? Am I in the wrong Army? When did this Army decide that you -- an E-5 -- can make any of these kinds of decisions?"
Of course, I said I wanted to very enthusiastically. Then said I had some concerns.
"Sir, Major Shielly doesn't like me much."
"I wouldn't worry about him." The way he said it made me feel secure and confident that he would be out of the picture.
"What's the other concern?"
I have a brother down at Ramstein Air Force Base who works in operations for the private jets they use to fly VIPs. We are from Norway and he's got a flight going to Oslo next week. I told him that I would like to go but.."
"What's the date?"
"Wednesday of next week. We're going to be dropping off an Air Force 1 star and be back the same day."
"Done"
I like done.
Do you know the funny thing about this story is, everything was set up, I went down to operations and asked it they had an inbound Air Force Jet. The look on their faces was priceless.
I waited for an hour and one of the operations said rather incredulously, "Sergent Edwards, we have an inbound T-39 inbound requesting that you meet them on the runway."
What was also funny about this is during REFORGER 78, I would be down in the same operation area asking if they had a German helicopter inbound to pick me up. The one below, took me to the Fulda Gap.
This time, I was head for the Fulda Gap. Again, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let's also get the various TOW Cobras we used out of the way. First, there was the Q Model Cobra.
By the way, if you see this picture on the internet and there is a byline on it other than mine, here's another angle of the same helicopter.
Tube Launched, Optically tracked, Wire guided TOW Cobra came in three versions. The Q model pictured above was barely able to carry 4 TOWs and sustain a hover.
The more powerful S Model could. But it still had the distinctive French curve canopy.
Engine exhaust was not being directed up towards the rotor blades.
The S Model modified was distinctive in that it now had the anti-glare canopy.
The production S Model was a fully built Cobra from the ground up and had a very distinctive control mechanism that protracted from the right of the helicopter.
By the time I left the Army in 1979, the Apache was just starting to show up in Europe.
Built down here in Mesa, AZ I had the chance to get up close and personal with one.
Of course, it always pays to have a Material Science Engineer for a daughter who works for Boeing
Am I really that old?
MISSION OF THE 3RD COMBAT AVIATION BATTALION
The mission of the 3rd Combat Aviation Battalion (CAB) was fairly straight forward. Create a battalion level unit of Aviation tank killers. Consisting of three Companies
The 235th Attack Helicopter Company came from the states and were located at Giebelstadt Army Airfield became B Company. They brought with them 20 TOW Cobras.
A sister unit, C Company, was located in Schweinfurt, Germany.
A Company and Headquarters Company was located at Harvey Barracks in Kitzingen, Germany.
While I never kept exact count, I believe there were to be 20 TOW Cobras for each Attack helicopter company.
Keep in mind, we were the mold from which all Combat Aviation Battalions either residing in Germany or coming from the states on REFORGER exercises would be modeled after.
General George S. Blanchard was the driving force behind this concept.
The concept was to kill tanks, slow down an enemy advance long enough to replenish and beef up NATO assets in such as way that it would make the WARSAW Pact think twice about attacking West Germany.
NATO needed way reacting to a Russian invasion of Western Germany with their massive --40,000 armored tanks and vehicles positioned on the east side of the East\West German border. Intelligence gathering saw an assault through the Fulda Gap as the most ideal point of entry that could (and never did) drive directly into Western Germany and take over Frankfurt.
It was NATO verses the WARSAW Pact.
With a theoretical 12:1 kill ratio, 80 TOW Cobras could easily destroy 960. Unfortunately, for the enemy, the kill ratio wound up being an almost insane number of tanks and armored vehicles being destroyed even before even 1 TOW Cobra could be spotted close to 1 mile away from the kill zone.
But we had to get there first and we had to promote the concept that the Cobra was, indeed, a formidable platform from which TOW missiles could be fired. The end result the inhalation of enemy tanks and armored vehicles.
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