Yet another incredibly annoying story "from the old days."

When I was a new 2LT, I went through my very first base exercise. I was manning the civil engineering call desk with a young A1C assisting. Up drives the wing commander and with him is the base commander and my squadron commander and they walk right into my call center. The wing king walks right up to my face and says “what do you do once you find out that a hurricane is on its way?” I looked at my squadron commander and I see him wince, likely because he knew that I never got any training whatsoever after I recently joined his unit. So I thought to myself, if you don’t do something, you’re going down in flames - guaranteed! So fast thinking, I grabbed one of the 3-ring binders sitting on the call center desk and flipped it open. It just luckily happened to open to a “Hurricane Checklist”! I looked at item #1 and read it out loud “Notify the command post.” I look at my squadron commander and I see him sigh in relief, so I know that I blindly nailed it. Hooray for me! They left immediately at that point, as I collapsed into my chair.

Another time, we were going through an ORI (it was on a TAC base). I was tasked to plot battle damage called into us over the radio and then I was to decide where to locate an expedient runway of 100 by 5,000 feet (IIRC) that had the least bomb damage to it. That way, we could send out repair teams to make the repairs and start launching our F-4s in the least amount of time. We were charged to repair a huge bomb crater in 3 hours, using aluminum AM-2 matting over the back filled and compacted hole. The inspectors made sure that they simulated bombing the hell out of our 2 main runways, so we had at least 1 crater to repair any way we could look at them (they were examining how well our repair teams were trained). Well, old smart alec 2LT me made a template that was 100 x 5,000 in scale and I slid it all over our base’s airfield pavements (on the base map). I finally found that by using parts of the parking ramp and taxiway, that we had a 100 x 5,000 worth of pavements without any bomb damage whatsoever. I radioed out the positions of the 4 corners of that strip to our painting crew. The crater damage crews were not engaged. We launched aircraft in less than 20 minutes on the “new” runway! The ORI inspectors were beside themselves telling us that we cheated and I thought I was going to be chastised. But in the end, our wing commander convinced the inspection team commander that we had every right to do what we did and they should applaud our ingenuity. They caved in the end, though they were still mad. My squadron commander called for a squadron briefing in the base theater and he proceeded to embarrass me by singing my praise in front of the whole squadron. I was a hero to every man on the crater damage repair teams!

Fun times looking back on those days, but it wasn’t a lot of fun living through them.