Palma, Tim oral history

              Veteran Transcript

Interview with Mr. Tim Palma

[b. 4/12/1962]

Interviewed by Annie Kortepeter

Recorded on 9/27/10 by Annie Kortepeter

Transcribed on 10/17/2010-10/31/2010

[0:00:08.5 counter start)

Annie Kortepeter: Today is September 27, 2010. I am Annie Kortepeter and I am interviewing Mr. Tim Palma at 8100 Morningside Drive [Indianapolis, Indiana]. Mr. Palma is a family friend. Mr. Palma is 48 years old and was born on April 12, 1962. Mr. Palma served in the Gulf War and was a V-F-A-H-7. And held the following rank of commander.

Tim Palma: During the war I was a lieutenant. I retired as a commander, which was the highest rank I achieved.

 [0.46.8]

Annie Kortepeter: Were you drafted or did you enlist?

Tim Palma: I enlisted.

AK: Okay, where were you living at the time you enlisted?

TP: Seattle, Washington.

AK: Why were you there?

TP: A job. I took a job out of school, out of college, out of Indiana University. As a marketing rep for a hospital supply company. And I was initially sent to El Paso, Texas and they transferred me to Seattle. And that was about seven months after I graduated that I made the decision that I just really didn’t want to pursue that field under pressure. So, I always wanted to get into flying and that was the best way for me to do it was to join the service.

AK: Why did you pick the service branch you joined?

TP: Well, there were two choices; there was the Air Force and the Navy. The air force was not hiring at the time, so I chose the Navy.

AK: Fair enough, what did it feel like to enlist?

TP: It was scary, because especially coming out of college, I was at the time twenty-two years old so we had a lot of fun in college. We had a pretty good lifestyle, pretty good group of core friends. And to go from really living on your own and doing whatever you want to a completely structured environment was a tough to decision to make because they gave you pretty much an itinerary of what to expect from day one of boot-camp and it wasn’t pleasant. And it was kind of difficult to be sure your mind wrapped around the fact that you no longer could you just shoot out and go to lunch whenever you wanted too. That was all going to be taken away from you. So it was a tough decision but you know it was one I personally needed to do.

AK: What was an average day of boot camp like? [0:02:15.8]

TP: You were up at 4:30 am or 5:00 am to drill depending on how nice the instructor wanted to be.  Then you immediately headed to the hallway to do some type of physical training while it was push-ups, leg lifts, something just to make you sweat.  And then that was for about thirty minutes. And between there they let you change into what they call your “t-change”, which was essentially just green, “infrantryman dress and boots.” Then we usually ran a five-mile run. And then they took us from there they let us go to the shower hall and that was about 6:30 am.  Then we got fifteen minutes to go back and change and shower. And then we were in class by 7:00 am.

AK: What classes were you taking?

TP: We took aerodynamics. Well basically the hardest classes were aerodynamics, American History, American warfare and American strategy. A lot of things that I think we needed to know as officers was just leadership classes. And a lot of physical training classes and a lot of swimming. Especially for the navy, we spent anywhere between one to two hours in the pool. Which you think would be fun, but it wasn’t fun splashing around unfortunately. It was a little bit better. But that was usually our day till about 6 o’clock when they took us back together again and then we had about three hours to study.  Then usually lights out by 9:30 or 10 pm.

AK: What got you through it? Anything in particular?

TP: My first day when we walked in there were fifty-five of us in my class.  And by the time we graduated only twenty-two graduated. So, as you saw people kind of start to get out for whatever reason, you kind of made you mind up whether you know. It really, more than anything, was just mental. They wanted to see how far they could push you before you broke. And physically you could only do so many push-ups and sit-ups; eventually your body says I can’t do it anymore. But what they’re trying to do, they are trying to mentally determine what your breaking point is and if you have any weaknesses. As far as when under pressure and under stress, where do you cave? And the purpose for that is, because you learn this as you go through the flight program, that you become under an enormous amount of stress during different situations and then you kind of rely on that training. You say, “okay I can put that aside for now and deal with the situation that I am dealt with.”

AK: Did you ever feel broken mentally during your boot-camp experience?

TP: You know I think everyone gets down, but I never was really broken mentally. It quite frankly was difficult, but we had a lot of good guys and we all sort of commiserated together, so it was, I am not quitting so you’re not quitting that type of thing. For me the hardest thing was the swimming because I was a terrible swimmer, I mean awful. And that was what worried me more than anything, because I wouldn’t be able to finish it. Because our swimming was to pass or to get commissioned you had to be able to swim a mile in a flight suit. Which is, have you ever seen the movie TOP GUN? There was green suit, that’s a flight suit and as it gets wet it gets very difficult to swim and you had sixty minutes to do it. And it’s in a pool and everybody does it at the same time. So you’re kind of swimming around the perimeter of this pool and you can’t touch the bottom of the pool. That was difficult. And the worst part for me was that you had to tread water for fifteen minutes through [hand-eye] water. And that was really hard because, you know, they teach you how to do it but until you have to do it for fifteen minutes straight, it was kind of difficult.

AK: Where exactly did you go? [0:05:53.1]

TP: We deployed the day after Christmas in 1989. And went to, initially went to-what happened for us was that we were actually deployed on a three month deployment prior to that. We were right off of Puerto Rico.  And we actually when turned [around] when the government started to cut off communication. We actually turned and started heading towards the Persian Gulf. We always knew we were going there because we had an essentially a maneuver going on a cruise. But they ended up bringing us back, and they said we had three weeks to get our affairs in order and then we are leaving. We’re moving your cruise up three months and you’re leaving the day after Christmas, so we knew we were going to the Persian Gulf or the Persian Gulf region. Once we got under way and we were deployed we found out we were going to the Red Sea and the southern tip of Saudi Arabia and I forgot the name of country and then to the Persian Gulf.

AK: What did you do during those three weeks?

TP: We flew everyday.

AK: What type of stuff would you do?

TP: They’re called training mission, “quote on quote,” but everything the military does is a training mission. But really what we were doing was preparing for war. I mean, we had prior to this week, known for about the last six months that we were kind of gearing up to go there and so we basically your (swords) would be similar to what we would do once we were in (theater) so you had a certain responsibility. So maybe you would have a simulated target granted that wasn’t far away, but we would get off and join up as a flight and actually attack some spot on the water that we dropped a smoke or something. And once we got that target, we would regroup and go back on ship or something. We did in all set types of weather. We did most of our stuff at night, so we would sleep during the day and start to work at 2 in the afternoon and fly till 10 the next morning.

AK: Do you remember arriving? And what as it like arriving at your final destination or the Red Sea?

TP: Well, when we went through the Red Sea it was a little weird because you’re going through the Suez Canal, and literally you’re on an aircraft carrier with people walking up and down the sides of this canal. And you feel very vulnerable because you’re just sitting there. There are helicopters flying back and forth and gunships to make sure no one is shooting anything at us. But we had taken all the aircrafts off the top of the aircraft carrier and put it underneath which is unusual. You just never see an aircraft carrier with nothing on top. And it’s about two hours to get through the Suez Canal. But once you get in, basically two hours later, we’re on the flight-ops again. So you stand there feeling vulnerable. Once we get to the Red Sea it’s like okay, it’s time to go were here and we were just really waiting for the executive order to start.

AK: What was the first thing you did while at the Red Sea?

TP: Well, I would say that right after the first of January, maybe the seventh or eighth. We hadn’t been given (directive) to attack so we were all really nervous to be honest with you. Because you just don’t know what to expect. We had built up, I think as a country, built up by Iraq and that this was a very formidable force and at the end of the day they really were not. We were all very concerned because it was probably the biggest fear of the war that the US had gone into since Vietnam, or maybe a few skirmishes after it. Prior to that, it had to do with Grenada and these smaller countries and the Bolivian War, it wasn’t a big threat.  I mean we threw a couple of planes and bombs at them and that was about it. But we knew that these guys had a very large army, a very large tank force, and an incredible amount of what we call surface-to-air missiles, which is our biggest enemy because they would shoot them at us. So we were doing a lot of studying and a lot of preparation and just kind of used that down time. And really, quite frankly, were hoping that we that we wouldn’t go to war because you never, at the end of they day, want to.

AK: What was your job when you did start fighting? [0:10:02.3]

TP: I had a lot of different jobs because the aircraft that I flew was called multi-mission aircrafts, so we were able to not only provide what they called fighter support. When you fly as a Navy Force, the purpose of the navy is that the navy is what you would call power projection.  So let’s say we were going to go to war with Mexico. But lets say we weren’t sure when that war was going to start, so they would take about four aircrafts off the coast of Mexico just to let [them] know that not only are we here, but we can actually attack whenever we want to. And then the air force’s jobs is the air force comes in, and after the fact, and say now were going to be command center, we’re going to run the entire show. We’ll include the navy obviously but still, our first primary mission is what they call quick spread force. So we’re essentially on a fifteen minute tether to be able to bomb anywhere within the [mysticated?] ability in our aircraft in that time frame. So we were staring a lot at the lure screen, sitting here, playing with the engines running we get shot off the front of the deck. It was boring a lot of the time, waiting for it to go, waiting for it to happen. But then once it did start to happen you had three primary functions. The first one was to provide what’s called fighter support, which is where you fly and look for other aircrafts coming up to hit the aircraft [carrier] their bringing and whether it’s to bomb the enemy [or not]. The other one is to actually fly an aircraft “the sig” what they call a fitted four air ground weapons. And last one would be a mission where you’re flying what they call a “his circus support” and what that means is that as you start to fly in someone’s country that has the surface-to-air missiles, that reduce alternative air on will look for you, once they see you they could then shoot this missile at you and then you could die. So another job we would do, is that once they turn those radars on, we would shoot a missile at it, we would actually guide them to the radar and actually take out the site where they were sitting there trying to shoot us. So those are the three basic missions, I mean again a little bit more specific but that’s, that’s in pretty broad terms.
 
AK: Were there many casualties in your unit?

TP: My next-door neighbor. A guy from Indianapolis [was] killed the second week. He actually checked off target, checked what we call feet-web, which he came off of rounds over water and he just never returned to the ship. We think what happened to him was that he took a couple of rounds at the bottom of the airplane and the airplane depressurized and he didn’t know it. And you’re wearing an oxygen mask the whole time. So, when you’re done you take it off and let it sweat off and gather yourself together, because now you have to get back aboard ship, which is never fun or easy.  I think he had the mask on for too long. And he felt so high, the air was too thin that he just passed out and the plane never found and went into the water. The first guy [who] was killed was a guy named Scott Spiker who was an instructor. He was the first person killed on the very first night. And it was just a freak accident that this one Iraqi airplane just happened to be up flying, a very mobile aircraft and it was just confusing because there were so many aircrafts. Somebody thought they saw an aircraft out there and A-Wax was the guy who looks over everybody and makes sure you’re not shooting friendly people that you’re shooting enemies. [A-wax] didn’t say that he wasn’t an enemy, and this guy ended ended up shooting at him and killed him. Then we lost four other people related to war, but not in my squadron. Overall I think there were only fourteen navy aviators killed during the war. I am not sure how many air force’s pilots, but on our ship we lost a total of six.

AK: How did you feel after your close friend was killed?

TP: What you were able to do is, you take things that you don’t really want to deal with, and put them aside for a while and deal with what you have to deal with. But eventually, you kind of sit back and take it all in, and it was hard. I mean he was a good guy and I think he had two kids at the time. He just left a new baby, so you don’t feel for him, but you feel for his family because you know what he is leaving behind. But it was tough; it left a big hole in our squadron to because now we were down to eleven pilots which means every day somebody had to fly a third flight and we all flew twice a day. And now you’re exposing yourself to a little more risk ever day. It’s a different field of emotions that you’re [not] used [to] that’s for sure.
 
AK: What were a few of your most memorable experiences?

TP:  The closest I actually was to getting killed was joining up with a tanker. A mini airplane when it takes off the aircraft carrier, it only has so much fuel. And what they do is, we go off immediately, and then we will refuel off of an aircraft that’s flying around in circles over a safe area. And this particular night, it was a really cloudy evening so were all flying in what we call a four-ship, we all tucked together flying through clouds trying to find this one, it’s the same size as a DC10, you know if you have ever been on a commercial airplane that has two aisles on it, same size but it’s full of gas. So there whole job in life is to fly in a circle. We all join up and get our gas and then we go bomb. Then we come back and we probably have to hit them on the way back just to get back to the ship. On this particular night, it was so dark and it was so cloudy and were joining up as four. It’s very difficult at night, in the clouds, to see the airplane you’re flying with. So were flying, if you ever see Blue Angels or stuff which is really kind of cool to see those guys fly in formation, well we do that every day. I mean that’s the only way you fly through clouds and still maintain visual contact with the guy in front. And at night it’s much more difficult, plus in war you don’t fly with your lights on. So were trying to join up on this thing because he’s flying in a circle this way, our lead is trying to figure out an angle to join up on. So he obviously flying a little bit bellow his altitude because you don’t want to hit him. So as he’s joining up on him literally you’re flying and it’s all black, black, black. And all of a sudden the tanker and about thirty-two other airplanes fly literally 150 feet over the top of our heads. Because he had mistaken the angle on his radar and joined basically 180 degrees out. So instead of this guy going, this guy is going this way, you kind of join up on a slow angle like a forty-five degree angle on the back of his airplane. He actually mistook the angle and we joined up 180 degrees out. It happened that quick and then it was like, “Oh, my God.” So then we separated as two’s, came back and boarded and off we went.  That was immensely scary. The other one for me going in, I know I was probably going to encounter a lot of ground fire as well as hostile environments. Late in the war when the Iraqi’s were actually exiting Kuwait, there was one “blank” route they were all exiting out of. At that particular time, because they were burning all these oils wells, the visibility had gone down about 2,000 feet. So you have about 2,000 feet from the ground up to the cloud deck. So we had to actually go down underneath this cloud deck and hit these guys as they are departing out of Kuwait. Problem was that we didn’t have any friendlies down there, and they were just waiting for us to come down below and try to pick us off. Those were tough, because they were usually about one hour and we pulled the carrier up to almost the border of Iraq. And it was go off, hit, come back on, launch, get gas, come back again and launch. And that was pretty frightening at times, just knowing you had to get down that low and knowing you were going to get shot at quite a bit.

AK: Did you do anything similar to that?

TP: Most of our missions, when we first started, because of the threat the Iraqi’s had, we were able to drop the weapons above what we considered their kill zone for our aircraft. So we were out usually by 10,000 feet if the weather was good. But once the weather started getting kind of bad, which it always does in late January and February there, then we had to start going below. But we almost got a false sense of security because by now all of the Iraqi aircrafts had been flown to Iran, so we had air superiority. So we never had to worry about an aircraft coming at us. We had to worry about Triple A, which is these big 50 caliber bullets shooting at us and all these surface-to- air missile. So any time you pointed your nose at the ground you always felt some concern that you were targeted for somebody. But we didn’t normally go down that low just because we didn’t have to.

AK: Were you awarded any medals or citations? [0:19:52.3]

TP: I was.

AK: What were they?

TP: I was awarded a Navy Commendation Medal with a V for Valor. Three air medals, one with the V for Valor. A three Kuwait medal, a Persian Gulf service medal, a Navy Commendation medal for performance, a couple of other ones here and there.

AK: What does your performance have to be like to get these medals?

TP: It had to do with how many sorties you flew in the war. One of my primary jobs not flying was called being a “single officer,” which means every third day I was at the back of the ship grading guys as they planed [?] back aboard. So those other two days I had absolutely no job responsibility, so I tended to fly a lot more than everybody else. So my sortie count was way high. It wasn’t really volunteering, it wasn’t something I was happy to do, but just because my name was always available they kept shooting me off. So my sortie count was real high and I tended to fly in more combat situations than people did. So that was kind of what it was based off of. There were a couple that were based off of individual things, that at the end of the day I don’t truly remember what they were for because I couldn’t put one day that was any better than another day. It wasn’t anything like you hear these medal of honor guys do something like that, just a phenomenal act of human courage. The stuff that we did, people did every single day all across the ship. They wanted to reward [us] with an award, so sometimes they just picked something out and put it in there and submitted it to the Awards Ceremony which went through Congress and then you were awarded something.

AK: How did you stay in touch with your family? [0:21:43.4]

TP: We didn’t, that was the hard part. You know there was no Internet.

AK: Did you write letters?

TP: I wrote a letter every day. You could send a letter for free to us and we could write letters back for free. You know, downtime I wrote a lot of letters because you just sit there with nothing to do. We left on the 26th  and the first time I was able to talk to my wife was after a general was killed in our squadron, and I had like a minute and a half to call her and say that it wasn’t me basically. Because they had already heard that someone had been killed in our squadron. The wives of course talked to each other and they weren’t really sure whom it was. But they gave us thirty to forty seconds, just a quick call on what they call a “marset” which is a satellite phone which now is fairly commonplace but back then they weren’t very clear. But that was it. I didn’t get off the ship until, God it was four months. We got off [in] Bahrain for a day. I had to go to a conference there for a day and I was able to use the phone there and call her.

AK: So you said in your downtime you wrote letters, did you do anything else?

TP: Played a lot of poker.

AK: Any other games?

TP: None that I would like to recount at this time.

AK: What were your meals like? How often did you get your meals? [0:23:07.8]

TP: Because of our flight schedule we tended to miss a lot of meals. Most guys ate in the middle of the ship and down below what they call the “officers.” The pilots in the front of the ship and that’s only open in set hours, so because of our schedule, a lot of times we wouldn’t have anything. But the meals we not very good, I mean we had powdered milk three weeks into the cruise till we pulled into a port with a month left in the cruise. We very rarely had fresh fruit or vegetables. It was a lot of starch and chicken and hamburgers. If you had hamburgers one day you had spaghetti the next day, which was a common thing because they ground up the leftover hamburgers and put it in the spaghetti. I think I lost 20 pounds on the cruise just because I didn’t really want to eat. You drink a lot of coffee and you drink a lot of water and there are some soft drinks available. You know it wasn’t terrible it was better then being in a field of it, so it wasn’t optimum.

AK: So you might have skipped meals but you wouldn’t have cared if you missed a meal?

TP: Sometimes you did because you’re pretty hungry, but I wasn’t that upset if I didn’t have that food, no. And I did get a lot of care packages from home; you know people have sent stuff. That was always good.
 
AK: How many care packages would you get a month?

TP: I would get one a week from my wife at least and then my mom and dad would send me stuff every couple weeks. And brothers and friends would ship me stuff too. So it was relatively common to get three or four a month.

AK: Did you guys have plenty of supplies on your mission? [0:24:53.6]

TP: Supplies for?

AK: Just in general, did you guys have to get a lot of supplies?

TP: For a mission?

AK: Yes.

TP: Because we were in the airplane the whole time we had to build up bombs. But there was plenty of that. Those things were plentiful. For every mission you had to build up the bomb and then everyone what they call “ fronts a fuse,” depending on what target you were going [after] you actually had to figure out what fuse you needed to use based off of how thick the target was and what you wanted to do with it, when you wanted the weapon to explode, whether you’re taking out personnel, or cars, or a building. For that kind of stuff we had everything we needed.

AK: Did you guys have enough food, clothes and gas?

TP: We had plenty of gas, plenty of clothes; we basically wore what we had on us. We had laundry service and they would do your laundry so you would just leave a bag out there. We didn’t bring food with us in the airplane, but we brought a lot of water because I flew a couple of seven hour missions which is really a long time in an ejection seat aircraft because you don’t really move around that a whole lot.

AK: What were those missions like?

TP: They were at the end of the war, after the war was over there we basically did go all the way to Baghdad, and the Iraq army actually kept killing people in the north and what we did was we actually flew cover support for them. We got out of the Persian Gulf and back down the Mediterranean and through the Red Sea again and we were actually east of the country of Crete. And we would fly through Turkey and come in the top of Iraq and the mission was called “provide comfort for the Kurdish rebels.” They were just basically trying to get north of Turkey and the Iraqi’s were bombing and killing them as they left because they were considered unholy. So we came in and would provide them cover but they figured out that we were going to be there so it wasn’t a whole lot of combat it was more just get ourselves there beyond station and providing them with air support when they needed it.

AK: Did you ever have to build a bomb?

TP: No we had guys who did that.
      
AK: Did you feel a lot of pressure or stress during your time there? [0:27:41.3]

TP: Yes, you know we did, but I don’t really recall it. My wife, she would tell me from the letters I wrote if I was more stressed than normal just by what I wrote in the letter. But to me it just seems like a blur everyday just kind of melded into one. You just got through it and then you were done. You were always really nervous going out, you’re really relieved coming back and then you’re really nervous when you walk back into the ready room which is where the office is and you’re figuring out when you’re going out again, how much sleep could I get, will I be able to eat anything. Usually the way the cycle was that you would do about three hours of mission planning, two hour pre-flight, you would fly for depending on where you were from one and half to three hours, come back, debrief was about forty-five minutes, then depending on when your next mission was you usually rolled right back into mission planning and then maybe you had a couple hours of sleep and a little bit time to eat, and then to mission planning and off again. So it was about a seven or eight hour continuous cycle depending how they fit you in, it was based off of who was available. Unfortunately for me there were two days where I didn’t have to work, and I had to fly a lot. And I was pretty beat up mentally and tired.

AK: What did you do you do in your pre-flight?

TP: You get together with the guys you’re flying with, and usually for us it was a minimum of two, and you never went out by yourself. Initially, it was a maximum of eight, and you basically briefed what the flight was. You take all the way through the start up all the through the join up, what the target area you’re attacking is going to be, join up after the target, back through the tankers and everything else, and then back aboard the ship. You would talk about potential emergencies you might have and then you would “what if it.” What if the bomb doesn’t go off, what do we do? What if one comes off and we re-attack? What if someone goes down? That takes a long time to step through that entire stuff so the one thing about the navy and really most military’s is that they feed you just kind of a system of steps. That you’re under pressure, you’re training will kick in immediately and you’ll know almost rogue memory what to do instead of saying, “Oh my God what am I going to do?” You have already talked about and you already know what you’re supposed to do, and you know where you’re supposed to be and you’re job is to actually get there and do it versus trying to make a decision under pressure that may be bad or harmful for one of your wingmen.

AK: So training helped a lot when you had to deal with these situations?

TP: Definitely.

AK: Was there something special you did for good luck before your missions?

TP: No, not really. I would say a little prayer here and there, hoping to get through my mission. I am not a big believer in luck. No, I am always prepared and I always tended to over prepare but I never went into anything without knowing exactly what was my role and everybody else’s role. If someone did go down, if I had to go to another position within the flight then I could take that position and not be concerned that I wasn’t prepared for it.

AK: What did you do to prepare?

TP: I knew basically everybody’s job and you always knew going into a flight what your job was whether it was going to be okay I am flying support, or I am not going to drop bombs versus okay I am dropping bombs where’s your target, what does your target look like and how do you identify your target, where’s your lead in point, what’s your dive angle, what speed are you supposed to fly. There is a lot things that going into actually putting your nose on the ground. You know you don’t just pluck this thing off and hope for the best, you actually have to get to what you call a release point with the right air speed, right altitude, at the right dive angle to get this weapon off and actually do damage to the target otherwise it could skip and do some other things that you would end up having to go back and bomb the target again. So it’s a lot of study more than anything else, and initially it was a lot of study because it was new and we were doing it so often, and then as you go back in we’re bombing similar targets, you’re familiar with the fusing, you’re familiar with the profiles. When you’re flying you remember it all so you don’t have to put in as much book time as you did before. But initially it was a lot of studying and a lot of time reading and just going over all the different missions.

AK: So you said to entertain yourself you played games and wrote letters, did you guys sleep a lot too? [0:32:11.2]

TP: Whenever we could. The hardest part was my roommate, I was on a two-man and we tended to be on different cycles so I am trying to sleep and he’s up. Very rarely we would sleep at the same time.
 
AK: So what did you do when on leave?

TP: We never leaved. Well, we did, I take that back, we were at sea for a 135 days before we actually went into our first port. That was when the war was already over with and our duties were relieved for the Kurdish rebel thing, so we actually were able to go into Haifa, Israel for three days. And that was a lot of fun, I mean it was just good to be off the ship and we called home and got back together and had a couple of adult beverages here and there. And really relax and not worry about, for twenty-four to thirty-six hours, the stress of being on the ship. And then they packed us up and we thought we were going out for another month and a week later we turned into Rhodes, Greece for three days. Which was really great, but that was it. After that we spend another eight weeks at sea and then we ended up going home. So we had seven days at port and seven months at sea.

AK: What was it like being out sea for 135 days?

TP: I never got seasick but it was weird after you got off the ship from being on a ship that long you always feel like you’re moving. You get out on ground, and you’re like this is weird because the ship is always moving even in stable waters because they take fuel from the different airplanes out of the bladder steers, then will list and sit and then move. And in rough seas it’s always moving so you’re always walking through the hallways banging off of stuff and you’re just used to that. And it’s really, really noisy. You can’t even imagine how noisy it is, because where we sit on our, in our ready room, and where we slept, it would be like here and the flight deck is there and that’s about how high it was above us. And an aircraft, when an aircraft hits the top of the flight deck it sounds like you would imagine it would sound. It’s 38,000 pounds of metal slamming against metal at 170 miles per hour and it’s extremely loud. And when the hook grabs the big wire across it to pull it out it’s like the loudest screeching sound you have ever heard in your life. The first time you hear it, you shudder and are like what the heck was that. But then you get used to it and during flight ops every forty-five seconds an aircraft lands aboard ship. It’s incredibly loud and it’s like anything else, you eventually tune it out. But for the first couple of weeks it’s pretty nerve racking work, you know you don’t get any peace or any sleep. But you get used to your environment and now I can sleep through anything.

AK: Do you think you experience would have been different if you had been stationed on land?

TP: I do I think good and bad because we were still under, except what they call general course situations, there was air conditioning aboard ship and it was really hot there. We started living in an environment that was comfortable where as a lot of these guys based in the outlying strips of the Marines and some of the Air Force units so there quality of living was probably worse there on land. But they didn’t have TV’s or anything like that. But at least when we went to bed it was in a cold room that you could make it black, where as a lot of those guys were sleeping on cots so we were lucky and unlucky. I think you could talk to an Air Force guy and he would say, I would never want to be on ship. You know I dropped in on one of those fields on time, and every time there was a simulated missile attack they had to put up these exposure suits that you see in commercials, those silver things and they were in those things a lot and there miserable hot and they were out there the same amount of time we were. I don’t think their living environment was much better.
 
AK: Did you recall any funny or particularly humorous events during your time?

[0:36:27.6]

TP: One of my good buddies, and you has to understand him, navy pilots tend to be very egotistical because most of us fly alone and reputation is basically everything. You could be the greatest guy in the world but if you screw something up it’s going to live with you forever. So a good buddy of mine, still to this day, and he always thought he was really, really cool and he had this radio voice when he would talk and we always used to tease him about it, but this one night, they have him at the bottom of the airplane these things called flares and what a flares is if you feel threatened by a surface-to-air missile or a area missile and you can punch out these flares and they have a heat source that are actually hotter than the engine on the airplane so the theory is you pop these things out of your bottom of the airplane and your missile will no longer track your engine but will track this flares. We were taught to use them at the right time and all this other stuff. Well we had a problem with this one airplane where you put these buckets and you would pop them in the bottom airplane, just like big fire crackers that’s all they are. And they pop out one by one and you can program them to pop out at a certain time. For whatever reason this guy he went to release his bomb and they all shot out at the same time and it was the middle of the night and it looked like his airplane just exploded. And he started screaming on the radio 
“ I am hit, I am hit, I am going down”, and I am flying next to him and I am looking at him and I am thinking I didn’t see anything come up and I am just waiting for a mark to where he so ejected to I can find him and all of the sudden all the flares kind of give away and I figure out what happened. And to this day he swears it never happened. But we got it on tape and we pull it out because we tape everything you do, and you pop it in there and listen and he sounded like a third grade girl just squealing, he was so scared. And you know one little mistake and we all kind of rode him for it. It was just a way to release some stress.


AK: So did you guys ever pull any pranks on each other?

TP: Yes we did. You know we did a lot of the same things your dad and I did in college, some things stupid and gross, but essentially the same type of thing. But really quite frankly a squadron was just a like a fraternity, you get in there and you’re together all the time, you do everything together even when you’re back at shore, your wives all get together on weekends and parties every weekend. In fact when we were in Kuwait Ford, it was actually mandatory that we had to be at Douser’s Club at 5 pm. We would stay there, have dinner together, and soon you developed a real sense of comradery. So we did a lot of the same funny stupid things that fraternity’s do to each other probably not appropriate for your story but it was just something to lighten the mood a little bit. Everybody had a nick-name and usually you go your nick name from doing something stupid or some personality trait that would come out at certain times or if your name was different and you could make something funny out of his name. And that was just  your name forever and guys would call you that to this day. Some are repeatable others are not.

AK: What was your nickname?

TP: Mine was Louie. On Taxi [there] was this little guy called Louie the Palma, and he was very sarcastic and very gruff and I could be that way I guess. So this guy back in flight school called me that and it stuck. To this day they still call me that and that has been my name for forever.

AK: So what was it like living in a squadron? [0:40:41.6]

TP: It was a lot of fun. That’s the one thing I miss more than anything in the military, is that you were in a squadron with twelve to fourteen to sixteen guys depending on where you squadron was, and you know like anything else there are some guys you don’t get along with but at the end of the day you always knew that he was going to be there for you and you were going to be there for him. And you would always do you’re best when you’re flying with them to protect them and to protect you. Everyone has different opinions on what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it, why we’re there, and what we’re doing there and how to go about our business. So you have differences of opinions, but you know you’re living with these guys and you have seen every single thing, and that was the one thing that was hard, we never had a day off it wasn’t like okay it’s Sunday I am going to hang out in my room all day. Every day you woke up and put your flight suit on and went to work and it’s like that for five months. That was the hardest thing. You know you had some down time, but you never got away from it. You always knew you were one phone call away from having to fly. And that was the hard part that you just couldn’t get away from it for a while.

AK: What did you think about the fellow officers and soldiers?

TP: You know I liked them all personally because I respected what they did. I respected the position they were in, because I know what they had to do to get there. The enlisted guys that worked below, I had a great respect for them too because their quality of life was a lot worse than ours was. They slept in the bunk rooms, you know they worked some long days as well. You know the military, at least in the enlisted ranks, attracts some of the more poorer people because they don’t advantages that I had, like that my father was able to put me through college. So because of that there may not be a job for them, so they [go] why I don’t I go into the Military at least I’ll get paid and it will provide me with a skill. Some guys went in with that attitude and some guys did not. So you know very quickly which guys are there because they have nowhere else to be, and the guys who are using the military to get to a better place. Those guys I have a lot of respect for, because you know their doing it all themselves and their trying to make something of their lives. Whereas, some of the other people who where there and they tended to be in trouble and get kicked out, or just leave because they have no other opportunities and they don’t really care where they go.

AK: So the guys were not forced to be there, but did they have to be there?

TP: Well it was different for us; you never had to be there you joined up. So they did volunteer which I give them credit for, but I think they volunteered because it was that or work at McDonalds. Not that there’s anything wrong with working at McDonalds, but they felt like they could go travel and they didn’t know what they were getting into. At the time there was no conflict going on, it just was go off and see foreign countries, be on a boat, yes that stinks but it would be kind of fun, all the sudden something starts up and you have the very real possibility that you are going to war. You find out real quickly who wants to be there and who doesn’t want to be there. Because a lot of guys will be like, I am sick now so I don’t want to be on the flight deck, not officers, but the Navy enlisted ranks.

AK: What were the officers like?

TP:  The officers were like my contemporaries, and they were all the pilots. Officers who weren’t pilots were in charge of the main troops and different main instructions. They were all college graduates, not that that makes you bad but they were all very educated and some of the lower grade troop tended to not be very educated, they had to have at least a GED to get out of high school but some of them that’s all they had. It was difficult to deal with them sometimes because it’s hard to relate to what they’re going through in their life. But then at the end of the day you still have to lead them and you still have to look at this is [as] our company mission, you know you can come with me or you can go against me, but either way you’re going there so figure out how we’re going to get there together and let’s do it.

AK: Did you ever keep a diary or anything like that?

TP: I did not, no.

AK: Did you get to read a lot while on board?

TP: After the war was over, I did a lot of reading. Because I did a lot of reading in preparation for the mission, [I] tended to shy away from reading. I was looking for something that would unplug my mind. If you had an hour or two in your room you would watch a video or something or just a movie that you had. We watched the same movies probably 50 times, but that’s all we had. You worked out whenever you got the chance just to get your heart rate up. But those were few and far in between If you had a couple hours to spare you tried to sleep or wrote a couple of letters or did whatever.

AK: What was an average day like on board the ship? [0:45:47.6]

TP:  Well during the war, we fly from 2 pm till 10 am, that was our flight operations. And we had four hours off. Now for the first time, see an aircraft carrier doesn’t travel by itself, an aircraft carrier with a battle group where all these support ships are around it. It never had more then one battle group in the Persian Gulf, well in the Persian Gulf before that it had four. So four ships, four aircraft carriers there were four groups of support ships in the Persian Gulf. So we were all on different flight ops trips. So a lot of it was you get up in the morning, try to eat breakfast real quick, then you usually were rolling right into your mission planning brief which was a three hour evaluation where we actually planned the timing of where you were going to hit, what type of weapons do you need to employ, from there you take your armed sheet that says we need this, this and this, take it to the guys who builds the bombs up, you start your pre flight, they build the bombs up and slap them on the back of the airplane, and then you have a set launch time. So let’s say you have an eight pm launch, you back that up five hours, that’s when you start planning for that flight. And then to pay homage to the flight you might launch off the front of the ship at 8 pm and most missions were anywhere from two to four hours. That was about the average. Some were a little shorter, and then very few got longer than four hours, it just depended on what you were doing. You get back from that, you had an hour de-brief period, and then you stick your head in the ready room and find out what you’re doing next, usually they give you hey you have got this, you have got that.

AK: So what were the last few days like of your service? [0:47:33.8]

TP: We got back end of July, and I was due to re-up in January. And I made the decision that I didn’t want to re-up and I wanted to do something else. I got a job as an airline pilot so I was basically just bidding [my] time till my time was up. It was fun I actually enjoyed [it] because I got to do a lot of flying and there wasn’t a lot of pressure anymore. It was more of a fun thing than a job. When you left, it was scary because the one thing the Military does is that it does everything. It does all of your benefits, you eat on base, you live on base, and everything is there. And all of a sudden they throw you back out into the world and it’s a different experience. But I was married with a kid so I was looking forward to something different.

AK: Do you recall they day your service ended?

TP: I do.

AK: What was it like?

TP: It was sad. You know [like] when you leave a fraternity on the last day and when you do it’s finally over and you’re like okay this is it. You can always call them to do things but at that point you’re kind of an outsider because you’re still in the Military but maybe not and since I was gone you’re kind of an outsider. They still call you to play golf occasionally because we still lived in Jacksonville, Florida but their focus is now on someone different and they’re doing different things. You get split off in the process and you aren’t really a part of that group.

AK: Were you the first to leave in your squadron?

TP: You know people rotate out on a normal basis, but to actually leave the military, I think I was the third guy in my squadron. One guy left right as we got back and another guy left a couple of months later, and I think I was the third guy to leave.

AK: Where were you right before you left?

TP: In Jacksonville, Florida.

AK: What did you do in the days and weeks afterward?

TP: I had a month before my class day at American Airlines started, so we actually packed our house up and I drove up to Chicago, because I was going to be living in Chicago and I found an apartment up there for us to live in. Drove back to Florida, packed up the family, and drove up and spent a couple days with my brother. And then found our apartment and then I wanted to train for American Airlines down in Dallas.
 
AK: How long was the training in American Airlines?

TP: The initial training was eight weeks.
  
AK: And that was a lot easier than your military training right?

TP: That was nothing. It was easy; all it was classes that you went to everyday. Because the government and the FAA is involved, they basically have the program set up for the stupidest pilot because it took forever. They have to train you that way because if someone there doesn’t get it, it slows everybody else down. So they bring you in as a class and as a class you go through and then they send you off to different bases to fly. It was the Navy [who] was called the fire hose, like you open your mouth and here’s the fire hose and they just give you a bunch of information and you have to figure it all out where to go. It was different in a corporate mentality because there is a lot more liability and risk and you’re dealing with the public now. So it’s a lot slower paced and it was really boring.

AK: Who would you say was your closest friend during your service? [0:51:19.7]

TP: I had a couple groups of friends, because initially after I finished my training they kept me back as a flight instructor in Mississippi for two years. And myself and three other guys lived in a house where were all in the same squadron, and those guys I talk to once a week. Very similar to my college buddies, when I wasn’t there we would speak every week. In my squadron I probably had two really close friends that I still talk to. I have been out for twenty years so it’s been a long time. I was on reserve squad from 1992 to 2005 so I still talk to a bunch of those guys too. They were all actually flying the reserves. So we all get together every couple of weekends and fly together. I still have about fifteen guys who I talk to routinely and I knew if I had a problem I could call them today and they would be there tomorrow.

AK: What was it like being a flight instructor for two years?

TP: I liked it, and I never thought I would like being a teacher, but it was fun for me because you got to fly with some really good guys and you had to fly with some guys you knew were not going to make [it] and that was kind of hard for me. Because you knew this guy was never going to get through and it’s tough seeing guys wash out of the flight program; you always think what would I do, what are they going to do. You know there is an embarrassment factor because everyone you know you have already told them that you’re trying to do this and now all of the sudden you’re not doing it anymore. So it’s kind of a fear of failure for a lot of people. Aviation is like everything else, it’s hand eye coordination more than anything. You have to prepare, and by chance wasn’t I a rocket scientist, but I worked very hard to get through school and I worked very hard to get through the Military and I over prepared for everything. And the guys that tended to be pretty good pilots tended to have pretty good hand- eye coordination just because they could kind of visualize things. So I found it fun and easy, whereas a lot of guys really struggled with it. These guys were probably brilliant but you have to take that books smarts and transition it into the airplane.

AK: What did you do in the Reserve Squad?

TP:  The reserves are a little bit different. Initially when I joined we called it flying club, we had to be down there eight days a month, which is really a lot when you think about because I was stationed in New Orleans, Louisiana and living in Chicago but it was a squadron similar to what is was when I was on the fleet. It was a lot more relaxed, we didn’t really have a mission, we’re basically there if the Chinese or Russians are knocking on our door and we could get called up and have to go back to sea. We knew that would never happen, but we were a part of the support and readiness for the navy reserves. But that profile changed as they started to cut costs and close bases. We started to go to sea more often, kind of like International Guard guys would rotate overseas for six months, that was unheard of when I joined. And now it’s common place, guys in my old squadron would go to sea every other year for six months. It’s tough to keep the squadron fully manned now, because guys are saying I don’t need this anymore. All the fun things you wanted to do, we did it because we were in charge. And then they said okay you’re no longer in charge, the Navy is back in charge and you’re going to start preparing like you’re going back into war. I decided I was done when I got afraid for the second time. I almost got hit, and I said you I am done. I was old and I thought maybe this isn’t for me. I have been lucky enough and got through this without getting killed, I should probably step down.

AK: What was it like the second time almost getting hit? [0:55:46.2]

TP: We used to fly in a F16 and F15 international guard squatter and then we were flying out of F15 for the Navy reserves. And we would brief and go out and fly together all the time and we would do Hornets versus air force and Hornets versus International Guard. On this particular day, essentially we were getting ready to go on this big reserve a small diplomat to Key West. But it was actually what it was that Key West was going to become our ship and we were going to fly out the Key West strip and defend it like it was. So what we would do was we flew out all the airplanes we could get up which was like ten at the time, against unknown enemy. And the enemy was the F16’s and the F15’S. Well they put every airplane they had up, so we were going against thirty-two airplanes. It became too many airplanes at once, it was like information overload. You could not see and prosecute all the different aircrafts. As I was turning on this guy trying to shoot him, this F15 who didn’t see me actually blocked out the sun and I looked up and saw the belly of his airplane what looked like twenty feet above me, but it was probably like 100 feet above me. But it was close enough to where I thought I was going to die. So I kind of rolled on my back and pulled away. And I said okay I am done. I didn’t quit right then, but I thought I have to figure out a way to get out here because that was way to close. And stuff like that started happening, as you got older, you start to feel more mortal. That’s probably a better term. As a young guy you feel like you can’t hurt me, I am bullet proof, I will live forever. But you also start to have a family and responsibilities outside of your airplane and you start to think about other things. That’s the hard part they always told you would get to point where you felt like I shouldn’t be doing this anymore because you can’t do it the way you used to do it.
 
AK: How many reunions have you had? [0:58:12.5]

TP: We used to have one every year right before 9/11. Then a lot of guys got called back up because they were doing reserve jobs at the Pentagon, so they were called up for active duty. It was kind of a bad environment so my squadron has had two since then. Every year there is a convention called the Tail hook Convention, I go to that every year to see the guys you know and see. So it’s kind of a reunion per say, but it’s more of a corporate environment because you have all corporate weapons and developers, all the people looking for government contracts, they are all out there.

AK: Did you join any veteran’s organizations?

TP: I did I joined the VFW believe it or not. I just joined last year because my wife wanted me to join because she wants me to get a license plate. I didn’t really care but she signed me up for it. I don’t particularly like to sit around talking to people I don’t know about stuff we did, because at the end of the day guys tend to glorify everything we do. You know sitting around talking to each other, I can out do you [with my story]. You know I enjoy people like your grandfather; those guys to me are phenomenal. These guys are like schoolteachers and stuff and six months later they are coming across a beach in a foreign country and they had no idea when they were going home. And we didn’t either and they told us when we were done, but it became apparent when we were going home but those guys didn’t know anything. To me those are the guys I could sit forever and talk to. But guys like me sitting around in a bar talking about stuff we used to don’t have any interest in doing that.

AK: So you said you went on to be a pilot, are you still doing that today[1:00:14.1]

TP: No, I took early retirement from that three years ago.

AK: What are you doing today?

TP: I started a business aviation consulting company about five years ago. Essentially most of money is from buying and selling airplanes and business jets.

AK: So what exactly do you mean buying and selling airplanes?

TP: Lets say corporations or very affluent individuals are looking for buying a personal or business aviation asset, lets say it’s a four seat jet everyone who can financially do it, has a different reason for it. Most of them are, I think after the event of 9/11, people are looking for a way not to have to go through the airport and if they have the means to purchase an aircraft and operate it then it’s a more beneficial way for them to travel whether it’s personal or business so my niche is to try and find those people and put them together with sellers of the same equipment.

AK: Did your Military experience influence your thinking about the Military or the war going on today in general? [1:01:28.4]

TP: I think it gives me a little more clarity. I think this whole process is drawn out and I sometimes question exactly what our purpose is in Afghanistan. I certainly understand the mission, you have to find terrorist activities and terrorist themselves and obviously eliminate them. But for me from a parental standpoint, I am not sure I want my nineteen or twenty year old kicking down the door of some cave trying to find some ghost that we haven’t seen for years. As I get older I get a little bit more, why are we over there? I mean you look at who’s gone there before and they have never won so why do we think we can? And why are we fighting people that we won’t stop fighting them till the last one is dead. We have problems of our own that we could probably take some of that money and spend on stuff and refocus it. It’s not lack of support to the Military at, I think I am more supportive of them but I think they are put into a position where they can’t win and there are a lot of guys getting killed over there and I just feel really sorry for their families.

AK: Do you think there are any similarities in the Gulf war and the war going on now?

TP: I do. There is always a reason for going to war, but the hard part is getting out of it. I think this was driven by a hatred for an individual and a hatred for a reign and that they have control over a large quantity of the earth’s oil.  I think if that guy was in Africa, I am not sure that we would have gone down there if they didn’t have something that we wanted. But that’s not for me to decide. I do think it’s similar because we are in Afghanistan and we’re not going to gain anything from going in there we’re just going to end up having the Muslims hate us worse than they do now.

AK: So do you think there are any major differences between the Gulf War and the war going on now?

TP: Yes from my perspective there is not as much error involvement as there was before. We don’t do much air to ground stuff because we’re not really sure where they are any more. There is no need to take out the air force because I think they have all been taken out. From a ground perspective I think it’s a lot worse because there is no defined target, and they don’t really know whom they are fighting. And they are trying to find that constantly which makes there job much harder.
 
AK: How was your experience in the military changed your life? [1:05:09.2]

TP: It’s made me very regimented, very structured. If we’re going to the airport we’re going to be there an hour early whether they like it or not. I tend to over prepare things, and it’s just a different way of thinking. I think that was a good thing for me, especially because I think I needed that at that time of my life, I think that was the best thing for me. I didn’t really have a goal in mind about what I wanted to do, and it helped me define my goals in life and what did I want to do with my life going forward. I think it was the best decision I ever made. I don’t regret it at all.

AK: Do you think your life would have been different if you wouldn’t have done it?

TP:  It’s funny I actually thought that question when you called. I still think I would have been successful but I don’t know if I would have found what I really wanted to do. The hard part is, you get out of college; you have to figure out what you want to do. But for me it thrust me into something I love which is aviation, which allowed me to do something that was kind of fun and cool and it’s been a great experience and I have met a lot of great people and now it’s prepared me to continue on into another aviation job which I love getting up every day and I love my job and what I do. Which you know, a lot of people can’t say that.

AK: Do you think you can deal with stress better because of your training?

TP: I think I handle it differently, not necessarily better. If I need to focus on that right then, I can. But I still get frustrated and upset about certain things I usually can’t control, which you know is stupid but. Things that I know are going to be stressful I can usually take a step back for a second and take a look at it from a different perspective. But like anybody I have issues with things that I deem stupid.

AK: Is there anything else you would like to add that we didn’t cover in the interview?

TP: No, I think you did a great job.

[Out of the interview]

Bill Kortepeter: When were you at Top Gun? [1:08:34.2]

TP: September of 1989 to November of 1989. It was fun, it was a good time.

BK: But that’s only the best that go to Top Gun?

TP: Yes it’s kind of different the purpose of top gun back then was to identify a training officer for your squadron. Because you have thirteen or fourteen guys usually it’s for an air wing, for an air wing you have ten squadrons so maybe that’s 165 of us so what they do is they try to find somebody they want to send to come back and act as a mouthpiece and say this is what the Navy is training our guys to do. So essentially all the information comes in here, they disengage it, and send it back out to the squadron. Because a lot of guys are not capable of teaching or instructing, they pick someone out and say we want you to come here and be the subject matter expert of everything. And come back and teach people certain things and then they can become subject matter experts on. So I was selected for that and I was able to go out there and do that which was really a great experience and a lot of fun. The flying was unbelievable. We didn’t fly as low as the movie, but everything that they did we did and more.

BK: Have you seen the movie Top Gun?

TP: It’s pretty cool but obviously it’s cheesy. Like every other movie it’s got a lot of glorified stuff in it. But it was during the heyday of the naval aviation man. It was a lot of work. We spent a lot of long hours. You were treated very well though. It was kind of nice to be rewarded for your efforts a little bit. And you came back and you were kind of a figurehead because you wore this one badge that very few people had, so they look at you like okay, if I have a problem then I can go to him and he can tell me what to do. Problem with that was that it was also a burden because you had to keep your nose in the books all the time because everything keeps changing.