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surprise_i'm_armed wrote: ↑Sat May 26, 2018 3:56 pm Please accept my sincere apology for using the words I
used in my previous post.

You are totally correct in your negative feelings towards me
since your service consisted of important missions that are a
part of any successful US military operation, and my reference
was rather glib and thoughtless.

Please accept my apology.

SIA

Apology accepted. I responded perhaps more harshly than I should have. Today my thoughts are about those who paid the ultimate bill for the nation.

surprise_i'm_armed wrote:JSMH = ??

1. I just heard a radio piece the other day with a gentleman who directed the recovery effort.

2. I have known of the Savanah bomb for years.

SIA

Look, I get it, lots of people want to slag the USAF. "Chair Force", etc, ha ha. But some Air Force cops losing a couple of pieces of equipment in the here and now has absolutely zero to do with those incidents involving nuclear munition losses in the 1960s. Completely different mindset, training, personnel, etc. Plus it's not like equipment hasn't been lost by anyone in another service, either. I never been in combat, or had anyone try to kill me, but I breathed in my share of sand, and sweated out who knows how many times my own body weight over in that filthy desert making sure aircraft were ready to go to get the mission accomplished, and so did the guys and gals who worked alongside me. So, you can make all the fun you want, and talk all the trash you want. I may not have been some hard-core trained killer, but I'm proud of the almost 21 years I spent wrenching on aircraft in the USAF, and of those who were there with me.

surprise_i'm_armed wrote:Speaking of losing important weaponry from Chair Force aircraft:

1. January 1961. A B-52 carrying 2 nuclear bombs lost a right wing and crashed
near Goldsboro, NC. As the plane broke up, the 2 bombs separated from the aircraft.
One had its parachute open, and fell into field, implanting itself straight up, with about
15 inches in the ground. It was trucked away intact.

The second one's parachute did not deploy and landed at high speed in a swamp.
After 5 months of digging in the swamp, a huge crater yielded the primary weapon,
but not its secondary device. The Chair Force bought land around the area, filled it
with concrete, and called it a day.

2. Another US atomic bomb was accidentally dropped into the ocean off Savannah, GA.
It has never been found.

The above 2 stories tell me that the loss of the North Dakota gear should be small potatoes.

SIA

You're digging up stories from the 60s? JSMH.

The USAF has its own police, known as Security Forces. In addition to typical police duties, they are also responsible for securing installations. As part of that function, they are tasked with Air Base Ground Defense, and practice doing so using a wide assortment of weaponry, including grenade launchers and machine guns. As for falling off the back of a truck, the base where this was reported to have happened is an ICBM support base. They have silo sites that are scattered around the area, maybe some of them have some rather rough roads leading to them, and maybe they didn't secure their gear very well on the Humvee. On the other hand, someone may have seriously damaged the machine gun, never reported it, and simply scrapped it, and someone else miscounted the expenditure of training grenades. Then, while doing a required inventory, someone responsible for that gear felt they had to come up with some kind of excuse. I'm not saying it's right, but young folks in uniform tend to get creative when trying to reconcile the books.