The Old Breed

[Colonel]

This guy is cool beyond fucking belief.

Captain (pilot) USMC, passed over for promotion,
getting RIF'd.  Resigns and signs up as a fucking
[i]gunny[/i].  Goes flying again.

[url=https://www.mca-marines.org/leatherneck ... -old-breed]https://www.mca-marines.org/leatherneck ... -old-breed[/url]

[quote]As old breeds go, Jack Lee Grinstead represents the last of his line. When he retired from the Marine Corps in 1992 at age 50, he was the last chief warrant officer piloting Marine Corps aircraft, and there hasn’t been another one since.

Along the way, he also wore the silver tracks of a captain and the double-rockers of a gunnery sergeant.

Growing up on a farm after World War II, he never imagined earning the eagle, globe and anchor of the United States Marines let alone a naval aviator’s wings of gold.

It started in 1960 when he was an Indiana University freshman, majoring in physics.

“My roommate joined the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class,” he recalled, admitting he didn’t know what PLC meant at the time. But he discovered he could stay in college and join the Corps. “I was busing tables for 95 cents an hour, so the base pay and flight pay looked pretty good.”

For Grinstead, it was a golden opportunity. “I’d never thought about it before, but when I found I could be a pilot, I thought, ‘Yeah, I’d like to be one of those.’ ” So he joined the PLC program, attending six-week summer camps at Quantico, Va.’s austere Camp Upshur between his freshman and sophomore years and again between his junior and senior years, when the camp was held south of Larson Gym near the Quantico airfield.

“The summer camps weren’t that bad,” remembered Grinstead, noting that it was hot, but he was conditioned from working long hours on the family’s 80-acre farm. “Camp Upshur was so far out in the woods that I couldn’t have run away if I’d wanted to because I wouldn’t have known which way to go,” he joked.

In reality, the summer camps qualifying him to be a Marine gave him the goal of finishing college, which he said he’d originally started in order to not disappoint his parents.

In retrospect, his upbringing had probably made him a natural candidate for the rigid lifestyle of a Marine.

Born the oldest of three brothers and a sister, he had assumed the customary leadership role held by the eldest sibling in a rural post-war family. Growing up, he did the things typical of a country boy.

“Most of my time was taken up doing chores and going to school,” he said, remembering a simpler time in farm country an hour south of Indianapolis. “But there was always time for playing soldier, building forts in the hay, going squirrel hunting and things like that. We didn’t have a TV, but I remember Saturday nights going to a neighbor’s a mile to the west and watching a Western or wrestling and eating popcorn.”

Although he said that at the time he didn’t know what the Marine Corps was, he was nonetheless being instilled with the Corps’ characteristic discipline, issued primarily by his mother because his father worked at a factory full time and farmed part time.

“If I was playing with a neighbor kid, and my mother told me to be back in 30 minutes, and I got back in 31 minutes, it was here-comes-the-switch time,” he quipped in his easygoing Hoosier drawl.

Graduating valedictorian from a class of 26 in 1959, he was destined for college, never being asked if he would go, but instead, which college he would choose.

June 1963 was a busy month for Grinstead. On June 3, he graduated from college and was commissioned a second lieutenant. On June 15, he got married and later that month reported for flight training in Pensacola, Fla.

“In those days, all officers weren’t required to go through The Basic School as they are today,” he said. He spent 18 months in Pensacola learning the basics of flight in fixed-wing trainers, and then he transitioned to helicopters. He’d hoped to fly jets, but the Vietnam War was escalating after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, and helicopter pilots were in high demand, “So that’s the direction I went,” he reflected. “I don’t regret it.”

His first operational assignment was with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron (HMM) 263 flying Sikorsky UH-34 Seahorses, the last of the piston-driven helicopters before the Corps upgraded to turbine-powered types such as the UH-1 Huey and the CH-46 Sea Knight.

“They had an intensive training program underway there getting ready to go to Vietnam,” he said, noting that within a year they were bound for Southeast Asia, but not before going on an operation off the coast of the Dominican Republic a couple months prior. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent U.S. troops in during political unrest there to prevent what he considered another Cuba, a potential communist regime on the U.S. doorstep.

“We went in, I guess, mostly as a show of force,” he recalled. “There was some type of insurrection there. I never saw any firefights, but I did get in some good flight time.”

He saw plenty of action during his first 13-month tour in Vietnam, nine months in country. His time in Vietnam is not a subject about which he cares to elaborate, minimizing it as, “Interesting … [b]any time you’re getting shot at, it’s always interesting[/b].”

However, his record speaks for itself: more than 350 combat missions, earning the Air Medal with 17 awards (each award equals 20 missions); the [b]Distinguished Flying Cross; the Bronze Star with combat “V”[/b]; and a host of unit citations.

First Lieutenant Grinstead returned from Vietnam in 1966 and was assigned to Marine Helicopter Squadron One (HMX-1) at Marine Corps Air Station Quantico where he trained on the CH-46. There were significant differences between the ’34 and the ’46, and he wasn’t an immediate fan of the newer aircraft.

“I remember being able to see the bottom of the engines from the cargo compartment,” he said pensively. “I looked at a lever in the engine compartment and touched it and asked what made it stay on. It looked to me like it could come loose and dangle—and I asked, ‘Is this supposed to be this way?’ They told me no and tightened it up.

“The H-34 piston engine was real heavy, but it didn’t use a lot of fuel so we didn’t have to carry as much of it,” he mused. “The ’46’s turbine engine is fairly light, but you have to carry quite a bit of fuel because it uses more. I remember taking 14 or 16 hits in the H-34 picking up a Vietnamese medevac one time and flew it out, then went back later that evening and took two more shots. One hit the fuel line, and we had to set it down overnight.”

Although he said the Seahorse didn’t have the payload of the CH-46, especially at higher altitudes, it still was a very versatile platform used for medevac, troop transport and cargo. “We used to carry live food, like chickens and pigs, to the Vietnamese troops in the field,” he said wryly. “The crew hated when we carried pigs because afterwards we had to clean out the cargo cabin.”

The twin-engine, medium-lift CH-46 Sea Knight became operational in Vietnam when Grinstead was there flying H-34s. “We were carrying external loads to troops in the field with the ’34,” he said. “The ’46 could carry a lot more and carry it faster than we could, but they couldn’t land to pick up the slings to carry it back because the trees were too thick for them to get into the small landing zones.”

He also was with HMX-1 when the heavy-lift, CH-53 Sea Stallion was brought in for training after two pilots from the squadron went to a school at Sikorsky and returned with one of the helicopters. “They became our trainers, and when I saw the ’53, I said, ‘I gotta fly that one,’ ” he remembered. “It was sleek. I liked the fuel and engine being outside the passenger compartment; it could carry heavy loads, and fast too.”

In 1969, Capt Grinstead returned to Vietnam with the Military Assistance Command. “I was the air liaison officer in the Da Nang area, working a great deal of the time with the only remaining H-34 squadron in country,” he reflected. “Plus, I worked closely with the other U.S. services. I lived in a special operations camp at Marble Mountain.”

He departed a year later for MCAS Tustin, Calif., where he joined Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron (HMH) 361, flying his dream machine, the CH-53.

Surviving combat in Vietnam, his Marine Corps career looked as though it was on track. Surviving the post-war drawdown was another story.

He stayed with HMH-361 until 1975, and that’s when his career banked into a drastic change of course. He was passed over for major and was in danger of being forced out of the Corps.

“It was a bit of a blow to my ego, especially seeing some of the people who did get promoted,” he lamented, not unlike many others who were caught in the reduction in force. “But it came down to how you looked on paper, and I just didn’t make it.”

Taking Yogi Berra’s advice when faced with a fork in the road, to just take it, he resigned and enlisted at the grade of gunnery sergeant in June 1975. “ ‘Gunny’ was as high as they could go by law because you had to have at least five years enlisted time before you could get E-8,” he reflected. “So, they did as well by me as they could.”

[b]He went home one day as a captain and returned to work the next day as a gunny.[/b]

“The guard at the gate wouldn’t let me in because I still hadn’t changed the officer sticker on my vehicle,” he said. “He made me go around to the front gate and get a pass.”

Just because he couldn’t fly didn’t mean he was going to be kept out of the aircraft. In 1975, Grinstead went to navigation school in Texas and became a navigator on fixed-wing KC-130 Hercules aircraft at MCAS El Toro, Calif.

“I enjoyed navigating, but it just wasn’t the same as flying the controls,” he declared. “Unofficially, I flew the aircraft on patrols a couple times, but never on takeoffs or landings. One time I impressed the hell out of a captain. I flew the C-130 around the holding pattern and later he was raving to his copilot about how good this gunny was, until the copilot told him the gunny probably had more flight hours than both of them together.”

Shortly after assignment to El Toro, Grinstead applied for the warrant officer program, even though he knew he wasn’t fully qualified. He didn’t have enough time in as a navigator, and he was nearly at the maximum allowed years in service to apply, which was 12, waiverable to 14. “I applied anyway. I figured, nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he said.

He didn’t make it and settled on staying at pay grade E-7 and maybe picking up E-8 before retiring. “But lo and behold, the next year they approved a one-time waiver of the 14-year limit, and I was just over 14 at the time, so I applied again, and this time got it,” he commented, adding that he continued in 1978 as a navigator for a while longer, then requested to be put back on pilot status.

“The first time they turned me down,” he said. “So I put in again and told them I’d like to fly ’53s, but if that wasn’t possible I’d fly anything.”

In 1979, while stationed in Okinawa, Japan, he received authorization to fly the CH-53 and returned to MCAS Tustin for refamiliarization with Marine Helicopter Training Squadron 301. After retraining, the squadron commander asked him to stay on as an instructor, which he did. “I’m not really sure why they let me back into the cockpit, but I’m glad they did,” he said.

In the mid-1980s, there were only two other chief warrant officer pilots on active duty besides Grinstead, and the other two retired prior to 1986, leaving Grinstead in sole possession of a unique aviation title—the Marine Corps’ only flying warrant officer pilot.

“I was coming up on 29 years, and I understood that at 30, I had to write a letter to the Commandant every year saying why they should keep me in,” recalled Grinstead, now fully retired at 72 years old and living in California. “I wasn’t great at creative writing, and Steven Spielberg cost too much,” he joked. “I had two kids in college, and I realized that in one more year I’d be looking for a job.”

Fate delivered him an offer he couldn’t refuse. “I got a ‘do it now or forget it’ offer to go to Saudi Arabia to help the Saudi navy set up their training program for the Super Puma,” he said, referring to the Eurocopter AS332 Super Puma utility helicopter. “So I jumped on that and spent a year or so over there.”

He returned to the Florida panhandle area looking for a job, but there weren’t any. [b]“I thought truck drivers seemed to be making good money,” he observed, so he went to a six-week driving school, got certified and drove cross-country for the next 13 years[/b]. “I never could find the road to Hawaii or Alaska, but I did spend my 65th birthday in Canada,” he reminisced.

There has never been a program directly enabling Marine Corps warrant officers to fly, according to sources at the Marine Corps Aviation Association (MCAA). However, the concept of a Marine Corps flying CWO program was suggested by CWO-2 Colin Young in a November 2013 Marine Corps Gazette article (link is external).

In the article, he cites increased aircraft readiness and cost savings as the two primary benefits.

“A CWO pilot with a special skill set of being a technical expert in the assigned T/M/S (type/model/series) … will allow the operational squadrons to increase FCF [functional check flight] certified pilots to keep the full mission capable aircraft at a ready basic aircraft rating,” he wrote, in reference to the readiness issue.

“The Marine Corps could save a great deal of money in the basic pay scale alone,” he postulated. He also suggested that flight training could be shortened for warrant officers.

In response, retired CWO-4 James R. Casey wrote in the January 2014 Gazette that today a Marine is going to be about 30 years old or older when selected for the warrant officer program, and the maximum age to be a naval aviator is 27, with rarely approved waivers to 31. He noted that those granted age waivers have a poor track record of successfully completing training. Casey, who is the deputy executive director of the MCAA, made other counterpoints, including that compressing the flight training can be dangerous.

It appears that the subject of more Marine Corps warrant officers in the pilot seat will remain a hypothetical point of discussion. As that discussion continues, and as aircraft that Jack Grinstead flew transition out of the Corps and make way for the MV-22 Osprey, he retains his title as the Corps’ last flying warrant officer pilot.[/quote]

[Nark1]

This flying Army Chief Warrant Officer, would like to say, Semper Fi.

[Colonel]

Jesus, these kids were tough:

[youtube][/youtube]

[quote]Henderson Field was also very close to the thinly-held lines of the U.S. First Marine Division, so security was always a concern.
There were no fuel trucks, aircraft hangars, or repair buildings.
Damaged aircraft were cannibalized for spare parts, and with no bomb hoists, all aircraft munitions had to be hand-loaded onto the warplanes.
Fuel, always critically low, had to be hand pumped out of 55 gallon drums.

Living conditions on Guadalcanal were some of the most difficult ever faced by Marine aviation.
Pilots and mechanics lived in mud-floored tents in a flooded coconut plantation called "Mosquito Grove."
These living conditions led to most Marines contracting tropical diseases such as malaria, dysentery, dengue fever, or fungal infections.[
At night, Japanese warships would periodically bombard the airfield, and by day, Japanese artillery shelling frequently struck. [/quote]

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smith_(flying_ace)]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smith_(flying_ace)[/url]

[quote]During the crucial battle for the Solomons, he led Marine Fighter Squadron 223 (VMF-223) on sorties against the enemy, during which the squadron accounted for 83 enemy aircraft destroyed.

A complete list of Col Smith's medals and decorations includes:
the Medal of Honor;
the Legion of Merit with Combat "V;"
the Distinguished Flying Cross;
the Bronze Star with Combat "V;"
the Air Medal with three Gold Stars, indicative of four awards;
the Presidential Unit Citation;
the Navy Unit Commendation Ribbon with one bronze star;
the American Defense Service Medal with Base clasp;
the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with one silver star, indicative of five bronze stars;
the American Campaign Medal;
the World War II Victory Medal;
the Navy Occupation Service Medal with European clasp;
the National Defense Service Medal;
Distinguished Service Order;
the Korean Service Medal with one bronze star;
the United Nations Service Medal;
the Philippine Liberation Ribbon with one bronze star;
the Philippine Presidential Unit Citation; and
the Korean Presidential Unit Citation.

Smith was featured on the cover of the 7 December 1942 issue of Life Magazine[/quote]