Travels in my head: work hard, play hard

Last time, I left with me weaving my way back to my bed along dark and dangerous back alleys, unharmed.

Which is nice.

So, I was on det in Las Vegas. Why were we there?

Well, good question.

Red Flag is a pan-national exercise in which pilots try to shoot each other down, with lasers. Or something. So, planes go up, pretend to shoot each other, try not to get shot, then come down to refuel and be rearmed.

The C130 mk3 was a generally unarmed aircraft, but the RAF turned several into Special Forces (SF) capable, and these were armed, or defended by AN/LE 40 chaff and flare systems.

Chaff is the modern version of Window, aluminium foil, in strips that interfears with radar and locating equipment.

Flare is like a hot firework that serves to confuse heat-seeking weapons that lock onto an aircraft's engine exhaust, so the flare serves to distract the weapon, to confuse it.

From what I gather, the Hercules, the Herc, Fat Albert, never gets away. But doesn't stop them trying.

Of course.

So, when a plane, or several planes go away, it needs ground crew to maintain, an our case, arm it ready for the next sortie.

That's where we, the armourers, came in.

So, our day would begin at about half six with coffee before driving to the base in our crew truck. We would go to the bomb dump to eather prep the next load or take the prepped load to the pan to arm the aircraft.

Prepping the load meant inserting explosive sqibs into the ent of each stick of chaff and flare, then inserting both into a holder/magazine. Then a full magazine would be put into a meatal tin to stop it being detonated by stray electro-magnetic waves.

Once at the aircraft, we remove the spent cartidges, ould the holder and insert the magazine.

Then back to the bomb dump to do it all again.

We would stop somewhere on base for breakfast and lunch, then work until after the last flight, either with the aircraft re-armed after it's last flight, or the next load ready to go if we had time to arm it before the scheduled flight the next morning.

The bomb dump at Nellis overlooked the desert with Vegas in the distance, at dusk all the casinos and hotels lit up, neon lights flashed and the sky went from blue, to pink to red.

Once the work was done, paperwork completed and signed, we would drive back to the Budget Suits, shower and change and the night would be ours.

Repeat this for two weeks, with the weekend off and you can quickly see that we burnt the candle at both ends, and sometimes in the middle too.

We would go to Silver City or Slots of Fun, or was it Slotsa Fun? Anyway, beers there were 75 cents for domestic, or a buck for imported. We got to know the staff, especially those behind the bar, or course. And it was there that we learned from security that they knew which gambling machine was going to pay out and how much. There is no luck to it, really.

Kind of kills any impulse to gamble, although we would put a few spare quarters into a machine if bored.

Sometimes we would win, mostly not.

After a few beers, we would go to find somewhere to eat.

Las Vegas is brash, loud, colourful and loud. Did I mention its loud?

Its not for everyone, but as long as gamblings not your thing, you can enjoy the other things the city and casions have to offer: great food at reasonable prices, great entertainment and even rollercoasters outside and sometimes inside casinos.

Best and best value places to eat at the buffets. As much as you can eat for a fixed price. And as long as you tip the waitresses well, drinks keep flowing too.

On that first trip I saw a couple of lounge shows, featuring some very well names of soul that I didn't know then, and comedy featuring Judy Tenuta who had featred quite a lot on British TV at the time, she was supported by Emo Philips, who was even more well known back home. I only paid something like five bucks to go, and the Corporal, Dave, gave me the afternoon off from work to go.

Each week of the det, we were given daily "rates", extra money on top of our wages with which to feed and water (ha!) ourselves with. As you can imagine, first night on The Strip, some gambled their who week's worth of rates away, or worse went to a lap dancing place and stuffed dollars into g strings. You could be careful for a few days, then go to a really great place last day of the week to have a really big steak. Or something. And steaks came big, 32 oz was one I had.

We had the middle weekend off, and Rog said, no demanded, and he outranked us all, that we should have a BBQ beside Lake Mead.

First stop was the BX for supplies, and trying to make staff that we wanted burgers to cook. It took 15 minutes, at the end of which we learned we should have asked for "patties".

Even though it was still 70 degrees during the day, which counted a nice summer's day back home, there was only us an a Mexican family at the BBQ spot beside the car park. There was a grill to use, so we fired it up, cracked opn the beers and enjoyed the day. I was more than thrilled to see an actual roadrunner come to investigate what we were doing. It did not say " beep, beep", and there was no coyote.

A few days later and the det was over, we climbed onto the same VC10 for the long journey home.