31 January 1968 – On the first full day of the Tet Offensive, Major Joe Bulger (Flight Lead) and 1Lt “Fearless” Fred Abrams were asked to bomb their own base. In the early hours of the day, Vietcong forces had launched an attack on Bien Hoa AB. “The whole east end was hot,” Abrams said.
“…after flying school, I went to Luke Air Force Base, which is also on the west side of Phoenix, Arizona, and from there — I was flying F 100s in gunnery school. From there, I went to Spangdahlem Air Force Base in Germany, and there were 4 of us that went to Germany in the F 105.
And we didn’t — we were probably the only guys that never went through a formal F 105 school. And all of us ended up in Vietnam later on, but 2 of us went to Spangdahlem, and the other 2 guys went to Bitburg Air Force Base, which is just a few miles away. And we checked out locally on the continent and then went down to Wheelis at Tripoli, Libya, for our gunnery training, and then we were there for most — until — from April of ’64, we were at Spangdahlem until September of ’66, and there was — Europe was trans- — transitioning to F 4s, and we didn’t have retainability, and I had actually volunteered several times already to go to Southeast Asia. And so I think it was the 26th — or 22nd of September, 1966, there were I think 14 or 16 of us, families, got on the airplane in Frankfurt, came to the States, and we were in the States on leave until the first Tuesday in November. The day that Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, we got on the airplane and went to — stopped in Hickam, then on to Clark for snake school, and then after snake school, went to Tahkli Air Force Base in Thailand.”
You can learn a lot more about Lawrence Cobb by reading his interview for the Veterans History Project at: http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.27111/transcript?ID=sr0001
