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HomeMy WebLinkAboutAl Meyer BBV Radio Transcription #1City of College Station Heritage Programs Oral History Interviewee: Al Meyer Interviewer: Tom Turbiville Transcriber: Brooke Linsenbardt Place: College Station, Texas Project: Veterans of the Valley 00:00: Tom Turbiville (TT): It is six years that Alton Meyer will never get back. The six he spent as a Vietnam P.O.W. Now retired in rural Brazos County, Al Meyer has many memories and artifacts of being held captive in Hanoi at what they called the Hanoi Hilton. He spent his first several months on his back with his broken leg healing. Hi I’m Tom Turbiville, this is Bravo Brazos Valley brought to you by Mees and Associates. We’ll start Al Meyer’s story today, and it does start with why he entered the Air Force to start with, on advice of a friend. 00:33: Al Meyer (AM): He said, he was about in the middle of a battle every day but he had a nice, clean, warm bed to sleep in at night so I figured the Air Force is for me. TT: Yeah, his job was to fly backseat as an electronics’ warfare officer. 00:45: AM: Well electronic warfare officer, most of us went to B-52s and sat in the back of the B-52 and, and operated the, the electronic defenses to, for the, for the B-52, the jammers and things like that to jam the enemy radar. And that’s what most of our class went to. I went to Air Defense Command and flew in B-57s, which was just a, a light bomber. And our job was to fly targets for the, the Nike Air Defense Missile Training and then also for fighter interceptor pilot training. We would jam their radars while they tried to intercept us and simulate shooting us down. TT: Stationed in Thailand, his very first flight actually came before he was properly checked in to his post. 01:26: AM: I arrived late one afternoon and went to personnel and they told me that, to come back the next morning at nine o’clock. I went back to, down to the squadron and they had us on a flying schedule, and we went flying. We got up at two o’clock that morning and we had a four o’clock in the morning takeoff, and it was pitch black. We took off and the, the air conditioning system, on the F-105 doesn’t come on until the, the gear’s retracted. And when we got off the runway and retracted the gear, there was a, a large rice bug came out of the air conditioning in the front cockpit. The pilot says, “You got it.” And so I had to stick and you know, there, there were, it was pitch black out there. There were no visual references and they had taken most of our flight instruments out of the back seat. And so, I was trying to maintain wings level, positive rate of climb, and not stall the airplane and until he got through the rice bug and every once in a while, he’d swat the stick and the, the, the Air Force, the airplane would wobble a little bit. He finally killed a rice bug and so we went on with the mission. TT: Al Meyer flew several missions over north Vietnam. He can’t remember them all, but he certainly remembers his last one. It was mission number thirty-five. 02:33: AM: The target that day was a, an electric, electrical switching station which was in a building in-inside a dirt [inaudible] which we had tried to bomb two or three times before and never had been able to hit that building. And so we got to the, the beginning of what we call “Thud Ridge” which was a ridge which sort of pointed toward Hanoi like a finger and you could fly down that ridge and if they fired a missile at you from one side, than you could dodge to the other side to get away from the, the missile. But when we got there, the, the, it was very cloudy and we, we called back to the, we were four minutes ahead of the, the mission lead, and, the mission commander. And we called back to him and told him that it was all cloudy. And he says, “Well go take a look, there may be a hole over Hanoi.” So I remember that and I remember we were above the clouds and the missile popped out of the cloud and exploded right above the airplane. TT: And that’s the last thing he recalls. Other than the torture, the comradery, the perseverance, and the family back home. They’re all part of this amazing story of Al Meyer. It will continue tomorrow. I’m Tom Turbiville, this is Bravo Brazos Valley.