Never Volunteer

It’s the second rule you learn after the one about not calling an NCO, “Sir.” Learn it well and it will see you through a career. “Never volunteer for nothing.” I screwed up once and managed to survive it. Of course, that was what it was about. Surviving.

I was floggin an F-4 Phantom out of Torrejon Spain after my second combat tour. I’d been in the squadron for more than a year and thought maybe I needed some unit credibility beyond my illustrious previous achievements. They asked at the squadron meeting for a couple of volunteers for a Flintlock exercise in Germany. I knew about Flintlock. It was a Special operations Europe-wide exercise in the fall and it involved a lot of POW and escape/evasion stuff. Not a picnic and not something I really got off on. But, they specified they were looking for a field grade officer from a flying unit with an international driver’s license. I’m thinking this is going to be referee or evaluator or supervisor. No discomfort, no interrogations, no torture. Short hours, lots of beer drinking and back-slapping with a letter of appreciation for the file afterward. My hand went up.

Three weeks later I’m on a Swissair DC-8 headed for Zurich and then Stuttgart. Next morning breakfast at the Patch Barracks O’Club when a Green Beret many-striper comes up to the table and says I’m to accompany him. As we leave the club he tells me to get my gear rounded up and we are leaving. “Where?”

“Sorry, sir. I can’t tell you.”

Twelve of us. Six Air Force and six Navy fighter crew members boarded a T-29 and were airborne within an hour. Next stop unknown. Mountains pass underneath and after little more than an hour at prop driven speed we descend along a mountain face to touch down at one of my familiar deployment sites from Spain, Aviano Air Base. Not much secret there. Still feeling unthreatened.

A blue bus takes us past the Victor alert shelters to the secondary alert area. We pass through the concertina topped double chain-link fence and the guard towers to the expansion nuclear alert facilities and the controller’s offices between the Tab-VEE shelters. We file in and dump our bags as a half-dozen field dressed Special Forces NCO’s gather to welcome us and break the news.

“You are downed aircrews. You will have two days of training here and opportunity to select and prepare your gear. We will train you. Relax and learn.

“You will then be broken into two man teams. You will be taken to random locations in the nearby Tyrolian Alps and dropped. This will simulate your bailout locations. You will have six days to navigate to a contact point for a rendezvous with members of the Escape & Evasion assistance net. From that point you will be under their control until your escape is completed. The local police departments in all communities in the region will be alerted to your mission and seeking you out. The Italian Carabinieri or state police will also be seeking you. They are the enemy. You must avoid detection. We will also be in pursuit.

“Know one more thing. The E&E net is the real thing. These are the real NATO team members who agree to covertly operate the assistance network in the case of nuclear war. They train and prepare to aid you in a war. They are generally civilians and the net has been in existence since World War II. Good luck, gentlemen.”

I travel with Dick Masters, an F-111 weapons officer from England. We’re dumped from a white Fiat sedan off a two-lane blacktop somewhere a few kilometers short of the Austrian border. We’ve got a GI sleeping bag and poncho making a survival style rucksack. We carry a canteen, whatever we want to take from a case of C-rations, a hunting knife from our aircraft survival kit, some matches, a compass, a map and some parachute panels and cord. Flight suit, jacket and boots complete the outfit. We run up the hillside into the woods seeking cover. We’ve got twenty kilometers to cover and six days to do it. Volunteering seems not to be working out.

First night we learn that a hammock from parachute material slung between two trees is not conducive to a healthy back in the morning. We also learn that traveling along the “military crest”, that untrammeled area two-thirds up the hillside, is a bitch. We keep encountering ravines and washouts that require descent to the road and re-climbing the mini-mountains. The second day is drawing to a close and we’ve found ourselves on a bluff overlooking a wide river valley, a branch of the Po. It’s easily ¾ of a mile wide with a stone two-lane bridge covering most of it. The river is not full but a long way from dry. We’re several hundred feet above the valley and our objective is at least ten klicks on the other side of the river. There’s a small village at the base of the mountain on the far side of the bridge which we will need to traverse as well. It’s raining like the proverbial cow on a rock. This sucks.

I turn to my partner. “Ok, Dick. Here’s what we are going to do. We can’t sneak across that valley. We’re going to walk the road. Just like we belong there. Italy is a Mediterranean country. It’s like Spain. These are friendly people and the custom when you meet someone along the road is to look them in the eye and greet them. It ain’t New York city where you avoid contact. These people are friendly. If we don’t look threatening or suspicious, we’ll go right through. Can you say Buon Giorno? Everyone we pass on the way, everyone, gets a smile and a ‘buon giorno.’ OK?”

We descend and hit the road, looking like two refugees from a youth hostel rather than evading fighter pilots. We meet little old ladies with market baskets and black-suited grandfathers riding bicycles down to the trattoria for lunch. We’ve got no money and only our ID cards, so there’s no pasta or vino in our future. We smile and greet our way across the bridge and into the picturesque little village. We stop at the central fountain and fill our canteens. While checking our map for the next step a kindly old lady asks in Italian if we need help. I mangle some Spanish with pidgin Italian and some signing to ask the way to the top of the mountain. She points to a sign leading to a trail and matches it to a broken wandering line on our map. We “grazie” and “buon giorno” her assistance. She smiles and “prego”s us back.

Up the mountain like a couple of puffing goats we follow the path. It narrows and fades until we are wandering through a grassy meadow hoping to find a resumption on the opposite side of the field. We don’t. We are lost. We make camp in the field in a shepherd’s small shelter. We’ve got a flat floor to spread our sleeping bags and in short order we build a small fire to warm ourselves and dry our gear after the rain. In a few minutes a somewhat petulant man approaches us and points accusingly at our fire. We show our wet gear and he relents. He warns us to be careful and we eagerly promise to do exactly that. “Buon Giorno.” Three days to get to the meeting place.

Backtrack down the mountain. Halfway we find a fork where we clearly had missed the obvious route. We resume the climb and by late afternoon of the fourth day we reach the saddle where the trail drops over the crest. About half a kilometer away is the rendezvous, a conspicuous split in a rock face alongside the trail. Below the crest there is a hunter’s lodge, a large white stucco building which currently has a gathering of four or five boisterous Italians who look as though they have been traipsing the hills in search of grouse or partridge and are now enjoying some vino and birra with a bit of cheese. We hide and watch. The weather darkens and there is a chill in the air. Soon they pack up and leave. We continue to our destination. We are here a day ahead of schedule.

We squeeze through the cleft in the rock to get off the trail and make a cozy evasion shelter under the bushes. We crawl into our sleeping bags and drop off for the night. The next day dawns cold and clear. We scout the area and see no one around the hunting lodge. There also is no sign of a contact. We wait in our shelter under the bushes and watch. The day passes. Clouds begin to build and we fear we’ve missed our contact.

Snow flakes begin to fall. “Dick, we’re going to be up to our butts in snow on top of an Alp if this keeps up. I’ll stay here by the meeting place and you go back to the hunting lodge. Look around and see if maybe there is a way in. Did they leave a door or window unlocked? Maybe there’s some food inside. We’re going to need shelter.”

He heads to the lodge. I stand at the cleft. I see nothing unusual. Dick is rooting around the building two hundred meters away. A voice, “Don’t move! Put your hands up. Don’t turn around.” Until that moment I’d seen nothing. Heard nothing. I’m caught.

“You have a friend? Don’t turn, just say yes or no.”

“Call him back. Don’t warn him.” This guy better be the E&E net or we’re in a heap of trouble. It’s now snowing heavily. Volunteering is stupid. Never volunteer for nothing!