★ When Horner arrived at Korat, the squadron from McConnell and the squadron from Kadena operated as independent units; the one from Kansas was owned by TAC, while the one from Okinawa was owned by PACAF (officially, Southeast Asia came under PACAF, which made the squadron from Kadena more equal, in an Orwellian sense, than the squadron from McConnell). The two had a common command post and shared a mess hall, where the food was just about inedible. Horner, Myhrum, and a few others (most of them nonrated—to take care of supply, motor pool, maintenance control, intelligence, civil engineering, and the like) had been brought in to set up a wing structure not only for Korat but also for Ubon, Udorn, and Takhli. However, that quickly proved impossible, for there were not enough people to handle it, nor were there sufficient communications. Consequently, provisional wing structures were set up at each field.

From the start, there was rivalry between the two squadrons. Both TAC and PACAF wanted their squadrons to get their noses in the war. On the face of it, Kadena, from PACAF, had first dibs, since it was PACAF’s theater of operation. However, things weren’t quite that simple. Because Kadena and Yokota (in Japan) had nuclear alert duties, PACAF needed augmentation, which meant that TAC deployed a squadron. That didn’t mean that the TAC squadron was welcome, since PACAF didn’t want to share the glory of fighting the North Vietnamese with a TAC squadron any more than TAC wanted to share the glory with a PACAF squadron. It was all very adolescent, and in the end, it all proved moot. There turned out to be plenty of war to go around.

The competition between the commands was obvious, even at base level. Though the pilots and maintenance crews were all perfectly friendly, the deployed commanders were often reluctant to help one another out; each was trying to hog the war for himself. For example, Kadena squadrons, unlike TAC squadrons, normally didn’t deploy to other bases, and so didn’t have available the extensive war reserve spares kits that the others did—metal boxes on wheels that contained what a squadron needed for the first thirty days until a supply line to the depot could be put in place. You’d think it would be easy for a mechanic from Kadena to get a part from the TAC deployed spares kit. Think again.

The rivalry was also evident in the makeup of the provisional staff. PACAF made sure that Kadena people filled all the important positions, no matter what their qualifications were. Another bone in the TAC people’s craw was the rotation policies: the PACAF people rotated in and out on short notice, while the TAC people were there for as long as 120 days.