RVAH 7 Disestablishment.
I had a hit in my referrer logs last week for "RVAH-7 Personnel." It prodded me to look again for the little booklet that was made for the squadrons decommissioning. I knew that had a roster list of the unit in it. Eventually I found it. Not where I thought it was, but I had it, and scanned it so I could make it available here
RVAH-7_Disestablishment_Ceremony.pdf. This document was created by photocopying the original booklet through a photocopier that can generate a pdf. The page order comes from pulling the staples out and sticking it in the document feeder face down. So page 1 of the pdf is the booklets center overleaf, p. 8 and 9; then p. 10, 07; p. 06, 11; p.12, 05; p. 04, 13; p. 14, 03; p. 02, 15; and pg. 8 of the pdf is the back cover and front cover... You are probably going to want to print this out and reassemble it. Everybody who was in the squadron when we decommissioned is here along with a history of the squadron and bio's of our c.o., x.o. and wing commander. Mark and I are in there as IS3 Edmunds and ISSN Bushmiller respectively. I see the squadron history talks up our impeccable readiness on that last cruise. I notice it doesn't mention that the squadron and the planes spent most of that summer back at Cubi Point in Subic Bay. They took up a lot of deck space for planes that didn't get in the air much. I and Ensign Gent stayed with the ship through that interval, myself because a port call in Hong Kong was scheduled. The history also indicates the heavy squadrons were based at NAS Albany Georgia until sometime in late 1974. Admittedly before my time in the unit, but I can't recall if I ever knew that, or just took it for granted that the whole program had been based in Key West since the A5 took on its reconnaissance role. Similarly I had assumed that Admiral Fallon the current Centcom (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan) commander would know NAS Key West since he had flown RA5Cs at one point, but possibly not. I saw and heard some small pieces in the press on Admiral Fallon over the last week, It turns out he only recently arrived in the Gulf, and spent much of his time dealing with the British-Iranian Naval imbroglio. In the curious way of international news here is Vietnamese press coverage of the Admiral's statements
VietNamNet - U.S. commander denies attack on Iran soon. It was nearly all I could find. I think it's a Xinhua wire story. There was also a NPR or WAMU piece (an interview with a author writing a book who had flown out to the Gulf with him) which ran on the 2nd or 3rd of April that I can't seem to find now.  I include a picture I found in the booklet which I must have torn out of a Navy aviation magazine, which is a plane marked as being piloted by Lt. Paul Habel who was Rvah 7's Operations officer. Since I was a black shoe rating I'm not sure what the person standing in front of the plane is indicating, but I think he is saying "if you can guess which hand your car keys are in you can drive home tonight".
One last item before I leave off here. I got a comment on a post from January The one titled Admiral Fallon, in that post I had sketched out a brief history of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Harold Wise who wrote the comment wanted to mention that he has just had a book published by the Naval Institute Press: Inside the danger zone : the U.S. Military in the Persian Gulf, 1987-1988. It is on the phase of that war when the US Navy became involved, commonly called the tanker war. ---
11Apr07 I think the pdf problem is fixed now. Folks, never deal with pdfs on a dial-up connection.
11:52:33 PM  ;;
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