Thomas Browder and Ed Browder

[00:02] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: My name is Tom Browder, legal name, Thomas Malan Browder junior. I am currently 78 years old. Today is Sunday, March 6, 2022. We're in Pensacola, Florida. My interview partner is my brother, Ed.

[00:23] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: My name is full name Edward Rafael Browder. Everybody calls me Ed. I'm 75. Today's date is March 6, 2022. We're in Pensacola, Florida, and my partner in crime here is Tom Browder, my brother.

[00:45] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: One of the things we wanted to do with this opportunity is lay out some stuff and memories we have that we, every time we get together, we've shared. And if no one recorded it, it might pass into history and people forget. But we think we have a pretty interesting little thing that happened to us many, many years ago. I think it'd be 50 years ago this summer, just to give you a little wanted to lead up to how it happened. Basically, it's a small world meeting at a place that will become obvious here in a minute. And I just wanted for our descendants to see how we got to this magic point. And both of us. I was born the oldest of all of our brothers, and we're the only two left now. But eventually, after high school, I went to Air Force Academy when we were living in Sanson, Virginia, right outside Richmond. And that was a long story to get there. But I graduated from there in 1965, and that was, we were the 7th graduating class, so the place was pretty new then. That's Air Force academy for those kids who don't really know this, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And after that, I went to pilot training at Moody Air Force Base near Valdosta, Georgia. And that was. Got there in the summer of 65, spent a year there. While I was there, met my future wife, your sister in law, missy. She was from Quintema, Georgia, which is about 30, 32 miles from there. After I graduated, we talked about marriage, not real seriously, a whole lot. The Vietnam War was cooking off. I got into the f four pipeline. I was on my way for future training after graduation, so we said goodbye, and I tooled off, driving out west to enter the f four train pipeline as a P Wizzo, which is a pilot weapon system officer. The first training was at Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. That was for backseat radar training. Finished there, and then went into flying training at Georgia Air Force Base in Victorville, California. Victor Ville was the home of Roy Rogers, which is kind of interesting. And while we were there, there over Christmas, and at Christmas, I had bought a ring, and I flew back home, and Missy joined us. I don't know, if you remember, at Christmas in Richmond at our parents house and moved. And I asked her to marry me then, and she did. She at least agreed to. So we pressed on, and I had to go back and finish training at George. And that finished somewhere around April of what year were we now? 67. Then I had to go to Fairchild Air Force Base for survival training. And then in the meantime, missy and her mother and our parents had been planning my wedding. Our wedding. So I booked on to try to get back to Quitman, Georgia, from Spokane, Washington. And it took me about three days. And that was a miracle to make it back to Georgia in time for the wedding because I got there about two days before the wedding. And that was some interesting on the way, because after I left Fairchild, came across the mountains. It was still pretty wintry up there. Went through. I wound up having a blown tire. Had changed that. No, it was a bad tire. I had to get it changed at a place I got stopped in Wyoming. Got on down into the corner of Colorado, and on a Sunday, I was driving my mg, and I had a, you know, four valve carburetor, and I lost the engine. Quit. Fortunately, in those days, there was a gas station open, and the guy said what I had was I lost the. Had a problem with the distributor, and fortunately, the guy was able to fix it, and I had to stay overnight there. So I lost the night there and on across the country long, long ways. So I wound up getting into Columbus, Mississippi, and I was on my home leg, and I was at a traffic light, and I was in my mg, you know, only sitting about so high off the ground. Next to me was an old crown Victoria. And we were in a four way stoplight. The light turned green, and driver like in the old days, we used to do hot rodded it at the green light. And then he came to stop. I didn't see it in time. I stopped, and then I got hit by a guy coming across. So that put me one more day late for my wedding. Had to spend the night there while they fixed my car. Eventually, we got married, and I was en route to my first studio station. So we hunting them? Yes, sir.

[06:26] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: I think we should say a little bit about the wedding equipment that was at the country club.

[06:31] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Well, I don't remember much about the wedding.

[06:33] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: I do. I don't remember some. It was the first wet wedding in Quitman, Georgia, at the country club. And his wife's parents had a gentleman who did yard work with them called Sunshine. And sunshine was going to be the bartender. And he had never attended bar. And he came up to me and he said, mister Ed, I don't know how to. I said, it's really easy. I said, you put some ice on the grass, take three fingers, fill up three fingers to whatever booze they ask for, and then whatever the mixer is going to be. Okay, fine. I. It was a grand wedding. It truly was. Band played and dancing. But the highlight for me, other than the ceremony, was our mother, little Carolyn, and her big sister Ethel, who we all call sister. There was an upright piano in there, and after the band quit, Mama and sister got up on the bench, and I had only seen my mother play the piano in church, you know, in southern Baptist hymnals. They started playing boogie woogie, rock and roll. People started dancing, and my jaw just dropped. It was. That was fantastic. That was a part from my mom, a side of my mother I had never seen. It was great. It was. And it was great to see, you know, two moms, you know, my mom and sister doing something, his sisters rather than his moms. Yeah, that was fun. That was fun.

[08:30] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Yeah. And I heard about that, of course. And back in that day, I'm sorry we didn't have video cameras and such, at least in our bunch. He had the old eight millimeter, but there are still pictures of the wedding, and some of those things are in there. But thanks to my dad and my brother, then become brother in law, we were able to sneak out of there without a whole lot of stuff attached to our car. And then we had our honeymoon to get on the way to my next duty station. We were getting there. The wing. Seymour Johnson, Goldsboro, North Carolina. It was a brand new wing that had f 105s there that had deployment, regular deployment to Europe. And most of the old 105 guys were taken over as f four front seaters. And then we were brand new pilot called pilot weapon systems officers. P. Wizzos. The f four was, the war was ramping up, and air force was pumping out all kinds of, getting all kinds of f four s from basically the same airplane as the Navy had, including the tail hook, but a little bit newer model. And the airplane called for navigators in the backseat, normally, and that's the way the Navy flew them. But the air force didn't have enough navigators to fill the back seat. So when they were coming on, the first assignment was to backseat as a pilot. So that was a little strange. But as soon as we all got there and the wharves ramping up and the airplanes were ramping up, we all stuck our name on the list. Volunteer to go again to volunteer. And I got in the line for the next RTU assignment down at MacDill. And a lot of other interesting things happened when I was there, including, I'll mention later, it's not directly a part of this to the path, but the Pueblo crisis happened about that time. My wing deployed for that, and I was on the list. They had to run through the list. They had a bunch of guys that were on slots to go into training for the front seat. Then they had to coordinate that with filling the slots for the wing because we were deploying over to Korea for the Pueblo crisis. And in the process, Chuck Yeager, famous general Chuck Yeager, became our wing commander. And so I always had to say Chuck Yeager was my wing commander, but I never saw him because we stayed there and he left anyway. Eventually, I didn't make the cut happen just below me, so I stayed until my RTU date started, which is a few weeks away. Then I went down to MacDill and the. I think it was the 43rd tfts. And by that time we were married. She went down there and she'd become pregnant. We had our first child while we were there. So he's the first Florida native in our family, even though we had been in Florida when my dad was stationed at Eglin back in 49. Anyway, from there, after we went through the training there, everybody's anticipating everybody in the class going to Vietnam. But at the same time, remember, they were ramping up, changing one hundred and five s to f four s in Europe and in the US and also other of our bases in the Orient, including Masala Air Base, Japan, which had f 100. So our whole class, most of our class, got slotted to go to Masawa Air Base, Japan. So after our training, we packed up and hit it on the way to Japan. We could not go together. Missy and I couldn't go together because they had had an earthquake that year. So this was. We graduated from the RTU and around in the summer. In the summer of 70. 68. Sorry, 68. And so since they didn't have. Since the earthquake took out a lot of base housing, I had, those of us guys who had families had to go ahead and leave the families home. And those of us who had families were class b bachelors. And so we lived in the Q Boq bachelor officers quarters. Actually, it was a teachers dorms, different story. Until we could find a place for our wives. Eventually, I wound up the first house ever bought was a house built by a Korean in Japan. And in Japan, you can't own the land. We had to rent the land. So that worked out to be very interesting when we had to leave eventually. So while we were in Japan in that period, Washington, you, you're going to tell your story how you got there. But we were just somewhere in here, somewhere around 1969, we had expected to see you come visit us in Japan. And back then, you remember, we did, you know, telephone was expensive. I was not much of a letter writer. Neither of us were very much.

[13:58] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Still not.

[13:59] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Still not. At least we have iPhones now. Yes, which is very helpful. Very helpful. But back then, communication was a little tough. So we were over there, and we were all involved in getting used to a different culture and flying activity. Our wing flew regularly between northern Japan, Honchu, northern Japan, and our forward bases in South Korea. And we had several active flying bases over there that at that time, Daegu. Now they call it Daegu. Guangzhou and Kunsan and Osan. So, 69, you didn't make it Christmas, so we don't know what was going on. And the next summer, in summer of 80, I mean, sorry, summer of 1970, my back seater at that time was a navigator named Jim White. And Jim and I, there was a regular program going on to help the effort in Vietnam, and we were all going to participate in the thing one at a time, one crew at a time called Combat Sage down in the Philippines. So our turn came, and the plan was we would leave Massau Air base in a single airplane, f four cs or ds then, and go to go to Yokota, pick up a crew, and he was going to be my wingman, pick up the crew from the. We had another fighter base at Yokota Air Base, Japan, near Tokyo. And then we would fly to Kadena overnight there, refuel, and then one hop it into the Philippines. So that was the plan. And we started out the trip that day. And all of us, when we got to Japan, we know the first thing we did was buy all brand new stereo gear and all brand new cameras of one kind or another. So I had a wonderful Minolta single reflex, single lens reflex camera, and I was taken there, and film was expensive, so I was trying to be very careful about processing, and I always did slides to get the most from my buck. So I took this camera, and I was taking off. I'd always taken all kinds of pictures up in that part of the world. So now we're going to fly in a place I'd never been. I got into the cockpit that day, Jim White in the backseat. And I get in and I drop my bloody camera to the ramp. And that's about, as I recall, somewhere around seven or 8ft. And the crew chief picked up the camera for me and took it out of the case and looked at it and I didn't see any dents, no breaks or anything. So it looked like it was. You don't know. Just assume it's going to work and we'll take some pictures. So we took off for Yokota, and then. So we overnighted at Yokota and we met our wingman. I don't remember their names now. And while we were at Yokota, it was kind of neat because the big names were touring all over the Orient back then, entertainment troops. And we had at the Oak club at Kadena, Ray Charles is in town, so we got to go see Ray Charles close up in concert. And it was led by. I always said he was an unknown singer to me. Looking back at Google now, he was not unknown, he just was unknown to me because we'd been out of the country since, you know, mid 68 or late 68, and it was lew rawls and he'd been singing for some time. I just wasn't familiar with his name. We didn't have itunes or any of that stuff. So I got to see Lou Rawls and then Ray Charles, and that was quite the show. Next day we took off, we got to Kadena, same drill, you know, we spent a night at Kadena, and then the next day we'd take the longer hop to Clark Air base in the Philippines. There we go. Land at Cadena. We checked in the queue and back then in the quarters, there were no female pilots back then in service. So when we check into the queue, generally, you would get a room with two twin beds, you know, and if you had a crew of eight, you'd get four beds. Four rooms, two beds each. And then you'd share, you know, share, what do they call them anyway? Share bath with the room on the other side.

[18:38] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Right.

[18:38] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: So we checked in there and this was weird. Cause the room had three beds, three twin beds. And I think all the queues there did. Cause they get more people in there and, you know, three rooms.

[18:49] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Kind of like an omen of three beds. Like an old one.

[18:52] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Exactly, exactly. That's part of this weird story. And anyway, so Jim and I went to, you know, changed clothes, got cleaned up, went to the old club and met our wingman, AC and Gibb guy in the back sometime. And we're at the Oak club at Gadena. It was a big, big old lounge. We got a table round, and we just had a good old time that night. I met guys from the academy I knew and guys from pilot training. It was a crossroads of the south when we got there, crossroads of the Pacific. And then we had to fly the next morning. So we didn't go crazy on the beer, went back, went to the cube, got up, got dressed, ready to go launch the next day, went down to flight line, did all the flight plan, had our pre flight briefing, and now it's time to go out to the airplanes. We followed and done the weather check. Yes, sir.

[19:52] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: I was going to say, before we get the meet cute, maybe let me fill in my background and then we'll do the.

[20:01] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Yeah, I'm going to. I was going to leave it right there.

[20:04] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Okay.

[20:04] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: When I got there, I had to. We're going to leave it right there. And then you pick up how you got there.

[20:10] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Right. Okay. Tommy and I actually went to the same high school at different times. He graduated from Holland Springs, number one in the class. Three years after him, I graduated from Holland Springs. I got a football scholarship to go to a small NAIA college in Portsmouth, Virginia, called Frederick College. And I guess our parents were kind of fortunate in that they didn't have to pay for college education or. Yeah, for either one of us. And we felt good about that. So, you know, I played football. I majored in history. And in the summer of 1966, I started getting interested. Vietnam was rocking and rolling, and I was getting interested in serving in my country. Our father served in the army. And later, when the Air force became a separate branch, he went there. And he spent how many years? 2020 years? 820. No, he spent 2020. So I started looking at. And I really liked and fell in love with the Marine Corps. And so I went to Portsmouth to a recruiting station, and I signed up to go to OCS in the summer of 1967. Ocs in the Marine Corps is one place. That's at Quantico, Virginia. And I remember. Remember my father telling me, you know, I was going to take a bunch of clothes, and he told me, Eddie, don't do that because they're going to fit you with all of your gear, all that you need. And so I took. Took a Dopp kit and underwear, and that's about it. And there were people who showed up because this was officer candidate school, so all of the guys were college graduates are going to be. And so some of them thought it was a vacation. And there were guys that showed up with golf clubs, with tennis rackets and all. And our barracks was on the Potomac river. And we met our drill instructor, and he was every bit as scary as any marine drill instructor that you could find. His name was staff. He was a staff sergeant, staff sergeant Lee, first name, middle name, Roy Parrott. And he talked like this, and he was something else you couldn't do. What happened in the summer of 1967 at b barracks on grounds at Quantico? He had everybody who had a tennis racket and tennis ball stand. And he says, we're going to have grenade practice. And they threw up the ball and they had to hit it into the Potomac river. Then he had them throw the rackets in there. And, you know, he basically said, this isn't a blankety blank country club. This is United States Marine Corps. And if you're going to fight for the Marine Corps, you don't need tennis ball or golf clubs. People threw golf clubs. If they didn't want to do that, they could turn around and walk away. And nobody walked away. We were all scared out of our minds, so we got through that. It was a long summer, but it was really great. In fact, when I went back for my senior year playing football, I had lost about 2022 or 23, and I played fullback in my college. Coach was not happy with me, but that's okay. I graduated, like I said, I graduated in 1968. And what was really great for me was I got my commission at graduation and I was the only one in my class to graduate. And by the way, that was the last class, 1968, for Frederick College. And you can google Frederick College. And it, you know, the good part for me was that I've never had to pay, you know, dude, what do you call tuition? No, no, not tuition, but for being, you know, a graduate. When they go back, you know, you give them.

[25:04] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Oh, yeah, yeah.

[25:05] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: You know, that saved me money.

[25:07] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: I love association.

[25:08] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. So at graduation, the Marine Corps then wore, like, the Navy wore white uniforms. And my fraternity brother, a fraternity brother of mine, Frank Eisenhower, who was also commissioned. I z e n o u r. Not like dwight eisenhower. He had graduated Vietnam and he had gone to Vietnam and he served up in the north and third marines. And he was at Que San and he was running across the. Some of these men were in trouble. He was running across a berm line and a sniper shot him in the foot. And it just. And so he ended up being medevaced and had a series of operations and then ended up in DC at the naval hospital there. And I was going to graduate and I went to the hospital. I knew he liked scotch, so I bought him a fifth of scotch, and I went to his room, and he was in good spirits, and he had had something like five operations. And I asked him if he would be kind enough to swear me into the Marine Corps, and he said yes. So there was, with Frank swearing me into the Marine Corps, we were both in our little eskimo pie uniforms. That's what they call the eskimo pie. Remember the guys that used to sell in the neighborhood? Yes. That's why he lovingly called it. He swore me in. And my mother, God rest her soul, had a little brownie camera, and she took pictures of that. And she showed me sometime later, I mean, years later, and if it weren't for her, I wouldn't have pictures of me being sworn in by Frank being presented with my diploma and him walking away. And that was great. She also took pictures of all of us with the fraternity brothers. That was great. So I graduated, took my commission, and went to, back to Quantico to what they call the basic school. That's where all officers in the Marine Corps go for infantry training. And it was. It used to be eight months, but for Vietnam, it was cut a lot, and it was only six months. And so they pushed us through that, and it was. It was great. It was scary because we knew where we were going to go, some of us. And we all basically, you know, we didn't want to get assigned an mos, a military occupational skill that we would get that we would have to take training too long and not be sent right to Vietnam, you know. And I. So let's see where I'm going with this thing. So we graduated from there in November of 1968. And we took some people, took 30 days leave. Some people took ten. You could take whatever, you know, up to 30. And we had a flight out of Dulles airport in December of mid December of 1968. And Dulles, if you've ever been to Dulles or anybody, it's a beautiful, big airport now. But in 1968, I don't even know if it was a year old. And so we're on this big, all of us, many of us from the same class on this big airplane, and we start taxiing down the Runway and don't move very far. And the captain comes on and says, sorry for the delay, but they're going to have to get the cows off of the Runway because it was a bunch of dairy farms that made up. Now, you couldn't even see that there was a farm there, but that got a good hoot, and they rounded them up, and maybe rowdy Yates rounded them up and drove them off to where they should belong to. So off we go. Flying over to Vietnam. We landed in San Francisco, had a layover there, and then we got back on another plane and flew to. Towards Vietnam. We landed. Generally, the flight goes from San Francisco to Midway. You stop and refuel there. And Midway was a. Was a huge. Midway was a huge battle for the marines in the navy in world War two. And I remember the water, it was just clear blue. You could see fish swimming down there, and it was great. So flew into Danang, and being a green second lieutenant, I thought, sure, we're gonna have to fight our way off of the plane. But they had flight attendants waiting down there to give us these little welcome of things to Vietnam. So that shot that out of the water we housed there. We had a meeting the next day where we were going to get our assignments. We were all infantry officers, and it was a first force reconnaissance. Our force recon was the special forces, if you will, of the Marine Corps. And the training is very difficult, similar to Seal training, but UDT part is not. They're not all done together. You go in different times. But anyway, we're sitting in there, and the major comes out and he. He starts saying, we need infantry officers up in three corps. You know, who wants to go? Who wants to go to Foxtrot company? And I was sitting next to a buddy of mine, Len Lowder. Lynn Louder was six'five and had played defensive end at Illinois. He's a great, huge guy sitting right next to me. And they mentioned, who would like to go to force recon? Boom. My hand went up. His went up higher, and the major saw his arm first, and he said, you and you. So we joined force Recon and didn't have to go through the training at that time. We got the training later. So based on that segue, three years later, I'm leaving Vietnam after two tours. And because I had flown with there before, I knew that we were all drinking beer, leaving Vietnam. And so when I got to Kadena I had to go to the bathroom. Having been there, I knew that there was a pilot's bathroom by their ready room. That's what I called it. And so while all of these marines, 200 or something of us on a c 130, they're going this way, I walk calmly around to the bathroom, and I'll go up to. So I'm walking there, and I notice that the door is opening. And as I as I turned and kind of look over there, we bumped in. We literally bumped into each other. What? Twelve, 13,000 miles from home. And the last time we saw. And what I saw first was a gray flight suit. And I looked down, I saw his bars. I was the first lieutenant, and he's the captain. He certainly outranks me. And I said, oh, I'm sorry, captain. And I looked up and I went, Tommy. And he goes, Eddie. And we grabbed each other and we hugged and. And it was. It was great. And. And everybody was kind of stunned. They didn't know what was going on. And then I told him, I said, I've got to go into this bathroom, because, you know, I had so much beer. So you go ahead, sir.

[34:06] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Well, we don't have a lot of time left here, but. So here we were. Jim and I were in the crew. They were getting ready to take off. So we said, man, why don't you come out to the airplane with us and, you know, go through our fleet flight, and then we'll say our final goodbyes. Maybe we get a picture. So we went out to the airplane, did our fleet flat and all that stuff, and with this camera that we had no idea worked, we got. Jim took a picture. I took a picture of you, and then Jim took a picture, both of us standing by the cockpit. We had both those pictures on Ed's marine website, which is kind of interesting. But anyway, so we say signara, and we get an airplane, go. Launching off. And back then we had three bags. We called it three bags full in the air force. One centerline tank. I think it was 700 gallons and 350 gallon, uh, wing tanks, something like that. Anyway, they're heavy weight. So we took off. 30 seconds trail, let lead take off. Wingman comes behind and, um, getting up, raise the gear and flaps. And in the flaps, leading edge flaps have a thing called boundary layer control. And when they shut up, when they came up, I got a red warning light, BLC boundary layer control light. That's an automatic abort. It happens all the time. If it's a real condition, your plane can blow up. Generally, it's a wiring problem, and you're safe, so you don't sweat it too much. But you can't just wing it. So we dumped fuel, landed. Wingman's clear to go on to Clark buying cell. So we land, and here we have to spend the night because they're going to have to check out the airplane. And so Jim and I go check back into the queue. We're in a room with three beds. Go to the club. And we get there. And I said, okay. Well, Ed went to camp. Five minutes.

[36:06] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Sorry.

[36:08] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Ed had gone downtown. So I called over to camp. Hansen got ahold of this marine young man. I said, really confused him. I said, this is Captain Browder. I'm trying to get first lieutenant Browder. And that confused him a little bit. So he went and checked and said, sir, turn up Browder hometown to hit the bricks. Okay? So I said, if he ever comes back, tell him that Jim and I are over at the Kadena Oak club. So Jim and I went to the club again, saw the same thing, met some guys, and were sitting around drinking beer and having a good time. And all of a sudden, Ed walks in. The end of the story, if we can't get any farther, was, the camera worked, we got the pictures, we got to see each other. And in the real air force, people would say, tom, you faked that BLC just to get to spend the night and meet with your brother. But that would be a lie.

[37:01] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: And I know my brother, and he would never fake anything, because he's a straight arrow and a darn fine officer and gentleman and would never do that.

[37:12] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: So we have a little bit of time. I wanted to mention Chivas. I know. I want to mention a couple of little things just for interest. And one of the things I meant to mention about Masawa Air Base, Japan. It was very interesting because the Japanese had launched their fleet out of the. I can't remember the name of the bay right now, up just north of us, Masala was in northern Honshu. So when you look at, you know, Japan, basically the main island, and then they have. I forget. My memory is getting terrible. But we were at the northern end of the. Maintain main island. Tokyo is way down here. So that was where the Japanese had launched their fleet. And the base, Masawa air base, was the base that the naval aviation units were stationed. And the buildings, when we got to Masawa, the squadron buildings we were in. We were in the building that one of the Pearl Harbor Navy squadrons, air squadrons had been stationed in the. That was. I thought that was pretty cool. Other exciting things. I don't know. You have anything to add there, Ed? We have a lot of left we could talk about.

[38:25] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: I ended up going back to the room with the three beds. This is where we differ. We were. We were feeling very good, and we went back, and like I said, I had just gotten back from Vietnam, and I remember that I didn't want to sleep on a bed because I was used to being, you know, sleeping on the ground and all. And so I said, no, no, I'll take the ground part. And I don't want to sleep in a bed. And I think I finally ended up going, you know, going to sleep in the bed.

[38:54] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: But the other thing that I forgot, the end of that trip, when we finally took off the next day, after our run, after our rendezvous at the club, we went our own ways. And you back to the barracks for the rest of your trip. Jim and I went back down, got our airplane had been fixed or checked out thoroughly in the process. Kadena is an interesting base. I'd never been there before. They have a long Runway, and it hits slopes downhill to the ocean. And the B 52s did a lot of their heavyweight bomb loots, you know, launching from Kadena and flying into Vietnam. But we were on that way. When we were taxing up, I saw my first SR 71 blackbird.

[39:34] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: I saw that, too.

[39:35] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Yeah, you had seen it.

[39:37] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: It's a spy plane.

[39:38] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Yeah, it's black. Early ones, that was back when they were really, really secret. Not many people got to see him. And so that guy was taxiing out, and Jim and I were taxing out. We were first for takeoff. We took off. We're loaded heavily, so we're climbing out on schedule. He took off after us, and he took off and came below us, but he's on his supersonic planned flight up to the stratosphere. So he came underneath us. The Pacific was clear blue, not a cloud in the sky. And all we could see is cons coming underneath us and going up. Disappeared into the stratosphere. That was one of the prettiest airborne sights I'd ever seen. The rest of the flight was absolutely inconsequential. We had a bum out mission. We didn't get to shoot our missiles because of one malfunction or another. The trip back was routine. So that was a. I have other small world stories, and I'm sure Ed does, too, but that. That meeting was so, so miraculous. It's just.

[40:43] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Yeah, very. Yeah. And basically, you know, 12,000 miles from home and, well, for me and, you know, to literally bump into each other, and not many people believe it, but it did happen.

[40:58] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Yep. Not a clue beforehand.

[41:04] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Well, okay. That's from my end. Yep. Thank you, Tom.

[41:14] THOMAS MALAN BROWDER: Thank you, Ed.

[41:15] EDWARD RAFAEL BROWDER: Yes, sir. Glad we got it down.