Good morning. Welcome to Solid Cast, number 43. This production of Solid Cast is brought to you

courtesy of Jockowling Productions and its technical staff with Carrie Helton today.

My name is John Stryker Meyer.

I'll be your host today.

And we are joined today by a good friend of mine and an aviator so we get the aviator side of the story from

the secret war through our sogcast.

Rick Freeman, welcome to the show sir.

Thank you. And Rick, you served with the 100 first Airborne later in the Vietnam War

Correct and talked about one of the reason why we want you here is to talk about the change of tactics

Some of the historic missions that you served with particularly

later on we'll get into it but first let's start with where you began where you grew up and

then how you decided to join the army and become an

aviator flying COBRA gunships for sog protection.

I grew up in South Florida. My dad was stationed there in World War II in

World Cox Field at Miami International and he stayed in the reserves and he was in a transport squadron, they fly in C-46s back then, but he was flight engineer, flight mechanic in those days.

And so I've been around the Air Force growing up

in that kind of an environment airplanes my whole life. Yeah that's that's what

I know.

And so in 1960 they moved the squadron from Miami International down to Homestead Air Force Base

south of there.

So we moved down to that part of the county.

And Homesteaded originally was a bomber base. They had B-52s there and then

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