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White to move and mate in two #394 - you go Ukraine! [1]

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Date: 2023-08-20

Well now, this is most extraordinary. I was first going to post a piece about evolutionary biology. Then I had decided that Al Gore’s latest Ted Talk was more topical. But then… I saw the lede of a story on DK concerning the transfer of all of Holland’s F-16s to Ukraine. And in one of those really strange twists of fate, it turns out I have skin in that game.

And so… a war story, of sorts. 45 years ago in 1978, this NJ Yank had just graduated from uni (Lafayette College in PA) as an electrical engineer. And I wound up working for Westinghouse Defense out of Baltimore, MD on the F-16 radar as a field engineer. I well remember my first day on the job. They gave me several options where I could be based. The first place was Iran, because we still had diplomatic relations with them up till the end of ‘79. Meh. The next option was Edwards Air Force Base in CA. That didn’t sound too bad. And then yer man says: “Oh, and you could go to Amsterdam”. Now, I was skeptical: “You mean Amsterdam, NY, right”? “No, he says, Holland”. “Jesus, I said, really? Sign me up”! And he said: “OK, great. Nobody else wants to go there”. And that’s when I said to myself: “What’s wrong with these fools”?

So that’s how, at the tender age of 22 in January, 1979, I wound up in Amsterdam. The Dutch aircraft manufacturer, Fokker, right next to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, did the final assembly for all the F-16s in Europe. Since Schiphol Airport was only a stone’s throw away from Fokker, they had built a small taxi-way between there and the main runway at Schiphol. When an F-16 rolled off the assembly line, you could watch it taxi across to the main runway and wait its turn. A 747 would take off ahead of it, after a long run-up, going gradually into the sky. Then you could just barely see the F-16 taking off behind it a minute or so later, and going straight up into the sky after just a few hundred yard run-up. What a sight to behold!

Aside from my main duty of fixing the radar when things went wrong with one of the circuit boards in the antenna (my particular area of expertise), the computer, the digital signal processor, et. al., this then 20 something-year old field engineer used to debrief the pilots, to help us diagnose operational problems they were having with the radar. I was going to tell you a story about that, but even though that was a long time ago, the MIB might still show up at my front door with a helicopter were I to do so (hollow laugh, looks over his shoulder briefly, figures that was a really long time ago. Shrugs).

Anyway, the contract between Texas-based General Dynamics (the manufacturer of the F-16) and Westinghouse was only supposed to last 2 years. But then 2 years turned into 3, and then 4. And by then I had gone native. I can still speak fluent Dutch, not bad for a Yank. So when the contract ended and all my colleagues went back to the States, I quit and hired on as a circuit board designer at a small Dutch firm that provided information systems for Schiphol Airport. Several years after that, I met my eventual business partner in Amsterdam, and emigrated to Ireland in 1985, where I live happily to this day. I’m a bleeding heart liberal now, of course, after all these years living in Europe. I have mixed feelings about having worked for the military industrial complex, but as you can tell, I’m proud of what I did for my country. We’ll leave it at that.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/20/2188502/-White-to-move-and-mate-in-two-394-you-go-Ukraine

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