State Militia Tries Hard Not to Live Down a Roguish Handle

It was a hot, muggy morning at the airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, when about two dozen U.S. Army troops filed into a C-130 for the brief flight to Palmerola, an isolated military base that epitomizes the Reagan Administration’s commitment to building U.S. combat strength in Central America.

The four-engine transport, painted in camouflage green, bore lettering that identified it as belonging to the U.S. Air Force. The crew wore U.S. Air Force uniforms. They had been dispatched there by U.S. Air Force headquarters in Panama as part of a regular shuttle service throughout Central America.

But when a captain greeted the troops inside the cargo hold, he began: “Welcome to the Hollywood Air Force.”

The previous week, the captain, Rick Gibson, was a city council member in Baldwin Park and part-time roofer. But on this day, to his collection of amused passengers, he was the Air Force, if not exactly the one the Pentagon--or Sacramento--probably thinks it has.

A two-week trip around Central America with the “Hollywood Air Force,” a nickname for the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing of the California Air National Guard, is an exercise in seeing things that are not quite as they appear.

Mission Sparks Reaction

The mission by three C-130s and 60 guardsmen from the 146th, based at Van Nuys Airport, drew a lawsuit and sparked opposition by state legislators and inquiries from the governor’s office when it was revealed that the Defense Department had ordered them to Panama as a base for duty in Central and South America last month.

The governor is the peacetime commander of what is legally the “state militia,” as the California Constitution still refers to the National Guard. But under the Pentagon’s “total force” doctrine, the Air Guard is changing into an auxiliary Air Force and given day-to-day U.S. Air Force missions around the world.

California air guardsmen on a foreign mission are indistinguishable from the U.S. Air Force with which they serve--except for a patch on their right shoulders showing the state’s symbolic bear outlined against a setting sun.

They draw Air Force pay and fly Air Force planes and spend an increasing amount of time under Air Force discipline. But if they have evolved away from being the “state militia,” they are still not quite the U.S. Air Force and are determined to remain that way.

On duty, they pride themselves on doing their flying jobs better than the regular Air Force, while thumbing their noses at the regulars as humorless and rule crazy.

“The Air Force looks on us as a band of rogues, and sometimes we feel obliged to live up to their expectations,” one officer explained.

Van ‘Requisition’

On this trip, the unit took a van with them in one of the planes. When it broke down in Panama, a “midnight requisition” task force stole the necessary parts from a regular Air Force van.

“Oh lord,” commented one officer, “I think the enlisted men are doing something I’d have to stop if I knew about it, so for God’s sake don’t anyone tell me.”

When the van suffered another breakdown the next night, another regular Air Force van was pilfered.

Officers say they do the same thing with airplanes. “The Air Force has what they call ‘can’ planes, to cannibalize for parts,” one officer said. “We’re just following their lead without a lot of paper work. We’d rather apologize than ask permission.”

At one point, it was suggested that a group looking for dinner while off duty one night take an Air Force van, which they were not entitled to use, into a part of Panama City where official vehicles were not supposed to go.

“Gee, that breaks all the rules,” said the officer in charge while grinning. “Let’s do it.” They did.

Tales of Hell Raising

Given an audience of outsiders, they will ply them for hours with tales about what a wild bunch of hard-drinking hell raisers they are.

There are enough carryings-on to justify this to some extent. At just one after-flying-hours party last month, three officers “mooned” their colonel through a window at the bachelor officers’ quarters, the BOQ. The colonel tried to embarrass a bumptious young lieutenant by kissing him. Another officer, famed for his penchant for eating virtually anything, scooped a tropical moth the size of a small bat off the ceiling and chewed it.

On an earlier trip, the same officer captured a sloth and kept it in his room where it dangled languidly from an upended couch. There were no captured sloths on this trip, the amusement being provided instead by sizable packs of coati-mundis--raccoon-like animals that swarm over the BOQ from the adjoining jungle, begging food. The Californians restricted the handouts to snacks, unlike the Southern guardsmen downstairs who got them drunk on vodka-soaked bread.

The guardsmen do, however, exaggerate. In this, they are as unlike the “Hollywood Air Force” of their own legends as they are the “state militia” at law. They don’t really drink as much as they would have outsiders believe. Those scheduled for flying duty the next day--which invariably begins before dawn under the Air Force schedule--often switch to soda after a beer or two.

The Air Force has rigid requirements about getting the planes into the air on schedule, and the guardsmen take pride in their work. During the two-week tour, the three planes flew 144 hours, covering about 43,260 miles, into nine countries, making 90 takeoffs and landings, a wing spokesman said. They delivered 106.7 tons of cargo and 312 passengers and dropped 84 paratroopers and 1,000 pounds of parachute cargo.

Missions to Countries

They traveled to Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Jamaica, where a series of emergency missions, requested by the State Department, flew five planeloads of cots for flood victims.

Although there was one mission to Managua scheduled, it was canceled by the Nicaraguan government, which the Air Force called a common occurence. Pilots who have flown the mission in the past said their reception by the Sandinistas was cool, but not overtly hostile, and the flight is regarded as routine and not dangerous.

One result of the changed role of the Air Guard, taking regular Air Force missions around the world, has been the rise of a new kind of “Guard bum.” They are men with a unique life style--dropping in and out of the military, an officer on an Air Force assignment one week, a civilian the next.

“Back in the early 70s, the Guard bum was an airline pilot between jobs, trying to pick up some money until he got on with another airline,” said Capt. Jim Mock, 32, of Agoura.

“Now guys are shunning the airlines to fly in the Guard because it’s so flexible. You can turn flights down--just don’t answer your phone. The guy who is deliberately a Guard bum, by choice, is something new, since about 1982-83,” said Mock, who is, by his own and others’ descriptions, a prototype of the new-era bum, along with Lts. “Squash” Kebely and “Biff” Baxter.

The ‘Guard Bum’

A Guard bum, depending on rank, can make $18,000 to $25,000 a year, plus $50 to $100 a day in untaxed expense payments, some of which can be saved by a transient pilot sleeping in cheap BOQs. There is an array of federal programs and classifications under which they can be hired, with somewhat different pay scales, but a captain may get $100 a day, a first lieutenant $75. A sergeant working as a load master gets about $40.

In turn, they become the military equivalent of day laborers.

“They live from paycheck to paycheck,” said one of the full-time staff officers of the wing. “They’re the flight scheduler’s dream. Some guy who has a regular job has to cancel out on a flight, they can always call one of the bums and say ‘tomorrow, pack your bags’ and off they go.

“We have to have the Guard bums to handle all the flights the regular Air Force gives us now. We’re kind of victims of our own success. They check in with the schedulers every day to find out if there’s a flight they can take, or sometimes just come down and hang around the base, hoping something turns up.”

“Something” could be anything from four hours dropping reserve paratroopers in the Mojave to a two-week hopscotch tour to Germany and back.

“I was in England last month. I got back and they called me Tuesday to fly down to Panama Friday. I’ll be in Hawaii next month,” Mock said. “Any of us could make more money outside, but where else would I get that kind of flying?”

The life has other compensations. “We used to have Guard-bum groupies, but the goddamn increased security on the base is keeping them out now,” said Mock, a tall, preppy bachelor who was once an actor in a church-sponsored Christian soap opera.

Others like the ability to take military life on, at least to some degree, their own terms.

“I live where I want,” one said. “They can’t transfer me. I fly with the guys I want to fly with.”

Said another: “It’s nice to be able to tell some guy who’s giving you a hard time that ‘Hey, Jack, tomorrow at midnight I’m a civilian. So long.’ ”

The “bums” argue that they are a bargain for the Pentagon, flying the same planes the same places as regular Air Force fliers, but without the cumbersome load of benefits. “Just because I flew a plane today doesn’t mean the Air Force has to fix my wife’s teeth tomorrow,” as one put it.

“The Hollywood Air Force” and “Hollywood Guard” are nicknames given the 146th--the largest air guard unit in the country--by guardsmen from other states and by the regulars.

It is based partly on the fact they come from Southern California and partly on the frequent use that television and the movies make of their conveniently located base for military scenes, from “Stripes” to “Raid on Entebbe” and “Call to Glory.”

“It started years ago as an insult,” said Gibson, “but we’ve made it our own.”

The guardsmen embraced the label with a vengeance. They designed an unofficial insignia, showing a beer stein-toting California bear reeling drunkenly through the sky in a C-130 that looks like Dumbo. The insignia graces a flag they fly at parties and caps they had made.

For a recent gathering of guardsmen from around the nation, they made a poster of the Hollywood sign, retouched to read “Hollywood Guard,” which was photographed through the legs of four female members of the wing, wrapped in regulation Air Force skirts hiked high enough to reveal lacy garters.

“We dazzled ‘em all,” said Lt. Col Tandy Bozeman, vice commander of the wing.

The high-ranking officers at state headquarters “are not at all fond of the Hollywood Guard label, but the working troops just think it’s the best thing in the world,” Bozeman said.

And part of the art of running such a command, he emphasized, is that the National Guard is the ultimate in the volunteer military--the troops have got to want to belong.