Hey everybody, I'm Flashy Bay and welcome to an incredibly exciting episode of the Afterburn podcast.

We are in our evolution of suppression of enemy air defenses series, Seed, better known as Seed.

And we're here. I am incredibly excited to talk to two guests that this guys is an honor.

I got Lucky Ekman, I got Gringo Webster.

Two original weasels from Vietnam, both flew and linebacker one and two.

And we're going to hear their stories today as we kick off this series from the start all the way through the future fight discussing Desert Storm, Allied Force, Iraq,

the second time. And again, I'm just excited to have these two. So lucky, let's go ahead and

start with you. Give us a little bit of a rundown on joining the military, your time in Vietnam,

and then what you ended up doing throughout your career.

Okay. I grew up in an Army family, went to a military high school, and quickly decided I didn't want to be a ground pounder. I wanted to fly. Built every plastic model airplane there ever was.

My mom had to dust those things without breaking

them. And then I went on to U-Control model airplanes and I said, I want to go to the

Air Force Academy. And so I did. I went to the Air Force Academy and graduated from there and went

to pilot training with a bunch of real sharp folks at Williams Air Force Base.

And after that, I got one of the two F105s directly out of UPT.

We were only the third class of UPTers to go directly into the F105.

They had sent previously people into the RF101 directly, and all five of those

guys in that experimental class died with the F-101's pitch-up tendency.

So they weren't too sure what was going to happen when they sent us from UPT, but I didn't

care.

I wanted to fly that big, ugly mother.

And so I did, got my first assignment out of, I drove, out of Nellis and went to McConnell, went in, talked to the one commander

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