(upbeat instrumental music) - Hey everybody and welcome to Behind the Wing, the 315th Airlift Wing's official podcast here at Joint Base Charleston. We're excited to have another edition. I'm your host Maj. Wayne Capps with my cohost today here in the studio Lt. Rashard Coaxum. - Lieutenant's back in the building. (cheering) - Alright, we're glad to have you in here. It's been awhile since you've been on the podcast. - I know, it's been a couple weeks. The last time I was on we were talking with Sgt. Pilch about his trip over to South Korea, supporting the Olympics, that was a pretty interesting episode. - Yeah, glad to have you back in here. So we're gonna have fun today. We have actually no guests. We've got lots and lots of things to cover, but this is one of the first things that we've ever done where we've had no guests. And our news guy, Micheal, and I we were sitting around chatting about it and he said, "Who do you want to have in here?" I said, "We've got so much to talk about "let's just sit down and just hash it out "and talk about what's going on." - Yeah, that's a good idea. It's a little bit different format but we got some new things we're bringing to ya' so we're excited to go over them and bring you what we got. - Yeah, so first I'll just hit some of the highlights. The D-Day anniversary was a big thing for us so we'll talk about that. And we did something pretty cool that's never been done in Air Force and you're gonna be talking about the Air Force's brand new uniform or daily uniform that we're gonna be wearing. I'm excited about getting into that and then we're gonna go into some news and Micheal's gonna hit just a bevy of topics, everything from air shows to a new mission video that was just released, we're so excited about that. We have somebody trying out for the Air Force triathlon. We had a wedding on the C17 and we're gonna close it off and we're gonna finish up the show by talking about our inspection that we finished up last month that we're glad it's over but we're so proud of the Wing. - All those topics are great so we're excited to get to it so let's go ahead and get the rundown going. (upbeat instrumental music) So the first thing on the agenda today is the 74th anniversary of D-Day. Sorry, this is really near and dear to my heart. When I first came into this office several years ago I actually got to go back to Spanhoe, England with five veterans from the 315th Troop Carrier Group and on the ground there were two more, so we had seven total veterans from the 315th and we got to fly over the field that they flew out of 74 years ago this week. It was amazing. - Yeah, that's awesome. A lot of people don't know the history of where the 315th came from and for you to be able to go back and see that with the members who were part of the unit when it was back with the Troop Carrier Group, must have been an amazing experience for you. - So I met some absolutely amazing people and one of the most near and dear people to my heart, Lt. Col. Ret. Dick Ford. I hung out with him for a long time and he would come back to Charleston, stop by, we'd go have lunch and this guy was in his 80s and let me tell you he was jumping off the ramp of the C17. He was running around, he didn't stop the entire time we were in England. I haven't talked to Dick in a long time so I don't know where he's at right now. But I'm telling you one of the most impressive gentlemen I've ever seen. To sit and talk about his stories and if you look under, on YouTube on our YouTube page, there's actually an interview I did with him years back where he talks about getting shot down and he's just laughing about it and having a good ole time. The guy's amazing. - I can't imagine what it's like for him to go back and mentally relive the time, the scenes, the days, the nights, the hours that he spent over there fighting, so it must have been a very interesting thing to get inside of his mind and see what's going on now, these many years later. - Yeah, so when I flew back I was about to put on captain, I was a 1st Lt. and I had all of these guys who were WWII vets, they were flying back to England. They hadn't been back in probably 65 years. As we were about to go over Spanhoe Field we got all five of them up in the flight deck, we're in the C17, and we do a low, slow pass over Spanhoe Field and I look around and there's not a dry eye in the place. There's just tears rolling down and it was probably one of the more touching things I've ever experienced in my career and of course the maintenance guy in the group, he has to stop and he kinda chuckles and he points and he said, (chuckling) "I knew a girl who lived in that house." and everybody started laughing and then one of the other guys nudged him and said, "You know she's either 80 or dead, right?" (laughing) you know and that set the tone for the whole weekend. These guys had such a good time and that history is so near and dear to my heart after that trip, so I'm a big WWII history buff. So this year was the 74th anniversary of D-Day, of the D-Day Invasion. So we were thinking and we wanted to do something to commemorate the people who came before us 'cause I think that's important. And we're in public affairs, we live in a social media world. So I said what if we do a social media reenactment, a full-on social media reenactment as if D-Day was happening on the anniversary of D-Day? As if it was happening in real time, just like live tweeting from an event and everybody, you know of course there was some naysayers and I don't know, that doesn't fit on that platform. - Yeah, we've done some innovative things here in the Wing but this is one, if I'm not mistaken, one of the first time if not the first time this has ever been done in the Air Force. - Yeah, it is the first time that anybody's ever done and I coined the term, a social media reenactment, because I didn't know what else to call it. So we decided, okay, we're gonna do this and we pulled our Wing's history and we did a lot of research and started digging into things with our historian and we pulled some books and we just pulled all of information and we started writing a timeline. And then about a quarter of the way through I saw that the 437th Airlift Wing actually flew out of England as well and they were right down the road from Spanhoe. And they're our active-duty partners here so I thought okay, this is bigger than the 315th. It's a big event, so I reached out to those folks and I said do you guys want to do this and come at it from a Joint Base Charleston perspective, not just a 315th, 'cause it's way bigger than us. - That was so awesome seeing that partnership because if you paid attention to it on social media you saw them, the events as they played out happen on both pages and it's just so interesting to see and it's more than just us telling the history. We wrote it out and scripted it out as the people involved actually speaking and saying what they would have said while the events were occurring and it almost puts you in the zone with them, in the briefing rooms, in the aircraft, coming back, I mean we ran the whole gamut of things that were included in this. - So we actually pulled everything together I got with the 437th and we combined our efforts. So we were gonna have a social media reenactment from a Joint Base Charleston perspective as if we were deployed doing it tonight. So we started out at 7 o'clock and it happened overnight, we flew out of Spanhoe just before midnight. So we started out from the briefing and as if it was really happening. We got so much of a good response and we got so much of a great response out of it we were really excited to see some of the interaction. Our 1st commander of the 315th, his daughter chimed in right away and we posted pictures of him. They actually loved it and it was so interesting to see that and people were posting pictures of their dad and their grandfather and it was just really exciting to see how popular it became and actually the 82nd Airborne, we never even reached out to those folks because we were trying to keep it all about what our mission did, as if it was coming from our people and they started doing the exact same thing so it grew into a whole operation from England to D-Day. And they did the night until they landed on the ground, so I thought it was really cool. - Seeing the pieces play out, the timeline play out it kinda takes away your breath so to say to see actually what was occurring. It's amazing, there's some things that I learned about our unit, the 315th, the 437th that I didn't know just merely by following this timeline of events as it happened so that was a history lesson for me to say the least. - So we wanted to include some real things and one of the things that happened while the paratroopers were getting ready to load the aircraft, one of the guys dropped a hand grenade and it ignited several other hand grenades and several people were killed, it did some damage to the aircraft but not that much. It injured the radio operator on the aircraft and we told that portion of the story just like it happened. You know there's been some conflicting history remarks, some history, some books and accounts that I read said the aircraft didn't take off, but yet we came back with every aircraft that we had. So we had to did into our Wings unclassified, official history and found out it actually lists that in there, it says they cleared out the aircraft, washed it out, and then reloaded it. - Wow. - So imagine that, you're getting ready to go, boom, there's an explosion that kills several of your buddies. And injures the radio operator of the plane, they pull everybody out and take buckets of water, and wash it out and then load back up and take off for a mission. Put yourself in that position and that's the kind of stuff that we try to convey on this social media experiment that we had. - It kind of just gives me chills thinking about it again from that perspective, putting yourself in first person and thinking about smells and you know what was going on, the time of day, I mean it's all there and definitely get back, if you haven't seen it definitely follow our page and go back and reread the events as they occurred as we posted them. - Yeah, so it's available right now. It's the 315th Airlift Wing and 437th Airlift Wing on Facebook and on our Twitter feed as well. And you can go through, start in the beginning and just go through just like it happened. I thought it was, it ended up really well and I liked how we closed it. We ended with all the guys had fresh eggs for breakfast, evidently that was kind of a treat for them so the day they got back they had fresh eggs and it said everybody had a double shot of whiskey before they went to bed. (laughing) You know it's real world, our pilots now can you know respect that after a long mission they'll come back and sit back and have a little drink, unwind a little bit. So I think putting that first person stuff in there was really important and it was exciting to do. - Right, and to all, everyone involved, everyone who was involved with the missions, from 315th and the troop carrier group, the ones that passed away we just want to make sure that we say thank you for your sacrifices and doing what you did. Because we wouldn't be here without your sacrifices of fighting that day. - Yeah, absolutely and when you see it, you know I was really worried, the biggest fear that I had in doing this, because nobody's ever done anything like this, so is it gonna blow up somebody's newsfeed, they're gonna be agravated and unfriend us, unlike us because it's just agravating, just getting in the way. And I also feared the whole War of the Worlds situation. Somebody would kick in and right in the middle and see that one of our planes exploded or was getting shot at, that they would think it was real time, happening in real life, so we were uber careful about hashtagging and branding and making sure we let folks know what was going on. So go back on our social media, it's still out there, we're gonna keep it there for you to read, 315th Airlift Wing and that's three, one, five, A-W. Or four, thirty, seventh, A-W, you can see it, we hope to make it bigger and better next year. It's the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Hopefully we get a whole bunch of partners and do it as one big combined event and I think that would just be absolutely amazing because all the folks who did this deserve this kind of recognition. We wouldn't be here right now if the 315th Troop Carrier Group wouldn't have gone to England and flown D-Day. - Absolutely you mentioned getting other people involved. It would be amazing to see if it wasn't just the 437th and 315th, but you mentioned the 82nd, maybe some other units and we make this thing really big and global. It could be a really, really interesting thing to see from a global perspective how those D-Day events played out. - So thank you everybody for making this social media reenactment a success. We reached 175,000 plus people on social media so far. We were in 43 media outlets across the country and across England, so I would say that's a big success. So thank you everybody for your support. (upbeat instrumental music) So switching gears to our next story we want to talk about the Air Force's newest uniform. This summer the Air Force Chief of Staff announced that we're getting a new uniform. Sgt. Tell us all about it? - Back in mid-May we got a notification from the Air Force Chief of Staff that we'd be switching to a new uniform. For the past few years we've all been wearing the ABUs, before that we had the BDUs, but now we move into what we know, the common terminology is the OCP, the operational camoflauge pattern. We've seen it around for quite some time. The Army has been wearing this uniform out in the combat areas and that's their standard wear for a few years now. But now it's the Air Force's time to move on to this new uniform. - So you know when I see something like that come out, we're gonna switch uniforms, I always say okay why? You know but I don't think that's as important of a question as when and how and what's it gonna do for us because I think it's important to realize what that uniform's gonna bring to the fight. So can you shed some light on all of that? - Yeah, let's take a look at some of the benefits when we talk about this new uniform. It's a uniform that's designed to work in all climates. Regardless of whether you're in arctic areas or whether you're out in the desert. It's designed to work in all climates, regardless of the mission that you're performing. As I said earlier we've got lots of people have already been wearing this uniform. If you've been deployed to the desert you've probably been issued these uniforms already as a standard wear. Late last year they switched, they went from the ABUs and switched over to the OCPs as an optional uniform if you were issued them. So I fortunately had both uniforms when I was deployed last year to the Middle East. It's definitely, you're talking night and day, these uniforms, they're totally different. - So why, you're talking wear and what every body out there thinks out side of the military is look and why. You know for us we want to know how's it wear? How's it fit, what's it like because quite frankly even the summer weight of the uniforms that we wear right now, the ABUs the air and battle uniform is pretty heavy. It's almost a canvas type material, we live in Charleston, South Carolina. (laughing) And in the summer it's the temperature of the sun here. - Yeah. - So when you go outside you feel it in these things. - Oh, absolutely. The first thing I would say is that they're lightweight. To be totally honest and upfront with you, they're like wearing pajamas. They're really nice, the material isn't too heavy, but it's not too light as well. They're great for both cold weather and the winter weather, which is again it goes back to regardless of the climate you'll be able to wear this uniform and perform your operations. - So you're being all professional now in talking about it, but whenever this thing was released I remember you coming in going "the pajamas are here!" (laughing) _ yeah, I loved it, it was great. You know going back to my time in the desert, I had the opportunity to have the Chief Master Sergant of the Air Force, Chief Chief Kaleth Wright visit our installation and this was one of the hot topics for him in the open house that we had with him. And at the time they were still kind of debating and making the decisions on what, how we would go forward with the uniform, but he was wearing it and we got to see it first hand and see how comfortable it was. So if we can wear it in 125 degree heat it can definitely work here in Charleston. - Yeah, I'll take that. What I like about it is branding and some people say the Air Force doesn't do a good job of branding. You know that's been thrown out there because we change so much. We're the newest service and some people say that we're still finding our identity. I think we've found our identity, we're just growing and growing into that identity. And I think that's important and I'm glad to see that they're bringing the patches back. - Yes, absolutely. That was one of the biggest things that I heard about the uniforms, are the patches coming back? Everybody, you know we've all had our unit patches, when we had the BDUs and uniforms before that, are the patches coming back? And with this uniform we'll be able to have our unit patches back and I think that'll bring a lot of the heritage back that we've always come to know in the Air Force and the military. - Yeah, for us, you know we're a heritage oriented environment, even though we are the youngest service, we like to have those patches and for moral if anything, I want people to look at my uniform and say, ah, that guy's a 315th guy or that guy's a 437th guy or he's a 628 person or she does this or she works with the red horse, or combat camera or that person's this unit. It's not just the flyers who get that organizational recognition anymore. So it'll be in the entire Air Force, I think that's a big deal for a lot of people. - Right it is, the history is important. The history is who we were, who we are and definitely where we're going it'll be interesting to see this uniform as it gets into normal wear as we see it coming up here and if we can jump on over to the timeline if you want to head there? - Yeah. - I'm speaking of the normal wear. Starting October 1 is when if you've been issued the uniforms, OCP uniforms, you can start wearing those come October 1, 2018 this year. Moving forward in April next year we'll have the expansion in some of the AP stores. The main stores you'll be able to get them from starting October 1 are actually Aviano, Air Force Base in Italy. Here at Joint Base Charleston, we got Shaw Air Force Base up in the Columbia area. Then McDill Air Force Base down in Florida. So you'll be able to get those uniforms and start wearing them, purchasing them in October but we'll have expanded storage of those uniforms so you can go out and get them. - So if you're on the West Coast you gotta rely on Ebay, is that what you're saying? - Call us up, we'll ship you some. - Yeah, there you go. - But moving forward we've got 2020 is when the boots must be worn. We're switching from the sage greens that we know with the ABUs over to the coyote color. They're a little bit deeper brown than the tan that we've worn before, but they're still a great color, they match the uniform well. And then come April 1, 2021 is when the end date for the ABUs and we all have to be switched over to the OCPs. - So it's a slow roll out? It's an actual slow roll out of this product and that's intentional. I mean to meet the supply of the entire Air Force, you know it's gonna take some time and a lot of money. So Colonel Gilmore, when we were talking about this he wanted us to really hammer home, hey guys, October 1st is when you can wear them. This doesn't mean you're gonna run over to your supply person and get them issued, it's gonna be a slow roll out through the unit through the next couple years. When your old uniform needs to be updated, then you'll go in and get a new uniform issued. So if you've got a good ABU uniform going on right now don't expect to run in and get a new one issued. It's just not gonna happen right now. - Right, since the 100,000 airmen who are already wearing them, we've got to think, we're a big air force, 600,000 plus, 650,000 plus, somewhere around those numbers so we're tying to outfit an entire organization so it's gonna take some time to roll out that's why they're giving us till 2021. - And it's gonna be a slow roll out so if you're expecting to get these uniforms right away it's just not gonna happen, we're gonna do it on a logical timeline and for the air crewmembers out there, so no rompers for you, maybe the next time around when the uniform board meets. (upbeat instrumental music) And now we're gonna switch gears for just a second, we're going to do all things news and tell you what's going on here in and around the 315th Airlift Wing. We've got Micheal Dukes our news director and he's our chief of command information. Welcome to the studio, Micheal. - Thank you. (upbeat instrumental music) - So what do you have for us, what's going on? - We've got a lot going on this month and for the last 30 days we've been very busy. The D-Day social media thing, that kept us quite busy, but along the same lines we just finished our new mission video which ties into that whole heritage piece. - I'm so excited about this video and I'm so glad it just hit the streets. It's called A Legacy of Valor. It's about our historical tie. So probably a year ago we were talking, sitting around, we needed to update our mission video. We show these videos at Chamber of Commerce events, it's our who we are video. It's a five-minute video that we show tour groups and people who visit and we put up there in social media for everybody to share and find out who we are. But we wanted to do something different, we wanted to do something a little bit different. In the past we've always done great compilation videos about the 315th Airlift Wing, and little catchy slogans and phrases and high-end video graphics that come in. We wanted to scale all of that back and do less than a five minute, short video of two guys talking. We said okay, how can you make that interesting? (laughing) And you know if you're listening to us you might like that, but. So we set this at a bar, we have somebody the WWII-- - Two pilots go into a bar. (laughing) - Yeah, I've heard that joke before. But it's all about an older gentleman sitting down telling his story to a younger pilot who's telling the story of the current 315th Airlift Wing and I think it came out really well. You did a lot of work on it Micheal, I really appreciate all the hard work you put into it. But I think you guys are gonna like it. So it's called A Legacy of Valor. You can find it on all of the 315th Airlift Wing's social media platforms. Let us know what you think, make sure you comment and like it and subscribe. - Yes, so that was some of the busy stuff we have been doing. We've got even more busy stuff coming up for the next, well particularly in July we've got two big, big air shows, or actually three that we're gonna be attending. One of them is at the Yeovilton International Air Day. The other one, it's right on the backend of that is the Royal-- - The Royal International Air Tattoo. (laughing) - There you go. (laughing) - It's one of the largest in the world. I went to that last year and I'll touch on Yeovilton, I love those people over there. It's a smaller town in Southern England. We're typically the only Americans who go over there and I've never been to a place where they've been so nice. They're just wonderful people. - They treat you like family. - They really do, everybody there. They brought me cider and it's not what you think, so it's got a little bite to it. - Whew! - So you know they show up and they just have such a good time and they love aviation over there and they're so welcoming. So we're excited to go back and we've got a crew in Niagra Falls right now at their airshow. I just saw it on FOX news and I talked to our ops group and they left this morning, they're already there. So great airshows coming up. We've got a couple more, so RIAT. You were talking about the Royal International Air Tattoo. A huge event, one of the biggest in the world and it's such a big airshow. The chief of staff was there last year, we had such a good time. It is the world's air power and you can see it on stage and we'll be a part of that. - And then I guess the largest in America is the Oshkosh Airshow. The Oshkosh Airshow, Airventure should be fun. The 315's gonna have a presence there so if you're up around Oshkosh, come see us. It'll be a good time. If not, you can certainly watch for pictures, photos and videos of us being there. - And of course if you missed last months podcast we covered our airshow and talked to some of our folks who were out there. - Yeah and next month I think we're gonna take this podcast on the road from England and there's no telling what's gonna come out of my mouth or some of those folks mouth. (laughing) So we will, we're gonna try to do our podcast on the road and have something-- - From the pub? - No, I don't know what you're talking about, Micheal, (laughing) we will not be at the pub. - Two pilots walk into a bar. (laughing) - Yeah, two pilots walk into a bar, that's gonna be the theme of next month's airshow, just kidding. We'll be over in England, so I'm gonna find a person with the strongest British accent and interview them. - Oh yeah, definitely. - You know you can't put subtitles on any, on a podcast. - What are you saying? (laughing) - So it's like southerner hear and somebody with a Cockney accent over there having a conversation nobody can understand each other, so it'll be great. - Alright, switching over to sports. One of our 317th Airlift Squadron pilots, Mj. Jaime Turner who's been very active in the Air Force sports program over the last, boy it's almost a decade now, she actually this week, as we speak she's in California and she's competing in the Armed Forces, the National Triathalon Championship there. - Wow, so good luck Jaime, if you're listening to this. Jaime's a wonderful person and let me tell you she does a lot to represent the Air Force and the Air Force Reserve and she's out there absolutely killing it doing these triathlons and I've seen her run on trips, as I'm sitting in the hotel lobby eating a donut, she'll run by. - She's like the Engergizer Bunny. - Yeah. - Just keeps on going. - So best of luck, Jaime, we're all with you in the 315th and I know you're gonna kill it while you're out there. - And if she does well this week at the National Championships she has a chance to be nominated to represent the United States at the World Military Championships. This year it's in Sweden. - Oh, good for her. - So I'm sure she's really eager to go to Sweden. - So best of luck, Jaime! - And lets see, was it last month was the royal wedding? - Yes. (laughing) - And was it the same day that we had our wedding? - It was. Yeah, so England had their royal wedding and we had ours. - I know a lot of people were following the English Royal Wedding last month. I know Wayne, you were really excited about it. - I was, I was a little more excited than I should be, I admit it. - But we also had our own little, not really royal wedding, but to us it was, it meant a lot. It was two of our captains in our Air Medical Evacuation Squadron who actually got married on one of our C17s out on the flight line. - Yeah, that was a good event. Captain Amanda and Derek Martindale, congratulations. They actually tied the knot on the C17. I thought it was such a cool thing. They did it on a drill weekend so all of their sqaudron mates could come to their wedding and they did it on a C17. I thought it was really cool, I thought it was exciting. So Amanda and Derek, amazing people, we were so happy for them. They actually met on a C17 and then they got married on a C17. So a nice full circle and they did it right there in front of all their squadron mates, as the folks are coming in from work, they just walk out to the C17, they get married and then they walk back to the squadron. It was a cool thing. It was something that you don't see everyday and it was two very good people uniting two families, so it was wonderful. - And we had one of our chaplains actually-- - Perform the ceremony. - Exactly. - Yeah, that was nice. - We also just finished up a unit effectiveness inspection. - Yes, we sure did and you say that three times fast, Micheal. - I had to. - Yeah, I know right. A little bit of editing going on there. (laughing) But we just had our UER, Unit Effectiveness Inspection, it's a two year cumulative process that we get graded by Air Force Reserve Command on how effective our unit is. And the 315th of course came through with flying colors. We worked with some amazing people, it's a two-year process. They gave us a rating of effective, which that's exactly what we want. It means we do our mission and do our mission well. So thanks to our IGI, our Inspector General Office here in the 315th Airlift Wing for doing such a good job of keeping us on track. But really everybody in the Wing was just doing their job and it's not like the old days where we used to come in and polish that rock a little bit before the inpectors came in. - The ORI. - Yeah, where you get in chemical gear. - Operational Readiness Inspection. - Let's go fight a war out in the field, we don't inspect that way because we don't operate that way anymore, so we've got a really good, common sense inspection system now that grades us on the job we do and the mission that we do right now and the 315th came through with flying colors so congratulations to everybody who participated because it's a long, two-year process. (upbeat instrumental music) - That'll work. - And I'll say it before the screen cuts off. - Yeah, exactly. (upbeat instrumental music) Hi every, oh wow, that's loud coming right back out. - A unit effectiveness investigation. (laughing) - Don't say that. (laughing) - The unit effectiveness. - Say that one more time. (laughing) - Infectious investigation. - Long trip. (laughing) (upbeat instrumental music) - You're still hear? It's over.