EXCERPT FROM HISTORY OF THE TWENTY FIRST AIR FORCE/

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warfare gear on hand when they flew into the AOR, and also that some DV's were

showing up over there asking, "Where's my gas mask?", and so forth.  What steps

have been taken to resolve this problem, if any?

Col Cotter:  The people who manage the CRAF program up at MAC... let me go

back a bit.  Probably back in the November time frame, the CRAF carriers had a

civilian lobby group get together.  All the CRAF carriers went to this lobby 

and said they had some complaints.  They wrote a letter to the CINC, and to some

Congressman.  I went to the meeting with all these carrier representatives while I

was at the HQ MAC/DO conference in early November, and listened to their

complaints.  There were a number of them, like, "We're not getting intelligence, or

our chemical warfare gear."  And, once they got to the AOR, they felt they didn't

have enough access to telephones.  So the MAC Plans people put out a classified

brochure for the CRAF carriers, which had things in there like radio frequencies,

divert procedures, and chemical warfare defense ensemble (CWDE) donning

procedures, and they promised to have these CWDE suits at locations in the 

theater.  It probably wasn't coordinated very well;  the AOR was probably not

tasked properly.  So some of the carriers, when they would go in and talk to an

ALCE guy at Dhahran - somebody who's been out there on the ramp for 18 hours

straight, launching airplanes, with no sense of humor left - and when this fat airline

captain who is going to go back and crew rest in Chicago or something like that is

standing there sniveling about his CWDE gear...well, you can imagine that the

ALCE guys may have made some comments off the cuff.  And that upset the CRAF

crews, so they started complaining, which got everything up on the front burner.

But the reality of it was, the concept was good, but it hadn't been implemented

very well...and a couple of these complaints brought it back to the front burner.

Now, everything is generally "fixed."  There are chem bags there, the ALCE

commanders have been briefed to assist these people.  But you can bet...if I'm an

ALCE guy and we're getting hit by a chemical attack - whose stuff am I going to 

pull out first, yours or mine?  (laughter)

Col Clay:  But the theater ALCEs do have a procedure where, when a CRAF plane

lands, they wheel a cart up to it which has the chem bags on it, and a guy gets up in

the plane, briefs the crew, asks if there's any questions, and tells them where their

masks and stuff are.

Col Cotter:  And good luck to you!  As for the DVs...for example, the other day we