Radar operators to reunite, conduct memorial at depot

Local News

September 9, 2010

By Bill Robinson Senior News Writer The Richmond Register Thu Sep 09, 2010, 04:00 PM EDT

RICHMOND — From 1963 until 1994, a Strategic Air Command radar installation at the Blue Grass Army Depot tracked and helped train crews of giant B-52 bombers that flew low over Madison County on training missions.

The training ceased when the United States and Russia agreed to reduce their nuclear strike forces after the Cold War ended.

About 40 former members of Detachment 8 of the SAC’s First Combat Group who based at the depot are in Richmond this week for a reunion. About 30 spouses plus other friends and relatives bring the number to around 70, said Emerson McAfee of Red Lick, a Detachment 8 veteran.

On Saturday reunion participants will conduct an 11 a.m. memorial at the depot for those of their number who have passed on, including 19 who were killed during the Vietnam War. The ceremony will take place by the historical marker where the radar installation once stood.

Because the reunion is taking place on the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the veterans also will honor those who died that day, McAfee said.

Among those who served at the depot radar installation and perished in the Southeast Asian war was Henry Dish who was killed in 1968 when North Vietnamese forces overran a U.S. radar station in Laos, about 20 miles from the North Vietnamese border, McAfee said. Dish was married to a Madison County woman, McAfee said, and she and their daughter still live here.

Dish and 12 other unarmed Americans lost their lives in the engagement that is recounted in the book, “One Day Too Long,” by Timothy Castle.

Dish and the others were discharged from the military and were employees of a U.S. defense contractor when they operated radar that guided U.S. air strikes against North Vietnam.

“They knew the North Vietnamese were coming, but believed the attackers could not climb the steep slope to reach their mountain-top radar emplacement,” McAfee said. “As the book title states, they stayed one day too long.”

The radar installation at the local depot contained two units, McAfee said. One American but the other was a copy of a Soviet radar captured by Israeli forces in the 1967 Six-Day War. U.S. military officials would not comment on the unit when it was operational.

Some in Madison County believed an actual Soviet radar that U.S. commandos had seized during a raid inside North Vietnam was in use at the depot, buy McAfee said that was untrue.

Although a copy of equipment captured in the Middle East, it was supposed to function the same as Soviet-made radar used at surface-to-air missile sites in North Vietnam, McAfee said.

The strategic bombers that flew low over Madison County tried to jam the Soviet radar as it attempted to track them on their missions, McAfee said.

Detachment 8 was created in Puerto Rico in 1948 as a “temporary” unit, McAfee said, but it remained in operation for 46 years. It moved to Paris, Ky., in 1960, and to Lynchburg, Va., in 1962 before settling in Madison County one year later.

McAfee, a native of Springfield, Ohio, served in the U.S. Air Force from 1960 until 1984. He was stationed in Southeast Asia for two years during the Vietnam War, but spent most of his service at the radar station here.

Bill Robinson can be reached at brobinson@richmondregister.com or at 624-6622.

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