I stopped by Flight Ops yesterday to see if I could snag some TCA charts verify a couple of noise abatement procedures (a long story and I'll leave you dangling for a few days) and the Facility Commander wandered in.

"Heya, Bill! How you doing, compadre?"

"Hiya, Sir -- que pasa, comment �a va and all that?"

(Jorge's the only Cuban-born RLO I know who speaks French with a Norman accent. 'Nother long story).

After the usual rundown on the usual not-for-publication-stuff, he said, "Mac went to the helicopter exhibit at the Air and Space Museum last week and got a book on the Loach. Guess what? You're in it -- a *lot*!"

"Geez, I guess he finally got it written..."

Okay, flash back to Spring of 1995. I got an e-gram from a bud at Guard Bureau saying that Wayne Mutza was writing The Definitive Book on the OH-6A and wanted some pilot input, pictures, memorabilia 'n' stuff. (The aviation grognards will recognize his name, but for the benefit of those of you whose library card expired right after Internet access got easy, Wayne's an aviation author. A very *prolific* aviation author. Go ahead and Google him -- I'll wait...)

Long story short, I sent him a bunch of pix and patches and pins, he wrote back asking for some stories, I wrote some war stories, he asked if I could find out the final disposition of all the Guard's Loaches, so I compiled a database of where all the NY-NJ-VT Loaches went.

We TINS'ed a bit over a couple of years about the bad ol' days in the Land of the Two-Way Gunnery Range and I scored an autographed copy of his Cobra book. Just before I left for Boz, I asked how the magnum opus was coming along and he replied that he'd changed the main focus a bit, but had been too busy playing with his grandson to get much done. Heh -- the man's got his priorities straight...

Flash forward to 2002. Enter me, back from Boz.

"Yo, Tim -- where'd my desk go?"

"Dumpster. Along with everything else that got trashed when the outflow pipe from the latrines cracked."

Fark. Cardfile, computer and correspondence files.

Flash forward to yesterday. Enter Mac.

"Wow -- I know you; you're the guy who landed on that rock!"

[Frey's Rock is a balancer perched on the tip of a bluff about a thousand feet from the Colorado River. A thousand feet straight *up* from the Colorado River. Visualize an Easter egg atop another Easter egg atop a ketchup bottle atop the peak of your roof and you'll have an idea...]

Heh. Don't take *my* word for it -- buy the book. Or at least rent it while you're flipping through the pages.

Who knows -- if Wayne makes enough on this one, maybe he'll send me an autographed freebie...

/end shameless gratuitous plug.

*grin*