Riding Shotgun

I had finished a week of temporary duty at Stars and Stripes newspaper in Tokyo and was in the waiting room at Tachikawa airport when I heard my name being paged.

Puzzled, I went over to the counter to find out why.  It turned out that I was being assigned as a courier guard.  I was handed a pistol belt with a holster containing a M1911A1 .45 caliber pistol.

"Um," I said.  "I haven't been checked out on this weapon."  (I'd range fired M1 and M14 rifles, the M1 carbine and even a shotgun, but never a pistol.)  The sergeant whipped out the pistol and did a zip-zap pretend round chambering and said "okay, now you've been checked out."  Obviously I would have been worthless if there had been an emergency because I would have fumbled with the chambering and fiddled with the safety for more than enough seconds for disaster to happen.  Nevertheless, I was now a courier guard.

I was guarding a Marine Corps major carrying a stuffed, brown leather briefcase handcuffed to his left wrist.  He and I had priority seating in an Air Force C-121, the military version of the Lockheed Constellation airliner.  All the passenger seats in that plane faced the rear.  In the early 1960s it was demonstrated that this was a more survivable seating arrangement in a plane crash.  So far as I know, no major airline complied with this idea, but obviously the Air Force did, on a few aircraft at least.  Truth is, facing the rear just didn't feel right, and the scheme seems to have been largely abandoned.

The flight was uneventful, and the major and I got priority exiting the C-121 when we arrived at Kimpo airport near Seoul, Korea.  I was happy to turn in the gun I didn't know how to use.