James “Jim” E. Lamberson Jr. Security Police, Military Training Advisor, and First Sergeant, USAF-Apr 1973 to Sept 1996, Retired.

I arrived at Korat RTAAFB, Thailand in the fall of 1974 as a 19-year old who had just finished the Lackland AFB Security Police Combat Training course. It was the closing days of the Vietnam War.

I was selected to deploy to an F-4 crash near one of the bombing ranges. The F-4 apparently experienced an explosion while on a training mission and crashed with the pilot ejecting and the weapons officer going down with the aircraft. Our security team spent 7 days securing the crash site and searching the surrounding jungle, near a Thai village, for aircraft parts and any evidence of the cause of the aircraft crash.

Much of my Korat duty involved guarding alert aircraft that supported Vietnam, machinegun bunkers on the base perimeter, and weapons storage entry points, all while standing in monsoon rains and the occasional nighttime harassment pop shots from the darkest parts of the perimeter fence line.

Another event, one of the scariest in my life, was after the Thai Guards that helped U.S. Security Police secure the base went on strike. One of the augmented Thai AF troops that now worked the back gate with me kept failing asleep. One day I woke him again for the up teem time, and he went nuts, chambered a round and pointed his M-16 at me and said he was going to kill me. Since I had only a .38 cal. pistol, I turned around to walk back to my gate sack in anticipation that I would be shot in the back. It didn’t come, so I called Central Security Control and my Flight Chief and a Thai Air Force Colonel showed up, relieved him of his weapon and he was taken away. The next time I saw the Thai AF troop, he was on the back of a prisoner truck headed to Camp Friendship.

Another time I was on duty at the Checkpoint when I noticed a fire in a building on the Camp Friendship side with locals screaming. I called it in and ran over to investigate when the building exploded into flames. I was able to determine that there was still one person in the building and as I tried to enter, the heat blew me back out. I later learn that this person didn’t survive the fire.

My experiences in Thailand stayed with me my entire Air Force career, helping me to overcome many tough moments as a Security Police officer and First Sergeant. Today, I still have an occasional flashback of the day I thought the Thai Air Force troop was going to shoot me. Another event was the loss of my only son while serving in Thailand. So sometimes I think things may have be different if I where stateside. All in all, I would not change this experience, as it helped this Key West boy grow to be a responsible asset to the Air Force, son, brother, husband, father and friend. I am “Pound to have Served.”

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