BACKGROUND of the HISTORY BOOK PROJECT
One of the many subjects discussed at the ‘Mother of all FAC Reunions’ was the concept of putting together a history of Forward Air Controllers in Southeast Asia. Perhaps the beautiful history book published by the Rustic FACs provided the seed of the idea, but as the idea grew so did the purpose of the book. Not only would a comprehensive history be nice to share with our families and friends, but it would also be an invaluable source of information for future generations. Also, should this type of war emerge again in the future, perhaps others can benefit from our mistakes and improve on our tactics and techniques of forward air controlling as we improved on the concepts developed in previous wars.
A working session was held at the reunion to consider publishing a history book, approximately 25 people attended. The outcome of the working session was formation of a representative committee of people willing to tackle the project. We only had time to agree on a couple of ground rules, basically that the committee members would stay in touch by E-mail and that we would use MS Word as our basic computer program. Darrel Whitcomb was to be the committee chairman, but work commitments required him to turn the chairmanship over to Charlie Pocock and Jack Webb. Since the reunion, the FAC history book committee has taken shape with various assignments.
One of our major objectives is to have a ‘first draft’ of the book available at the April 2002 FAC reunion in Hawaii, which will be here before you know it!! If we are going to meet this objective we need to have everyone’s stories in the committee’s hands by the end of August this year. So, please help us by getting your stories and pictures into the FAC History Book committee as soon as possible. Also, please pass the word on to any of your FAC acquaintances.
The committee members are very excited about this project and we hope you are too.