Ron, I was at Clark at that time. We had just past our ORI and were put on alert but not deployed until June when we put an additional four aircraft to Tainan Taiwan with air-to-air weapons and sat on five-minute alert in the arming area between our Victor Alert pad and the runway, when our intel recon birds were transiting the Straits.

I don’t think that President Trump will put up with this sh*t.

My squadron of Phantoms was deployed to Kunsan for an ORI practice at that time. At the actual time of the shootdown, we were having a full squadron (18 jets) nuclear generation exercise on the transit ramp with each bird loaded with a B-43 “city whacker.” Our government obviously decided not to launch us nuclear, but instead had us reconfigure with conventional weapons. We sat alert for a conventional retaliatory strike for a week but were never launched.

We (USAF fighters) had been flying BARCAPS off the east coast of North Korea and along the DMZ following the Pueblo incident. We stopped flying them, without explanation, just a few months before the EC-121 was shot down.

This type of thing was not uncommon during the Cold War. To my knowledge the U.S. never did anything but “protest.”

I have to agree with Dave. After this horrific act of aggression and murder, the USA did nothing. Disgraceful.