 This past December, Major William Booth and I had the honor of flying to Columbia, South Carolina to interview our first Eagle, Colonel retired Walter L. Watson Jr. It was a wonderful experience getting to know Colonel Watson and learning about his childhood growing up in Columbia. He shared some fun stories such as meeting his high school sweetheart Joyce, who later became his wife. We also learned about Colonel Watson's college experience of working hard towards his degree in mechanical engineering. Colonel Watson graduated from Howard University and commissioned in the Air Force in 1971 as an avionics maintenance officer before later becoming a master navigator with over 3,100 hours in F-4s, F-111s and the SR-71 aircraft. He had a very diverse and distinguished flying career in the Air Force and made history as the only African American SR-71 crew member. He continued to have a great impact when he served as the commander and professor of aerospace studies at North Carolina A&T State University. He also served as the chief of the Air Force ROTC Scholarship Branch here at Maxwell Air Force Base, creating and executing one of the most powerful recruiting tools in Air Force ROTC history. The scholarship program he created, the professional officer core incentive scholarship, reversed adverse enrollment trends and saved millions in expenditures. Colonel Watson has received numerous awards throughout his career. In 2004, he was awarded the Brigadier General Noel F. Parrish Award, which is Tuskegee Airmen Incorporated's highest national award for service and impact. Colonel Watson is a true example of striving for your greatest ambitions, even when the odds are against you. So without further ado, please help me give a warm welcome to our first Eagle, Colonel Walter L. Watson, being Watson Jr., being interviewed by my Gathering Eagles teammate, Major William Booth. Sir, thank you. It's a privilege to have you here and it's an honor to have you here. Before we get started, why don't we go back to the beginning? Okay, well, go back to the beginning before you became an Air Force officer. You tell us a little bit about not only your childhood, but what inspired you to become an Air Force officer, sir? Well, I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. I was on the footsteps of Fort Jackson. And once I saw Fort Jackson, I kind of knew I didn't want to do that. So I was kind of directed in another direction. I saw a movie. I might have been about seven, maybe eight years old. And the movie was called The Hunters with Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner. And they were flying the F-86s. And I sat there with my friends and I said, man, guys actually get paid to do this. I would pay to do that job. And they said, Walter, you're not... Well, they didn't call me Walter. They called me by my nickname because anybody who calls me Walter is selling me insurance. But anyway, they said, you're not going to do that. That's not going to happen. And I thought, what do these guys know? Well, they knew a lot. Nicky alluded to having some reading challenges through the first six years of elementary school. I was always behind in reading. They said, hey, this guy's... Probably the best thing he's going to do is press license plates. He's not going to do anything other than that, probably. But what they didn't know is I had a mother who was a second grade teacher. And she said, hey, what are you interested in? I said, man, I like airplanes and I like monsters. So I got all kinds of books about airplanes and monsters. And it kind of went back to that movie because I said, well, I want to build airplanes. So I started building models. I built all of the Sentry series airplanes, F-100s, F-105s, F-102s, F-106s. And that kind of caught me on fire. And so my teachers said, well, we don't think you're going to be able to fly an airplane. Why don't you think about building airplanes? I said, well, that's aeronautical engineering. I think I can do that. I like science and math. And that's kind of where things went. I didn't realize that I had other deficiencies. I had not had an extensive flight physical. But one of the experiences I had was when I traveled with my friends and we would go picking plums, my bag would be absolutely full from the bottom to the top. And I would offer them to my friends and say, hey, I got more than you can have something. They said, no, we don't want any of yours. So I would eat my plums and I would be instantly very sick. And my closest friend said, we don't know what's wrong with you, but all your plums are green. And that's when I started to figure out, I had a problem. I'm colorblind. I could not see the right and yellow color of the plums. I was thinking all the green ones. And I wonder why I kept getting them all and they were picking from all the looms in there. And I couldn't give them away. So those two things alone started to make this big snowball well. One of the things that they also knew is I missed a couple of months of school, first grader. And I had a couple of eye operations. I'm six years old. So I can't be in a pre-med person. You probably understand things like salasions and all the ophthalmology. Used to. But anyway, they did those operations which left me looking like a pirate for about two months because I had a patch on. And they said, well, this guy's got eye operations. He's got reading issues and he's colorblind. He's going to get in other than some experimental thing where they fire him out and he doesn't come back. But that's kind of what happened as an elementary school person. Junior High was being turned on by science projects and I was in the science fairs. And the most significant day throughout all that elementary, junior high and secondary school, the most significant day was around the 23rd of September of my sophomore year. I saw a girl. This girl attracted my attention, not by design. And man, I thought this is going to be great. Then I found out she would not have spent on me if I was on fire. And I tried for a year. I told her all the things that I thought she needed to know about me and she said, yeah, that's nice. You might want to spend your time doing something else. Go find a yard to rake or something. Don't waste your time with me. So I went around telling my friends that this was my girlfriend for a year. I went with her for a whole year. She did not know. I didn't have a telephone number. I didn't have an address. I barely had her first and last name. And she stiffened me off for a year. So that's kind of taking all the way from first grade up through graduating from high school. That's great. Thanks for sharing that story. So obviously we're the intro video and things we've talked about about the SR. But that's a big gap of time. So if we go from the time where you were in high school to the SR, let's kind of bring it down in the middle. I understood you flew the C-130. Can you share some times before the SR about your Air Force life? Sure. My first assignment was to a Lowry Air Force base. Now most of the bases I will mention are going to be closed. So I'm not that old, but most of them are closed. I went to Lowry Air Force Base as an avionics officer. And I told the Air Force we had a thing at the time for those of us who are a little bit older. It was called a Form 90. We called it a dream sheet where you put down what you dream you'd like to do. So I told the Air Force I wanted to go west of the Mississippi and south of the Southern Nebraska borderline. And the Air Force said, that's great. You're going to Grand Forks North Dakota. So I went to Grand Forks North Dakota, which turned out to be a great assignment. I was a maintenance officer. We had two airplanes, two types of airplanes. We had T-33s, which is basically an F-80 with drop tanks on the tips of the wings. We had F-106, which is a very fast Delta Wing airplane. It could do almost 1600 knots. That's the kind of slow airplane. Anyway, when I got there, the squadron commander, Kenneth Olinger, said, well, Lieutenant, what are you going to do for us? And I said, well, sir, if you show me what kind of missiles you are firing and how you want them to work, my job is to make sure that when you squeeze the trigger, it goes off and hits the target. He says, yep, that's what I want you to do. And my subtext was, in order to do that, I really need to fly in that F-106 over there. I need to get in that T-33. And the squadron says, we'll fix him. We're going to put him in a T-33 and we're going to take him out over Devils Lake and make him sick. And I flew with a guy named Jordan Fitzhugh. And he went out and he did bow rolls. He did loops. And then the next thing I heard up front was, woo! And I said, Jordan, are you okay? He says, yeah, I think we're going to go back. So we went back and he made himself sick. So they worked with me. We had a flight surgeon in the squadron. They asked me what flight school I wanted to go to. I said, well, what's the first one you can think of? I said, well, go to NAF school. I said, okay, that sounds good. And so I got an assignment to a maether. I went to maether with the intent of getting into an F-105 or an F-4. But the 105 was the airplane I wanted to get into. I got a C-130 because it didn't have any F-105s in my class. I took a C-130 to Clark. It was a remote tour. It was 15 months. I got to Clark. It was about as cool as it is outside now. And my squadron, the first squadron I was in was an airlift squadron. The 776, I believe it was, Red Lions. Hadn't thought about that in about 40 years. But I learned a lot in that squadron. Most operations were out of Udapow, Thailand, and Karat. And nowadays, when aviators talk about electronic countermeasures, it's usually a switch or a knob that you turn. Well, in those days, it was not a switch or a knob. It was a person. And let me explain that. We had a mission that went into Phnom Penh, Cambodia. And we would fly from Udapow early in the morning. And we would come over at Phnom Penh at about 18,000 feet. And the reason we started at 18,000 feet is they had a shoulder fire infrared missile. It was called, we call them strellas. It was SA-7s for the old heads. In a way, what happens was I'm a relatively new lieutenant. I'm about maybe 24 years old. I'm going to live forever. No missile they designed can handle me. So we get to just 18,000 feet over the airfield in the C-130. And we're doing all of it, maybe 255 knots or so. And the guy says, okay, it's time to configure for countermeasures. Oh, so I'm looking around and a low master comes to me and he says, okay, here's your harness. What's that got to do with me? He says, Lieutenant, you got to put your harness on. He said harness, not parachute. He said, yes, harness. So he puts the harness on me and he has his long lanyard and he hooks the lanyard on the inside of the airplane. He says, okay, come on back here. And he depressurized the airplane and opened the door. He says, okay, here's what the deal is. You and I are electronic countermeasures. We're going to lean out of the door starting at 18,000 feet. And if we see any SA-7s coming up at us, you're going to fire your berry pistol, your flare pistol at the SA-7. This doesn't sound too good. So we start this descent. Now mind you, I didn't tell you the guy that flies in the seat that you fly and in the left seat was maybe eight months older than me about 24, 25. The guy in the right seat was maybe six months younger than me. So all of the officers were under 27 years old. The low master was a million. The flight engineer was two million years old. So they had all the experience. They'd seen everything. So we start down and it's early in the morning and it had rained. And every time you make a bank and turn, the sun would glit off of the water puzzles that puddles down there. And you would think that that was a missile. So the low master fired. And I thought, what's he fired at? I don't see anything but a water puzzle. Well, as soon as he fired, that's when they fired. And then that's when I fired. And then I said some words. And I think some people did some things in the underwear. And we got on down and landed on the airfield there and taxed it behind the revetment and unloaded. We were carrying the Howard serves and all those kind of things that if you hit it, they would go boom. So it's going to be a short ride if we got hit. So we unloaded the stuff there. And then I thought, okay, we got down that way. How are we getting back up? And the low master said, guess what? We get the switch harnesses. You on the opposite side. So we did that back up again. They didn't fire that was on the way out and went back to Utapau. And that was probably my first combat sortie. We had many after that. I was involved in the evacuation of Saigon. And I think I actually flew on the very last day of what's called the Vietnam era. And it's like May 5th, May 6th of 1975. And the reasons that designated date was that today we got the migraines back. And we got to see a lot of different things that way. You have a bomb now called Moab. We had a thing called a big Bertha. It was 15,000 pounds as opposed to 20,000 pounds. And we dropped it at the back of the 130 to make a landing zone to rescue the Marines that were there. So that was C-130 stuff. F-4 stuff is just as exciting. I had some great leaders in F-4s. I flew F-4s first at Homestead. That's why I trained. And because I had been in 130 and had been in a combatic situation, they retained me at Homestead to set Zulu alert. Because the month before I got to Homestead, a guy defected out of Cuba brought a big 21-down initial at Homestead, pitched out and landed at Homestead. So now we had to set Zulu alert at Homestead. But I left Homestead and went to Bentwaters flying F-4Ds there. And then I went to Woodbridge, which is right across the street from Bentwaters. And then I went to Han flying F-4Es. And I had some great people all around. I mean, there are people in the audience I've known since 1971, way before I was flying, people I met at Han. I had some great leadership when I was at Han. I ran into a guy. I always teased him. I told him, his name was Leon Armour. I said, Leon, when you were a freshman in college, I was in the second grade. And he said, yes, that's true, Walter. But we're going to play your racquetball. And I'm going to show you how experience beats youth. And he would beat me in racquetball, 21-2, 21-3. And sometimes he would spot me 15 and beat me 21-16. But he tried to keep us honest and try to keep us with our wings, because as a young captain flying F-4s, you know, you're all forehead and no real thought. You just go out and as much speed you can get, you go do all kinds of things. But I had a good experience at Han. And then the Air Force said, hey, we'll give you any assignment you want. I said, oh, that sounds good. Coming back from overseas, I said, well, I like to have an assignment next to a major metropolitan area. And they said, well, we got Luke. That sounds pretty good. We got Las Vegas. And they said, we got this basin in New Mexico. And I said, well, is it near a major metropolitan area? He said, well, it's not too far from Albuquerque. I said, well, that sounds great. I like to go there. So I took an assignment to Cannon Air Force Base. And it is, it really is next to Albuquerque. But you have to have the wings all the way folded back at 72 degrees, doing 600 knots. And you're only about maybe 12 minutes away. Otherwise, it's about four-hour drive. But I flew F-111s there. I met a guy and flew with a guy. His name is Gordon Geedy. Got it? Gordon? Gordon. Yes. Gordon Booth was my next door neighbor. He was one of the guys on my flight. They told me he had a little boy. He had a big head. Nobody likes him. He's the worst. He had a big head. But I flew 111s there. I met a lot of guys who I would find out later, fly with later, fly over later, who did a lot of great work for this nation. The F-111, yesterday one of the eagles asked me, what's your favorite airplane? And my answer always back is for what? If you want to haul stuff, see 130. If you want to do air to air, F-4E. If you want to carry 2,000-pound bombs at night at 200 feet above the ground, do a Mach 1.2, F-111. If you want to go face the enemy and look them in the eye with impunity and not have them be able to do anything about it but hold their ears, then the SR-71 is it. So each one of the airplanes has something special about it. But the 111 community is a very small community because we really only had like four bases, not Cali and Nellis either. Cannon, Mountain Home, Upper Hayford, and Lake and Heath. That was about it. And I had never done the back-to-back thing. If I was at Cannon, I didn't go to Lake and Heath back to Cannon and then to 12th Air Force or something. I never kept a job. And I always changed going someplace. And that was hard on the family. My daughter had two states, three elementary schools in two countries in the first half of first grade. So she had to be extremely flexible, extremely flexible. But that kind of brought me up to the SR-71. It's a great transition. I couldn't kind of script that better. Hey, so talk about now the SR. When we had our interview, I thought it was pretty interesting. We talked about the application process. This is not your standard pilot qualification process. It's something different. Would you mind sharing with the audience? The way it came to me, I was in the standardization evaluation eye-wizzle, the wing director of operations, Steve Pzak, came and said, hey, we just got a message. The SR program is looking for folks. We have three guys on base that they're looking for. We're looking for somebody who's got at least a thousand hours jet time, hopefully some combat time. Walter, will you be interested in applying? And I said, well, come on, Pzak, let me do some research and find out what's going on. Well, just so happened, that particular day, I had an Air Force magazine on my desk and I was flipping through it. And I saw a guy named Bob Coats in it. And I had flown at Han, Air Force with Bob Coats. So I said, let me call out there and talk to Bob. So I called Bob and said, hey, Bob, they asked me to consider applying for this program because I was also considering applying for test NAB program. So Bob Coats said, hey, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you want something here, you can get it. If it looks like gold, it is gold. And I said, well, Bob, I think I'll consider that. And then he said, but don't take my word for it. Talk to Tom. Well, Tom was another guy who had been my roommate and Air Force at Zera Gosa. So I called Tom up and I said, hey, Tom, tell me about this interview process. And he said, well, you can handle it. And I said, well, okay, Tom, it's only going to be a couple of hours maybe, you know, like a regular flight physical. You know, talk to a couple of guys. He says, no, flight physical is three days. I said, three days? He said, yeah. I said, what can they do to you in three days? He said, well, you really don't want to know right now. So I said, okay, I'll do that. So I went out to take the interview. And I spent the first three days in the hospital. Now for those of you who account, you have nine openings in your body. And for those who want a pressure suit, I know that they put things in those openings that didn't fit. At least that's what they did to me. They did the little thing where they put the probes on your head. And the technician told me to relax. And we just want to see where your brain waves are. And it was a cool day in Northern California. I didn't relax. I went comatose. I was asleep. And the person shipped me said, no, we don't want you to relax that much. So they did that. And then they did the blood glucose tolerance test. Where you get the little ball of what looks like Dr. Pepper that is basically 99% sugar. And then they take blood for the next three hours. You look like a junkie when you come out. I had to explain that when I got back to Beale. You know that I had not turned over a new life. But that was part of the process. They did that first before you did anything else to see if you passed a physical. And I passed a physical. Then came the simulator. And what I would call stumped the dummy. It's like you get in a cop that you've never seen before. There are things that I've been, by that time, I've been through five airplanes. I thought, well, it's not going to be anything you can show me in here other than a cosmic laser or something like that I've never seen. But most of the stuff I recognize. And then when it got to the reconnaissance system stuff, I've never taken a picture like that. That kind of stuff. That's somebody else's thing. But the biggest thing that they were looking for is flexibility. How flexible are you? The third part of the interview, I think, and there's probably a couple of astronauts in here. I think there are fewer SR guys than there are astronauts. And as a result, we had to be able to get along with one another. Because a lot of things we were doing, the only people we could talk to was the ones in the group. And because we operated out of three locations, Beale, Milden Hall, and Kadena, often there's only four of us. So there's something going on. We're going to talk to that group. So they want to see if you compatible. So that was a week-long process. At the end of the process, they don't give you an answer. They say, go back to your base and do the best you can. And if you change your mind about coming, let us know before we give you an answer. So I went back to my base. And unfortunately, when I went back to our base, we had to deploy. And I went to Egypt. So I was gone for about a month and a half. And I did not find out about being selected until I landed back at Cannon. And that was a strange day. Because when I landed at Cannon, my wife and daughter and son were out at the runway. And we were taxing in. And I saw my wife. But I didn't know who that girl was that was with her. Because she was taller than my wife. When I left, she was shorter than my wife. And when I got off the airplane, my wife came up to me. My daughter, my son came up to me. And the squad commander came up and said, hey, Walt, congratulations. Welcome back. But you're going to be leaving in a month and a half. Go to the SR program. So that's kind of how it happened. So then you joined the SR program. I know you had a good amount of missions there. But would you mind sharing with the audience perhaps a memorable one or perhaps your favorite? There are two areas that come to mind. I have a memorable one in Southeast Asia area. And of course, I had one in the Middle East. If you have followed, there's a series of books out, one called Sled Driver, one called The Untouchables. If you've read anything or know anything about those books, my friend Cedar and I flew in El Dorado Canyon. El Dorado Canyon happened April 14th, 15th, 16th of 1986. And it was as a result of a bombing done by Libyan factors in Berlin. And President Reagan decided to make a statement to Moammar Gaddafi. And Brian and I flew three consecutive days against Moammar Gaddafi. And I say that because to our knowledge, there's not been another crew that's ever done three consecutive days. And what that really means, it doesn't mean you go out and fly. That means that what Brian and I had to do was prep the airplane for the primary airplane. They would take off. We'd get an out-of-air plane, take off behind them. Very seldom do you have two SRs in the same airspace at the same time going in the same direction. That's very rare. But that mission required a lot of coordination. There were so many tankers because the French denied us the ability to go over their territory. Not so bad for Brian and I, but terrible for F111 guys who are cruising at 500 or 600 knots. At 17, 1800 knots around Spain and we're there, you know, across the rock of Gibraltar and we can be in the Mediterranean in just minutes. But Brian and I had been talking about, okay, what are we going to do when we get there? And we've had, like, Nikki's folks, the intelligence folks, said, hey, here are all the missiles that are there. And one of the intel guys said, but we don't think they're going to shoot. I think, where did this guy come from? We just dropped 2,000-pound bombs on him. You don't think they're going to shoot? Where did that come from? So Brian and I took off that morning. We hit a tanker just off of Land's Inn and we accelerated to Mach 3, checking the airplane out, make sure it could do what it's supposed to do. And then we let down over the Mediterranean. The typical SR-71 profile is you're at 80,000 feet. The tanker's down to 24,000 feet. He's going as fast as he can go. And we're going pretty fast at 80,000 feet. So we got to slow down from our best altitude down to not so good altitude, 24,000 feet. And now we're going as slow as we can go behind the tanker. So we are pulling up behind the tanker. And my job, at that point, is to get us behind the tanker to rendezvous with the tanker. Once we get there, then my job switches to being two things. One, fuel management, making sure that when we get to the end of the refueling track before, and to cheer Brian on. Because I'm going to hear all kinds of, how long? How long? How many more minutes? And I always tell him in the convo. I said, you just got a little while left. Just another 1,000 pounds, Brian. Another 500 pounds, Brian. Another two pounds, Brian. Okay, hold on a second, Brian. I've got to have some butterscotch pudding here. And I'd have a little bit of butterscotch pudding and get myself rehydrated and I get back with Brian. But when we got onto the tanker, you know, I'd heard some HF traffic, wasn't really for me. But every time we pull up the tank and hook up, kick us off. What is this? Pull up, kick us off. And Brian says, what are you doing? I said, I'm not doing anything, man. That's what are you doing? He said, we can't stay connected. So finally the tanker gives us a code to go to their HF frequency and they had this urgent message for us. And I said, it's got to be something earth shaking. And the guy came on the radio and he said, hey, call sign blank at the blank. Be aware there's going to be missile activity and they're going to shoot at you. I said, boy, that guy's really smart. He's really smart. I said, Brian, what did he say? I said, they're going to shoot at us. He says, that's all. I said, that's all. He said, are we going? I said, yeah, we're going. Doesn't matter. We're going. So we pulled back onto the tanker filled up and Brian and I did our checks and we started climbing to 80,000 feet and accelerating to Mach 3. And now Brian and I already knew that Mach 3 was going to be the slow limit. That was going to be the slow limit. And as we approached Tripoli, you know, Momar and his boys gave us all the signals that, hey, we see you. And then the next signal was, we see it. We're looking at you. And then the next signal after that, we see you. We're looking at you. And here comes your birthday gift. And I thought to myself, this is my daughter's birthday. These clowns, there's something wrong with them. I said, Brian, Mach 3 is not going to be good enough for them. We do Mach 3.2, 3.28, whatever it is. It doesn't matter to me. This is as long as we can make that turn. And they tried to try to end our weekend. That didn't work. The sad part about that is below, I lost two friends. One, the guy across across the desk from me in Stantaville, I named Fernando Rebus. And he was killed along with Paul Lawrence. Those are the two guys who lost in that mission. The other mission was not as bad. But Brian and I did that three times. And it really made Brian and I a team. Because I grunt, he knows exactly what I mean. He whines, I know what he means. But Brian and I wanted to fly over places that we have been before. We flew over the place where he had been shot down several years before. We flew over that place. And we flew over the place where we dropped the 15,000 pound bomb over the island of cocaine. And I could look down and still see the big spot where he had dropped it several years before. That was in Southeast Asia. We were going pretty fast there. The airplane, a lot of times people ask me, how fast can the airplane go? And most of the time, I'll say, well, very fast. And they say, well, were you looking at the speed? So yeah, we might have been looking at the speed. But if we are concentrating on defeating the missile, you know, the speed is good, but we're more concentrated on defeating that missile. Thanks for sharing that. You're welcome. Let's move on to now pass your Air Force career. So the legacy that you left behind, not only for the community here in Maxwell, around the Maxwell area in the River Region, has been significant. And so can we talk about some of the time that when you're here working in ROTC, but also when you work with the Tuskegee Airmen and you work with the kids in your local community in South Carolina? My path to Maxwell was through North Carolina A&T State University. They're known as Aggies, not to be confused with the one out in Texas. But North Carolina A&T is a very distinguished historically Black University. They are known for their engineering school, among other things, engineering and accounting. Those are there too strongly. I was a PAS at that detachment and the kids there, they were highly refreshing because most of them really wanted to be Air Force officers. And we had to jump a lot of hurdles to help them. And I was willing to do that because I said, hey, I was just like you, but it's been a few years. And I know the challenge of getting ready for the AFOQT, trying to pass the physical. My wife said that I had a bias and I have denied this for 30 years. She said, you had a bias toward the people who were in engineering. And I said, no, I didn't have a bias toward the people in engineering. I just told people, if you're in engineering, you are right. That's all I told them. But in all honesty, I would tell people, you know, in the Air Force or any military organization, you know, your academic major might be important, but your leadership ability, your character, your integrity, is going to be the most important thing people see. They won't see your department that says BS, W-E-M-E-C-E-I-E-E-I-E-L-O. But they will see your character, they will see your leadership. And sometimes they will say, I don't believe that. I said, well, I'll tell you what. What's Colin Powell's academic major? And they would guess, well, he's an astrophysicist. He's a nuclear researcher. I said, no, he's a genealogist. He studied rocks. And he's not dumb as a rock. He studied rocks. But he's got great leadership skills. And that's what the military is looking for. We helped the kids move there. I was very proud that at that time, I had a discussion with a four star, and we were trying to get black folks into aviation. And I said to him, I said, you know, we need to do something different. And he said, well, Walter, you know, I don't understand what you're saying. I said, well, sir, real simple. This is 1992. I said, 1992, you have the same number of black pilots as you had in 1942. Five. Lemuel Custis, DeBow, Davis, Ross, and Roberts. This was the first five. I said, you have five black, second lieutenant pilots out here in the Air Force. And all of the 10,000 fires by black, second lieutenant. And I said, you need to, we need to do something to encourage to let the world know that we're receptive. Because the last time we had a thousand black pilots was World War II. 1996 Tuskegee, Maryland. And that's when I started to learn a lot of them. I met B.O. Davis. I met Lee Archer. I met Roscoe Brown, the first black guy to shoot down a jet in combat. But when I left A&T, the things that I'm most proud of are those guys and girls who graduated from A&T and took a commission. Now, I have to take some beatings about that because I have to bring this up. I don't mean any disparagement to Aggies. But I was trying to follow a biblical mode and you send your very best to help the people who need the most help. So I told my wife, I said, I want my daughter to be an Aggie. I'm a Howard graduate and Aggies and Howard rivals. So we're going to send our very best to help the Aggies out. So we're going to send Alexandria to A&T and have her help them out. Alexandria went to A&T. She graduated with honors for the degree in industrial engineering and she was the detachment commander. Now, she will tell you that I pulled a mafia deal on her. She said, Dad, I don't want to be an ROTC. And I said, okay, Alexandria, you don't have to be an ROTC. And she said, well, Dad, I want to live on campus. I said, we only lived about five miles from campus. So I said, Zanny, you can live on campus if you try ROTC for one year. And she said, well, what if I don't do that? I said, well, your brother would be your roommate. And she thought about it for about a nanosecond and she said, I'll try ROTC. And she did well in ROTC. She got an undergraduate degree in engineering and a master's degree in engineering from North Carolina A&T and she was a die-hard Aggie. To my chagrin, I have to keep reminding her, she was sent there in a biblical mode where you send your very best, help the people who need it the most. From A&T, they offered me an opportunity to come to Maxwell to run the scholarship program. And at that time, it was very difficult to recruit. This is prior to 9-11. The economy was booming and everybody was watching LA law thinking that they were going to graduate from college and move to LA and make six figures and dress nice and work for about 15 minutes a day and then be in the bars in the evening. And we kept telling them, that's not kind of how it works. So when we came to Maxwell, my job was to find what kind of programs, things we could do to enhance our opportunity overall and what kind of things could we do to help the eight HPUs that they had host units at. And I said, well, in the final world, we had a term called dance with Hu Brungman. And they said, well, what's that mean, Walter? I said, well, the kids who are going to be juniors have committed to being in your program. And those are the kids you need to invest your money in. So we came up with the POCI, a professional officer course incentive scholarship. So we paid partial scholarships to those kids who were in their junior year of college. That helped a lot. The enrollment boomed for the people who were going to get commissioned. I did that for about a year and a half. And then I got to be director of operations. I had about 885 junior ROTC units from, well, they were all over the world. And then of course, the operations for the about 130 college units, about 10,000 cadets across the nation. It's hard work because it takes a hard work because most people say, every general I met said, I need some more second lieutenants. And I said, yes, general, you do. And they said, well, but I can't afford to have field training here. I said, you know, that's tough. You know, last time I checked, you know, no disrespect. But I haven't seen the Air Force go out there and hire a general off the street. We grow them. So if you don't have a second lieutenant, you don't get to have a general. And one of the generals looked at me like I was crazy. I said, yeah, I hadn't thought about it that way. I said, yeah, that's the way to go. He might have been an Aggie. But anyway, I had as much fun as I could do here at Maxwell. And then it became time to let somebody else have some of that fun. And I had gone for the interview and I had come back here and a friend of mine called me and said, hey, do you know your high school junior ROTC units coming open? Would you be interested in going? And I said, you bet. Now, what I told you back in the green room was how I got to Columbia, South Carolina. I had been interviewing in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Durham. And I came home and told Joyce, I said, hey, I looked at a great house in Durham just outside of Duke University. And I looked at a great house up off of 66 in Washington, D.C. And I was thinking about a house in Atlanta. And Joyce said, oh, those are great. Those are outstanding places. And she said, you can build that house in Washington, D.C., you can contract that house in Durham, or you can discuss that house in Atlanta. But you're going to be paying for a house in Columbia, South Carolina. And I said, well, let me think about that a little bit. And I said, all right, I get it. My wife is a daddy's girl. I didn't realize that. And so we ended up moving back to Columbia, South Carolina. My goal was always not to go to Columbia, South Carolina for a number of reasons. Primarily my mother-in-law lived there. And that was the reason why I went to South East Asia. They offered me a job at Shaw. And I told the guy, my mother-in-law house is 23.8 miles from Shaw Air Force Base. If you send me to Shaw, I'm going to wish I was dead every Sunday. But if you send me to South East Asia, they can only kill me once. But anyway, we moved back to Columbia. And I went to my high school as a senior aerospace science instructor. That was almost his hardest combat. The high school had really changed, really changed. One of the teachers, actually the assistant principal that hired me, I had known her since I was 14. And she called me by my nickname. And she only called me that. She used to call me Colonel Watson. She called me on the phone. She called me by my nickname. I knew I was in trouble. She says, Colonel Watson, I need to talk to you. Oh, that's administrative stuff. But if she called me skip, oh boy, it was going to be a long talk when she was doing the talking. I was doing the listening. Because I had known her for some years. But the kids there were really excited about being in the program. We went from having a daisy printer and one Apple computer to having about five laser printers and maybe seven or eight Macs. I knew we didn't have Mac. We had PS1s, computers. The kids started earning scholarships because I convinced them not to wait until their 12th grade year to take the SAT. There probably one, at least one commissionee in this room, perhaps, out of that program. There were five that went on to get commissions. Three in the Air Force and two in the Army out there somewhere. We found out that the kids, I had a discussion with a general. His name was, I think it was D.W. D.O. We had a discussion once. He said, come by my office. I need to talk at you. So I said, I'll go by. Yes, sir. Went by his office and he said, I need some feedback. I said, okay, what is it, sir? He says, Tuskegee Airmen, talk to me about Tuskegee Airmen because we want to give some information out. Now, he had already had a fantastic program out. If you've probably seen these ads, Marquis with the Tuskegee Airmen talking about the things they did, those are powerful ads. And I think that was his idea. And he asked me, what impact would you think that would make? I said, you know, once we tell the kids what it's about, it's going to make a tremendous impact. He said, what do you mean tell the kids about it? He said, don't we already do that? I said, we kind of sort of. He said, you go talk to those ROTC guys, junior ROTC guys and see if you can work something so we can get the information out to connect the ends. And we did. And I respect General Deal for that because he didn't have to do that. That was a whole different reach out to make that happen. But the long story short of that, that directed me another way to get the word out. So after some machinations trying to figure out something, we created a Tuskegee Airmen award. Most of the awards for cadets are for seniors and juniors. No freshman, sophomore. So we created an award for Tuskegee Airmen, and it covers all 986 units, no, 930 units at that time, over 100,000 cadets. And by this time, probably one and a half to two million cadets have been exposed to that. And that's all about leadership, perseverance, and integrity. Really it's about the Air Force core values, integrity first, service for the South, excellence in all we do. That's what that was about. And that work made all the difference in the world. I did that for about a decade and a half. And I never was so busy in my life. My wife said, luck you didn't stop traveling. I said, well, you know, we live, the school is bounded by four major little roads. And most of the kids have never been out of the county. I said, you know, if you haven't seen an airplane, haven't been in an Air Force base, or haven't been in a museum, hadn't come here, met a general, you know, you didn't know what it's like. And I made it happen. I said, I'm going to take you places. And I told the principal, I said, I'm going to get in your pocket. And he said, what do you mean? I said, you got $5,000? He said, not in my pocket. I said, but you got it in your budget. And we would move it legally to transportation for cadets to go to the Tuskegee Garmin Convention. And I said, now it's not going to just be kicked back and have fun. You're going to do something when you get there. And they would present their awards and the Tuskegee Garmin would support them. And they would be able to make an impact. Thanks for sharing that. This concludes the formal interview. So what we'd like to do now is we'd like to take about five to six minutes and open it up to questions for Colonel Watson. Go ahead. First question is in the back. Colonel Watson, I read that a previous eagle was your front-seater. What stories did he tell about you? Oh, geez. What stories are true or what stories did he make up? Any stories, sir? Any story. Well, fortunately, he is in the audience. He's over here to my right. And the best person to ask about that is Brian Shule himself. I think I have a story or two I would like to share at this moment. Having just found out I flew with a man that was colorblind. I'm not too happy about that. All the missiles are the same color. Walter is a very humble man. And he would not tell you this story. And I thought of the many stories I could share with you today, all of which would embarrass the hell out of him. And I will forego those to tell you a story that I think sums up the real character of this man on stage right now. He told you a little bit about our Libya missions in 86, but the part of the story, he did not tell you. I've always found most interesting. I witnessed history that day. We're sitting in the hangar, cranking the jet. The whole world is holding its breath. President Reagan has just bombed the hell out of them. People don't know if we're going to start a whole other war in the Middle East. And the SR-71 is going to fly over the line of death over the Gulf of Sidra. Gaddafi said I will shoot any airplane down. It penetrates our airspace. Here we are cranking. We're pretty nervous. It's all calm out. Get every tanker in the world out there deployed. And Walter has a very sophisticated rear cockpit back there. We have a little R2-D2 navigation system back there that tracks stars in broad daylight. It's called an ANS, an astro-nursial nav system. And it has an atomic clock. Those of you that are navigators here, an atomic clock to accurately fix your position at 90,000 feet at 2100 knots. It's kind of handy. That clock is never wrong. And we're cranking. And I used to kid Walter on his knee board. He had three watches. He had like a little Casio thing. And he had like an Air Force watch. And then he had like a stopwatch. And I go, Walter, it's not an F4 now or something. What are you doing? He goes, trust me, I have a system. And I had learned by then to trust this man because he did have a system. And I didn't interfere with it. And we're halfway through the crank sequence. And he said, the clock is wrong. And this had never happened in the history of the SR-71 program. And the commander's there in the hangar. We got all these locky people there helping us. And the commander goes, what do you mean the clock is wrong? Clock can't be wrong. Never wrong. Walter says, it's off a few seconds. Commander looks at me like, talk to him. If Walt says it's off, it's off. He says, that's never happened. They took the whole world's holding its breath now. We're on hold. They take the R2-D2 out, put it on the bench. Six minutes later, they come back and said it was off. It was like six seconds off. I was in awe. The commander, looking at Walter like, you are a sky god. To this day, I still don't understand how the three watches, but he had a system. Walter would never tell you that story. They saved that mission. We flew three times in three days, and we were very proud to be a part of that. It was little things like that, that a man who's committed to excellence knew his job. Imagine the guts it took at that moment against all odds in the entire face of the program to say, I feel certain it is off. I was always held Walter very high esteem more so than ever after that display of incredible confidence. Walter historically will always be known as the first African-American guy to fly in this program. I will always know him as the best back-seater anybody could have ever had in the squadron. Proud to salute you today, Walter. It's long overdue, and thanks for flying with me. Thank you, Brian.