00:00:03JASON BEYER: My name is Jason Beyer, and I'm a graduate of CSUSM (California State University San Marcos). Today's date is Thursday, November 20, 2025. And we're conducting this interview at CSUSM in the CSUSM Library, located in San Marcos, California. Today we're with veteran David Shaffer. This oral history will help preserve the lived experiences of United States military veterans. Please state your full name.
00:00:37DAVID BERNARD SHAFFER: David Bernard Shaffer.
00:00:39JASON BEYER: Your branch of service.
00:00:41SHAFFER: US Air Force.
00:00:43BEYER: The highest rank that you attained.
00:00:45SHAFFER: Captain.
00:00:47BEYER: And please state the war or conflict that was happening during your time in service.
00:00:52SHAFFER: Well, it'd be the Cold War, 'cause I was in Europe in the 1960s.
00:00:56BEYER: So right now we're gonna start with introductions. Where were you born and raised?
00:01:02SHAFFER: I was born and raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado until I was four years old. Then we came to San Diego, California when I was four. My dad worked for Consolidated Aircraft building B-24s and B-32s and all other airplanes thereafter, till he retired in 1974.
00:01:25BEYER: For the years that you were in Colorado, do you remember what that experience was like?
00:01:29SHAFFER: Yes, I do. My dad—we lived on South Cheyenne Canyon Road and the river that came over Seven Falls came down in front of our house in a meadow. My dad used to go out every morning before he'd go to work, and the deer were being forced down off Pikes Peak, and he's gonna pick out a deer that he wanted for deer season and—nope, not that day. So the next day we'd do the same thing, and I'd go out there with him—oh, there's one. He'd shoot the deer. We'd pile in our '37 Ford and go up and go across our little stone bridge into that meadow, and he'd wrestle the deer up onto the fender—bring it back, hanging it up in the garage by its rear feet. My grandfather would come up and he and I would dress that deer all day long. I was a 3-year-old kid. Somewhere in my archives, I have a picture of me at three years old standing by that deer with a wooden gun (laughs).
00:02:28BEYER: When you moved to San Diego, what was life like for you in San Diego? Or the transition to San Diego?
00:02:34SHAFFER: Well, in San Diego we lived in defense housing, and my dad had told me then my mother that he's not coming home from work maybe once a month until this war was over—World War II. So he stayed at Convair—Consolidated Aircraft—24 hours a day, seven days a week, and expected his employees to do the same thing. And he said, if the soldier, sailors, airmen and Marines can live in tents and in foxholes, the last least he could do was stay at work until the war was over. And he did. I very seldom ever saw him. And on VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day)—was my sister's first birthday, so my mother's getting ready to go down and pick him up from work, and we're gonna go out to Balboa Park for a party—for a birthday party for my sister. I was a 5-year-old kid. So we went down there and my dad piled in the car and says, "Yeah, the Japanese surrendered today." So when we got to Balboa Park, I never saw such a party in my life. There were thousands of people hugging and kissing and drinking and having a grand old time. And at first I thought they were all there for my sister's birthday, but I realized they weren't (laughs). VJ Day, San Diego, in Balboa Park.
00:03:57BEYER: Did anyone in your family ever serve in the military before you?
00:04:00SHAFFER: Yes. My great-grandfather was a soldier of the second Pennsylvania heavy artillery (2nd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery Regiment) in the Civil War (American Civil War). His dad and people before him were—well, I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to anyway. His grandfather—my grandfather's great-grandfather's grandfather—was a soldier with the Prussian army fighting with the British in the revolution (American Revolution). And he realized he'd made a big mistake. So he deserted, went over into Pennsylvania and took out a couple letters in his name and blended in in German-speaking Pennsylvania and became an American in that process in the 1700s. But yes, I have my Uncle Bliss, Bliss Shaffer. He was my grandfather's little brother. He joined the Army in 1898 and was in the Philippines. He was a horse soldier, cavalryman. And he was at Fort Bliss, Texas. And when I was a little kid, I always thought they named Fort Bliss after my Uncle Bliss. But I realized later they didn't. Anyway, he got outta the Army in 1928 and did a lot of jobs around Colorado. He had a pinto bean farm in Cortez. He drove the Galloping Goose (railcar) on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad for a while. He drove my grandmother nuts 'cause he was always showin' up at the house with another saloon floozy (laughs)—that she called 'em. Anyway, Bliss, my grandfather, and my dad—and my dad would try to join the Navy, but my mother had taught him to ski and he'd really wrecked a knee. And he always had this trick knee the rest of his life. And the Navy wouldn't take him. He wanted to be a photographer with the Navy. So he ended up getting hired from Convair in Colorado Springs. They sent him to Denver University for a crash course in engineering that took about six or eight weeks—or months, I'm not exactly sure—in 1943. Then we came to San Diego in March of 1944.
00:06:27BEYER: What were you doing before you joined the service? Were you going to school? Did you have a job? Or were you helping the family out?
00:06:37SHAFFER: I had a job. I was a marine engine mechanic, outboard motors and inboard motors on Shelter Island in San Diego. I was a student at San Diego State (San Diego State University). The Air Force wouldn't talk to me until I had a college degree, 'cause I wanted to go to OTS—Officers Training School. So I graduated in January, 1963, then they would talk to me 'cause I could show 'em a diploma (laughs). And by the end of '63, I was a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, but I was too tall to be a pilot, and that's what I wanted to be. I was six-foot four and about 220 pounds. And they said, "Nope, too tall." So I was—I said, "Okay, air traffic control, then. I wanna be an air traffic controller." So they sent me to Keesler Air Force Base in January of 1964 as a Second Lieutenant for tech school for air traffic control. And I finished that along with a TERPS (Terminal Instrument Procedures) certified terminal instrument approach procedure. It would've been my job, if we'd ever had to deploy to a forward airfield, to design the forward airfield to give it to the Corps of Engineers in the Army and also the BCE, the base civil engineers of the Air Force, to build the runway where I had designed it. And in 1967, that Six-Day War, I designed six of them in the Sinai Peninsula for real. But they never used 'em 'cause the war was over in six days. Which amazed me, 'cause I had gotten married the day that war started. I had a wife floating around somewhere in the world, and I didn't know where she'd gone. So after six days, I signed out on leave to go find her. And we ended up finding her. Had the church wedding in Lajes Field in the Azores (Portugal). Now air traffic control officers are required to be shift supervisors in bases that are run by the Strategic Air Command (SAC). General LeMay (General Curtis LeMay) said, "I want all of my shift supervisors and all SAC bases to be officers." Well, it was a good way of getting training to become a flight facilities officer later, like I was at Hahn, Germany. I was a shift supervisor in Lajes Field for 18 months, and then I was transferred to Hahn, Germany as the flight facilities officer. I was the OIC (Officer in Charge) of all the air traffic controllers at Hahn Air Base, West Germany from 1965 to '68. And then my wife—being an Air Force brat, I married the colonel's daughter that I found in the Azores—she didn't want to spend any more time living three years here and three years there, so I didn't go into air traffic control when I got back to San Diego. I had teaching credentials from the state. I started teaching industrial arts and history in high schools here in North San Diego County.
00:09:44BEYER: Why did you particularly choose the branch that you served in?
00:09:48SHAFFER: Well, I wanted the Air Force because I wanted to fly. I was in love with the B-36 Peacemaker, and I wanted to fly a B-36. I just, ever since I was a kid, my dad had—they brought—the B-36s were built by Convair. They came to San Diego. The A model did not have the jet engines on the wingtips, and all of the jet engines were added to the A model B-36 here in San Diego. And it was my dad's job to figure out how to put the—as an engineer at Convair—to figure out how to put those jet engines on an airplane that was already built. There was two ways of doing it. Either take the skin off of the wing and do all your work and then re-skin it, which meant you had to re-stress the wing—and it was very time consuming and expensive. Or, find somebody small enough to get out in that wing and do the work. So in the summer of 1951, I believe it was—50 or 51—he and two other engineers advertised all over the country for what we today call little people. But in those days we called 'em dwarfs and midgets—not to be derogatory, but that's what they were called. He hired 300 of them that came to San Diego that could get out in that wing and add all the hardware and tubing and brackets and everything to mount those jet engines. At one time, San Diego had more little people—midgets and dwarfs—than any other city in the United States. They were well thought of, they were well paid, and they were very valuable employees even after those jet engines were added to the A model B-36, because there's a lot of places in building an airplane that an adult six-foot tall or five-foot eight and above can't get into to do the work. So they were very, very valuable employees and very well considered. They were loved.
00:11:59BEYER: So we're moving on to your early military experience. What do you remember about your first days in the military?
00:12:07SHAFFER: Well, my first days in the military were in officers training school at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. And it's basically what I thought it was going to be. They're not interested in my opinion. They just—I'm to do what I'm told. And so I did. I tried to cooperate the best I could. I made it through there. When our upper class graduated and got their commission as second lieutenants, on a Saturday we got all called together—we're lower classmen. They said, "Monday morning you're gonna be upper classmen, and what we're gonna let you do is go to the OT club"—the officer trainee club, just like a regular officers' club where they had beer and so forth. Now we're all college graduates. We're all 23, 24 years old, and we haven't had a beer in months, so we went in there and within two hours there wasn't a sober person in there. And all at once in the front door come all our training officers all upset with us. So we're out there mowing the lawn—by hand, mowing the lawn. Years later in Germany, I ran across a colonel that was one of the instructors there. And I told him about that. He says, "Oh yeah, we sat out front in the car, and we called the bartender once in a while. Are they ready yet?" It was a big setup, but I thought it was funny, anyway (laughs).
00:13:34BEYER: What kind of training or schooling did you complete?
00:13:37SHAFFER: Well, the schooling was at Keesler Air Force Base. It was basically—teach you how to be an air traffic controller. The Air Force was the only one at that time that used the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) written exam as an ATC, air traffic controller. The Navy and the Army had written their own—why, I don't know. But we went up to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City and took our final exam in the FAA headquarters there in Oklahoma City and then flew back to Keesler. And then after we got back to Keesler, we worked on this TERPS, this terminal instrument approach procedure that officers only are responsible for. I was the only TERPS certified officer on the air base there in Germany. But I worked with a BFS TERPS man from—the BFS is the German FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), the Bundesanstalt für Flugsicherung (Federal Institute for Air Traffic Control). And he and I would design all the—and would change all of the instrument approach or departure procedures for Hahn that needed to be changed, like holding patterns and so forth.
00:14:43BEYER: Do you recall any instructors or leaders who had a lasting impact on you?
00:14:49SHAFFER: Yes, I do. My sergeants. I learned more on a shift there in the Azores from my E7s and E6s and E5s that I worked with than I ever learned in officers training school—other than one thing in officers training school that I really enjoyed. Every week we had a little film done by Jimmy Stewart. And Jimmy Stewart was a general in the army. He was a bomber pilot in World War II, and he would make a film on officer responsibility—how we were supposed to behave as officers in the United States Air Force. And I really looked forward every week to sitting down and listening to that 20-minute or 30-minute film from Jimmy Stewart. It was really great.
00:15:44BEYER: Were there any promotions or milestones during your early days of service that you'd like to share?
00:15:50SHAFFER: Well, I was promoted in the Azores from Second Lieutenant to First Lieutenant. And I was promoted from First Lieutenant to Captain in Germany—almost the same time I got married in '67. That was all happening at the same time. And I was glad I made it to Captain, but as a 1634B, which is my AFSC, my Air Force Specialty Code, 1634B meant air traffic control officer, non-rated, no wings, maximum rank, captain. A 1634A was an air traffic control officer doing the same job with wings, maximum rank unlimited. And in 1967, I was trying to get—I was still young enough by about three months—to get into pilot training and they were gonna waiver me for my height. But the command that's in charge of air traffic controllers wouldn't release me from my air traffic control duties because it was less than 80% manned worldwide. I was authorized to have 96 airmen and sergeants work for me there in Hahn Germany. And I was lucky if I had 60, because the Air Force could not keep enough air traffic controllers to keep everybody fully staffed. And I understood that, but I lost my opportunity to become a winged pilot. I told them I would go right back into air traffic control if I could just get my wings and be a 1634A instead of a 1634B. And finally I decided to request a release from active duty. So I requested a release from active duty in Germany. My wife and I stayed there for a few more months traveling, around and skiing and so forth before we came home.
00:17:54BEYER: What was the hardest adjustment to military life for you?
00:18:00SHAFFER: It wasn't really difficult. I had a very disciplined childhood. My dad was the kind that didn't tolerate fools very well. So if I acted like a fool, I got notified of the fact. So it wasn't really hard. It was very easy. As a lieutenant and captain.
00:18:22BEYER: What part came naturally or felt the easiest for you?
00:18:25SHAFFER: Well, the air traffic control just kind of was—not easy, but it was comfortable. I liked it. But I would've liked to have flown that B-36. But by the time I got in the Air Force in 1963, all of the B-36s were in the boneyard at Davis–Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. The B-52 had taken over the B-36, but I was really in love with that B-36 from a little kid on.
00:18:57BEYER: So we're moving on to your deployment to Europe. When and where were you deployed in Europe?
00:19:06SHAFFER: Well, my first assignment out of tech school at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi was to Lodges Field in the Azores, Portugal. And I got those orders while I was still in tech school in Mississippi. And I'd grown up in a Portuguese colony here in San Diego. And all my kids and I from the fourth grade on were Portuguese. And one of my best friends could not believe that I got sent to Portugal. He thought that was a funny—"How'd you pull that?" I didn't, it just happened. When I got off the airplane in Lodges Field from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey in three o'clock in the morning, the only people on the airplane were Navy and Air Force personnel for the base, and I coming down the ladder there, the steps to get off the airplane, and there's a string of Air Force and Navy personnel to accept their new troops. And there are 10 Portuguese civilians standing there. And I thought, what in the world are they doing out here at three o'clock in the morning? I got down to the bottom of the steps, they hollered out my name, they all came running over, were shaking my hand and giving me hugs. They were the grandparents, uncles, cousins, all the relatives of the kid that I'd grown up with in this Portuguese community in San Diego. And my Colonel looks over at me. He says, "Come over, stand Lieutenant. You've been here before? How come you know everybody?" And I had to think about it for a minute, 'cause my mother had told all our neighbors that I was being—and they were all Portuguese for that, in that period of time—that I'm getting transferred to the Azores, Portugal. And one of my friends that I grew up with, the only kid in the fourth grade that was not Portuguese, that he and I got to be friends first—when I first went into this school in San Diego—he kept talking to my dad about it. He kept—"How in the world did they do that? Get to Portugal?" But I loved their father music, their folk music that we used to play in school. I loved their food they had. The Portuguese food, their wines. It was just like old home, being in the Azores. I met my wife there. She was a daughter of a Colonel there on the base.
00:21:29BEYER: What stands out most about your time overseas? Moments that were meaningful or difficult?
00:21:37SHAFFER: It was a little difficult with that Six-Day War. I thought for sure—I'd gotten married the day that thing started, and I got put on alert instantly. And I started designing those forward airfields because our 50th tac fighter wing (50th Tactical Fighter Wing) at Hahn had to have a place to go. And it was up to me to tell the Corps of Engineers (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) and the Air Force where was a place that was proper to build an airfield in the Sinai (Sinai Peninsula). And I thought for sure I was gonna end up down there in the Sinai Peninsula. And that was a little difficult those times right in there. But the war was over in six days. I couldn't believe it. How could Israel have taken care of all that in six days? Was just amazing to me. So for those six days it was a little tiring, a little troublesome, 'cause we were dividing up our air traffic controllers to stay at Hahn and most of 'em were gonna go with me down to the Mid East. We were just—and all our fighters were getting ready to go down to the Middle East when the time came to help out. And we didn't get to go. Which is fine.
00:22:54BEYER: What were your experiences like with the local populations or different cultures in Europe?
00:22:59SHAFFER: Well, the local population, the Germans, were glad we were there. I liked to snow ski. So my friend who was stationed at Ramstein (Ramstein Air Base), he and I were snow skiers and we were always heading to Austria on our leave time to go skiing. We got down in Bavaria and it was so snowy and icy, we couldn't make it on into Austria. So we checked into a (unintelligible) down there. And there were—what did two young Lieutenants do the first thing they get their junk thrown in their room? They head for the bar for a beer! So we're down in the bar—and speaking English, of course—and a couple of guys that were only about six or eight years, maybe five years older than we were—German guys—way too much stupid juice came over and they wanted to pick a fight. They wanted to go out and fight in the snow. Mm-hmm (Shaffer shakes his head). You take a swing at me in here and that's gonna be the last one you swing at me. And finally some older guys came over—World War II vets—and told 'em to knock it off and to be thankful we were American military and not Russian military. And that calmed them down. They went away, but they were probably Hitler Youth and been brainwashed as teenagers. Never made it into the German army, but they had poor little alcohol on them. And up comes all of that stupidity from the—as a Hitler youth. But for the most part they were very nice. Very, very nice to us. And in our town where I lived, Kastellaun, Germany, which is just west of Koblenz, there's a Hunsrück-Kaserne (Hunsrück Barracks), Kastellaun, a German Army base there—tanks, Panzer base. And it was only about a half-a-mile from our house. And my roommate and I decided one afternoon—we were both wandering around the house, still in our uniforms—we're gonna go up to that Hunsrück-Kaserne, Kastellaun and have a beer with the other Lieutenants up there—see what they're up to. So we went up there, the gate guard, the MP (military police) at the gate wanted to know if we knew where the officer's club was. And I said, "No, we've never been on the base before. Driven around it a lot, but never on it." He said, "Well, let me show you." So he jumps on his BMW motorcycle and led us to the officer's club. Walked in there and there's nothing going on down the hall to the right in the bar. I couldn't figure it out. It's not like our fighter base where all the fighter pilots are in there trying to out story each other. Anyway, we walked down the hall and I heard voices in a room just to my left. And I opened the door to see what was in there, and it was a private dining-in with all these German army officers, from two Colonels all the way down to some Lieutenants at the end of the table. And I said, "Oh, excuse me." And I started to close the door. And the Colonel says, "Oh, wait a minute. Come here, come here. I wanna talk to you." So we walked in there. He says, "What's your deal here?" I said, "Well, we live downtown. We just thought we'd come up to the Hunsrück-Kaserne for a beer with the—your lieutenants—and have a beer with you guys." He says, "You had anything to eat yet?" No. "Would you like to join us?" So yes, that'd be nice. So the lieutenants set us up, a couple chairs down at the end in place setting. We had dinner with them—full dining-in, German style. And at the end of the dining-in, the two Colonels up at the—full Colonels—up at the end of the table said, "I wanna tell a story, especially to the two American Lieutenants down there." They had been soldiers, young soldiers, young Lieutenants, in the Afrika Korps. And they were taken prisoner by the British, and they were in a little field, POW camp in North Africa—in Libya probably. And when the United States entered the war in 19—and sent all the troops over in '42 to North Africa, the ships were gonna go back to the United States empty. So they put all of the POWs they'd collected—the British and the Americans—into those ships and brought 'em back to the United States. And these two colonels, along with two other Lieutenants were—four of 'em were buddies—they were put in a POW camp in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. So they spent the rest of the war in Winston-Salem. And because of the Marshall Plan, Marshall told all of the POW—all of the commanders of POW camps in the United States—to treat them well, because whatever's gonna become of Germany after the war is over, these guys that are in these POW camps are going to be the leaders of whatever Germany is to become. So treat them well, so they're not all pissed off at the United States. So in the summer of 1944, they gathered up all of these young Lieutenants and Captains and so forth into a room, into an auditorium, and told them that—that you guys are gonna be the leaders of Germany, and what we want you to do—you don't have to do it, but if you want to—we're gonna put you in civilian clothes, put you on a train, and give you a tour of the United States. So they did. The summer of '44, they went all the way down into Texas, across into California, and up across by Rushmore (Mount Rushmore), Yellowstone (Yellowstone National Park), all the way back across the north, through Iowa, and back to North Carolina. And when they got back there—this is the fall now or the late summer of '44—they said, "We need—if you want to, you would like to, there's an awful lot of businesses in the town here that need help. If you want to, we'd like to send you out to do something besides sitting in the camp." So the four of 'em decided, yeah, they wanted to do that. So they sent 'em to the loading dock on the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, loading product on the trains in the evening at night shift. And there was an old night watchman on the dock there called Old Gold. And Old Gold was way up in his sixties or seventies. He weren't too sure he wanted four German Lieutenants on his dock. But after a few days he realized, these guys are okay. So Old Gold invited them over to his house for Thanksgiving 1944, Christmas of '44, and Easter of '45. The four of them went back to Germany, and when the Bundesrepublik (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or "Federal Republic of Germany") was formed in 1953, they went back into the West German Army (Bundeswehr). And in 1957, they were probably all four of 'em Majors or Lieutenant Colonels, Old Gold died. All of 'em took leave from the West German Army, went back to Winston-Salem to be Old Gold's pallbearers. And I would love to have a picture of that if I could find it. Old Gold being buried and being carried by four West German Majors or Lieutenant Colonels. But their love for the United States was just as great as those guys I'd met down in Bavaria that said, "Be thankful they're American soldiers and not Russian soldiers." And in 1966, late '66, we had F-100 Super Sabres there at Hahn. The Air Force, decided to send them back to the States—probably needed them in Vietnam—and provide us with F-4 Phantoms. So there was a period in there of about eight weeks in the late fall, early winter of '66, where we didn't have any airplanes. So I got orders to send my controllers except for a skeleton crew that ran the GCA (Ground-Controlled Approach) and tower during the day—five days a week, just Monday through Friday—and shut down that air base until we got our F-4s. So I gathered 'em all together and asked them where they wanted to go. Some of my sergeants and airmen wanted to go to Berlin. Well, a fellow I'd gone to tech school with in Keesler Air Force Base down in Mississippi, he was doing the same job at Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin that I was doing at Hahn in Germany. So I said, "I want to go too. I wanna see what Berlin's like." So I got permission to go there, and I got facility rated in the control tower. I wasn't there long enough—as long as my sergeants were—I had other things I had to do. I had to get back to West Germany, prepare for the F-4. And the corridor between Checkpoint Alpha, which is just outside Frankfurt, and Checkpoint Bravo—it's when you enter the American sector of West Berlin. And everybody knows about Checkpoint Charlie. That's the third one. That's a footpath in and out east to east. It was all run by the East German air traffic controllers, en route air traffic controllers. So I was sitting there in the control tower one afternoon, and Tegel (Berlin Tegel Airport) was the only civilian airfield in West Berlin, and it was up in the French sector. And we did all the air traffic control in West Berlin—period. Whether it was the American sector, the British sector, or the French sector. So they had to get permission from us to take off and land at Tegel. We had up above Tempelhofer Feld in the American sector, what we call the upside down wedding cake. It wasn't real long approaches to—along the final. It was a kind of a spiral down and a spiral up to get into those corridors. So C-130 had left Rhine-Maine, which is in Frankfurt (Frankfurt Rhine-Main), and entered the corridor at Checkpoint Alpha. And the East Germans canceled his flight plan. And I thought at the time, "Well, why would they do that?" And they were—the pilots flying in and out of Berlin—were briefed, if they do that to you, to shut off all your electronics, all your transponders, everything, and pull out flaps and throttle back and go into what they call slow flight, but don't try to turn around in that corridor or they're gonna shoot you down. So I thought, "Well, he's almost 200 miles away, and he's in slow flight. Now what's the deal?" About that time an Air France Caravelle (Sud Aviation Caravelle) called me from Tegel for takeoff. And I said, "Well, I can't have him ascending in the corridor until I know where that C-130 is." So I told him to stay on the ground until further notice—stay right where he was. About the time I said that, the East German air traffic controller called me and says, "Clearance is approved on the 130." They wanted us to have a midair right over Berlin between an Air France passenger plane and an Air Force cargo plane." Can you imagine that? And every time there was a war protest that went on over here in the United States, especially in Berlin—draft burning and draft dodging and all this other stuff—the Stars and Stripes newspaper would publish it. Of course, the Russians were keeping track of what was going on here too. They thought it was hilarious that we were a paper tiger. They pushed the ADIZ, the Air Defense Identification Zone, between East Germany and West Germany, with just masses of aircraft. And I thought for sure we were gonna get invaded. I didn't think we'd ever not be invaded because of the actions of the war protestors here in the States, especially giving the Soviet Union a green light actually to invade by their attitude here. And fortunately they didn't, but I don't know why they didn't. Sure came close.
00:35:51BEYER: While you were stationed in Europe, did you do anything for good luck or did you have good luck items during your time of service there?
00:35:59SHAFFER: Well, I loved to snow ski, so I was always heading for Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which is run by the US Army, or the ski areas in Austria. Kitzbühel was my favorite spot in Austria. We'd take leave—probably a week or so, two weeks maybe—in January, and head for Kitzbühel, Austria to go skiing. All of us. The Canadian Air Force was at Zweibrücken down by Ramstein. All the Canadians and us we're always truckin' down to go skiing (laughs).
00:36:32BEYER: So now we're getting ready to talk about your transition out of service. Do you remember the day your service ended? And please describe what that was like.
00:36:41SHAFFER: Well, I got a release from active duty, actually on the 20th of December '67. And my wife and I decided to stay in Europe. We went back to Austria to go—she liked to ski too—so we went back to Austria. We did make a trip to the Soviet Union. I wanted to see how the other half lived. And I asked the Air Force if it'd be all right if I—my wife and I—went to Moscow. They said, "Oh hell yeah, Dave. You don't know anything. They'd pull all the fingernails outta you they want, but you're not gonna tell 'em anything that's important." So we did go to Moscow. And what Moscow reminded me of in January, 1968, was it was run by a bunch of junior high school kids. They didn't know how to make change in the store. They didn't know how to make change in the restaurants. They didn't seem to care if you were satisfied or not. They'd walk down the street and about knock you in the gutter in, and my wife was all dressed up in her Bavarian clothes 'cause she had been going to college in Munich when we got married. And so they saw these European clothes on us—Western European clothes. We could have gone back to the hotel every night naked because all the locals wanted to buy our clothes off of us. And after that we came back to the Germany and got the car and went down to Austria—spent about three weeks down there skiing and having a good time before we came back to the States. But when I went back up to Rhine-Main to fly back to McGuire, I was authorized to put my uniform back on. I was—all of us lined up to get on the airplane, and the Air Force personnel came out and said, "Do all you guys have civilian clothes?" Yes. "Well, please go put 'em on. Don't be going back to the United States in your military uniforms in '68." And so I went back in—had to put civilian clothes on a ride home. Embarrassing—because of the hatred for Vietnam they were taking that out on us. In 1966, as an Air Force officer in the com squadron, we were also responsible for all of the secret stuff that was going on in the combat operation center. And they had cards printed. And I would take the crypto cards back—had to take the crypto cards back to the Pentagon. And I thought, "Well, no way I can get out of Andrews Air Force Base back to Germany." But I got up to McGuire. And then I thought I'd take a leave and come back to San Diego for a couple days—visit my folks—hadn't seen 'em in several years. So I got a boarding pass out of Philadelphia Airport. And so I piled on the little Air Force bus and rode from McGuire Air Force Base to the airport in Philadelphia. I was the only officer on the bus. There were Navy, Marines, and Army on there. And as I came in there, I got to go through the door first, right into a bunch of hippies that were having a protest. And I got spit on—I decked the hippie right there in the airport. He was out cold instantly. And all the soldiers and sailors and airmen behind me kinda huddled around me, and we stepped over him and went onto our airplane. But that was my first interception of a hippie that spit on me. Now I wasn't so much worried what the Philadelphia police were gonna say to me for deckin' that hippie. I was worried what the Air Force is gonna say. Air Force officers aren't supposed to be decking hippies in airports. I was afraid of what—they were gonna chew me out for it. But nobody ever did anything. About somewhere over Ohio, I cleaned up my uniform and my knees quit shaking. I sat down properly in the airplane and rode on to San Diego.
00:40:47BEYER: How were you received by your family and your community once you returned? Did you come back to San Diego?
00:40:54SHAFFER: I came back to San Diego, yes.
00:40:55BEYER: How were you received by them?
00:40:56SHAFFER: Fine. Fine, yes.
00:40:58BEYER: What about the community here in San Diego at this time?
00:41:00SHAFFER: Oh, well, San Diego is a military town and was more so military in those days than it is today. And it's still a very much of a military town. So it wasn't hard to get accepted back in San Diego. However, I always had a heartburn for draft dodgers. I ran into neighbors, guys I worked with after I left the Air Force, that had all gone to New Zealand, Australia, Germany, France, everywhere—Canada—everywhere in the world to evade the draft—guys my age. And they wouldn't back off. They would call me a lifer. They had all these comments, and the hatred is still there. I have one that still lives in my neighborhood and I won't talk to him—that did that. I just want nothing to do with him. To run off—he ran off to New Zealand to stay away from the military draft.
00:42:02BEYER: This sort of leads into our next question. So what was it like adjusting for you back into civilian life after the military?
00:42:10BEYER: Well, coming—I started—I had teaching credentials as a high school teacher before I ever went in the Air Force, so I started teaching high school. And one of the problems was, with my airmen, if I said something, it's "yes sir, no sir." And trying to convince high school kids that I'm in charge was not that easy. See—(Shaffer mockingly mumbles). The attitude of the kids had changed considerably since I got my teaching credentials in the early sixties. By the late sixties, they'd been influenced by too many damn hippies, I think—'cause I could not stand hippies (laughs).
00:42:52BEYER: Did the G.I. Bill influence your next steps after the military service as far as going back to school or—
00:42:59SHAFFER: Yes, yes. I wanted to learn to fly since I was a kid. And since the Air Force wasn't gonna teach me to fly, I'm gonna do it myself. So I went—I thought, well, I'll use my GI bill to help with my pilot training. So I went down to the local office. They said, "Well, we don't pay for the private, but we'll pay for"—this is the VA (Veterans Affairs) now talking about—"we'll pay for everything above your private"— like the commercial, the instrument, the ATP (airline transport pilot) and all the others above it. So I said, "Well now, how am I gonna pay for the private license?" So I decided to sign up at San Diego State for my master's degree, went back to the VA and said, I'm going to go to San Diego State College to get my master's. I need—they said, "Good, we'll send you some money." Well, I used the money they sent me from my master's to get my private. And I got a master's and a private all at the same time. Then I transitioned—after that, now I have a private license—to Palomar Airport in Carlsbad, California to work on my commercial pilot's license. So I used the balance of my G.I. bill at Palomar Airport with flight trails on my commercial. I accumulated maybe 750 hours total by the end of that. And then I'm on my own nickel. So I joined flying clubs and had a friend at work that had an airplane, but he needed all of us at work that had pilot's licenses to rent it from him several times a month so he could make the monthly payments on it. So I rented his airplane for a long time. He lived in Fallbrook, California, and I'd fly it out of Fallbrook and take the wife and kid somewhere, if they wanted to go.
00:44:59BEYER: Did you maintain any friendships after your time in service.
00:45:03SHAFFER: With the people in the military? Yes. This Fred Deal, the one that I had gone skiing with. He left the Air Force about the same time I did. And yes, until he passed away just a few years ago. His wife Angie is still a friend of my wife's. They live in Arkansas now. He was a good friend.
00:45:26BEYER: So now we're moving on to reflections. How has your military service shaped who you are today?
00:45:35SHAFFER: I don't tell—I'm like my dad—I don't tolerate fools very well. And I like everything orderly and straightforward. I don't like wishy-washy things. And when I was a little kid, I thought to myself, "I don't want to be 85 years old and not be a veteran." And I think about that all the time. Now that I'm 85 years old and a veteran—good. I didn't want to ever be 85 and not be a veteran of something. Either I was gonna join the military right outta high school or right outta college. And since I wanted to fly airplane so bad in those days, as a kid, I thought, "Well, I'll wait until I'm outta college and then—" But being too big, they wouldn't take me. I wouldn't fit in the cockpit. One of my jobs in the Air Force, when we got the F-4 Phantom, they couldn't hold the holding patterns on our air base of the F-100. It would—the interturn between two TACAN (Tactical Air Navigation) radials at 15 DME (Distance Measuring Equipment) was—we were way over in a German Air Force's airspace. So I had to redesign the holding patterns for that F-4 'cause it ate up real estate like crazy. And I thought this is ridiculous. That F-4 should have been a bomber, not a fighter. It was not a good dogfighter, for instance. The German or the Russian MiGs (Mikoyan, MiG) and Sukhois (Sukhoi) could have outturned that thing in a heartbeat if we'd ever gone to war with them. Now in Vietnam, they used the F-4—and they had the same problem—but they used it for what they called the Wild Weasel. It would go in ahead of the 105s (F-105), pick up the radar from the anti-aircraft sites, and then fire a rocket right down the—their own rocket, their own radar right into them. But as a dogfighter, in my opinion and the Air Force's opinion, it was not a good dogfighter. It was heavy. It still had the Navy hook on the back—which we didn't need in the Air Force, but they had it anyway—McNamara (Robert McNamara) and Lyndon Johnson decided the Air Force was gonna have that. But my wing ops officer, Colonel Pattillo, Cuthbert Pattillo (Cuthbert A. Pattillo), who retired as a four-star general—three-star—he couldn't he couldn't tolerate having it. He didn't like it. It was gonna be a terrible airplane to fight the Russians over the clouds as they invaded through the Fulda Gap. And we couldn't run away because we gotta stay there. Our life expectancy at Hahn, if they'd ever invaded through the Fulda Gap, those of us that were left at Hahn was 20 minutes before we'd been vaporized. Our pilots used to practice in the F-4 and in the F-100s with a patch over one eye, 'cause each one, each pilot at Hahn had a target in the east. He'd never been there, of course, never seen it. He'd studied it on maps. So he knew to fly this road, that ridge line, that river, whatever it took to get to that spot, drop his ordinance and then be lucky if he ever made it back out. Only about 2% of our fighters in the 50th attack fighter wing (the 50th Wing) were ever expected to make it out. And if they did, they had a patch over one eye because with all the atomic weapons going off, their only way out is the good eye that was under the patch. And then there would be no airfields left in West Germany, because in 20 minutes we were all gonna be vaporized, 'cause every airfield, civilian and military was targeted. That they would just fly as far west as they could till they ran outta gas and the motor quit and then eject.
00:49:40BEYER: What message would you want to leave for future generations who may watch or hear this interview?
00:49:49SHAFFER: Well It's hard to say. Just that, if we don't know history and we don't study our history, we're bound to repeat it. So if this does anything to tell the younger generation—like I've told my granddaughter this stuff, I want her to always remember—that whatever land we think is ours is only ours as long as we're strong enough to keep it. If you look at the maps of the world, there's been so many changes of ownership on land over the centuries that we're only here as long as we're strong enough to keep it. Somebody else is gonna grab it if we get weak. And that's the thing I want to tell 'em. Patriotism is number one in my book. I try to promote patriotism with a younger generation. I belong to an organization in the Masons (Freemasonry) that is dedicated to that. And that's what I want to do. Try to promote patriotism and keep this country as strong or stronger than it is now forever.
00:51:04BEYER: What do you wish more people understood about veterans?
00:51:10SHAFFER: Well, there are two kinds of veterans. There are those that are drafted and those that go in on their own. I have—those that go in on their own, go in for a reason—their own personal reason. They want to, like I did. Those that are drafted—I don't say that they're not good. Some of 'em realize that this is the best thing they ever did in their life, and others don't. But it's hard to say. It's an individual thing. Like my brother-in-law. He's a year younger than I am. He was drafted into the army right outta college. I told him when he went in, I says, "With your college degree, why don't you become an officer?" "No, I don't wanna do that." Okay, it's your decision. You could have. But he's suffering now with Agent Orange so bad that I don't—from Vietnam—that I don't think he's gonna live much longer. I just went up to see him about a week and a half, two weeks ago, and he can barely move. He's in such bad shape. And—but yet he's proud of being in the military. He's glad he did it, even with the Agent Orange that he got in Vietnam.
00:52:24BEYER: If you were to reflect on the journey of your service, what themes or life lessons emerge?
00:52:33SHAFFER: Well, that's a good question. Patriotism, like I just mentioned. This is the best country in the world—the world has ever seen—and I thoroughly believe that. We have our problems, but we're still the best country that ever existed on the face of the earth. And it's all a personal—whether you join the military or not, we have good presidents and bad presidents, and we have good leadership and bad leadership from time to time. But generally, we gotta do the best we can to keep this country the way it is—and better—and stronger. And otherwise somebody will take it over on us. Sure as hell.
00:53:31BEYER: So how did you become connected with San Diego County? Is this where you chose to come back after your time in Europe?
00:53:39SHAFFER: Yeah, I—before I left Germany, before I got a release from active duty, I contacted the education center here in San Diego County, 'cause my parents still lived here, and my sister was living here, and a lot of all my friends were. My wife is an Air Force brat. She didn't have any long time friends. She'd lived three years here, three years there, three years all over the world and didn't have any real ties to any particular place. So yes, I came back here because this is where I was offered a job before I ever left the Air Force, teaching the high school industrial arts up here in North County.
00:54:24BEYER: Thank you again for sharing your story.
00:54:25SHAFFER: (Shaffer laughs.)
00:54:26BEYER: It's an honor to help preserve it.
00:54:28SHAFFER: Thank you. Was that okay?
00:54:31BEYER: Yeah, you're good.
