In those early days, he would take a lone Phantom and a back seater, and push himself down low over the Gulf side beaches, ripping from one island to the next heading east from Gulfport. Living across Biloxi Bay from these islands, he knew them like the back of his hand. My best friend, Greg Williams, whose dock I was sitting on, was one of those Mississippi Air Guardsmen who had flown this route many times. All uninhabited, all bereft of antennae, chimneys and tall trees. These weekend warrior guardsmen as well as regular force fighters would follow the barrier islands from west to east-Chandeleur Island, Ship Island, Cat Island, Horn Island. The “Sluffs” and “Rhinos” came from the Air Guard deployment camp at nearby Gulfport, where they would spend a week practicing being “deployed” at a base far from their home. Pauli Girl beer in my hand, I would sit with my face towards the southern sun and my feet dangling over the receding tidal waters brimming with shrimp and watch as pairs of A-7 Corsairs from the Oklahoma Air National Guard or RF-4Fs from Meridian Mississippi would thunder along the very edge of the horizon following this timeworn route. Back in the early nineties, on a dock on Davis Bayou, with a cold St. Along the sunny Gulf Coast of Mississippi runs a VLA route (very low-level, high-speed flying) frequented by American military fliers for decades.
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