Richard L. Holt

I remained at this job with this new battery until my required years with the Army were completed.  I then submitted my resignation to be discharged.  I had a position to go to since during this last year I had been visited by engineers from the Navy who wanted to learn about how the Army handled the problem of missiles in a community.  They left me their cards which I then pulled out, called and was offered a position nearby at the Naval Air Station, Point Mugu, California.

Boy, did I luck out when I stepped out of a career in the US Army to a  job that was tailor-made for me.  Fortunately it wasn't all luck.   The Navy guys that recruited me knew exactly what they wanted me to do.  I had my degree in Physics, had a lot of training from the Army in communication systems, missile command and control systems, missile safety systems, radars, computers and finally had been in a system (Nike Ajax) that I could see was worthless because of the countermeasures that an enemy could take to neutralize this complex and very expensive system. 

I was assigned by the Naval Missile Test Center as a Physicist/Electronic Engineer to the Electronic Warfare Division (Countermeasures Systems)  at Point Mugu and became the Project Manager for the Electronic Warfare Test and Evaluation of the Eagle Missile System designated as the AAM-N-10 an air-to-air missile which was to be carried by a brand new aircraft the F6D-1 Missileer.  The system had a brand new pulse doppler radar with 120 NM range, and the missile could be launched at targets over 100 miles away. After launch it could switch from tracking the target in a "clear" environment, no jamming, to one of tracking the target in an electronic jamming environment and then back again as many times as the enemy wanted to try to throw it off.  This was the latest state-of-the-art in both aircraft and missile systems.  The radar was a brand new radar system.  What a place to start!  All I had to do in Electronic Warfare and Countermeasures was to test the system in its entirety and make sure it would not be vulnerable to neutralization by an enemy.  Right up my alley!  What a deal!!

I was sent to San Diego to North Island Naval Air Station and put through all the training, self-tests and the full usage in Navy aircraft of the many safety systems, escape procedures, and familiarization of becoming an air crew member for I was scheduled to fly in the Missileer or other test aircraft for the test and evaluation.  The high altitude test chamber, the ejection seat training, the water entry and exit and escape, the parachute training.  I had my own flight helmet, my own oxygen mask, my own flight suit.  Wow! A kid with a brand new toy, that's what I was. I passed everything even getting out of the ejection seat underwater, no mean trick.  But I was a qualified SCUBA diver, and an instructor as well, so no big deal with the water work.

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One day I was working away in the office when Col. Ross came into my office and grabbed me by the lapels and said we were on our way to meet John Wayne.  Col. Ross had dressed up in his best Marine Corps summer uniform, and knowing how John Wayne loved Marines, he thought we could wangle our way onto the movie set on the beach at Point Mugu, the movie set for North to Alaska which was being made there.

Col. Ross had his driver take us as far down the beach as he could.  We got out and proceeded to stand at the nearest barricade to the movie set, still about 100 yards away from the shooting.  Sure enough, John Wayne looked over at us, saw the Colonel in his flashy uniform with all the medals on it, and sent a runner over to get him to bring him to sit right next to him behind the main camera.  And of course, Col. Ross said that he had to have his young friend, Mr. Holt with him, so both of us got to spend all day and into the evening with Mr. Wayne, his producer, director, and the other actors and actresses on the set.  We had lunch with them, had breaks in the afternoon when Mr. Wayne asked Colonel Ross to address the entire set with stories of his adventures during WW II flying Corsairs as a Master Sergeant when there weren't enough commissioned officers to fly all the planes against the Japanese zeroes.

Of course I had heard all the stories after spending so much time with Col Ross in various airplane cockpits, but these people hadn't.  And John Wayne had done a movie, Flying Leathernecks, about the very same events from WWII, so we had quite a day.  Every time I see North to Alaska on the TV, I race back to these days in my mind when life was super. 

And I should add, the exact location where the movie was made was where a year or so later we built our dolphin training pools and housed our offices.  And an even greater coincidence,  the very spot where the landing barges were making their way back and forth to shore from the movie scenes of a rough and tough village in Alaska is where our daughter married a young Navy Chief last year (2005), on the very same sand in their bare feet!  Small world!

Col. Ross took me under his wing at Pt. Mugu;  I flew a lot of hours with him in our testing, and he never failed to give me flying lessons in whatever kind of airplane we happened to be in, from a two engined R4Y (transport and test bed aircraft) to our high speed jets, the F4, A3D and others.  I got in a lot of very good experience this way on a variety of aircraft long before I had my pilot's license.  Flights to China Lake, San Diego, San Francisco and other locations  in our unit's Twin Beech 18 taught me a lot about flying over mountains, deserts, and landing in very hot conditions with all kinds of wind conditions as well.

The honored emblem of the Old Crow Society an elite group of scientists and engineers that develop electronic warfare countermeasures to counter enemy weapons systems

I did well.  I got a patent for coming up with a fantastic system that was so classified that I couldn't even read what I had written.  They had to immediately upgrade my security clearance to Top Secret - Black Programs so that I could continue to work. That first year I also received a huge (to me) cash award and a Superior Performance Award from the top dog at Point Mugu for my work.

I became a member of the "Old Crow Society" which was a very honorable group made up of the best of the best in doing test and evaluation in countermeasures.  We were the enemy to any system that was proposed, and it was our job to take the position of the enemy and try to outsmart the system and make it useless.  A great bunch of guys to work with.  Very bright people.

I worked on one other system after Eagle while still attached to the Electronic Warfare Division at Mugu,  the AN/TPQ-10, Forward Air Support System, a Marine Corps attempt to get their fighter bombers to drop bombs on specific targets right up on the front lines with the help and direction of forward air controllers directing the aircraft and even releasing the bombs from ground control.  Same thing happened as on Eagle.  I quickly shot down the system and quickly became an enemy of those people trying to sell the system to the Marines.  I found a way to get the aircraft to drop their bombs directly on our own troops by playing tricks with the radars and guidance equipment.  On one major test up on the inland test range at China Lake on the Mojave Desert, I had the Marine fighter jets dropping their bombs all over the valley, much to the chagrin of the manufacturer of the system.

I had a great team of Navy personnel, mostly Electronics Systems Chiefs that were invaluable in the testing.  I did what the enemy would have done if the system had been put into service. Not too good!  But the Marines were grateful for it saved them a lot of money on buying a system that would prove worthless in actual front-line conditions.  This work I did mostly at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, California, a desert site that, by the way, I fell in love with.  I learned to love the desert climate, and even to this day, love to go to Palm Desert in the middle of the summer on vacations with my wife, Cheryl, who also loves the desert.

Again, another time in my life when I was in the right place, with the right qualifications, at the right time. 

The Navy was just beginning a program to find out more about the Dolphin as a potential for use in some way in Naval Warfare.  I was a qualified underwater SCUBA instructor teaching Navy personnel how to safely dive at a time when there were not many licensed to do this (SCUBA was still brand new), and I was already resident at Point Mugu where this program was to start under the command of our Admiral.  Accident?  Don't really know.  But this I do know.  I had always been told, even back in college days, that the beauty of majoring in Physics was because you knew something about everything but not much in detail about any one thing.   

But I was also told, and believed it, that I could learn anything I wanted to learn, because Physicists were flexible, curious and had to be very bright just to have made it through the college years in that major.  I agreed with all the above.  And I was flexible and willing to take a chance into areas where I knew very little.  What in the heck was the lynch pin between flying in aircraft doing electronic countermeasures work, working as a battery commander in the Army with a bunch of missiles made to shoot down airplanes, and now going to work in the water with an animal that very few people knew anything about?  Who knows, but I wasn't afraid to try.

Proceed to my next section of my Professional Background, the establishment of the Navy's Dolphin Program in which I took part