Yajko relates a life on alert

SALMON PRAIRIE – When John Yajko graduated from college, he got a job as a football coach at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. It looked like the beginning of a promising sports career – until he received a draft notice.

Not wanting to go into the Army, Yajko immediately went down to the Air Force recruiting agency and signed up. Hoping to become a pilot, he added his name to a long list of others who hoped for the same thing. In the meantime, he went first to Officers Training School and then to Communications-Electronics training school, the career path a battery of tests decided best suited him.

What Yaijko didn't realize at the time was the initial year of obligatory schooling for Communications-Electronics extended his commitment to four years. By the time that obligation was completed, he was 27 ½ years old. At that time, age 27 was the cut-off for pilot school.

There were, however, openings for navigators. It wasn't flying a plane, but at least he would be aboard one. Yajko took basic navigator training, then bombardier navigator training for B-52s. Shortly after that, he was assigned to Kincheloe AFB in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.

In the midst of the Cold War in 1970, the mission at Kincheloe centered around early warning and nuclear alert. Six B-52s flew on alert at all times. For Yajko, that meant 12-hour missions, seven days on and four days off, capped by a 25-hour mission every two to three weeks.

Yajko explained, "You'd go up and circle the North Pole for 20-some hours. There's such a big radar system up there for early warning, in Greenland, that they had to have backup communications. So we were a relay in the air for SAC [Strategic Air Command] headquarters in Omaha, Neb."

Interspersed between the Kincheloe missions, B-52 crews were rotated in and out of the war in Vietnam. For the last two years of his tour at Kincheloe, Yajko sporadically was based at Utapao, Thailand, for bombing raids.

Yajko said, "At that base, every hour of every day of every year, at minimum three B-52s took off on a bombing mission."

Bombing runs resembled complex and deadly games of hide-and-seek tag. Each B-52 was accompanied by two fighter planes whose dual goal was to protect the bomber and to lock on to the enemy's radar signal and send a missile to destroy the radar unit. The enemy's goal was to take out the B-52 without being detected by the fighter planes. To avoid detection, the B-52 would fly a complicated flight pattern; to avoid being locked on by the fighter planes, the enemy would only send short five to eight second radar bursts.

The other players in the conflict were MiG planes piloted by Russian or North Vietnamese. Their goal was to fly through the U.S. B-52/fighter formation to confirm altitude data to send to ground radar and enable them to better target the bomber. The U.S. fighter planes, in turn, endeavored to stay between the Mig and B-52, forcing the MiG to stay on the ocean side, if possible, until it ran out of fuel.

In the meantime, the B-52 navigators were trying to pinpoint by map and by input from their own radar stations where exactly to drop their bombs, taking into consideration the speed of the plane, angle, speed of the bombs' descent and other variables. Yajko said during the last 50-80 miles, the radar navigator flew the plane from the lower level until bomb release.

Despite the hazards of battle, the time Yajko found himself closest to a forced ejection was not in the midst of a bombing run but right after take-off. On that occasion, only five of the eight engines were running at optimum capacity during the initial take-off and the pilot had to abort and bring the plane around for another attempt. However, on the second run he failed to readjust the wing flaps and the plane wouldn't climb more than 100 feet. It looked like they would have to drop their payload into the ocean – 108 bombs weighing 250 pounds each. If that desperate measure failed to create enough lift, the crew would have to evacuate and allow the plane to crash. Yajko explained that while the ejection path for the topside crew members was upward, for the two navigators in the lower level, the ejection path was straight down – doubly risky at low altitude. Yajko said he and his fellow navigator sat with their hands on their ejection handles, waiting for the eject command from the pilot. Instead they heard the pilot say, "Flaps!" He adjusted the flaps and they got the needed lift.

Yajko said there was only one other time he felt he might be in a crash situation. That occurred during nighttime training maneuvers off the coast of Oregon. Their B-52 was turning at too steep an angle and losing lift. The pilot said, "Hold on!" But Yajko said he and the other navigator already knew what was happening because the g-forces were causing all their manuals and notebooks to float around the cabin. They plummeted 10,000-12,000 feet before the pilot was able to level the plane out.

By 1974 the war was coming to an end. Yajko was assigned to Guam where his B52 was transformed into a human cargo plane, helping to evacuate Vietnamese refugees to Guam. Yajko said tens of thousands were transported to the island by whatever planes and ships could be pressed into service.

After the war, Yajko continued to advance in rank as he undertook assignments as Chief of Maintenance, Deputy Squadron Commander, Navigator Instructor, Chief of War Plans and Chief of Intelligence. The last two offices at Fairchild AFB, Spokane, Wash. involved determining mission assignments for flight crews on alert. That included drawing maps detailing enemy areas and potential bombing targets as well as identifying other important physical features.

Yajko retired from the Air Force in 1989, primarily because he was being transferred to another base and didn't want to disrupt his family life while his children were in high school. He enjoyed a year and a half of hunting and fishing before his first wife pressured him into finding a job. He decided to take the test to become a member of the Spokane Valley Fire Department, along with what turned out to be 1,100 other applicants. Yajko came out on top and was hired.

It turned out Yajko was the oldest rookie firefighter to go through the Washington State Fire Training Program. It also turned out that only about 10 percent of the job dealt with fires, the rest were medical responses. When the department realized Yajko, who had lived with his Ukrainian grandparents for the first 12 years of his life, was able to speak Ukrainian and Russian fluently and make himself understood in other related Slovak languages, he was requisitioned whenever medical runs involved "his people" as they called the large Ukrainian/Russian population in Spokane.

After 11 years with the fire department, Yajko retired. He was divorced and four years later met Judi, whom he later married. When Yajko mentioned he had always wanted a hunting cabin in Montana, Judi enthusiastically embraced the idea but on a larger size. They created a home in the Salmon Prairie area, where Yajko can hunt and fish virtually out his back door. He varies his outdoor activities by interspersing a little golf.