Ghost drivers

Conventional munitions are color coded.. Live ordinance has a marking somewhere.. Most bombs have a yellow band around the nose to signify a live one.. a sky blue paint job signifies inert / training round..

Rockets and missels get more complicated.. There is a series of squares on the package like a yellow square, brown square, blue square that if you know how to read it tells you stuff like if it has a live rocket motor, live or training warhead, reduced range, extended range, ect..

Even artillery rounds are coded..

I remember there being a cover on a magazine, I think it was a "Popular Mechanics" around the 80's that had on it's cover a exploded view of a nuke.. I remember being shocked, as I was at the time trying to chase people who tried to catch a glimpse of these weps. Never mind a camera...

I was # Norfolk, Va. and saw a flatbed straight truck roll out the main gate with a rack of B-61's... No tarp over it or anything.. Also no security.. right out in public..

 

Nukes are not ever color coded but the magazine are. Navy OP5 is where we would find all the information. What you saw was not B-61's but Bomb Dummy Units or BDU's. BDU's look the same and are dropped over and over again because they are filled with concrete and give the pilots practice. You can look back at my post and see the reference I gave for the ghost fleet and you'll see me standing next to a civilian in white coveralls in front of a flatbed semi. Those are the real deal B57's. What you don't see are all the marines standing in a perimeter. Those are offical navy photos taking to show our workers all over the world how trucks should be when moving these weapons. They gave everyone in the crew a set and said it was ok as long as we did not tell where there were.

I also worked in a BDU shop in Flordia and the pilots would drop these weapons down at the Navy bombing range called PineCastle. They did have a small amount of explosives in them to blow the parechute out and of course that was loaded just prior to flight. I've got tons of pictures of BDUs in various conditions and you'd be surprised how we could make them look good after they've been dropped.

 

Yup, I understand that the nuclear inventory does not use color codes.. It is why i said "conventional" in my post.. I just wanted to assure the other post that if he saw munitions again and he was nervous, he should look for the markings to determin if they were real or not..

I also understand the dummy bombs.. It's just that we were instructed to not allow even pictures of the size, shape, color, of the bombs be made available to the general public. I've chased down people and ripped the film from and confinscated their cameras for taking pics of "chopstics" on the ship.. To see this was a shock and went against everything we were taught..

I was 1 of those marines who guarded the things.. On the aircraft carrier for 2 years..We had B-28's and B-43's.. I did everything from stand watch in the 2 special weapons mags, to sgt. of the guard.. I was also doing the same thing # NSB Bangor, Bremerton, WA with the Tridents for 1.5 years. I don't pretend to know all the tech schematics, as I wasn't a GMT in "W" Div. or a missle tech, but I knew enough of them... I still keep in contact with a few to this day.. There is a saying in the field.. I.Y.A.O.Y.A.S.!

It means "If You Ain't Ordinance You Ain't ####"!

 

Small world, I was a GMT and I'm sure we've crossed paths. I was on CV-64 and at Bangor but Bangor was not Bangor then it was SWFPAC. I rode the T-AK out of there. One thing we did for the Marines is we took a few of our GMT's, downgraded their clearances and turned them over to you guys so when we pulled into Subic every Marine could go to the Ball. It was cool to see sailors running down the passageways going to aft SASS with M-16's yelling step aside. We always got along great with you guys. I was also the LPO for W-Div and ran the forward SASS.

 

Your right. I used to work at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, LA. as a bush hog operator cutting what is called the "iggiloo grounds" (SP?)basically which is grass covered mound's you could drive inside of and then go down under ground. This area is heavily gaurded with 5 fences 3 with high tech sensors and a high road with lot's of heavily armed MP's and personell. The bunker doors are blocked up with with a bunch of one ton concrete blocks stacked on top of each other. Take's about an hour to get in and hour to get out of this area and go through back ground checks, metal detectors, dog's even checking the equipment going in. I threw a rock from under the cutting deck and hit one of the fences and they were there within a minute (it's a big place) and was on me like stink on ####! No joke. Told them what happened and got let go.

About once a month or so the same OTR truck would come in and they would put us on lock down when they opened up a bunker and we couldn't continue work or move anywhere until they completed what they were doing. It's an older guy who drive's the truck around in his 50's but when he left out he had 4 van's and 3 unmarked car's loaded with guy's that looked they were navy seals armed to the teeth and covered with gear. So yea, these guy's do exsist and it's very real that they haul such weapon's around the country.

When I first saw the post I thought ghost driver was being reffered to as the fake driver a driver created for an extra log book and so called it "team".

 

I served on CV-67.... The USS John F.Kennedy.. The last of the oil burning carriers. (Yup, the JFK is now retired.. It was decommissioned last year I think? Maybe the year before?) Even though it's been a LONG time since I was stationed on it, I still to this day keep in touch with a bunch of guys from "the boat".. Even you "squids" from "W" Div. haha.. (we got along great with these guys, heck we worked side by side every day)..

 

What job did you do?

 

That is exactly my first thought as i have signed for many a ghost driver that was not there back in my early hard running days. I never ran that ghost log book but signed at the shipper that I was running team just to get the load and had to run like i was a team to get the load to where it was going.
This has been an interesting thread.many Thanks.

 

I was traveling down a stretch of highway one night when a couple of Humvees passed me and pulled in front of me, then 1 came up beside me pointing a gun at me and told me to pull off of the road, I sure wasn't going to argue with them, I pulled off and waited, about 30 seconds later a very discreet looking 18 wheeler truck passed by me followed by a couple more humvees with weapons and a couple of black suburbans. I had no idea what the hell was going on until I mentioned it to my cousin who used to be in the marines and he said it was probably either carrying nukes, or any number of warheads.


Then my brother told me about a time when he was in the army and there was a tractor/trailor came onto base with 4 police escorts. The driver delivered the massive truck 1200 miles to deliver 1 envelope to the base commander. Im like ####, how can they waste that much money to deliver an envelope when all they have to do is put it in an armored vehicle if it is that important.