Retired Air Force Col.: 'The Last Fighter Pilot's Been Born'
Austin American-Statesman | Oct 27, 2014 | by Dale Roe
"We think the last fighter pilot's been born," says retired United States Air Force Col. Lester Frazier, who lives in Georgetown. Due to drone technology, those military heroes are becoming obsolete, which makes Frazier's collection of military pilot wings all the more fascinating and poignant.
The worldwide tradition of issuing pilot wings to fliers began in the United States, says Frazier, a 78-year-old former jet fighter pilot who served three tours of duty in Vietnam and two tours in Thailand.
"The guys that flew airplanes were part of the Signal Corps, and the guy that was in charge of the Signal Corps thought they ought to have some kind of a badge that recognized the fact that they flew airplanes, because it killed a lot of them," he says.
Stationed in Japan in 1961, Frazier and a fellow pilot flew a pair of F-100 fighter jets to Genda, accompanied by an American colonel. Genda wanted to run some noise tests, Frazier says, because he was getting F-104 planes, and two F-100s were comparable in noise to a single F-104.
"We get out there and we're standing around talking while they're tying the airplanes down, and I admired the wings thatGen. Genda had on," Frazier recalls. "They have a chrysanthemum, which is the national flower of Japan, on 'em. And he said, 'Would you like to have a set?' And I said I certainly would, and Col. Davenport (the American colonel) and the other kid, whose widow lives right here in Austin, said yeah, they'd like to have a set, too. So he went off to get us a set of wings."
Frazier had his own wings, of course, so he began to carry them around in his pocket, offering to trade with any foreign pilots he bumped into. After a while, though, instances where he'd meet a pilot from a country whose wings he hadn't already collected became few and far between, so Frazier began writing to the air attachés of countries missing from his collection.
"I would hear back from them. In fact, I kept all the letters that I got back from them," he says. "Sometimes they would send me wings; sometimes I never heard from them; and sometimes they would write and say, 'Hey -- you don't get extra wings from this country.' They give them one set when they graduate from pilot school and they don't ever get another set."
Frazier has wings from two countries where that's the case: Turkey and Sweden. Those single-issue wings can wind up online or in auctions when their owners die.
That's where Frazier turned when he'd gone through all the foreign attachés he could find. But the online sites either turned up items that were different relics mistakenly labeled as military pilot wings or were outright counterfeits.
"You wouldn't think that there would be a market for phony pilot wings, for God's sake. I mean, who cares? But there is," he says. "You have to be careful if you buy from there."
In 1995, realizing that most of the American pilot wings he found were fakes, Frazier, who had no way of telling if the foreign offerings were authentic, stopped actively collecting them.
"But, by then, I had a pretty large collection," he says, "and from time to time if I would see a wing that I thought was authentic, I would go ahead and get it." (His collection spans from Afghanistan to Zambia, but he'd still like to get his hands on wings from North Vietnam.)
Nobody in Frazier's family is interested in his collection so, eventually, it will fall into the hands of the Super Sabre Society, an association of F-100 fighter pilots he founded that currently boasts about 1,400 members.
Meanwhile, he recalls his love of airplanes beginning when, as a child in Walla Walla, Wash., his grandfather's farm was taken away from him to build an Air Force training base. His family had special permission to get on the base because of farm equipment, etc., to which they needed access.
"I was able to get fairly close to the airplanes, and I think that's where I got to like it a lot," Frazier says.
"I can't think of a time in my life that I didn't like airplanes."
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/10/27/retired-air-force-col-the-last-fighter-pilots-been-born.html?comp=1199436026997&rank=2
