Tribune Chronicle / R. Michael Semple Air Force veteran John McCaughan sits at his desk at his Champion home displaying a photo taken during his service time. McCaughan enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1951.

Editor’s note: This is part of a series published every Monday between Memorial Day and Veterans Day honoring local veterans.

CHAMPION — For John McCaughan, joining the Air Force was the fulfillment of a promise to his commanding officer at the Pennsylvania National Guard.

“I was not quite old enough when I started. I was 17,” McCaughan, 85, said. “The CO of my anti-aircraft outfit called me in one day and said we were very close to going to Korea. ‘I know you are still in school, and we can’t take you. But promise me, you will join up,'” McCaughan recalled the officer saying.

McCaughan spent two years in the Pennsylvania National Guard before he enlisted in the Air Force in 1951.

He started basic training in April 1951 at Lackland Air Force Base outside of San Antonio, Texas.

“Back then, the Air Force had so many inductees, they couldn’t handle it. When we got there, they had no uniforms for us. We had the clothes on our backs and our shave kit,” McCaughan said.

He spent a week in the same pair of clothes. He had no barracks and slept in a tent.

After nine weeks of basic training, McCaughan was sent to Southern Technical Institute, a civilian school in Atlanta, for 18 weeks. There, he learned basic electronics, gun laying, turret control and radar.

Once finished at Southern Technical, McCaughan was sent to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, where he trained on simulators.

“Here is where we got into the nuts and bolts of gun control systems and radar,” he said.

McCaughan never served in Korea and spent his entire four years in the Air Force serving stateside. His first assignment was at Fort Worth in Texas, where he worked on the B-36 plane.

“A lot of people did not know this plane existed, and probably still don’t,” he said. “Basically, this plane was designed to carry very heavy bomb loads at high altitudes. It could stay in the air for three days. It cruised around 400 miles per hour. Today, they cruise around 600. The bomb it carried was basically a nuclear bomb that weighed 36,000 pounds.”

“On the B-36, I had two jobs. That plane had 16, 20-mm guns. I worked on the turrets and the guns. They weighed about 100 pounds. They weren’t used often, but there were training missions to see if they worked,” McCaughan said.

He also worked on the construction and maintenance of the hoists that would lift the bomb, inches at a time, into the plane.

“Because of the secrecy of the cargo, everything was done at night, under the cover of giant tarps, and there were a lot of armed guards around,” McCaughan said.

Later, he spent two years in Columbus working on the B-47.

“This was a reconnaissance plane. Instead of bombs, they had giant cameras installed. This plane was designed to avoid the MiG 16’s and 17’s,” McCaughan said.

He said going into the military was a great experience.

“One of the best fallouts to all my service was the education I got. When I was finished at age 22, I went into the job market in Columbus. I had three companies competing for me right off the bat: AT&T, IBM and a small company called Industrial Nucleonics. I went into management for the smaller company and then later sales,” McCaughan said.

Originally from the McKeesport area of Pittsburgh, he married his second wife, Pat, in 1973 and they moved to the Warren area later that year. He said he chose this area because it was centrally located between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and he did business in both cities.

“I made an offer on my house and the real estate agent said they never would accept it. I found out my offer was exactly what was owed on the house. They just wanted out,” he said.