During the four years of my enlistment the approximate one-year period spent on the RB-29 crew, in training, and in Japan, stand out more vividly in my memory than any other portion of my military history. I'm quite sure that this experience relates to the discipline and the training that was required to work successfully as a crew and the resultant camaraderie is a byproduct of our training. One vivid memory of our crew experience has remained with me for nearly fifty years and has influenced much of what I have attempted in business or personal goals.

On the flight line one day, I was disassembling a lower turret for some routine maintenance and as a consequence had the .50-caliber machine guns and parts strewn all over the ramp. Our aircraft commander, Lt. Stone came over to where I was working and our conversation turned to the relative complexity of the remote control gunnery system on our aircraft. During our conversation I mentioned my earlier experience of attempting to get into the Cadet Program. Also expressed was my admiration for the obvious skills and training a pilot must certainly posses to takeoff, fly, and land an aircraft the size of our B-29. Our talk concluded that there was really no "mystery" involved in the skill level achieved by either one of us. He pointed out that I saw his accomplishment as a B-29 pilot after a long period of incremental building of knowledge and skill levels, and tended to overlook his initial learning in a much smaller single engine trainer. Conversely, to Lt. Stone, the turret mechanism I had torn apart and had scattered all over the ramp appeared to him to be a hopelessly complex puzzle to be assembled back into a working machine gun turret. Forgotten were the endless hours spent in a classroom back at Lowry learning the very basic working parts and assembly procedure.

The long remembered very simple principle from our brief conversation was that each of our individual skills was the product of a learning process that began with small incremental steps and bits of accumulated information and grew into an advanced and seemingly complex skill. The acquisition of our separate skills only required perseverance, plus a desire to learn by adding new knowledge to a growing base of information. Certainly this is a basic and simple thought process, but one I have resorted to on numerous occasions when confronted with what seemed at the outset to be a complex task to be completed. It is no mystery.

Editor’s Note: The story of Dick Sniker’s RB-29 crew experience in training and flying reconnaissance missions out of Japan is told in some detail in another part of this web site. If you, now or later, wish to visit that information and related photo illustrations, you may do so by going to the home page and clicking on “Introduction & Table of Contents for “RB-29 Crew Operations.” If you wish to check it out now, you may click here and then use your back button to return to Chapter #3, this story.