AR5?
I remember the ridiculous time in Gulf War 1 (c) when Saddam was kicking off again. LYE was in the middle of TACEVAL and we had to play, even as an operational route departure....,the upshot was that we left with 2 lots of the damn stuff, an exercise set that we had to wear for departure and the ‘real’ stuff in case Saddam got feisty again!
I was on PRT, thought I’d successfully dodged most of the TACEVAL, we’d only done the groundschool on day 1 when we were told we were off to Kuwait in our crews. When I went to pickup my green bag I was told in no uncertain terms that it was ‘not to be used’.
We managed to spend most of the week away but were sent home for the end of TACEVAL, we ended up spending the final day on the pan in our ac before joining the survival scramble as EGDL was about to get ‘nuked’. After some time in the SORBIT over Devizes we were all diverted to Brize & parked over in the SE corner of the airfield. As the clock ticked down to the ENDEX we imagined all the blunties back in the mess drinking the barrel put on by the Staish saying ‘where are all the aircrew?’
Eventually someone came over and said ‘you can all go home now’- cue a ‘Le Mans’ style start as everyone dashed for their ac, taxying on 2 engines to get ahead in the queue whilst starting the remaining ones. We were off second as I recall, off Rwy 24, straight to Rwy18, 8 mins flying time, not quite quick enough to round down to 5 in the logbook.