But how many times were we reminded in those Airwing recce games there were balls on a Balzam? Of course we had guys that knew they were Fulcrums because the picture had pine trees in the background
Speaking of Recce games, CVW-5, by virtue of being forward (and always) deployed onboard USS Midway, was identified by some low life jealous CO as having not been through an ORE in over six years as of 1981, so AirPac reluctantly informed us we had to go through one. No one took it seriously at all, and our squadron AI said he had the gouge on the recce exam. For about three weeks, we practiced the recce exam by memorizing the answers. On the day of the actual exam, he handed out the test sheets and, I swear it's true, most of us had all the answers discretely filled in before he had gotten to the first slide (the first three answers were ships).
So you can imagine our horror when the first slide was some airplane, and the second a sub, neither of which any of us knew. Since the AirPac observer was in the room, it wasn't as if we could say "What the f*ck, over."
After the fourth slide, the AirPac observer said "I swear, I've never seen a squadron so lost and baffled and incompetent when it comes to a recce exam." He waited about ten seconds, through pure silence, and then turned to our skipper, a dear friend of hi, and said "Gotcha!"
He then replaced the slide tray with the "correct" slide tray and we all aced it!
)
... we made several more low/slow ID passes by them waving back, beckoning to them, one with the canopy open ... ahhhhh ... love was in the air, hands across the sea. 
