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Military service a family affair for Colonel Fisher

  • Published
  • By Mike W. Ray
  • Tinker Public Affairs
TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. --  Military service is a family tradition to Col. John Fisher, the B-52 system program manager at Tinker.

His father was a colonel and deputy commander for the AWACS program at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., in the 1970s. His father-in-law was a helicopter pilot who saw combat in the Vietnam War. And his grandfather and both great-grandfathers all served in the armed forces, also as colonels.

Colonel Fisher officially retires on July 31 after a 25-year career, although his retirement ceremony was held at the Tinker Club on June 4.

He entered the Air Force in 1988 as a distinguished graduate of the Reserve Officer Training Corps program at The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

Colonel Fisher served three separate tours at the Pentagon totaling more than six years. "I enjoyed working there," he said. "I had great jobs. And it's easier to find your way around the Pentagon than it is here" in Bldg. 3001, he said with a laugh.

While working in Washington, D.C., serving in multiple positions on the Air Staff, he and his family lived in Virginia. "My neighbors kept an eye out for my family while I was in Vietnam for a year" on assignment with Joint Task Force - Full Accounting.

Colonel Fisher spent 13 months in Vietnam, where he helped repatriate the remains of two dozen American military and civilian personnel listed as missing from the Vietnam War.

"That was the most rewarding assignment I've had during my 25 years in uniform," he said. "We helped to bring a sense of closure to some American families."

The colonel also has spent nearly eight years at Tinker, initially with the AWACS program. He has been qualified in the E-3 Sentry as a weapons director, senior director, instructor senior director, and replacement training unit instructor senior director. He acquired more than 2,000 flying hours in AWACS, including 79 combat support missions against Iraq, protecting the United Nations no-fly zones.

He was the chief of the Combat Systems Sustainment Division in the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center prior to his promotion to B-52 SPM two and a half years ago.

Colonel Fisher received a bachelor's degree in business administration from The Citadel, and a master's in business administration from Oklahoma City University. He also earned a master's in military operational arts and science from the Air Command and Staff College, plus a master's in national resource strategy from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

After he retires, Colonel Fisher intends to move to Charleston, which is his wife's hometown and where he attended college. The couple have two daughters attending school in Charleston and a teenaged daughter who lives at home. As for his plans as a civilian, "I'd like to do what I'm doing now: program management work," the officer said.

Time in Vietnam
During time he was in Vietnam (October 1999 to November 2000), Colonel Fisher helped locate and repatriate 24 sets of remains thought to be American MIAs from the Vietnam War.

"We excavated at 25 to 30 crash sites, but we also did investigations, interviewing people who said they had captured or killed Americans during the war, or survivors of those Vietnamese."

Most of the aircraft crash sites were north of the Demilitarized Zone, while the MIA burial sites were usually south of the DMZ, Colonel Fisher recalled. In addition, some sites were along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a system of paths that extended from North Vietnam to South Vietnam through neighboring Laos and Cambodia that were used by the North to convey soldiers and supplies to their troops in the South.

As a direct result, Colonel Fisher worked with government officials in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia on cross-border operations. "We had to negotiate with landowners because we excavated in rice paddies and we cut down trees to enable our helicopters to bring people and supplies to excavation sites," he said.

Typically there were 50 to 200 Vietnamese and 20-25 Americans at an excavation site, Colonel Fisher said. The U.S. contingent included a forensic anthropologist, a medic, an explosive ordnance technician and communications personnel, among others.

"Most of the remains we found were nickel- and dime-size," Colonel Fisher said. One reason is because not much remains intact after an airplane plows nose-first into the earth. Another reason is that the soil in Vietnam is acidic, Colonel Fisher said.

"Each artifact was a clue to the loss incident or missing Americans, and helped us determine that the site was the one we were looking for," he said.

Many reminders of the war still remain in Vietnam, he said. For example, surface-to-air missile sites still ring Hanoi. At a C-123 crash site 10 kilometers from Khe Sahn, "We were surrounded by live 105mm artillery rounds that had been untouched for 25 years," and at a helicopter crash site in the South "we found a pistol rusted in the 'locked and loaded' position."

Although Colonel Fisher was in grade school when the U.S. finally pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, he still wears a fading metal bracelet engraved with the name of an MIA: Howard M. Koslosky, a Sailor who was aboard a Navy cargo aircraft that went down in the Gulf of Tonkin on Oct. 2, 1969.