SP Augmentees Assisted in the Mission of the 81st SPS


SP Augmentees mainly augmented the security side of the house during exercises.  They were personnel (usually A1Cs or SrA) taken from "office" jobs with no wartime role (such as finance, CBPO, etc) and then given a week's training in the basics of security work.  Then during exercises we would normally man the perimeter protection (PP) posts, those sandbagged (later concrete) shelters that ran along the fenceline of the twin bases every hundred yards or so.  Sometimes when we were lucky we got to ride along with response teams, but most of the time we sat in PP posts with our M-16s, 120 rounds of ammo, and a Motorola brick radio.  On rare occassions, at the end of exercises, we would stay on for a few extra hours to allow the regular SPs to get back on schedule.  I manned the back gate to Woodbridge once, checking IDs as people entered the base. 

Really there isn't much more than that.  I don't think I have any good pictures of me as a "Augee Dogee" (as we were called), all I had was a 110 camera back then.  The one thing I do remember is we were allowed to wear BDUs during exercises, back when the cops were the only ones in the USAF that had them.  Normally we wore the old fatigues.

I am sure there are a couple of hundred if not thousands of us who performed augmentee duties at Bentwaters over the years.

Contributed by Michael Moore, 1982 ~ 1984 RAF Woodbridge