Marfa, TX actually IS a "whole 'nother country". The area is geologically part of the Chihuahua Plateau of Mexico. Personally, I think Marfa would be better known as "Empty, TX".
There is no more desolate region of the USA that I have ever seen than the Big Bend area, but this is also one of the most beautiful. High desert, big mountains (one approaches 10,000 feet) and remote canyons and valleys separate Texas here from Mexico just past that ridge...
That reminds me to tell a war story on myself.
Back in 1979, I re-entered onto Extended Active Duty with the USAF, and immediately went to Carswell AFB, Fort Worth to learn how to be a bombardier in the B52D. I had been a Navigator in that aircraft before, and a very successful and recognized one at that, but the Bombardier had different responsibilities.
My first low-level attack mission involved flying a Visual Flight Rules (VFR) low-level, high-speed route that started at Marfa, TX and flew down the US Border almost to Brownsville, TX, then ended. There was a simulated bomb run down at the Gulf end of the low-level navigation leg.
So, here we are, a "green" crew, with a trainee Aircraft Commander, "Jungle George" Jackson, assisted by a brand-new co-pilot with NO time in the airplane, and a brand-new Navigator, "A-J" Gipson, a new second Louie fresh out of the Zoomie School (USAF Academy), but known all over for being a first-class outside linebacker for Air Force. I had a ton of experience navigating the aircraft, but NOT navigating it and running the bombing radar at the same time. We had an Instructor Pilot and and Instructor Radar Navigator along to teach us.
We do the high altitude work (air refueling from a KC-135 tanker, celestial navigation, ECM calibration runs) well enough, and the Pilot finds Marfa VORTAC and we begin descent to low level. Navigation at this point is routine, because we have the altitude to see over the mountains, and the air route navigation beacons (VORs) still work up there. Soon enough though, we are at 500 feet Above Ground Level (AGL), and the radar picture shrinks to a little blob in the center of the scope, and the VOR equipment just pouts, unusable. We back up our feeble attempts at high-speed, low-level navigation with Dead Reckoning, which is simply flying pre-planned courses and speeds, using the compass and stopwatch.
Now, from the air, one canyon looks pretty much like the next one you might fly down, except for one biggie: the Rio Grande river. The objective was for the pilot to keep the Rio Grande on his RIGHT shoulder and we would stay in the USA. He didn't so that, and I didn't catch his error with the radar, and A-J didn't either with his Dead Reckoning.
We wound up in Mexico, flying a course parallel to the Rio Grande in a canyon on their side of the border. Finally, a combination of us realizes that there is supposed to be WATER down there, and there is none, so we must be in the wrong canyon.
The safe thing to do when lost at 325 knots Indicated Air Speed is to climb to a safer altitude than 500 feet (well below the ridge tops), so we do, and surprise, surprise, we are intercepted by the Mexican Air Force, flying F-86 Sabre jets we gave them 15 to 20 years before. The Fuerza del Aero looks lost also, and they are annoyingly close to our wing, so Jungle George decides to just sneak into the next canyon to the north-east and drop down again, giving them the slip.
The Mexicans WERE ALSO lost, so they followed that giant black B-52, refusing to believe IT could be lost. We then realize that we have an illegal alien air escort of armed fighter jets! We're almost to the bomb run though, and having in mind that we came to bomb something (and now had found our position so we could bomb accurately), we ignored the Mexicans.
When you do even a simulated bomb run (camera only, no actual bomb dropping out of the bomb bay), you DO open the bomb-bay doors. Now, it just so happens that opening the bomb-bay doors is a recognized sign that a bomber aircraft has hostile intent. The Mexicans, who must have thought they were "arresting" our aircraft for our border overflight violation, now go ballistic, and begin jinking their aircraft up and down and waggling their wings at us. OUR pilots all decide that is hostile-looking, but we have an empty tail gun, and can't do anything about it, except....SEE HOW BIG THEIR COJONES WERE! We're still in the low-level route for a few more miles, so the pilot puts the aircraft down on the deck and makes "moving pick" plays with mountain peaks to "scrub" the F-86s off our wings, then when the Mexicans have given up on trying to escort the "crazy" Gringos, we zoom up and out of the low level route, just in time to see a pair of patrolling F-4s looking for the Mexicans. It seems that our Ground Control Intercept radar WAS good enough to pick up all the low level shenanigans with the FAM Sabres.
Common sense prevailed, and since this had happened before with other trainee crews, a phone call from one of our colonels to one of theirs settled the matter amicably enough.
Never did fly with that set of instructors again, though. This whole episode WAS very sobering to your blogger though, because I had been A LOT more afraid of getting yelled at by senior officers than I was of jeopardizing the crew's safety by getting lost, and I never made the mistake of THAT poor priority placement again.
I soon adopted a laborious, but VERY accurate way of continuous-triangulation navigation by radar bearings to navigate strange terrain with, and I could still use it today, even though GPS navigation keeps the B-52 within 5 centimeters (two inches!) of it's actual planned position 30 times a second. My system was good to a few hundred feet of accuracy, which is close enough for government work when dropping nukes in the one-megaton range.
Marfa, TX. Thanks for the memories!
