Operation Homecoming, 2020

Operation Homecoming, as we all know, was the repatriation of U.S. prisoners of war after the 1973 ceasefire. We don’t mean to imply that our efforts here are in any way connected with that momentous effort. But borrowing the term does signify an effort to welcome back those folks associated with the EC-47 “back in the day” who have dropped off the radar over the past ten years or so. 

We extracted several hundred addresses from the legacy website then fired off a mass email in hopes of re-establishing contact. Given that much of the info is two decades old that's a long shot. Many of those individuals are now RTB for good. Others haven’t been heard from in years. But we’re encouraged by the response thus far. Be sure to check out Doug Mitchell's 1 April post, about two-thirds of the way down the page—now that's the kind of stuff we like to see!

The search feature in the upper right of any page on the website can be used to look for a name or any other set of words, but we decided to combine the 50 or so individual web pages of J.C's "EC-47 Crewmembers, Front End and Back End” into one pdf file. That content is itself historically significant, representing as it does the thoughts of the “pioneer” contributors when they first discovered the site back around 1999. It's a fairly hefty file, but it's now all in one place and easily searched. Once the files open, just click on the three verticle dots in the extreme upper right corner of the page, select "Find..." and enter your search term.Other than collapsing paragraph breaks for the sake of space reduction, with very few exceptions the verbiage appears “as posted.” Obviously many of the email addresses and phone numbers will no longer be valid, but unless the information is known to be outdated it's been retained.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 scare has given us all time to reflect — and maybe look for something to do inside the hootch until this thing blows over. Which brings us back to J.C.’s original website. When health issues forced J.C. to give up the site in 2014, we preserved as much of it as possible. Unfortunately, though, much content has been lost. Due to technical limitations many photos, some of real historical significance, had to be reduced to “byte size” that greatly diminished their clarity. Whether you’re a frequent visitor or just returning after a long hiatus, why not use this hunker-down time to sort through those scrapbooks and shoeboxes full of “stuff” from your SEA tour? If you posted something back then, take a look at the link above or scan the legacy site and think about updating your entry or rescanning some of those old pix to a higher resolution. The current site has virtually unlimited capacity. If you want to leave a shout-out just drop us a note.