Tinsel Bombs

IHF NOTE: This story was related to IHF Researcher Johnathan Clayborn personally by Mr. Carroll during an in-person discussion in 2005. He has presented the story here to best of his ability and recollection. Any errors in the details below are assumed to be Mr. Clayborn's error in transcribing the story.

Not all of our missions were about death and destruction. Sometimes we had the very important job of being a decoy and sowing chaos and confusion so that other friendly units could sow death and destruction. One way that we did this was to load the entire bomb bay with small scraps of foil. We would fly over the target, which was almost always the approximate location of an enemy radar station, and then we would drop our tinsel bomb from a pretty good height over a long, slow path. The foil, due to the size and shape, would flutter in the air and take a long time to hit the ground. This created a large metal field of debris in the sky that had the effect of scrambling the enemy's radar. They weren't able to tell what was a plane and what was trash on the screens for at least an hour and then our boys could move in a strike with impunity. I always hated this missions, not because we got shot at a lot, but because inevitably there would be some scraps of foil stuck to the inside of the bomb bay. I'll give you three guesses who got stuck cleaning it up.