The General of Val Verde County

January 18, 2008
By Bill Sontag
Feature Writer

“God has blessed me with a good personality. I smile a lot, and get along well with people.” Maj. Gen. Gerald Prather (U.S. Air Force, retired) understates the impact he’s had on those around him in his fruitful and gratifying 73 years.

Prather is well-known in nearly all Del Rio civic, military and business circles, but only a fortunate few have come to understand the vast career foundation of his military success. Fewer still may appreciate those underpinnings as the source of Prather’s contributions to the community which he and his wife, Carolyn, chose for their final approach and landing in 1986.

Before he completed his 32 years of service to the U.S. Air Force, Prather was honored with a Bronze Star Medal with “V” device, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and an ascent through ranks from airman first class to major general in record time. Since his retirement, Prather continues to serve and be honored for his leadership. But his story begins in a one-bedroom tarpaper shack in the stubborn, red clay of Troup County, Georgia.

His first recollection of home was outdoor privies, heating and cooking over coal in a pot-bellied stove, going barefoot all summer, and getting a fresh, single pair of shoes at the beginning of each school year. The Prather home – sited inconspicuously behind his step-grandfather’s house in La Grange – was barely a rifle shot from the Chattahoochee River where it wends south to become the border between Alabama and Georgia.

One of Prather’s prized memories is this portrait sent to his father, Pate Prather, from his training days at Hondo Air Base in the U.S. Air Force Aviation Cadet Training Program. There, Prather trained in the same type of aircraft, the AT-6 “Texan” used by the namesake of Laughlin Air Force Base, Jack Laughlin, a decade after Laughlin went down in the Pacific during World War II. (Contributed photo/Gerald Prather) (click image to enlarge)

Prather pauses to recall the details of his C-130 “Hercules” combat supply missions in Vietnam, discussing his 13 months in service during the heat of that conflict, 1967-1968. Prather was awarded both the Bronze Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery and skills before he returned to the United States with the rank of major. (LIVE! photo/Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)

A crisp, confident Capt. Gerald Prather pauses for a snapshot on entry to his C-130 “Hercules” cargo and tactical airlift plane at Ton Son Nhut Air Base, Saigon. “I think this was just before a mission,” Prather said. “I look too clean here for it to be afterwards.” (Contributed photo/Gerald Prather) (click image to enlarge)

“A friend of mine at Khe San shot this while I was dropping supplies to the base. This is my aircraft, but I don’t remember what the cargo was. It was taken in 1967 on a mission when we didn’t have time or safe enough conditions to land there,” Prather said. (Contributed photo/Gerald Prather) (click image to enlarge)

Pate Prather strove to keep his family clothed and fed, but with a fourth grade education, he jumped from meat packing to automotive repairs, and finally to the mills. Cotton was still king in Georgia, just as sheep were the four-legged monarchs of south Texas, and Gerald remembers his dad starting as a weaver, tending the shuttles and bobbins of Callaway Mills, while his mother, Hazel Belle, spun cotton in the same plant.

“My great grandparents were Creek Indians, and my grandfather died in the 1920s, plunging the family into poverty. My folks married when they were very young, and my mother only went through the seventh grade. We lived in pretty sparse conditions,” Prather recalled. “But we didn’t even know we were struggling.” He is the eldest of four children of Pate and Hazel Belle Prather.

The Prathers moved to a slightly larger house on Orchard Hill, where Pate had long walks to work at the mills, next to a four-acre farm from which Gerald rode a plow mule to school, and climbed trees to catch ‘possums to sell for a quarter apiece. When he was in the fourth grade, the family moved to Murphy Avenue in town, and stayed put until he graduated from high school. “My teacher told mom I wasn’t doing well, so she sat me down in the kitchen with the multiplication tables and said if I moved from there, she’d get the biggest peach tree switch I’d ever seen. So, I became kind of a math whiz,” Prather said, chuckling at the memory and how it sounded when he talked about it.

In high school, Prather was center for The Grangers, wearing blue-and-white football jerseys, played trumpet, French horn, trombone, baritone and base in the band, “And I wrote the school song which they still sing today,” Prather laughed. He was class president in both his junior and senior years, and won a Callaway Mills music scholarship to Oglethorpe University, Atlanta. But the scholarship had strings. Parents had to work at the mills, so when Prather’s parents divorced, he lost the scholarship.

“But I stayed busy all the time. I’ve always lived by the words of Charles Wendt. ‘Success in life is not so much a matter of talent or opportunity as of concentration and perseverance,’” Prather said, adding, “…and damned hard work.” So, he sold insurance, waited tables until, “One day a buddy of mine drove by and said he was going down Valdosta to take a test to see if he could be a pilot in the Air Force. Well, I’d never even seen an airplane. It was 1953, 1954, Korean War time, and I was invited to take the aviation cadet test, an all day battery. It wrung us out.”

He waited half an hour for the results with 40 other boys. On a list of 10 that passed the Aviation Cadet test, Prather was included, his friend was not. “He was pretty torqued about that,” Prather said. At the age of 19, and with only a year of college under his belt, Prather enlisted in Atlanta and was sent immediately to Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, for basic training. It was his first trip exceeding 75 miles from home.

He got his airman first class stripe, was sent to Goodfellow Air Force Base, near San Angelo to help maintain the B-25 Mitchell “Heavenly Body” fleet there. Then, back to Lackland for pre-cadet training. “I liked it. They gave us a place to sleep, clothes to wear, food to eat, and $40 every two weeks,” Prather said with a chuckle.

Then, Prather began a seeming unending series of training assignments for a phenomenal range of kinds of aircraft, beginning with the AT-6 “Texan” trainer at Hondo Air Base, followed by the T-33 “T-Bird” at Laughlin Air Force Base. Here he met Carolyn, only three weeks before graduation, and things got serious quickly. At his 1956 graduation from Aviation Cadet pilot training, on Laughlin’s flightline, Prather’s mother pinned on his new rank insignia, and Carolyn pinned on his silver pilot’s wings.

“First thing a new 2nd lieutenant does is buy a new car, and I bought a two-tone green, 1956 Pontiac for $3,200, and I proposed to Carolyn in it on a hill overlooking Lake Walk [smaller lake inundated 13 years later by Lake Amistad],” Prather said. “I told her I’d probably be dead before I turned 26 because I intended to be a fighter pilot.” Also on her mind was the lifestyle of fighter pilots as “hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-working, risk-taking, where every man was a tiger.”

Then came F-84 fighter training at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz. The nickname of the single-seat, swept-wing beast was “Thunderjet,” but Prather and his comrades called it “a ground-loving whore,” an indictment of the jet’s legendary heavy weight and poor engine thrust. “But I was a damned good pilot, and could make just about anything fly. And I still can. That served me well, and has kept me alive,” said Prather. Carolyn took a train to meet him at Luke and they were married in November, 1956, at the base chapel. He had no money at the time, so Carolyn bought the Arizona marriage license.

After a three month temporary duty assignment, island-hopping an F-84 across the Atlantic to Avino, Italy, Prather came home and learned to fly the country’s first supersonic fighter, the F-100 “Super Sabre.” But not for long. With the close of the Korean War and increasing tensions with the Soviet Union, different kinds of pilots were needed, and Prather and his F-100 buddies were assigned to B-52 crews at Mather Air Force Base, Calif. Expecting to be stuck on a ground radar assignment, Prather was pleased when he ended up in the cockpit, first as a co-pilot, then as a pilot and finally as aircraft commander.

Was the transition from a sleek, fast fighter to a monster bomber daunting? “Absolutely!” Prather exclaimed. “It scared the hell out of me!” Moreover, the big bombers carried massive ordnance. “This was Cold War time, and any one of them could have won a war if they got through. They were loaded for bear,” Prather said. But high-altitude patrolling was the mission. The 24-hour patrols took Prather and his crew from California to New York, then to Greenland, the North Pole, down to Alaska, across the Aleutian Island chain, and along coast of Washington and Oregon, and back to Mather in California.

By 1961, Prather was aircraft commander, then his was a “lead crew,” next a “select” crew in the top 10 percent of the hierarchy of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). He was eligible for the rank of major, but spurned it so he could return – with Air Force tuition – to Auburn University. He finished his electrical engineering degree in two years, graduating in 1966. Though he hoped to get back to fighters – specifically the F-4 “Phantom,” Prather ended up in the C-130 “Hercules,” a four-engine turboprop cargo and tactical airlifter.

In 1967, he began flying combat support missions in Vietnam. “I flew everything from lettuce to ice, fuel in big bladders, ammunition from Da Nang, Saigon and Plei Ku to Khe Sanh and little bitty airstrips all over South Vietnam,” Prather said. He was awarded the Bronze Star with a “V” device (for valor) during the infamous 1968 Tet Offensive. At Tan Son Nhut Air Base, near Saigon, rows of aircraft became vulnerable to incoming mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and rockets. A C-130 took a direct hit, and Prather, under fire, scrambled to the flightline to move adjacent aircraft from the threat of fire.

In the chaos of incoming ordnance, a fire extinguisher was dropped, exploding in Prather’s face. He was hustled away and irrigated with water. “They saved my eyes, but not my skin, so they took me to a hospital, but there I saw all the seriously wounded being brought in and I just walked right back out. Those guys were in much worse shape.” He was then sent to Cam Ranh Bay, setting up operations centers and briefing rooms for three days with no sleep. Finally a lieutenant colonel ordered him to bed, threatening court martial if he refused.

Later in 1968, Prather ferried fresh marines and ammunition from Phan Rang to Tam Ky, a marine-controlled village south of Da Nang, along the coast of the South China Sea. The marines on the ground and nearby Army units were under attack, and badly needed the re-supply, but they and the landing strip were concealed under dense cloud cover. Prather flew out to sea to descend below the clouds, and then flew back to the marines underneath the overcast receiving small arms fire. “I was hearing this ‘thump, thump … thump,’ and heard another pilot scream, ‘I’m getting fired on,’” Prather said.

Prather verbally guided the other pilot into Tam Ky, then followed using the same procedure. On landing, his flight engineer pointed out dripping holes in the bird’s fuel tank, and Prather ordered them jammed with segments of carved broom sticks. Prather’s plane and the other craft, also with plugged holes, sustained more hits on takeoff. Landing in Saigon, both aircraft were pulled aside for repairs. Prather’s plane had taken 48 hits. “And no one was hurt. Isn’t that wonderful?” Prather enthused. For this successful mission, ingenuity and bravado, Prather received the Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded for “Heroism or extraordinary achievement … in aerial flight.”

“But my favorite mission, was one to Khe San during monsoons after the Tet Offensive of 1968. No one could get in there because of the clouds, but I finally found a little hole in the clouds one day, and dropped through it with re-supply of ammunition,” Prather recalled. Hoping for a quick exit, he ordered the cargo kicked out the back door, but got a message from his loadmaster. “We’ve got a problem back here, Boss. I’ve got a load of 100 marines back here packed and ready to go.” The war-weary troops had scrambled aboard before the cargo door could be closed. “Our authorized load was about 60, but these guys were all red with mud, so we just jammed them in there and took off anyway. And I’d do it again,” said Prather.

“The missions I hated the most over there were carrying out the body bags. With a lot, all you can do is stack them up like cordwood, and their body fluids are leaking onto the airplane, and the stench was horrible because the bags had been lying out in the sun for who knows how long. When you’re carrying 50 or 60 KIAs [killed in action] out at one time, it’s just bad news all the way around,” Prather said, eyes moistening.

Prather flew 500 support missions in Vietnam in the C-130, commenting, “And none of them were routine.” Pinning on the brass oak leaves insignia of major, he returned to the United States, after 13 months “in country” in July, 1968. Back-to-back directed assignments were to commands of communication squadrons at Chanute Air Force Base and Scott Air Force Base, both in Illinois. “When people ask how I got into the communications business, I say, ‘I don’t know, can’t even spell it,” Prather quipped. In truth, his degree in electrical engineering and an Air Force on the threshold of sweeping, global changes in communications technology forecast the marriage.

Promoted to lieutenant colonel a year earlier than protocol permitted, Prather was sent back to school, to the Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. In less than a year, Prather completed his Master of Science degree with a thesis on communications electronics meteorological program management, for which he received the Commandant’s Trophy because it revealed systemic efficiencies that could actually be implemented, Air Force wide.

With the Strategic Air Command at March Air Force Base, Calif., a trio of colonels interviewed Prather and asked, bluntly, “Do you want to make general?” to which Prather – shocked – replied, “Yes, I think I’d make a good general.” He was promoted to colonel – seven years ahead of the norm – and was reassigned to Air Force offices in the Pentagon. “So I went to Washington D.C. in 1972 with my wife, four kids, a dog, and a cat. I’m just a little country boy trying to get along in the big city, and I was a little nervous. They called me up there to implement my thesis,” Prather explained.

“It was an extremely challenging job for three years, developing the first satellite communication systems for the Air Force. For example, we needed to be able to send code words during the Cold War to all the B-52s flying, and we had to have cryptographic security for all the communication systems, from telephones to the satellites.”

At Offutt Air Force Base, Omaha, Neb., Prather went underground. In the command post beneath SAC headquarters, Prather was deputy chief of staff for communications and electronics, always in communication with – and sometimes riding in – a command-post-modified KC-135 “Stratotanker,” always airborne to take over command of SAC if nuclear war destroyed the base. For his work in support of below-ground missile bases scattered in remote locations across the northern tier of states, Prather was awarded the Minuteman Missile Badge.

Prather became first commander of a Strategic Communications Area – 1975-1977 – then transferred to Ramstein Air Base, Germany, as deputy chief of staff for U.S. Air Force Europe (USAFE), in charge of all communications in European and Mediterranean countries – 1977-1980 – and was promoted to brigadier general in 1979.

In 1980, Prather left Germany for MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, becoming the senior communications officer for the U.S. Readiness Command – now U.S. Central Command, CENTCOM, running the wars in the Middle East – in which he developed the first war plans for an invasion of Iraq. “We also had plans for invasion of all the Middle Eastern countries to respond to any tactical needs that may arise there where we have potential for certain levels of conflict; they’ve all been modified many times, but we began the planning back then,” Prather explained. At MacDill, Prather received the Defense Meritorious Service Medal.

Back to the Pentagon in 1981 with broadened communications responsibilities, Prather was awarded his second star (1983), and ordered to implement his plan to merge all Air Force communications and data automations functions throughout the service. He was named assistant chief of staff of information systems. Two years later, Prather was moved into the top slot of his career, commander of the Air Force Communications Command, assigned at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.

Here he was leader of one of the most pivotal organizational transitions in the history of the Air Force, and oversaw an immense command of 60,000 people in 747 units, squadrons and wings. “The communications command is still everyplace the Air Force is, and a whole lot of places the Air Force ain’t,” Prather said with a wink.

In 1986, Prather retired, closing out a 32-year, immensely gratifying and productive career. “They wanted me to go back to Washington for a third star [lieutenant general] and another five years, but I just didn’t want to go back to that political environment, and we were tired,” Prather said. “The kids call Del Rio home, and I love the people here. I don’t regret a bit of it.”

But his troops wouldn’t let Prather slip away easily. NCOs in his last command started a petition among 50,000 enlisted personnel in the communications command, worldwide, to honor Prather with the Order of the Sword, a commendation from the enlisted ranks for service rendered in a distinguished career. “Chief Master Sgt. Jeremiah T. Hayes started a petition before I even left, and I knew nothing about it. It’s a thing where all the enlisted personnel have to sign the petition or at least not say ‘No.’ Even a single blackball kills it,” Prather explained.

There was no blackball, only overwhelming support from the enlisted ranks, and the sponsors bought airline tickets for the Prathers to return to Scott on Oct. 17, 1986 for the presentation. “They reserved the entire officers’ club, and it was completely full of visiting troops who put on a show that watered my eyes, literally,” Prather said. “It was an absolutely beautiful, formal military ceremony.” In the history of the Order of the Sword, only 226 men and women have been selected, including comedian Bob Hope, Gen. Curtis LeMay, and Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger. Prather was number 111.

When he moved to Del Rio, he was immediately hired as a defense contractor’s consultant, and was traveling more than he wanted. He launched a second career in civic service to an imponderable list of organizations, all aimed at improving the community of Del Rio in a dazzling variety of tasks. At the behest of Val Verde County Commissioner James S. Leonard, Prather became Precinct 3 Justice of the Peace, serving for a decade. He created the Justice Juvenile Court with the help of Administrative Assistant Otila Gonzalez. In the first year, he heard 401 juvenile cases, requiring the participation of parents or guardians.

In 1997, Prather was elected president of the Del Rio Chamber of Commerce, and he remains an active life member of the board of directors. He also participates on the Convention and Visitors Bureau committee and the Special Projects Committee of the chamber, and is also a life director and vice president of the Military Affairs Association.

In the 1990s, Prather was on the board of the United Way, and was president for two years. He is Eagle Scout advancement chairman for the Amistad District of the Boy Scouts of America and was district chairman for three years.

Prather has been a member of Lions Clubs for 50 years, has served here as vice president of the Host Lions Club, and still serves as chaplain. Ordained as a lay Eucharistic minister, Prather served in that capacity with St. James Episcopal Church for three years, as senior warden of the vestry for three years, and as a trustee for five years. He was also a chaplain for the Juvenile Detention Center, 1994-2005, and continues as chaplain at Val Verde Regional Medical Center.

“My philosophy has not been to seek employment, but to seek service to the community. The major result, of course, is that I know almost everyone in this community, and they know me, and I pride myself on that,” Prather said.

His pride extends to continuing warm relationships with Laughlin Air Force Base, including the last 15 commanders of the 47th Flying Training Wing. Brig. Gen. Tod D. Wolters, commander of 325th Fighter Wing, Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., and Prather were good friends when Wolters commanded here at Laughlin, 2004-2006. “Tod used to call me the secretary of defense of west Texas,” Prather said, chuckling.

Though Prather is gratified about his service to youth in Del Rio with the juvenile court system, ROTC at Del Rio High School, and the Boy Scouts, the military man will not let go. He serves now on the board of directors of the Laughlin Heritage Foundation, and remains available for military service if needed.

Though retired, Prather is never completely off the hook if his nation needs him. “I serve at the beck and call of the president of the United States, and at his will whenever he calls me back to work, forever,” he explained.