Message posted by habu-e6 on August 16, 2009 at 13:45:13 PST:

Here is a letter that was recently sent out by one of the enlisted chiefs concerning another issue involving radioactive exposure with the U-2 program.

This notice was recently sent out to some people who worked at Beale AFB.

(Olympic Race) missions were high altitude U-2 missions to collect radioactive debris form Russian & Chinese nuke explosions. These missions if you were involved, you dressed up in your yellow suits and recovered the aircraft and downloaded radioactive particle and air samples. These missions mostly occurred in the 70's and to the mid 80's, one of the big ones was when the Russians had their accident at Chernobyl (April 1986). We also use to do background sorties in Korea and I believe at Beale also. Below is the first e-mail I sent out.

Hi to all of you,

Through some of our e-mails we discovered that a good number of us do not have any information in our V.A. medical files that we were in contact with or exposed to radioactive materials associated with the Olympic Race missions that we performed while on active duty.

The V.A. has identified several cancers associated with radioactive exposure.

If any of you were on any of these Oly Race missions and it is not identified in your VA records I am going to draft a letter stating we were involved in these missions.

If you want to be included in this please send me you name address. When the letter is complete I will add all of our names on the letter. I will send the letters out in a package all you need to do is sign all the letters and mail them to the next person on the list who will do the same. After all the signatures are complete send the package back to me and I will forward them back to you so you can get the letter put in your VA files. The letter will be verification to the VA of your participation in Olympic Race missions and your contact with radioactive material.

Please pass this on to anyone else who this might help.
My e-mail address cws@syix.com

The 9th wing historian is interested in any photos that any of you have of these missions. If you can scan them and send them to me I will pass them on. The historian is going to make a briefing to the wing commander as part of his history brief.

Thanks to all of you,

Stew

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