• 16 March, Jim Watkins and Dave Dempster arrive by KC-135Q.

• 18 March, Buddy Brown and Dave Jensen fly first, get weather aborted for their Ops sortie and fly a Cathy local area training mission.

• 21 March, Jerry O'Malley and Ed Payne fly next and target area weather good and so they fly the first Ops mission.

 • About 22 March, 68 the School Teacher's party and birth of HABU ( a close approximation ).

The Story of the birth of the HABU patch

One of the school teachers said: ...."every time I see one of the blackbirds I think of the HABU"!   None of us understood what that meant and looked at her blankly. Realizing we didn't understand, she told us about the Okinawan snake called the HABU and why it resembled to her the Blackbird. SIERRA HOTEL! WE LIKED THAT! It was a great image. Later on Dave Jensen and I walked back to our BOQ we talked about the HABU image and we both went to our rooms and started drawing a logo image. The next morning, Dave and I sat together and his was clearly the best, so we went to the Squadron area and sitting with the crews and Charlie Minter, we retold the HABU story, showed Dave Jensen's drawing and suddenly everyone liked it, including our Vice Commander/OL-8 Boss Colonel Charlie Minter. Decision: GO FOR IT! Now, what's neat about this story is that we were a SAC organization, but flying under their radar screen. No one was asked about all this except we crew members and Charlie Minter: THUMBS UP and that's all Dave Jensen needed. He had an empty schedule that afternoon and whoooooose, he was gone to Koza and find a good patch sew shop. He did and with his drawing produced our first HABU patches in about two days. The Okinawan BOQ maids and support staff were very friendly to us ( we tipped them for their help ) and within the next day or so, we all had HABU patches sewn on our K-2B cotton flight suits ( this was long before the green bag NOMEX fire retardant flight suits appeared on the scene ) and that was all there was to it.

• About 26 March, 68 the first HABU patches were brought to our BOQ and Squadron area by Dave Jensen.  As more patches were required and because of different people in the patch shop doing them variations creep in.  Short Red Nose and by the time Tony left in Aug 68 an all black SR-71.