It’s Military Reunion Season

Perhaps more than any other town in America, Pensacola, Florida, is the touchstone of generations of Navy and Marine Corps personnel and their families.

Each reunion group has a personality all its own—hard to define, but known by the insiders who lived in that world. The first A6A jet entered service with VA-42, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, in March 1963. The “Intruder,” as it was nicknamed, had a crew of two: a pilot and a bombardier/navigator. The plane joined Navy/Marine squadrons aboard fleet carriers in 1964. The A6 provided the Navy and Marine Corps with all-weather strike capability for the first time.
In April 2014, Pensacola welcomed returning heroes of the A6 Intruder Association and their families.

The economic impact of military reunions in the Pensacola area may be difficult to measure but 850 individuals certainly make a difference! This reunion was one of the largest ever hosted by the Intruder Association. A dedicated, tenacious committee of former Intruder personnel were advisers for the gathering.

Those crews who flew the plane and those who cared for it come from all over America, and it may have been their first time back to Northwest Florida in decades. They returned with early memories of their primary aviation training in Pensacola.

From a viewpoint by Nancy Fetterman, a widow of a shipmate, in the Pensacola News Journal, Pensacola, Florida