A bit about "Boochie"
from an E-mail from MoH_Soda:
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# MOH02SD started it's career as a shiny new LaGG 29 Series with a standard 1942 AMT-4 green, AMT-6 black and AMT-7 light blue camo finish. She was issued to Mladshiy Leitenant Sodakozkav in April of 1942 while he was flying for the 214 ShAP out of Taman airbase, Kuban. 2 weeks of four per day sorties during the German Kerch Peninsula offensive in May of '42 turned # MOH02SD into a mean bitch & quickly seasoned her rookie pilot. an encounter with some highly skilled boots & skinnies on 22 May '42 gave cause for Sodakozkav to test his emergency landing procedures & the structural integrity of # MOH02SD. Test ended about 200 meters short of the Bagerovo runway. Luckily the Germans withdrew later that day & the swamp was not that deep. #MOH02SD was salvaged, patched up, & the two were sent to defend the Black Sea oil depot port at Tuapse in southern Kuban. Action started to pick up the the area about September, & more than a few times Sodakozkav found himself returning to the base in the back of a truck while # MOH02SD (now appropriately named 'Boochie') was dragged to the crude repair shack of her crew chief, a transplanted Englishman everybody called Sneaky. By this time Boochie had collected a fair amount of air /ground kills & Sodakozkav was going out with the base commander's daughter (she was a brown bag kind of a girl, but hey, pilots do what they must in times of war). At any rate these two things afforded # MOH02SD some unofficial privileges, & somehow the 1180hp M-105PF engine & NS-37 37mm nose cannon of a recently wreaked LaGG-3IT had found their way into Boochie. Of course each time a repair was made the area was sprayed with one of Sneaky's two favorite colors (dull black or dull brown). So as you can see by this picture the original paint job is about 7 layers deep & Boochie was starting to resemble the commander's daughter; not so good to look at, but experienced & with all the right parts where it counted.
The Germans were stopped at Tuapse, fall rolled into winter, & soon Boochie & Sodakozkav found themselves ranging north along the Black Sea coast to the skies over the Kuban Bridgehead. Sneaky reluctantly busted out the white spray paint for the numerous repairs required that winter, but used it only sparingly. It was in the spring of '43 that Sneaky painted the words "nebe ostavili sled" on the side of Boochie. When Sodakozkav asked him why he put "they left a trail in the sky" on Boochie, Sneaky replied "those bloody bustards! they told me it meant "send us spits!"
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thanks Soda
F
"He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."
- The history of Paul Revere's
midnight ride, by Sarah Palin.