YOUNG HEROES

 

RICHARD

Richard had always dreamed of being a pilot. He finished the required 2 years of college to be a cadet. He was doing well, until he actually had to go airborne. He immediately got airsick. The Navy worked with him and after a few weeks, he was able to learn to fly. The first planes were essentially civilian planes that were almost impossible to stall out, to make it safer to learn. After the basics, they learned to fly on instruments. The student pilot was hooded, so he couldn’t see anything outside the cockpit. The instructor was behind with full vision and the ability to override the student. A couple of instructors weren’t paying attention as the wing of another plane struck Richard and his instructor’s cockpit. That plane made it down, but Richard’s lay in pieces. They finally found 3 arms to verify that both men were killed.

GLENN

The first military plane they learned to fly was the T-28. They are highly maneuverable, but they take a bit to get up to speed. We also were training foreign pilots at the time. The Vietnamese had a double problem. They are very small and the cockpits are designed for bigger men. They had to sit on pillows to see out. And  the language barrier. The Europeans were bigger and most spoke at least some English. As Glenn was coming in for a landing, one of the Vietnamese pilots pulled out on the runway in front of Glenn’s plane. He tried to  pull up, but it was too late. He had time to eject and save himself, but the plane was headed for Navy housing. As he was not married, he chose to stay with the plane turning it into unimproved land to save the families. I may owe my life to him, as I lived in Navy housing.

CONRAD AND FRIEND

After learning on the T-28 and new pilots learn to fly the type of plane they will fly when sent to their squadrons. Some fighter, some helicopter, and some transport. My husband chose helicopters and was trained and then assigned to HS-4 in Imperial Beach, California. Soon after his arrival some of his buddies had a chance to take a T-28 out to fly. They jumped at the chance, because the T-38 can to acrobatics. I am not sure what happened, they just never came back. Conrad left his wife and 3 children. The Navy wouldn’t declare him deceased for what seemed like forever. His wife had to wait it out, grieving and cut off from her family in the deep south. The other pilot was not married.

WARRIORS LOST

When the squadron got the planes they were to fly when deployed, they were fairly new. The altimeters were iffy and the Navy hadn’t fixed them. While deployed, they looked for submarines, watched the Russian “trawlers” that were watching us, and occasionally did angel duty to pick up survivors in the sea. Looking for submarines was their main function and entailed dipping the sonar into the sea to pick them up. At night judging how high you are visually is hard to impossible. One never came back. Again, no way of knowing what exactly happened, but the altimeter is the best guess.

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