MEMORIAL DAY SPEECH

City of Laguna Niguel

Memorial Day 2024

Mayor Jennings, Assembly person Davies, Supervisor Foley, distinguished guests, honored veterans, ladies and gentleman. Good afternoon. My name is Dan Heller, and I am a military historian and writer. I am the author of the books Across the Wing-Stories of Navy Carrier Combat Squadrons in the Vietnam Theatre and Their Stories-Tales of Military Service from the Docents of Lyon Air Museum as well as numerous articles and essays. I am also an instrument-rated pilot and fly light aircraft from John Wayne Airport when the weather is marginal and the controllers are friendly. It is both an honor and privilege to be able to talk to you today, and for that I thank John Pointer, and his fellow veterans of the American Legion, as well as the City of Laguna Niguel.

Today is a solemn day for this nation, a day when we remember and honor Americans who have given their lives for this magnificent country, the land we call home. It is also a day to recognize the tens of thousands of Americans who remain missing in action, as well a those who have passed from service-related ailments long after wearing the uniform. From the Revolutionary War to present-day, America has never had a deficit of sons and daughters willing to fight, and if necessary die, for the freedoms we enjoy. The guiding principles of their service and sacrifice are the words enshrined in the hallowed words of our founding documents, and the glorious stars and stripes of our flag. Every word in those documents, and every fibre in our flag represent the souls of the nearly 1.4 million who have given their lives in service of this country. They are the faces of our liberty, the memories of their lives the currency of our freedoms.

However, in reality that number is exponentially much greater, as every American soldier, sailor or aircrew who dies in the service of this country is not just one death, but many. For the mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the fallen, their lives are inescapably changed, never to be the same again. To them, for their great sacrifice, we also owe a debt that can never be fully repaid. The only solace and comfort we can offer as a nation is that that their loved ones will be remembered by future generations, that their lives will be honored and not forgotten. Therefore we must remember them as not merely names and statistics, but as faces filled with dreams, hopes, and aspirations.

Though the generation that fought in World War I, the “War to end all Wars” has faded into the sunset, within our generations are the last remnants of those who valiantly served in World War II. That war, which decided the fate of the world, cost this country 400,000 lives over 45 months of declared war. That equates to an eye-watering average of nearly 9,000 killed every month, about 2,220 per week.

It began with the 2,500 killed at Pearl Harbor, the 150 Marines and Navy sailors who died heroically trying to defend Wake Island, and the estimated 600 American POWs who died during the Bataan Death March after the fall of the Philippines.
Just four months after these horrific events and with the American public clamoring for a response, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and 79 other Raiders took off from the carrier Hornet in sixteen B-25 bombers and audaciously attacked Tokyo. Of the 80 men aboard the sixteen planes, 69 made it back to the US. Two aircraft were captured by the Japanese Army within China. Of them Dean Hallmark, Bill Farrow and Harold Spatz were executed following a mock trial while Lieutenant Robert Meder died in captivity in 1943 from malnutrition and beri beri. The remaining four miraculously survived the war as POWs. One of them, Jacob DeShazer, returned to Japan with his wife in 1948 where they spent the next thirty years as Christian missionaries. Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor, became close friends with the DeShazers.

Occurring just six months after Pearl Harbor, it was the Battle of Midway that will forever be one of our greatest triumphs, though with a high human cost. At 0920 on the morning of 4 June 1942 39 TBD Devastator torpedo bombers of Navy squadrons VT-8, VT-6 and VT-3 began attacking the four Japanese fleet carriers—Kaga, Akagi, Hiryu and Soryu. Thirty-four of those 39 aircraft were immediately shot down, resulting in the deaths of most of their crews. VT-8, which began the attack with 15 aircraft and 30 men, emerged with only one survivor. Within minutes of that massacre, and with the Japanese Navy savoring a crushing victory, 30 American dive-bombers appeared overhead in what would begin perhaps the most crushing victory in the history of naval warfare. In the ensuing action and within 24 hours four Japanese fleet carriers had been sunk, largely ending to their ability to project forward air power, putting them on the defensive for the remainder of the war.The price of that victory was 307 lives and the carrier Yorktown, which the Japanese believed they had already sunk at the Battle of Coral Sea a month prior. That beautiful boat was the wildcard that helped boost us to a critical victory. She lays in peace 18,000 feet below where she gracefully and eternally slipped into the water on 7 June 1942. Today is for her, too.

There was no time to rest in victory as within months was the Guadalcanal Campaign in the Solomon Islands. More than 7,000 Americans were killed in the six months of that campaign as we began island-hopping steadily toward Japan. That was followed by the Battle of Tarawa, a 12 square-mile atoll where the Japanese Army commander boasted it would take “one million men one hundred years” to conquer. It took 50,000 US troops three days to conquer at a cost of more than 1,000 Marines who gave their lives in that battle.

On the other side of the world the Army Air Forces were pounding German ground targets throughout occupied Europe, while our ground forces were charging across north Africa, landing in Sicily, and advancing up the boot of Italy. On 6 June 1944 the allies opened the western front as the invasion of Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” began, with 4,400 fatalities within the 24 hours of D-Day—Operation Overlord. On Omaha Beach the dead bodies provided the only cover for those advancing behind them. Survivors have told me so horrific was the carnage that waves crashing upon the beach and sand tinged blood red for weeks afterward. By the time that operation ended nearly three months later nearly 30,000 American troops had given their lives.

An offensive in the fall of 1944 that ultimately failed, Operation Market Garden, resulted in more than 4,000 casualties for the fabled 82nd and 101st Airborne. That winter, in a last-ditch effort to stop the inevitable, Germany launched the Battle of the Bulge in the midst of one of the harshest European winters on record. Only through grit, dogged determination, the 101st Airborne, and General George Patton’s 3rd Army were we able to stop the Germans from achieving their objective, to split the allied lines in half and reach Antwerp. However, it was the costliest single battle for America during World War II, with nearly 20,000 killed over six weeks of bitter fighting. More than 5,000 of them are buried at the American Military Cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg, where General Patton is buried at the front, as if leading his troops into battle. As we advanced upon the Ruhr and Rhine, and into the heart of Hitler’s faltering thousand-year Reich, 680 miles southeast of the Japanese home islands US Marines waged a vicious battle for Iwo Jima, a speck of volcanic rock jutting out of the ocean. As with previous hard-fought battles across the Pacific, much of that historic engagement came down to grenades, bayonets, flame throwers and hand-to-hand combat against an enemy deeply entrenched, fanatically vowed to never surrender and prepared to fight to the death. By the time that battle ended five weeks later the sands of Iwo Jima would be soaked with the blood of 7,000 dead marines-for 12-square miles of rock. One of the Marines photographed raising our flag on Mount Surabachi, Corporal Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona, was so haunted by the carnage and death that in the years following the war the only thing that could dull his emotional pain came from a bottle. On 24 January 1955 he was found dead. He was 32 years old.

Iwo Jima was the last natural barrier to mainland Japan, and once firmly in American control the next logical step was the Allied invasion of the home islands. Had that invasion occurred, intelligence estimated more than a million allied and Japanese casualties along with hundreds of thousands of fatalities during the operation. Those numbers weighed heavily upon President Truman when he made the difficult decision to use atomic weapons, only after Japan rejected several opportunities to surrender. In the aftermath of our costly victory in World War II came not revenge or vengeance, but magnanimity, with the United States rebuilding the countries of our vanquished foes, resulting in a peaceful Germany and Japan becoming key economic and military allies, close relationships that have endured to this very day.

It was just five years later when our men and women in uniform were once again called to action, to the Korean peninsula, when communist North launched a brutal invasion of the South in what would sadly become known as the “Forgotten War” That war, the first time American and communist Chinese troops fought face-to-face, would rage for three years and give birth to legendary battles such as Porkchop Hill and Chosin Reservoir, where US Army and Marine troops fought their way out through a narrow path not much wider than a highway, traversing over 80 miles of inhospitable, mountainous terrain where winter temperatures plunged to 36 degrees below zero. This crippled personnel and rendered critical equipment useless in the face of the coldest Korean winter on record. The US suffered nearly 2,000 fatalities and thousands of cases of severe frostbite. This is the legendary origin of the “Chosin Few” and “Chosin Frozen”. By the time the ceasefire was agreed to in June 1953 and peace fell upon the Korean Peninsula, America had lost nearly 37,000 killed during three years of fighting.

The years of peace to follow were paved by the nearly half-a-million American men and women in uniform who had selflessly given their lives in two major wars over the past decade. However, the peace achieved in Asia by blood and toil did not last. In his inaugural address on 20 January 1961, newly elected President Kennedy laid out his doctrine—“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” When President Kennedy tragically lost his life in Dallas in November of 1963 President Lyndon Johnson picked up the Kennedy Doctrine, and ran with it, to a war-torn corner of the world known as Indochina

My book Across the Wing, which took four years to write, was my first literary foray into the Vietnam war. What made it different from my past works on World War II is that there were many more veterans still living that I could talk to. What I discovered when I began my research, interviews, and writing, is that those who served in uniform in Vietnam were tasked with the greatest challenges, asked to do the most with the least, and given the smallest in return. Yet, when compared to their World War II and Korean War counterparts, they both succeeded, and exceeded, in every way, their acts of heroism and valor as numerous as the jungled canopies. A prime example this were the naval aviators of the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club.

Beginning in March of 1965, following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and at the commencement of Operation Rolling Thunder, an assortment of three aircraft carriers of the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, Task Force 77, maintained a constant presence off the coast of North Vietnam, at an arbitrary set of navigational coordinates in the Tonkin Gulf known as “Yankee Station”. A typical carrier deployment would be eight to nine months, with one month spent “on the line” before taking a ten-day break, typically in Subic Bay in the Philippines. This cycle continued for eight years, non-stop, seven days a week, with each carrier on a noon-midnight or midnight-noon flight schedule. Flying from Thailand and over Laos to reach their targets, the Air Force also flew missions into North Vietnam. While the Air Force shared responsibility of Hanoi with the Navy, it was the latter who was primarily tasked with missions to the cities of Vinh, Thanh Hoa, and Haiphong. At the time these four cities were of the most heavily defended in the world, with anti-aircraft defenses rivaling those of Moscow or Beijing.
So relentless was the pace of air operations that by the beginning of 1968, about halfway into the conflict and with nearly five years remaining, more bombs had been dropped on North and South Vietnam than had been dropped on all of Europe, and three times more than had been dropped in the Pacific theatre, during World War II. This number does not include ordnance dropped on Cambodia and Laos, which was significant in its own right.

For naval aviators, each mission flown into North Vietnam was a dabble with disaster, a brush with death. If an aircraft managed to successfully catapult from a carrier and cross the coast “feet dry” into North Vietnam, the men aboard faced a hornet’s nest of long gun and anti-aircraft artillery fire, ranging from .50 caliber to 100mm, some of which was radar-guided. To climb above that deadly envelope exposed them to the Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile, a 30-foot long “flying telephone pole” traveling at mach 3 with nearly a quarter-ton of explosives in a fragmenting steel warhead. We lost over 1,000 aircraft to this missile, with hundreds of casualties and fatalities as a result.

Should a Navy, or Air Force, airman get shot down over North Vietnam and manage to safely get out of the aircraft and parachute to the ground, there were four possibilities. First, they would be rescued. The military, most notably the Air Force’s Aerospace Rescue and Recovery and Tactical Air Support Squadrons, bravely performed aircrew rescue missions in South Vietnam, plucking thousands from possible death. They did so in North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as well. In fact, the CIA had several clandestine Lima bases in eastern Laos the Air Force used for that purpose. However the deep country as well as the location, and ferocity, of anti-aircraft fire in those places sometimes precluded such an effort. The exception was the coastline of North Vietnam, where American rescue aircraft routinely patrolled. Second was summary execution, especially if any resistance to capture was made. The third was internment in a POW camp, where they faced years of torture, inhumane deprivation, and illness, while waiting for release. Although the government of North Vietnam had been a signatory to the Geneva Convention, guaranteeing humane treatment of POWs, they decreed our military as war criminals, and refused to recognize any such protection. The fourth possibility was to die a POW, as did a total of 35 American prisoners while imprisoned by the North Vietnamese government.

Among them was Commander Homer Smith, skipper of Attack Squadron 212 flying from the USS Bonne Homme Richard. After being shot down and captured on 20 May 1967 he was taken to the Hanoi Hilton, where fellow POWs heard him being tortured, his anguished screams finally falling silent after several days.

Commander Kenneth Cameron of Attack Squadron VA-76, also flying from Bon Homme Richard, was shot down on 18 May 1967. After spending years in solitary confinement and enduring countless torture sessions, his mental and physical state deteriorated markedly. One day in 1970 the guards took him away, and he was never seen alive again. His remains were repatriated in March 1974.

Air Force Major Norman Schmidt of the 435th Tactical Fighter Squadron flying from Udorn in Thailand was shot down and captured on 1 March 1966. He was beaten to death after being caught trying to catch a glimpse of segregated fellow POWs through a small crack in a wall.

Air Force Captain Edwin Atteberry of the 11th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, also flying from Udorn, was shot down on 12 August 1967. He and fellow Air Force Captain John Dramesi were the only two POWs to escape from the Hanoi Hilton. Unfortunately they were recaptured just twelve hours later. Both men were subjected to consecutive weeks of beatings and torture. However, only Dramesi survived.

One of the most tragic is Air Force 1st Lieutenant Alan Brudno of 68th Tactical Fighter Squadron flying from Korat in Thailand. He endured nearly eight years of captivity, of inhumane treatment. Though he made it home, he was unable to cope with the terrible psychological effects of his internment. He committed suicide on 3 June 1973, just three months after his repatriation. His name has rightly beed added to the Vietnam Memorial Wall as a casualty of that war. Alan had graduated from MIT and dreamed of becoming an astronaut. He viewed the military as the quickest path to that goal.

Those who made it to a POW camp were perhaps fortunate compared to those who simply vanished without a trace after last being known alive. One such man was Navy Lieutenant James Kelly Patterson, an A-6 Intruder Bombardier/Navigator of attack squadron VA-35 flying from USS Enterprise, shot down by a surface-to-air missile near Hanoi on 19 May 1967. Kelly was on the ground for three days evading capture while actively in contact with rescue forces working to extract him. When those forces returned on the fourth day the radio was silent—Kelly was gone. His fate remains unknown. The pilot of the aircraft, Lieutenant Commander Eugene “Red” McDaniel, was captured the next day and spent nearly six tortuous years as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton. After his release he was awarded the Navy Cross for valor and heroism while interned, such as stepping forward and taking severe beatings in place of men who were weak and sick.  The man in the picture with Kelly is his younger brother Luck, a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran. This is when Kelly paid him a surprise, unannounced visit when he was serving as a marine infantry lieutenant in Hoi An, near Da Nang. It was the last time they saw each other as Kelly was shot down about a month later. For 57 years he has searched relentlessly for his brother, whom he loves and misses more than words can say. 

Air Force Lieutenant Terrin Hicks of the 14th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron flying from Udorn was shot down on 15 August 1968. While descending by parachute he was in contact via radio with his backseat Weapons Systems Officer, Captain Joe Shanahan, who was captured immediately after making landfall and ultimately released during Operation Homecoming. Terrin Hicks’ last known status was as a POW, being taken to Dong Hoi for medical treatment of a broken leg, according to debriefed POWs. He has not been seen or heard from since.

On 24 December 1968 an Air Force F-105 Thunderchief from Takhli in Thailand piloted by USAF Major Charles Brownlee. was shot down near the Ban Karai Pass in Laos, reporting to his wingman via emergency radio that he was injured. The approaching darkness meant the rescue effort was postponed until the next day, Christmas. On that day an HH-3 Jolly Green Giant from Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base was dispatched, and A1C Doug King was lowered to the ground, finding Major Brownleee hanging from tree branches that had snagged his parachute King freed him then attached them both to the jungle penetrator to be hoisted aboard the Jolly Green. However a trap had been set and enemy forces opened heavy fire, injuring King. When he told the helicopter to go the penetrator got snagged and both men fell back to the jungle floor. The helicopter was badly damaged by ground fire and had to leave the area. Subsequent searches failed to locate them. A Laotian refugee who later arrived in the United States stated King had been captured and put on a truck. Both remain MIA. Doug King was posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross.

Navy Commander and former skipper of the Blue Angels Harley Hall was shot down on 27 January 1973 near the DMZ and mere hours before the peace accords were signed in Paris. He was last seen alive on the ground, detaching from and gathering his parachute before running into the jungle. A rescue operation was immediately launched, however the Air Force OV-10 aircraft coordinating the effort was also shot down. Both of those crewman, Captain George Morris and 1st Lieutenant Mark Peterson, were shot and killed shortly after making landfall near the Cua Viet River. Subsequent enemy radio transmissions indicated a “big Blue Angel” had been captured alive, and there are reports of Hall being tied to an oxcart and paraded as a trophy. Hall’s backseat Radar Intercept Officer, Al Kientzler, was shot in the thigh during parachute descent and was captured, released several months later during Operation Homecoming. Hall’s remains, consisting of three front teeth, were repatriated, without explanation, in June 1985. He was married with a daughter, and his wife pregnant with their son.

To date a total of 1,576 Americans are now listed by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency as missing and unaccounted from the Vietnam War. Of this number 1,237 are from North and South Vietnam, 284 from Laos, 48 from Cambodia and 7 from Communist China. This brings us to another tragedy. It was within the mountain passes between Laos, Cambodia and the borders of Vietnam where much of the war material was moved from the north into the south via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Both the Navy and Air Force flew tens of thousands of sorties into those two areas, losing more than 600 killed or missing. During negotiations in Paris in 1972 and 1973 to end the war, our government made a passable effort to account for POWs/MIAs within North and South Vietnam. However, neither Laos nor Cambodia were parties to those negotiations. Therefore, no effort was made at the time to account for the whereabouts of those men.

Injury and death for Navy fliers did not always come in combat. Catapulting and landing aboard a carrier carries an inherent and significant risk. As you can see, one such risk was a ramp strike. On 1 April 1966 a Skywarrior tanker of VAH-4 was being launched from Enterprise when its nose wheel collapsed and the aircraft plunged into the sea. Of the three crew aboard only Lieutenant William Kohlrusch surfaced. He died in sick bay shortly after. Pilot Commander William Grayson and Petty Officer Melvin Krech went down with the aircraft, where they remain today.

On 25 March 1967 Navy Lieutenant James Hise of fighter squadron VF-53 was piloting an F-8 Crusader, returning to USS Hancock after a combat patrol. On landing the arrestor cable malfunctioned, sending his aircraft off the bow at too low of a speed to regain flight. He ejected, however his parachute snagged on the aircraft when he landed in the water, and he was dragged down with it as it sank into the sea. They were unable to recover his body. James Hise was 25 years old.

On 19 November 1967 Lieutenant Ed Van Orden had gone to afterburner for takeoff from Oriskany when the catapult bridle malfunctioned. Too late to abort the takeoff and with insufficient speed for flight, his F-8 went over the bow nose-low as he ejected. When descending his parachute caught on the port gun tub, slamming him into the hull of the carrier, which broke his neck. Ed Van Orden was 28 years old.

On 12 March 1968 pilot and VA-35 Skipper Commander Glenn Kollman and his Bombardier/Navigator Lieutenant John Griffith of VA-35 catapulted off Enterprise at night in foul weather for a combat mission over North Vietnam. Their aircraft experienced a malfunctioning wing slat shortly after leaving the carrier, pitched up sharply, stalled, nosed over-and plunged into the sea. Both men remain where they fell.

The day after their tragic deaths Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC) Admiral Hyland presided over an awards presentation aboard Enterprise. He had been scheduled to award the Navy Cross, the nation’s second highest combat award, to the two aviators for a daring mission flown three weeks prior. The awards were instead awarded posthumously. Johnny Griffith was truly a renaissance man who was also an architect, artist and journalist.

Deadly hazards aboard an aircraft carrier are not limited to the cockpit, and not exclusive to aircrew. On 26 October 1966 a magnesium flare ignited in a flare locker aboard Oriskany. Forty-four men died in that inferno, including 26 officers from the air wing who were trapped in their quarters just below the flight deck, in an area known as “Officers Country”. Among them was fighter squadron VF-111 pilot and flight surgeon Commander Norman Levy, as well as pilots Cody Balisteri and Bill McWilliams, whom they called “Irish”. Norm Levy was 31 years old. Cody Balisteri was 25 years-old and Bill McWilliams was 24 years-old. All three drowned when the compartment flooded with water from fighting the topside fire and they were unable to escape. Squadron Officer Lieutenant John Sande was speaking to them on their room telephone as their voices became silent.

On 29 July 1967 an electrical malfunction sent an explosive Zuni rocket of an F-4 Phantom fighter across the deck of the carrier Forrestal. It struck the external fuel tank of an A-4 Skyhawk piloted by attack squadron VA-46 pilot Lieutenant Fred White, one of several fueled and fully armed Skyhawks preparing to depart on a combat mission. One and a half minutes after the fire began the bombs on the Skyhawks began to detonate, instantly killing Fred White and all but three men of a firefighting team led by Chief Gerald Farrier. Another one of the Skyhawks was being piloted by John McCain, who barely escaped with his life. A total of 134 men died in that conflagration, the majority of which were enlisted personnel who heroically fought to save the ship, and the lives of their fellow sailors.

On 14 January 1969 aboard Enterprise a Zuni rocket of an F-4 Phantom exploded due to overheating. The explosion began a chain-reaction, igniting fuel and weapons of numerous aircraft on the flight deck. A total of 18 explosions occurred, blowing eight holes into the deck which allowed burning jet fuel to enter and flow. Twenty-eight men lost their lives in that fire. It was the last major shipboard fire aboard an aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf.

Between June 1964 and the end of US Navy combat operations in Southeast Asia at the end of January 1973, 854 Navy aircraft had been lost in combat and operational incidents resulting in 575 fatalities and 144 POWs. The Marine Corps lost 271 aircraft in combat and operational incidents resulting in 241 fatalities and 12 POWs. The Air Force lost an incomprehensible 2,221 aircraft in combat and operational incidents resulting in 2,472 fatalities and 341 POWs. The worst carrier losses occurred in Air Wing 16 aboard Oriskany on her 1967 cruise. During 122 days of combat the air wing lost one-half of the airplanes assigned to her and one-third of her pilots. Twenty aviators were killed or missing in action, seven taken prisoner of war, and thirty-nine aircraft lost. By the end of the conflict Air Wing 16 would account for one-quarter of all Navy aircraft losses.

It would be remiss of me to not highlight the terribly high losses incurred by Army helicopters. According to the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, a total of 5,607 Army helicopters were lost in combat and operational incidents, resulting in the deaths of 4,877 and a large number of number of MIAs. This picture is of Major Joe Bowen, F Troop Fourth Calvalry. He is on the left. In the closing days of the war he rescued a young marine officer who had been shot down near the DMZ and was at risk of capture or death. That man is alive today, as are his children and grandchildren, because of Joe’s bravery. As you can see, they really did paint cavalry sabres on their birds.

At present our total Killed in Action in the Vietnam War stands at 58,178. Among this number are eight women—all nurses who gave their lives in the line of duty. Among them is Air Force flight nurse Captain Mary Klinker, part of the crew of an Operation Babylift C-5 Galaxy that had taken off from Bien Hoa near Saigon on 4 April 1975 before experiencing explosive decompression and attempting to return. The crew was evacuating a plane load of war orphans to new lives in the United States, racing against the clock as communist troops descended on Saigon. She was 27 years old. One-hundred thirty-eight people were killed in that crash, including 78 children and 35 Department of Defense personnel.

I was truly fortunate to interview 64 veterans as well as the widows and children of those who fell in battle, and those who have passed. One of my early interviews was with a retired Marine colonel who flew more than 200 missions over two combat tours to North Vietnam. During our conversation he was still very much a hard-nosed Marine officer with a booming voice that made me feel like I should be standing at attention. That is, until he began describing to me the loss of a fellow pilot and close friend. He had been flying combat that day when he witnessed his friend’s aircraft take ground fire and erupt into a fireball, followed by his ejection. Flying a multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art fighter with enough weaponry to reduce a small town to smoldering ashes, he was powerless to help as he witnessed his friend’s death on the ground. As he spoke his voice grew quiet and quivered as he struggled mightily to hold back the tears that were welling up inside him.

Then there was the widow of a Navy pilot who died after a botched ejection from his battle-damaged aircraft over the Tonkin Gulf. When she told me she never remarried I remarked to her that was the case with many other widows I interviewed. She told me that so many had never remarried because they knew they could never be loved the way they were loved by the husbands they lost. The only recollections of marriage they could ever cherish were the ones they knew could never be replaced.

A retired marine Lieutenant Colonel spent a tour in combat followed by a tour stateside as a casualty liaison officer. It was his grim job to notify the next-of-kin of a Marine’s death and attend to their needs, including the funeral. At one such funeral, as he bent over and presented the casket flag to the mother of a young marine, she looked at him with anguish and sorrow, and said “I’m so sorry you have this job.”
“My knees buckled and I fought to hold back tears,” he said. “I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was present her with the flag and render my salute. After the funeral I went home and locked myself in a dark room. I didn’t come out until the next day.”

I interviewed the 59 year-old daughter of an Air Force pilot whom she still calls “Daddy”. He died a terrible death as a POW. She described to me, in exacting detail, the smell of her father’s flight suit when she hugged him for the last time-jet fuel, oil, diesel, and sweat. I could hear her inhaling through her nose as that beautiful memory came back to her. Her younger sister, who was only two when their father died, has struggled in life without him and longs for what could have been.

Of the dozens of naval aviators I interviewed for my book, many of those who flew combat from 1968 onwards, stated they had serious doubts about our efforts in Southeast Asia. They had begun to view it as stalemate resulting in countless needless deaths. This was especially true of America ground troops who, by the middle of 1968 and in the wake of the Tet Offensive, were dying at a clip of over 300 a week.  These airmen were also keenly aware of what was happening to those captured in Laos and North Vietnam, due in part to Navy POW Commander Jeremiah Denton cleverly blinking TORTURE in Morse code during the forced filming of a propaganda broadcast.

This naturally compelled me to ask—flying combat from an aircraft carrier over heavily defended targets in Laos and North Vietnam was extremely dangerous, and the risk of imprisonment or death at the hands of captors was a very real possibility. You were having doubts about our efforts there. On top of that, back in the states your service was being vilified. Why did you continue to risk your life flying combat? A Navy pilot or flight officer can turn in their wings at anytime.
Their answer, nearly universal amongst them, was striking. Firstly, they had made a commitment to their country. No matter how much they disagreed with political policy, it was their solemn, sworn duty to do their job. To shirk from that responsibility was dishonorable, an affront to the oath they took to uphold and defend the constitution, and to the uniform they wore. Secondly, while they felt they were no longer confident of victory, they firmly believed they were still fighting for a just and noble cause—the survival of each other. To abandon men who put their lives on the line for you in life-and death situations, day after day, was something they could not fathom.

In other words, they were willing to sacrifice their own lives so long as they could save the life of another. And there it was. That was what gave them the courage and will to go out and fly combat nearly every day or night for months on end, putting themselves in immense danger. It was not about themselves, but of each other. They loved what was beside them more than they could ever hate what was in front of them. It was a close bond of immense depth, one that not nobody outside of that world could ever understand, and one not even death could break. This was not at all exclusive to the ranks of naval aviators, but rather pervasive throughout the 2.7 million men and women in uniform of all branches who proudly served in that theatre, 73% of whom had volunteered for military service. They had each other, and at the end of the day, that’s what mattered most.

In closing there is one thing I want you all to take away from this observance today. For those of you who are veterans, consider this an unspoken and implicit portion of the oath we took. Remember these names. Remember these faces. Not just today, or on Veterans Day, but on all days. From World War II to the present day, you live in the freedoms, liberties, and protections their lives paid for.

Thank you and God Bless America.