The Sentinel July 6, 2020

      There is a point to this, but you will have to read to the end to get that point. I spent the year of 1965 flying all over the Pacific in one of these magnificent old EC121K planes. We flew from Guam to the Philippines and then flew to the coast of Vietnam to provide overnight radar coverage for the 7th fleet. In all of those flights if we had engine trouble and went down into the ocean we would never have been found. We flew a racetrack pattern over the fleet to catch any incoming boats or planes trying to get to the aircraft carriers. One night it was pitch black and we were over one of the carriers when they launched an air strike. There were jets launching and whizzing by us still in afterburner. The pilot freaked out wondering what was going on and I could hear the jets radio traffic asking the same thing, (what the hell was that we just went by?) There were also a few expletives uttered by the jet jockeys (something forbidden over radios). We and they could have been killed. One night the pilot called back to me asking what had just shot by us with flames shooting out the tail like a missile? I never saw it on the radar it was so fast. Again we could have been killed by something possibly enemy or friendly fire. One day we were trapped on the flight line in Da Nang when the bad guys started a mortar attack from the surrounding areas to the flight line. Not a scratch to us or our plane.
      We chased and even flew into typhoons (hurricanes in the pacific) with the plane shooting up and down several hundred feet in a matter of seconds. Again we could have been killed. One night we were chasing a typhoon and getting very close to Hainan island, the southernmost part of China. The Chinese have secret submarine bases there. They do not like American planes getting close to there and spying on them. We were not spies, but they didn't know that because other US planes were there frequently for that purpose, so they could have sent jets up to knock us down.
      I spent 2 cruises working on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, the most dangerous jobs in the navy and one of the more dangerous jobs in the world (excepting navy seals). I had multiple close calls that would have been permanent lights out for me. Anything from snapped arresting cables which can take an ankle off in a heartbeat, or explosions and fires with the deck awash in fuel and ordinance or simply a plane landing too far right or left of the arresting cables and crashing into planes a man could be working on.
      And then there was the Philippines with sailors being cut with broken bottles, knives and my favorite, me staring at the wrong end of 2 different WW-2 American 45 caliber pistols held by angry Filipinos when I was just minding my own business.
      Now to my point, I was in the navy in dangerous situations for 11 years without a scratch and now 47 years later I have been cut into with many surgeries, minor and major than I could have ever imagined. It just goes to show that we never know what the future will bring and I had been feeling bulletproof for decades.