Blackwell-Frazier American Legion Post #142 Hominy, Oklahoma

This is for my fellow “Fly Boys”. It happened last Sunday in 1969. I was wrapping up high school. It was at toward the middle of the Vietnam War (not conflict thank you). There was a young cargo handler Airman named John Levitow on board. His aircraft was the Spooky 71. It was flying night missions near the Tan Son Nhut Air base area when Long Binh came under attack. As the crew of Spooky 71 manned their aircraft patrolling the area, the pilot Major Kenneth Carpenter had seen muzzle flashes outside Long Binh Army Base. The pilot threw the AC-47 and its eight-man crew into a banked turn to engage the Viet Cong in the Tan Son Nhut Air Base area.

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I want to reprint something this year that I posted in the past. I thought I could top it but, I think I got it right the first time. It’s Black History Month, I think of my old friend Leonard Buckley often. Again, I would like to pay tribute to someone who was among the finest of soldiers I had the pleasure to serve with. He was a better soldier than me. His name was Leonard Buckley and we buried him with full military honors in December 2015.

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I was a young lad living in Edgerton Kansas in 1964 and there wasn’t much to do. When school started all my new buddies urged me to over to the community service that Tuesday evening to see something neat. I went to the meeting and saw about twenty guys my age in cool uniforms. They were Boy Scouts.

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(written for later this week)

On this day in 2003 I was managing a large telecommunications project at Ft Polk Louisiana. Looking up into the skies I could not believe my eyes. The Space shuttle Columbia broke apart in flames over Texas, killing all 7 astronauts just 16 minutes before they were supposed to glide to ground in Florida. The astronauts included Michael P. Anderson (b.1959), David M. Brown (b.1956), Laurel Clark (b.1962), Kalpana Chawla (b.1962), Rick Husband (b.1957), William C. McCool (b.1961) and Ilan Ramon (b.1954). An explosion in the wheel well under the left wing was later suspected as the cause. It was a sad day for our nation.

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Yogi Berra’s famous quote can to mind when I heard last week about the false “incoming” missile warning in Hawaii all over the news. Despite all the good technology things can still boil down to human error. This is not the first instance of this. For example, in 1995 on this day Russia’s early-warning defense radar detected an unexpected missile launch near Norway, and Russian military command estimates the missile to be only minutes from impact on Moscow.

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