TBT…

Posted on by March 23, 2016

Twenty-five years ago this week, we lost twenty-seven shipmates in a two plane crash off San Diego during routine training. I knew most of them personally.

VP50 memorial

HERE is a link to the memorial held this week. Their bodies and the airplanes were never recovered, becoming another deep water memorial to those who died.

Good folks all. Rest In Peace Shipmates. Your compatriots sons and daughters have assumed the watch…

Hand Salute!

Ready, two.

Comments

TBT… — 16 Comments

  1. 🙁 May they all rest in peace. Sorry for your loss. You need to write a memoir, you know. That is if your entire life isn’t all classified.

  3. I think I had a passing acquaintance with one of the AW’s. But everyone in the VP community felt the loss that day. It affected us all. We said a prayer for the dead, took a deep breath, and went back to work paying a little more attention to detail so that the same thing didn’t happen again.

    “Under the wide and starry sky
    Dig the grave and let me lie.
    Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

    This be the verse you grave for me;
    “Here he lies where he longed to be,
    Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.”

  4. I heartily second the memoir.

    I knew in passing the crew chief on Mojo 69. I can’t quantify it; but, losses incurred in peace time or in training accidents always seem to hurt more than those incurred while actively engaged with the enemy.

    “Bloody exercises and bloodless wars”

  5. I buried too many shipmates in my time in. I feel your loss. ET1/SS Wrobel 2/1984-10/1993

  8. Hey Old NFO;

    You honor them by posting what you did so people remember that there is a cost to keep the Red Wolf at bay.

  9. That IS too bad no memoir. We’ve allowed so many to slip away because we simply neglected to ask them.

  10. So if you can’t do a “memoir” can you do a highly fictionalized account based on life events? 🙂 Maybe a space opera?
    Or go ahead and write a memoir, leave it to your grandkids…hopefully by then stuff will be able to be declassified…we may not be around to read it, but the history will be in writing for others to learn from.

    Suz