In my case, I think that one of the great advantages I had was that after a short period of time in combat, there was no question of the fact that I was not going to live through the tour.

Once you understand that you're going to die, you have a tremendous advantage over the other guys because you never have to think about it again.

All you have to think about now, so it's not a question of if, if is gone.

You have to think maybe a little bit about when, and you get to think about how, but you don't get to think about if anymore.

That's already been decided for you.

When I was 18 years old, I dropped out of college and I enlisted in the Air Force.

My pilot and I were flying a bird out to Los Angeles, picked up a renovated one, started back, and we had all kinds of engine problems with it.

And our first stopover was in Las Vegas.

Approaching Las Vegas, the engine failed, and we ended up dead sticking it into Nellis Air Force Base.

Nellis Air Force Base was the home of the Fighter Weapon School and also the home of the Thunderbirds.

The pilot I had, he knew several of the instructors there at Nellis, and so he and I spent maybe two days at Nellis hanging out with the instructors there that were all flying the F-100.

And after two days and a gallon of beer, I decided that when I grew up what I really wanted to be was an F-100 fighter pilot.

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1934.

And shortly after I was born, my father got a big promotion and a new job, and we moved from Pennsylvania to New Jersey.

And so for the rest of my time growing up, I was raised in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

When I decided that I wanted to retire, identifying Brooksboro as a place where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives was that I didn't want to work and live in a big city.

So New York was out, Washington was out, Philadelphia was out.

And when we started to look at this area here in Brooksboro, Pennsylvania, we really liked it.

It had all the things that we thought we wanted in the transition from the Air Force to civilian life.

And so we bought a house by mail.

And moved to mountaintop Pennsylvania in 1982.

And I've been a big fan of the area ever since.

It was May of 66, and I'm back over into Vietnam, and we're flying out of a base called Benoit.

And it was during this particular tour that I flew what I think was my most important mission.

And at that base, we kept two aircraft at the end of the runway.

24 hours a day, we maintained an alert.

My buddy and I, we got a phone call from the headquarters in Saigon and said that we have a fire base close to the border of Cambodia.

This particular fire base had a couple hundred American soldiers at the base, and it was under attack by about 1,500 North Vietnamese troops.

And they needed some help from the air, or else it was going to be overrun.

And if it was overrun, then it was going to be a massacre, and all the American troops would have been killed.

They asked us if we would take off, go over there, help out as best we could.

We took off.

It took about 15 minutes, and we were over there at the fire base, and the forward air controller talked us down through the cloud.

We came around and set up for the first pass.

We had two 500-pound bombs and two clustered bomb unit tanks, and we had four 20-millimeter cannons, 800 rounds of 20-mil.

My lead went in, and as he was dropping a bomb, as I was setting up, I got hammered really hard by a quad 50 caliber.

So before I could drop, I pulled up above the cloud, and to see whether I could continue to fly the airplane.

But when I got up there, I found that my boost pumps that were pumping fuel into the engine had been shot out.

The only way I could get fuel into the jet engine was through gravity flow.

I was able to keep it airborne as long as I didn't do anything abrupt.

No turns, no ups, downs, sideways, or anything else, just very, very gently fly at minimum airspeed.

I waited up there for the lead to work over the target, and he was able to break up the enemy attack.

The enemy broke it off and panicked and ran back to Cambodia.

He had saved that first fire base.

Now I was waiting for him to take me back to Van Nguyen and try to get me on the ground.

He joined up with me, and we got a call from another forward air controller, and he said that they have a really serious problem.

They have another fire base with 500 or so American troops, and they're under attack by more than 4,000 North Vietnamese regulars.

He asked us if we could help out at that fire base.

Jack has a good airplane, but he doesn't have any munitions left.

He used all of his munitions defending the first fire base.

I have a full load of munitions, but I don't have any airplane.

The question becomes, are you willing to take a broken airplane and try to help out the fire base down below?

I have about a second to think about it, and the answer is, of course I will.

And as he's talking me down through the clouds, I finally break out, and I take a look at the situation, and it's clear that there's no way I get out of that one alive.

I've betrayed one slightly used airplane, one slightly used fighter pilot.

If we do it right, we get to save 500 or so American lives.

Sometime months and months earlier, I had come to the conclusion that I was not going to survive the tour and that my destiny was going to be to die in a rice paddy in Asia, and I think it was just a cumulative number of combat missions that I had had.

And when I looked out and I looked at the battlefield, I thought, this is my rice paddy.

I finally found out what it was and where it was.

So I started down.

You know, you're underneath a cloud.

You've got to remember, I can only go 200 miles an hour, and I can't pull Gs, I can't maneuver, I can't do anything, so that says you're going to just sit there and take hits.

It looked like somebody had kicked over an ant hill.

All you could see was thousands of enemy troops massing against this fire base.

I made my first couple of passes, dropped my two 500-pound bombs and put a dent in the heaviest concentration of enemy troops and then sort of ruddered the airplane around in a little small circle very slowly and set up for one attack after another, after another, after another.

And for whatever reason, the enemy forces, thousands of them, just panicked and broke off the attack and headed back for the Cambodian border as fast as they could run.

What they didn't know was that I was all out of ammunition at that time, but I didn't think that they knew that, so I decided that I would make a couple of very, very low, slow passes over the top of them to encourage them to run faster.

We finally got back to Ben Wah, landed, I rolled out and into the barrier at the end of the runway, and a great surprise was that I was still flying and I'm still alive, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how or why.

The question to me always was, who do you fight for?

And the answer to the question is, you fight for the guy next to you.

That's who you're fighting for is the guy on your wing, the guy on the ground.

And doing that is tremendously satisfying because you're saving American lives.