As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
Heroic Acts are always lost in war and civilian life. The Christians are lost in who secured Donald Trump the Presidency just as some Maintenance Officer aboard the USS Coral Sea is lost to history in what he accomplished.
The year was 1972 and due to President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty in the welfare state, his Kennedy war in Vietnam had Americans using equipment they should not have been exposed to. Americans provide themselves on always having the best and newest war toys, and as General McMasters who wrote a history on Vietnam focused on the political dereliction of duty, this story of the Vietnam War underscores what Vietnam handicapped US Soldiers with in not being supported by the government.
The story is about VF 51, a squadron of F 8 pilots, flying an obsolete jet, as the new F 4 Phantoms had been in the US arsenal for almost a decade. These fighter pilots were thrilled to learn that they were soon to be receiving F 4B's. Never mind that the current model was the F 4E, and the F 4D was a model looked upon with displeasure as it had only missiles, and the missiles did not work, the pilots were pleased to be receiving Phantoms to fly.
Pleased until the assessment of Maintenance Chief Chuck Schroeder discovered what planes he had received and was ordered to put into the air.
What the Pentagon had ordered were former Marine Corp F 4B's to be transferred to the Navy. The reason the Marines had these jets available is because they were classified as unairworthy. These fighters had been mothballed in the condition they could not fly, and were termed rust buckets.
That is what Schroeder had been ordered to get into the air as front line fighters.
Maintenance Tiger Teams were dispatched to Marine Corp Air Station El Toro, to overhaul the entire fleet, just to get them to be able to fly on station to Miramar. These rejects were gone through with a fine tooth comb, and due to Schroeder's leadership and abilities, VF 51 actually had planes to launch off the Coral Sea to prosecute the war as it went hot in the summer of 1972 AD in the year of our Lord.
No one has remembered Chuck Schroeder, but because of his work and the maintenance teams, there were pilots who came home safely to their families and were not KIA's or made POW's.
There was also another genius idea which the Marines had incorporated to the F 4B's which the Navy discovered, in for some unexplained reason the Marines had rewired all the radio communications in their Phantoms, so that when pilot would lock a missile onto an enemy craft, the only sound that would broadcast was the missile acquiring target.
Yes, in dogfights with MIG's the Navy fliers were deaf, because a jet would be transmitting the sounds of a missile talking, instead of a wing man screaming, "BREAK. YOU HAVE A MIG ON YOUR SIX!!!"
In Vietnam, the Marines should not have had jets to tinker with, tamper with nor fly, because they had absolutely no training in combat tactics and had too much time rewiring aircraft with idiotic ideas.
Everyone talks about bread and butter issues compared to bullets and bomb issues, but no one ever points out the United States military while wasting money at the top, had political leaders who were trying to make war in Vietnam on the cheap, instead of going balls to the wall in the 5 year and 500,000 troops which would have won that war.
Instead America lost the war on welfare, as Obama inflated that to now putting his Muslim and Mexican invaders on welfare too as trillions of dollars wasted was not enough, and the lesson was never learned because it never was made public how the US Navy got stuck with scrapyard jets from the Marines as there was nothing left available for the Navy, and somehow a heroic team of Naval Maintenance Crews, gave TopGun Pilots birds to fly.
That is the real history of Vietnam which Ken Burns will never present as his version is about whining racism.
agtG
