She flies piston engine fighters and tranports AND is cute as a button? What more could you ask for? ;-)
That's her, second from left.
Posted on 09/12/2009 10:13:59 AM PDT by Liberty Valance
Spankentruppen ping
For those that aren’t familiar with her she died in a plane crash in Texas.
You clicked on the headline but not to worry. Pretty soon all of these amazing ladies will have passed away ... unable to submit to those pesky, young local newspaper reporters interviews that are so repetitive and tiresome for you. With any luck you'll be able to avoid any dusty old books in the library about them as well.
That was the service that these women were performing, to free up the men like Goldwater to fly in the worlds war zones, like the "hump" over the Himalayas.
Gertrude Tompkins Silver, the only American woman who is MIA.
Next month, a major effort will be made to search the ocean off LAX for her P-51D, which is believed to have crashed shortly after takeoff.
When you have been reading this same “finally discovered” headline for as many decades as I have then you have a right to get tired of it.
This article and every article like it written over my lifetime has always left off the “heroic” service of the same people that were male doing this civilian job.
Are you dissing Bryanw92’s uncle?
“BTW, my uncle was a civilian ferry pilot during WW2. He didn’t get anything except a pink slip at war’s end.”
I’m not ‘dissin’ anybody. Especially the ladies about which this artcle was written.
Thanks for the great photos!
The point is when everyone is a “hero” then no one is a hero.
When we give gold stars to everyone for routine, everyday service, then what do we save for people like Roy Benavidez?
“With out orders, Benavidez volunteered so quickly that he didn’t even bring his M-16 when he dashed for the helicopter preparing for a rescue attempt. The sole weapon he carried was a bowie knife on his belt.”I’m coming with you,” he told the three crew members.
Airborne, they spotted the soldiers in a tight circle. A few hundred enemy troops surrounded them in the jungle, some within 25 yards of the Americans’ position. The chopper dropped low, ran into withering fire and quickly retreated. Spotting a small clearing 75 yards away, Benavidez told the pilot, “Over there, over there.”
The helicopter reached the clearing and hovered 10 feet off the ground. Benavidez made the sign of the cross, jumped out carrying a medic bag and began running the 75 yards towards the trapped men. Almost immediately, Benavidez was hit by an AK-47 slug in his right leg. He stumbled and fell, but got back up convincing himself that he’d only snagged a thorn bush and kept running to the brush pile where Wright’s men lay. An exploding hand grenade knocked him down and ripped his face with shrapnel. He shouted prayers, got up again and staggered to the men.
Four of the soldiers were dead, the other eight wounded and pinned down in two groups. Benavidez bound their wounds, injected morphine and, ignoring NVA bullets and grenades, passed around ammunition that he had taken from several bodies and armed himself with an AK. Then Benavidez directed air strikes and called for the Huey helicopter to a landing near one group. While calling in support he was shot again in the right thigh, his second gunshot wound. He dragged the dead and wounded aboard. The chopper lifted a few feet off the ground and moved toward the second group, with Benavidez running beneath it, firing a rifle he had picked up. He spotted the body of the team leader Sergeant First Class Wright. Ordering the other soldiers to crawl toward the chopper, he retrieved a pouch dangling from the dead man’s neck; in the pouch were classified papers with radio codes and call signs. As he shoved the papers into his shirt, a bullet struck his stomach and a grenade shattered his back. The helicopter, barely off the ground, suddenly crashed, its pilot shot dead.
Coughing blood, Benavidez made his way to the Huey and pulled the wounded from the wreckage, forming a small perimeter. As he passed out ammunition taken from the dead, the air support he had earlier radioed for arrived. Jets and helicopter gunships strafed threatening enemy soldiers while Benavidez tended the wounded. “Are you hurt bad, Sarge?” one soldier asked. “Hell, no,” said Benavidez, about to collapse from blood loss. “I’ve been hit so many times I don’t give a damn no more.”
While mortar shells burst everywhere, Benavidez called in Phantoms “danger close”. Enemy fire raked the perimeter. Several of the wounded were hit again, including Benavidez. By this time he had blood streaming down his face, blinding him. Still he called in air strikes, adjusting their targets by sound. Several times, pilots thought he was dead, but then his voice would come back on the radio, calling for closer strikes. Throughout the fighting, Benavidez, a devout Catholic, made the sign of the cross so many times, his arms were “were going like an airplane prop”. But he never gave into fear.
Finally, a helicopter landed. “Pray and move out,” Benavidez told the men as he helped each one aboard. As he carried a seriously wounded Frenchie Mousseau over his shoulder a fallen NVA soldier stood up, swung his rifle and clubbed Benavidez in the head. Benavidez fell, rolled over and got up just as the soldier lunged forward with his bayonet. Benavidez grabbed it, slashing his right hand, and pulled his attacker toward him. With his left hand, he drew his own bowie knife and stabbed the NVA but not before the bayonet poked completely through his left forearm. As Benavidez dragged Mousseau to the chopper, he saw two more NVA materialize out of the jungle. He snatched a fallen AK-47 rifle and shot both. Benavidez made one more trip to the clearing and came back with a Vietnamese interpreter. Only then did the sergeant let the others pull him aboard the helicopter.
Blood dripped from the door as the chopper lumbered into the air. Benavidez was holding in his intestines with his hand. Bleeding almost into unconsciousness, Benavidez lay against the badly wounded Mousseau and held his hand. Just before they landed at the Medevac hospital, “I felt his fingers dig into my palm,” Benavidez recalled, “his arm twitching and jumping as if electric current was pouring through his body into mine” At Loc Ninh, Benavidez was so immobile they placed him with the dead. Even after he spit in the doctor’s face and was taken from the body bag, Benavidez was considered a goner.
Benavidez spent almost a year in hospitals to recover from his injuries. He had seven major gunshot wounds, twenty-eight shrapnel holes and both arms had been slashed by a bayonet. Benavidez had shrapnel in his head, scalp, shoulder, buttocks, feet, and legs. His right lung was destroyed. He had injuries to his mouth and back of his head from being clubbed with a rifle butt. One of the AK-47 bullets had entered his back exiting just beneath his heart. He had won the battle and lived. When told his one man battle was awesome and extraordinary, Benavidez replied: “No, that’s duty.”
Great post. Roy Benevidez was by any account a National and Texas Hero deserving of the Congressional Medal of Honor which he recieved.
>>The point is when everyone is a “hero” then no one is a hero.
>>When we give gold stars to everyone for routine, everyday service, then what do we save for people like Roy Benavidez?
Exactly. That guy is a hero! America never has a shortage of real heroes and they’re all just regular people who behave extraordinarily in bad circumstances, so I can’t figure out why we need to create them. Even the current “Overseas Contingency Operation” is producing real heroes, but we don’t get to see them because of the media blackout of good news.
Put some panties on a scumbag terrorist’s head and you’re news. Go “Audie Murphy” in a firefight in Fallujah and Katie Couric doesn’t even think you’re worth mentioning.
Talk about a tough day at work, I love stories about heroism but that Benavidez account is so incredible.
From the heading into an overrun position of a twelve man team with only a bowie knife, to suffering almost every type wound imaginable, grenade shrapnel, rifle fire, bayonet and even butt strokes, it is way off the charts.
Once many years ago on a trip I stopped outside his house trying to decide if it was too early to stop and say hi to him, I drove on with out seeing him but his work that day should endure in the legends of warriors until the end of time.
They made a GI Joe of him about 10 years ago. http://actionheroes.homestead.com/reviewsfour.html
Unfortunately they gave him a run of the mill K-bar instead of a true fighting weapon, the all American bowie knife.
I find it hard to believe that all these people were ignored the past 60+ years and only now they are getting their just recognition.
LOL - It’s like Deja Vu all over again.
I wonder if any of these women when to Alaska after to war to become bush pilots?
Thanks for the ping PE. Go here...
http://military-photo.blogspot.com/2008/12/us-airforce-female-pilot.html
for the current version of post #3 pic:-)
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
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