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I remember that Sunday. This bright, cloudless day, warm spring was in the air in April. And my father, he was going to read the Sunday funnies to me and I was four years old, and it was joy. He read Li'l Abner and Popeye, and we would laugh. And when I would laugh uproariously, he'd pick me up and throw me up in the air and I felt as though I was going to go to heaven. And there were those strong arms to catch me as I came back down.

He's clearly the greatest man in the world and the strongest, the biggest, and the best – the best there was.

It was a Sunday later, exactly. I came down my house and down the stairs in my jammies and in our living room that was filled with women in black veils, black gloves, shoes shiny black, and they were whispering to each other. And I think one of them put her hand on my head and said, "Oh, Teddy, your father would have been so proud."

My father would've been so proud of me. That meant he was gone and he was gone instantly. Disappeared.

There was that fear of disappearing – him, me next. It carried me all the way through grade school and high school. And my savior, the thing I loved most of all that I would do after school, was watch documentaries or old newsreels of World War II and the way the Navy fighter planes came in on the carriers. And I felt maybe if I could do something brave and strong and glorious, and something for my country, maybe then I wouldn't disappear.

And so I applied for Annapolis, the Naval Academy, and got in. And I got graduated, and got my bars, and went through flight training, and got my wings, and now I was going to fly in the Navy's hottest new aircraft called the F9F. It was the first plane the Navy had really that would go supersonic right after takeoff. And you could get that thrill of not only lifting off, but then getting the extra boost when your wheels disappeared and your flaps came up, and off you went into space and you were climbing at faster than the speed of sound.

And I was in great shape and I hit all the gunnery targets. Now there's one thing left to do before we could join the squadron and go out and find the big carrier someplace in the Pacific and be ready for what was going to develop into the Vietnamese War. But I had to get qualified for the carrier.

In order to do that, they do something called a field landing carrier practice, which was an aircraft carrier drawn on the ground in an old field someplace. And you would have the LSO, the Landing Signal Officer, in a box at one end of it, and he would have his flags that he would wave across his throat if you were making good landing and you're allowed to land; and waving off as though you're batting away bumblebees, waving his flags violently in the air to mean, "You're not gonna land. Get going, Buster." See, you couldn't land and you'd have to go around again. 

We needed a hundred of those in this new supersonic jet to qualify. It was challenging and even the old veterans in the squadron, the 27, 28, and 29 year old guys, they were pretty impressed by this. And most of them came in getting eight or nine passes, so they were getting a hundred, and a hundred and nine, a hundred and eight.

I came in some place in there, but McDonald had just come aboard. McDonald was impish, blond, compact, a lot of fun, laughed a lot. And a perfect aviator. And he went around that pattern in those two weeks and got a hundred landings in a hundred and one passes.

You know, sitting at the bar with him that night after we'd all qualified, we were getting ready to go out to the practice carrier, the Tarawa, which I'd seen in the newsreels about World War II and now it was just used for practicing for jet landings. We had three to make, and if we did that and they were smooth enough, we got our cuts. Then we'd come back and we would pack our gear, and the whole squadron would fly off and we'd join our big super carrier someplace out in the eastern world and we would be representing the country in the world's strongest most impressive weapon - an aircraft carrier.

So, it was very exciting and, and we were having drinks the night before the bar, just a little bit because we got to go to the carrier the next day. And I was sitting next to McDonald, whom I really loved. Always fun. And I said to him, "McDonald, you aced it. Man, you got a hundred for a hundred and one. That's perfect! Nobody came close to that."

And his face, which had been jolly and smiling, turned dark and the corners of his mouth turned down. He turned at me, and snarled, threw his glass down on the counter, broke in a thousand pieces, scattered around the officer's club. And he pointed his finger at me and he said, "No, dammit. I did a hundred for a hundred. The damn LSO was just jealous. He waved me off. I should have had a perfect score."

Something new about McDonald: he had a temper and he was a perfectionist. But he was great.

We took off the next day all lined up, and off we went from Quonset Point. We're to fly out over Block Island in formation. And you come down the other side of the carrier, so if you can imagine a racetrack and you're coming down the far side of the racetrack. You're coming around the bend and you're coming into the home stretch, and that home stretch is the carrier.

So you're 50 feet over the water and as you come around you can begin to see the LSO. And the Skipper, I could see now, was already aboard and his wingman. And I was up next. By that time I was lining up on the ship, and I came in and I've heard the LSO talking me in, and his very calm voice about, "Yup, lookin' OK." 

I didn't make the world's best landing. But I was there. McDonald was coming in behind me and I had to see McDonald, I wanted to see his first landing in an F9F on an aircraft carrier.

And so, and I stood there as I watched McDonald coming in and he was lined up. His wings didn't wobble. Guy could fly! But somehow just as he got over the cut point at the end of the carrier, his nose came up a little bit. I'm not quite sure what he's thinking, but just came up enough. And just that little bit will attract the LSO's attention because if you come in too high you'll miss the wires. You're gonna go steaming on across the deck and do damage to yourself or to somebody and you can't land. And when he waved it off with his flags and the cannon went off and the sirens sounded, and everybody knew that he'd been waved off and it was so far he was the first wave off.

Now he had to go way upwind, get behind everybody, but he came around again, lined up again, and he came in and he still kept his nose high. I don't know what he was thinking. And he got waved off again. Everybody waiting for McDonald, the perfect aviator, to get aboard the carrier.

I was back now on the LSO platform and an enlisted gunner's maid standing there, didn't know me, didn't know MacDonald, but he turned to his buddy and he said, "I don't know who that jerk is, but we're going to have to shoot him down."

McDonald came on in. If you were going to do three landings and you missed all three cuts, they would send you back to the beach while you still had enough gas to make it, and you probably would not go with that squadron any place again. McDonald came over the cut. LSO gave him a cut. He was lined up.

And then, as though McDonald was saying, "Screw you! Think my nose is high? Watch this!" And he dropped his nose violently. Nose-wheel first, bounced off the main landing gear up into the air 50 feet above the carrier deck, not flying anymore, just hanging there in the air. Seemed a long time, but it was less than three seconds, and then he toppled off and fell over the port side of the ship and by the time I rushed over it was bubbles.

A supersonic jet is designed to fly, cut through, like a knife, the air. And you point it straight down into the ocean, it'll do the same thing that way. And all I ever saw of McDonald after that was a little bit of his tail disappearing down.

The choppers would stay there as long as they could till dusk, hoping something would come up, some clue. Maybe somehow he would survive. The destroyers weren't going to go any place. It's their job to stay there and look for a survivor.

But the carrier had a job to do. And you've got 5,000 people dedicated to getting these aviators on the landing, getting them qualified, sending them out to defend the country. So, they were going to call the next flight. I hoped they didn't. They can't, they can't call me because I am shaky. I am so shaky, my voice would...

I couldn't have talked. And they did call me. Now, I'm getting up on the escalator and I start across the carrier deck

toward my plane on the port side. And as I was going across the carrier deck I was thinking, "Which one of these am I going to lie about?"

I knew that I couldn't fly that airplane. I knew it would be dangerous to myself and maybe other people and I couldn't fly it. On the other hand if I said I couldn't fly it, they'd pull my wings, I certainly wouldn't...that whole part of my life would, would deteriorate.

Got in the cockpit, got adjusted. Williston, the plane captain, he climbed up on the wing beside me, helped me adjust the shoulder braces and was watching me as I went over each of the nine checks - the air pressure, the oxygen supply, one by one. And he was watching me as I was touching the gauges, which you do to be sure you're looking at the right gauge. I had to figure out some way to keep from going.

If you're going to be catapulted off as I was off the front of the carrier, you have to have full throttle on all the time. When you're catapulted off, you're going to go from 0 to 130 miles an hour in the length of a basketball field. Your cheeks are going to feel as though they are behind your ears. But you've got your full throttle on. You better keep that full. Otherwise you're gonna go in the water ahead of the ship. You're going to get run over. So, the way you avoid that is there's a little spring- loaded finger that comes up. It's called the hold back rod, or the hold back. You hold it and you put 100 percent power on. You check your gauges once again. If it's there, you call into air control and say, "I'm ready to go. I'm good to go." And they taxi you off and off you go.

I was not good to go. No doubt about that. I was, I was not good to go. Between the throttle and the hold back rod, I was able to get my finger, my index finger in so that I wasn't going to get to 100 percent. Because I couldn't get the throttle all the way forward. I was going to be all right. I was going to save. I was going to go home again, and I wouldn't disappear. And I held it there for long enough to decide, "OK, I'm going to report this. I'm not lying. I'm not getting 100 percent power. Not doing anything really terribly wrong."

And I pulled my finger out to -- it had now lost circulation and it was very stiff and I pulled it out and had my hand on the throttle at 96%, getting ready to hit the mic button to call air control. Williston, standing on my wing reaching through the cockpit, just put his hand on mine and as he did, my hand, as though it had been pulled by an invisible wire, just gently went that last half inch. And I went to full power. 

Williston turned round and looked at me and he said, "You're at 100%, Lieutenant. You're good to go! Have a great flight!"

And they taxied me out. And they strapped me into the catapult. And I ran the throttle all the way up and wrapped it around the rod, and prayed a little bit as well as I knew how. And the catapult officer saluted, which meant he was ready to fire me, and I right-hand saluted back that I was ready to go. And I was launched into the air immediately. I was at 130 miles an hour, climbing to supersonic speeds. And I went around and I got in the line, and I came back and I made another landing.

And I went on and I made dozens more landings. Night and day, heavy fog, rain, midnight, sun in your eyes. And I thought about McDonald every once in a while, and I thought about my father, and how they disappeared. And I knew there was a little fear down there someplace that was crying. But I never thought about not being ready to go again. And it's carried me on through my whole life.