Monday, my sister's husband Mark had triple bypass surgery.  (Everything went well)   All of us met at the hospital to wait with her as he was in surgery.  My brother Bill was there with his wife Janet.  They are the ones that were missionaries to China for thirty seven years.  He is a doctor.  He got his degree from OU by selling his soul to the Navy.  After he graduated, he owed the Navy four years so he went to flight school and became a flight surgeon for NASA and for a while he was the astronauts' doctor.  Gus Grissom, and Mercury project.  Yes, he was there when they were killed.  He has a million stories about airplanes and riding tandem with every yoo-hoo that needed a check.

My niece Lindsey was there as well, (her husband is in the Air Force in some aviation capacity).  The three of us got to telling stories about carrier landings.  Lindsey had wondered about why they did a million touch and goes, and Bill and I got started telling about carrier landings in stormy weather, at night, pitch black, on a deck that was pitching up and down while rolling side to side.

So many guys got killed because they couldn't land the aircraft correctly. You had to land at full power because  if the the tail hook boltered,  you would miss the wires, and had to have enough speed to go around again.  Thus, the touch and goes.  You practice landing a million times on the ground, trying to catch wire so that when you do it on the carrier, you get it right.

Ken said that the scariest thing he ever did for those twenty-one years of Marine Jet Aviation was night cat-shots off a carrier.  That superseded getting shot at every day in Korea and Viet Nam.  And if it was in a storm, you knew that when they blew you off the end of the carrier into the inky black soot of night that you were going to have to find your way back to the carrier and land.  He called it "Hours and hours of boredom followed by moments of sheer terror."

At El Toro, I used to get tired of the whine of the jets all day long as they practiced touch and goes, but was thankful they had done it when they went aboard the carrier.