When he was in the training command at Pensacola as an aviation cadet learning to fly, Ken said they practiced stalling the airplane--so that if they ever stalled a plane in real time, that they would know how to recover.  You practiced at altitude.  You never, never, ever wanted to stall a plane on approach to landing--or you would automatically end up dead.  So they practiced landing over and over again, making sure they didn't slow down to stall speed close to the ground.  You always wanted to hit wire (on land--practicing for carrier landings) at full speed--so that if you bolstered (hook missed the wire) that you had enough speed to get off the end of the carrier when you were at sea doing it for real.

But he said he messed up on a turn in the beginning stage of learning to fly--put the plane into a stall, and did everything he wasn't supposed to do.  Rotating the plane a few feet from the ground.  "I should have been dead," he said.  "But God is good.  By some miracle, I ended up wheels down when I hit the ground.  And shook for an hour or so."  All of Ken's friends would sit around telling "war stories," and tell of all the near misses they had.  One stalled, landed upside down uninjured, then unbuckled his seat belt and fell out of the inverted cockpit and broke his arm.  That was a "duh."

Another one landed long on the airfield at El Toro going too fast, ran out of runway and ended up on the train track a couple of hundred yards from the end of the strip--uninjured--and got hit by a train.  And survived.  Lost the airplane of course--which was a strike against him.  You don't ever want to lose a plane.  The paper work was horrible.  Ken was the safety officer at the time--which meant he had to file the accident report.  Pilots didn't want to create paperwork for him for something stupid.

I was at the squadron at El Toro one day and a pilot who had been flying an F4D, (they called it the Ford) walked in soaking wet holding his helmet.  He had ejected into the Pacific.  I was shocked, but the rest of the guys didn't pay him much attention.  The CO was really ticked off, "You lost another one of my planes!"  They had lost so many airplanes in that one area that they dubbed it "Ford Bay."  Pilots were cheap to replace.  Planes weren't.

Everyone of those guys had dozens of stories--that grew bigger and bigger every time they told them.  They never talked about their heroics, how they won their medals, or the wars they fought.  Just the stupid stuff.  And there was a bunch of that.  It's a wonder that any of them lived to tell about it.