So There I Was

Fig was involved in a serious crash on Thursday - 16 July. A Short update on his condition.

Putty talks Camp Bastion Attack in Sept of 2012, Lawman describes the most legitimate ejection ever made and Candyman talks traffic tickets in a war zone!

Marine Corps aviator Maui (call sign Cobra-31) joins RePete and Fig for stories spanning three decades of naval aviation: serving under Colonel Don Conroy — the real-life inspiration for The Great Santini — flying Huey gunships out of Marble Mountain, a hair-raising New Year's Eve medevac, training Iranian pilots before the Tehran evacuation, and flying CH-46s in Desert Storm.

In Episode 218 of So There I Was, Fig & RePete bring listeners two stories recorded live at the Harrier Sundown gathering in North Carolina. First up is “Monster,” one of the earliest Marine aviators selected for the AV-8B Harrier program back in 1984. He recounts the chaos of being handed the first-ever heavyweight VSTOL launch off an LPH — no computers, no test pilot, just a junior lieutenant, a hazy horizon, and a velocity vector that refused to move. Monster also shares the bookend of his career: selected first to fly the Harrier, and years later, the Marine to retire the Corps’ last A-4.

Next, “Rizzo” takes listeners to Fallujah and Al-Amariyah during the height of the Iraq War. What started as a routine night of illumination runs turned into a low-altitude gun run that blew straight through the 2,000-foot floor — down to 60 feet, right in the alley. The story closes two decades later, when one of the kids who scavenged his spent shell casings tracked him down on Facebook and sent them back as shot glasses.

Two pilots, two eras, one wild ride!

Marine Cobra pilot X-Man flew combat in both Grenada and Beirut — in the same month. He walks RePete and Fig through his path from a test pilot neighbor in Northern Virginia to the cockpit of an AH-1, the Grand Anse campus rescue operation, and a Beirut rules-of-engagement situation where the pilot in command was asked to apologize for returning fire. He declined. At 69, X-Man is still logging AH-1 time with the Army Aviation Heritage Foundation. This one's got range.