Word: crewmen
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...officers performed one of the saddest duties in the military: serving as couriers for the casualty division at Randolph A.F.B., near San Antonio. It had been the worst week for the Air Force since Tet 1968. Though only one flyer was known to have been killed, 38 Air Force crewmen were reported missing. Randolph passed along the news of each casualty to the Air Force unit nearest the home town of the next of kin. The officer assigned to the duty called for a blue staff car and drove off to deliver the news in person...
...next of kin who received such messages last week, there were particularly bitter ironies. Most of the missing flyers were B-52 crewmen, and B-52 missions throughout the war had been the safest combat duty in the Air Force. As far as is known, only one of the eight-engine Stratofortresses had been lost to enemy fire. That was on Nov. 22, and the crew was able to parachute to safety in Thailand. The air war had been confined below the 20th parallel during the peace talks, and a ceasefire, seemingly imminent, promised...
...marathon 9½-month tour at sea and to face a bitter post-mortem on one of the worst race riots in modern naval history. The sights and the sounds of the homecoming were mostly friendly, with helium-filled OPERATION WELCOME balloons lifting off the pier and mothers of crewmen's children born since the ship sailed waving from a special stand. But as the giant vessel came to port, two black crewmen, framed against the disk of the radar screen, lifted their fists in the black power salute...
According to crewmen, tensions began to mount on the Kitty Hawk almost as soon as Captain Marland W. Townsend Jr. took command in June. Formal and aloof, Townsend replaced Owen Oberg, a popular commanding officer who was given to moving among his crew and not above on occasion going over the side of the ship in a bosun's chair to wield a symbolic chip hammer. "He treated everyone as a minority of one," explained one sailor. Oberg had a way of sympathizing with the crew even when passing out an unpopular order, like the frequent extensions...
...four weeks of combat flying. The F-111s are now back in action, but they have not proved to be the invulnerable war machines their designers promised. In the past eight weeks, four have disappeared without a trace in the wilds of Southeast Asia. Cost in lives: eight crewmen dead or missing. Cost in hardware: approximately $60 million...