Word: thigpen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...almost gone by the time we were over Viet Nam. The setting sun bathed the clouds in orange as the pilot, Major John Thigpen, 38, of Windsor, N.C., banked his B-52 into the bomb run. Below him, on the lower deck, the bombardier-navigator, Major Leonard Harris, 39, of Atlanta, hunched behind his radarscope, adjusting the scanner, like a television cameraman, until it gave him a moving, living map of partially cloud-obscured plantation country northwest of Saigon. Under that cover was the target, a suspected troop concentration. Everything had to go right the first time. The slightest navigational...
...cascaded toward the ground more than 30,000 feet below us. There was no shock, no noise, no sight of explosions. Only the impersonal voice of the controller: "Bombs in the target area. That was a good run, fellows. Have a nice ride home and see you another day." Thigpen banked again and we were on our way back to Guam, six monotonous hours and 2,600 miles away. In a small oven in the cockpit the men began heating TV dinners. They had not seen their target, their enemy, or the effect of their mission...