Heavy Fighting

Flack was coming up and above us, planes were dropping flares so the fighters could come in and we could actually, I could actually see fighters coming in and attacking other planes. I could see other planes being blown up. And we...we had a, we were just coming out, we had gone through and were turning to come out. You know, you go in so many degrees and you turn, so you don't get a stream coming at you. You got to go away, so you don't meet these coming in. We were just pulling out and a voice came on the air and said "Oh... oh god, oh mother, oh mother, mother. Skipper, skipper, help me, help me." And the skipper came on and he said "Abandon air craft, abandon air craft, abandon air craft." And then he starting calling out the names of all the crew and all the crew answered except this one guy, and he said, he kept calling his name "Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.." you know, "Answer me, answer me..." And finally the guy said "Skipper, skipper... help me, help me. I can't move, I can't move." And the skipper kept talking to him and talking to him and you could see the damn plane going down, you could actually see it. And it got lower and lower and lower and finally the skipper says "Don't worry, I'm going to stay with you." And he did, all the way down, until that thing went "Badoom" and that was horrendous. Because none of us had realized, nobody ever... I don't think the pilot himself ever realized he had the... There's several different switches in the air craft, you can talk crew to crew, you can talk member to member, air plane to air plane, air to ground. And I think he got the air to air switch put on. So we were not only listening to him and his crew, you know, it was being transmitted to the other planes.