We watched in amazement as
the fireball rose behind the Headquarters building. A fully fueled F-105 with an extra 275 gallon
fuel tank under each wing makes a hell of an explosion when it
crashes on take-off. The only black flying officer I saw flying the
Thunderchiefs at Bitburg was Capt Emeal Tipton, and it was his crash
we watched that August in 1963. I couldn't see the crash from Bitburg
Air Base itself, too many buildings in the way. I had just come out
of Base Personnel office, but I could see the fireball over toward
the Trier Highway. He didn't make it.
According to the Veterans
of Foreign wars, Capt Tipton wouldn't qualify for membership even though he died in Germany: he was
a cold warrior.
The many hours Captain
Tipton spent on alert duty don't count for much officially, nor do
the millions of countless hours of combat alert duty the rest of the
service men and women, regardless of branch, who served around the world in the Cold
War. Officially, according to the Congress of the United States, you
weren't officially shot at, so you don't count as a real combat
veteran. It doesn't matter if you served on alert duty aboard a U.S.
Navy carrier in the freezing sleet of the North Atlantic, or in the
sweltering heat of a closed tactical missile launch bay underground
in Okinawa. It matters even less if you served your tour of duty in
the ZI, Zone of the Interior, or in civilian language, the United
States, regardless of what you did. You aren't counted as a war hero.
It doesn't matter we kept the most ominous, powerful threat ever
posed to our country from attacking us, possibly destroying the
entire planet in the process.
We won. And nobody cares.
