Buck Matthews
Dogpatch Days
Recollections of a Non-Combatant in the Combat Zone
There Are Deaths
Fire fighters from the 18th Wing try to put out flames at an F-51 Mustang crash site. A pilot with the South African fighter squadron, the Two Squadron SAAF, lost control of the powerful Mustang on take off. The propeller torque pulled him off the runway. He crashed into four parked Mastangs parked alongside the runway and destroyed them. Sadly, the young pilot, an Olympic contender who ran up and down the runway to stay in shape, was killed.
“There are deaths and there is death, the constant, unchangeable end to every life. But no matter how commonplace it is, even here in the field, it still fills me with awe and depression.
It isn’t the manner in which they die, but the knowledge that they have ceased to live that strikes me.
A bird piled in today – he didn’t make the runway – and the pilot died in the crash.
I don’t know this, but I can guess that he was probably twenty-three years old, six feet tall, and weighed one-hundred-seventy pounds.
Yet, when the crash crew recovered his body, its total collected in a small canvas sack, he weighed about the same as he did when he was born.
Twenty-three years in which to build a potential of usefulness and purpose in life – and he ceased to exist in a single, blinding explosion on the side of a hill ten thousand miles from home……….”
Water recovery of a crashed F-51 near K-10, in Chinhae Bay. The pilot did not survive. The wing of the Mustang is just breaking the surface. During the Korean War, the 18th Fighter-Bomber Wing lost 163 pilots and airmen, with many others wounded in action.
© Copyright 2008 Buck Matthews. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes without permission in writing from the author. Used with permission by BelleAire Press as a tribute to those American servicemen and women who served during the Korean War.