My Experience with HONOR FLIGHT

My Experience with Honor Flight
Growing up in a military family, as a kid I used to watch my Dad (Major William I. McCowen and later Lt. Colonel) lug around a cinder block size radio/phone everywhere he went. This thing was big and heavy. It was the late 60’s – well before cell phones and pagers. Dad was a pilot, exactly which airplanes he flew, I wasn’t exactly sure, but I knew they were large, very large. Although, at the time, I didn’t know the significance of the cinder box sized box constantly at his side, but later in life as an adult I became keenly aware of how important that radio/phone had been and how it would have changed my life, our lives and the lives of everyone in the world, IF it had rang.
I remember on one occasion, Dad brought home a weather balloon to we three kids from some mission that had expired relegating the balloon to the trash heap. My two bothers showed little interest in it, but me, I was very interested to see how it seemed to defy gravity. Just a bump and it drifted across the room as if by magic. The helium in it seemed almost spent, because it floated up at a very leisurely pace, not in a hurry at all. That was one the coolest things that a young boy like me could see, at least I thought so then and still do today. On the topic of floating things, I recall my brother Michael, just a teenager then, taking a dry cleaning bag and carefully arranging some string to hold a candle directly underneath the bag’s opening. I watched as he lit the candle, wondering what in the world he was trying to accomplish. After a few minutes, the bag started filling up, the wrinkles of the bag surface taking turns disappearing till the bag was fully inflated with hot air from the candle. I watched intently as Michael removed his hands from holding the bag and it slowly lifted higher and higher. 10 feet, 20 feet then above the trees and up into the evening sky! The light of the candle would flicker and cause the bag to also appear to flicker, creating a neat light show for anyone looking up in that general direction.
So, between Dad flying aircraft, weather balloons and homemade hot air balloons, I grew up interested in things of the sky. I was eight years old when 1969 brought the Apollo mission into our home on our brand new color TV, no more black and white, we now lived in the modern world where color was king. Also, Star Trek was on TV. I’d look forward to the evenings when it would come on and watch intently as Kirk, Spock and McCoy traipsed around the galaxy righting many wrongs.
All in all, not a bad time to be a kid, at least not for we three kids. However, the military nature and weight of my Dad’s job was always present. We lived with the knowledge that he could leave on a mission at anytime, with little notice, as had happened in the past when he went to Vietnam. The fact of the matter was that Dad was a B-52 pilot and Squadron commander of the Air Commandos. His B-52 wasn’t just any B-52, it was one of the airplanes assigned to drop nuclear bombs on Moscow Russia in the event that war broke out. Dad would be notified that the world was at war through the huge radio/phone that was his constant companion. IF that phone rang, everything for everybody on the planet, would change.
IF it rang, Dad would have kissed whichever of the family was nearby and then disappeared… forever, never to be seen again. Unknown to us, the mission to bomb Moscow was a one-way trip. His B-52 had just enough fuel to reach Moscow, then it would run dry, the engines fail, and he’d glide to the earth that he had just turned into a nuclear-hell. Of course, he was not permitted to tell anyone that it was a one-way trip, not even Mom. But years later, we learned the truth… that had that radio/phone rang, it would be the last time any of us would ever see Dad. IF that radio/phone had rang, millions in Russia would be incinerated and millions more die of radiation poisoning. IF that radio/phone rang, it also meant that the USA was at war and only minutes away from receiving the same nuclear-hell, dispatched by Russia.
Had that radio/phone rang, today would be much much different from the world we know. Civilization would likely exist, but without the technological and medical advances that occur during well ordered and peaceful times. Millions would have perished on two continents, IF that phone rang. The imaginary lines that we draw as borders for the world’s counties would likely be different.
Fortunately for all, that phone never rang. Dad didn’t disappear on a suicide mission to bomb Moscow and the world kept spinning to turn out the way we know it, for better or worse.
Gratefully, Clinton McCowen
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