My brother Greg with his wife, Mary Lou, and their children, Taylor and Grant.Photo: Chris Duel
October 22, 1980
Forty-two years ago this morning.
A 32-year-old military pilot and his navigator throttle-up their F-101 fighter jet and roar down the runway at Ellington Air Force Base, near Houston, for a routine training mission.
But moments after takeoff, something goes terribly wrong.
The supersonic engines flameout above the autumn Texas landscape.
Self-preservation protocol says to eject immediately.
One big problem...
A neighborhood and a schoolyard lie below the flight path.
Eject and the jet crashes into the neighborhood and probably into the schoolyard.
Hydraulics failing, fighter-jet falling, the two young pilots make a near-instantaneous decision.
Instead of ejecting, they struggle to pull the aircraft into an adjacent field and save the innocent lives below.
The pilot had a wife, a two-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son.
The pilot was my brother, Greg.
Forty-two years later, that split-second decision reverberates in the lives of the families of the two young pilots and the spared lives of the souls in that unsuspecting neighborhood below.
A moment in time.
An act of heroism.
A choice.
To sacrifice one's own life for the lives of strangers.
I'm proud of Greg's choice.
I hope that if I ever face a similar choice I will be as self-sacrificing for the greater good.
Today, Greg's children are in their forties.
And the children of the children in that neighborhood will never know about a choice that he made.
On a morning like this.
Forty-two years ago.