Misplaced Hero Worship
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When I returned from my 30 day leave (for extending for 6 months) in January 1970, Rog Johnson was assigned to me as my Cobra front seater to give him training and experience in our operations.
Rog was a very young guy (even amongst all of us other young guys) and had a lot of enthusiasm – he was on a great adventure.
Sometime during January we were working visual recon missions out of Tay Ninh. Our Scout reported taking fire out of a bunker, and was trying to engage the bunker buy dropping hand grenades into the opening – after a few tries, they had pretty much blown the camouflage off the top of the bunker, but couldn’t get a grenade through the door and were still taking machine gun fire.
So I said let me give it a try (a hold my beer moment), and I descended with my Cobra to low level, slowed way down and lined up on the bunker and fired a pair of rockets (generally, we would fire a first pair and then adjust the second pair for effect). As (dumb) luck would have it, both rockets went through the door of the bunker resulting is a very dramatic destruction of the bunker.
Rog, with his youthful exuberance was so impressed he had to tell anyone who would listen what a great pilot I was and how deadly I was with rockets. It got to the point that his “hero worshipping” became really embarrassing and I told him to knock it of – he did tone it down, but I still caught him weeks later telling the story.