To be fair, half would have died anyway. Tranny filter that shouldn’t have been able to be installed upside down; was. This crash made them fix that. Gen Peterson was rumored to ask if his furniture was on the down bird when the mishap was reported.
Since you seem to have inside knowledge regarding the accident, when they made the tranny filter fix, was there any feedback on how many other CH-53s also had the tranny filter installed upside down as well?
Was it a case of we had just been damn lucky previously and our luck finally ran out? Or was this really the first instance of upside down Installation and it cost us the lives of 20 Marines?