[az_gila]

A few decades ago I had dinner at a friends and one of the guests was an ex-Black Sheep squadron member. He jokingly claimed he was an ace since he had wrecked five fighter planes during WWII. :^)

[rlmorel]

I had an interesting event a couple of years ago. I have a friend whose wife was the cousin (maybe 2nd) of a Marine pilot in WWII, and she asked if I could use my Photoshop skills to repair a damaged photo of the guy in his flight helmet in the Pacific. I love doing that stuff, so spent several nights working on it and made it look really good (to my eyes, at least. It was a black and white 8x10 that had water damage, spots, and was cracked in a few places. I love working on military images, it is a connection with the past.

Some time later, I had driven down to Virginia and stopped at the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico. Fantastic. One of the finest military museums I have ever seen, and I have seen a few.

You walk in and there is a huge Rotunda, they have planes and helicopters hanging from the overhead, and dioramas on the ground with incredibly lifelike (rubberized, modeled from the faces of actual active duty Marines who volunteered) mannequins )

I was very impressed. As I was taking all of this in, I noticed they had huge rectangular portraits (15-2t ft high) of various Marines who were well known. My eyes rested on one, and I'm looking at it thinking "...hey...that face...where have I seen that face before..." and realized it was that guy, the exact same picture I had spent several nights cleaning up in Photoshop:

He was 1stLt Robert Hanson, a 23 year old pilot in VMF-215 with the nickname "Butcher Bob" brought down 20 planes in six consecutive days, and was awarded the medal of honor for taking on four Zeros all by himself and shooting them all down. He was shot down after 8 months in the Pacific theatre and killed in the crash. He was damaged by flak returning from a cancelled Rabaul sweep, and caught a wing in a wave trying to ditch. He cartwheeled and never got out.

Pretty wild, that I had worked on that for a relative of his then just saw his portrait unexpectedly at the USMC museum. I hadn't realized who the guy was.

[rlmorel]

The other cool thing there at the museum was an H-34 that had been restored by a group of guys, one of whom I got to know through my work. The thing had been restored to "Working Helicopter" condition, and it was easy to imagine it was what some of them looked like in Vietnam. But they couldn't afford to keep it going, and knew that if they didn't find a home, it would rot at some airfield somewhere, so the Marine Corps Museum got it, and boy, did they fix it up nicely, and had it in a diorama in the main rotunda with a bunch of Marines around it!

You can see one of those big portraits peeking over the top of the helicopter...