The “We-weren’t-there,-You’re-an-armchair-general,-Our-troops-lives-are-sacred” argument is duly noted, but not particularly pertinent to this situation.
Our soldiers, PARTICULARLY intelligence officers, understand that personal safety comes second to the safety of AMERICA... that is why our soldiers volunteer for a job in which they may lose their lives during the performance of their duty. In this case, it would seem that the flight crew chose their lives over a virtualy unlimited number of lives, lives that may be lost due to the loss of a large amount of highly sensitive, cutting edge military technology.
For these reasons, it was wrong to honor the crew with unit citations and the DFC. Sea conditions notwithstanding, the plane should have been ditched and the equipment kept out of the hands of our Communist enemies. If the crew was able to bail out and was later rescued, consider it lucky that the situation had a fortunate ending.
Of course, it also stands to reason that the crew may actually have been able to completely destroy a large amount of the equipment and any relevent classified documents... and that this was the real reason they we honored by the WH. This seemes to not be the case, but there exists the possibilty. At any rate, the exact details of the event and any subseqent debriefings are classified... and it is really only at this point that the “We-don’t-know-the-details” line of reasoning has any relevance.
Whoa there, eeeeeasy on the post key.