Randall Cunningham: “In 1972, I wrote a book, and I wrote the book because I held some of my friends in my arms that died on a carrier. Some…”

“In 1972, I wrote a book, and I wrote the book because I held some of my friends in my arms that died on a carrier. Some I was not able to because they were killed. And I can remember thinking, Don't the Members of Congress know what they are doing? Don't the liberals know that we don't want to be here but we need their support, we need better equipment, we need the parts to fly our airplanes because we are in combat, that we are not competing for six gold medals? I also look at the potential of Somalia, and I wrote about it in Operation Proud Deep in which we were forced to fly in weather that is overcast because the North Vietnamese were coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail, and we had not been bombing North Vietnam, and we called back. I did not call back. I was a lieutenant junior grade at the time, but the admirals called back and said we cannot risk our pilots over an overcast because there are surface-to-air missiles. And they said no, those are the only 5 days you have. And in that time we lost a couple of dozen airplanes in 5 days. Why? Because the SA-2 missiles were coming up through the overcast, and it did not give us time to react. Second, if you flew underneath it, and remember it is wintertime in the Bosnia area right now, we would be skylighted against the clouds for their airplanes and the gunners knew our altitude, and it was devastating. We also found our bomb damage assessment after the weather cleared that we had hit less than 1 percent of our targets.…”