Date: 4/22/2004 8:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Message-id:

I have known Karl for a long time. .We were stationed at Tinker and Korat
together. I have always known him to be a man of high integrity.

Please don't get me wrong, I enjoyed both Eschmann's and Michel's book and I
don't believe Eschmann intentionally mislead anyone in his book, he conducted
very detailed interviews of participants and used official USAF documents.
Michel went a step further. He confirmed through both Soviet and Vietnamese
sources that they had no LOW BLOWs in country before 1975, thus dispelling the
"hybrid radar" myth. As far as dispelling the MiG shootdown, Michel again went
one step further and inteviewed Vietnamese Air Force officers and was allowed
access to their official documents. Michel concluded there were no MiG-21s in
the area of the BUFFs on either night. Michel also concluded they were probably
shooting at F-4s who dived away, but Ed questions that aspect. I believe the
exact circumstances of those two incidents will never be known.



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I agree with Ed. Trying to get an F-4 that highand to keep up with the bombers
in the configurations we had was not much more than a pipe dream So far as
official records are concerned, I can tell you that I have read some of the
accounts if operations I was involved in, in Korea and SEA, in the 70s and what
happened are not always one and the same.

We had a debate here sometime back about a plane that I flew in Korea and later
went to SEA to shoot down a couple of MiGs. Supposedly that plane wasn't even
at the base I was at but my official flight records show that I did indeed fly
it.

Having been involved with a couple of accident boards as well, I can tell you
that if the official record, for the USAF at least, is 90% accurate, it is a
wonder.

The process we are centering our debates around starts out with personal
recollections, partially inaccurate records, subjective conclusions then a ll
that suddenly becomes fact. Like saying that I heard Dan Blather say it on TV,
so it must be true.

I'd personally believe personal accounts given first hand, than anything else.