Friendly Fire Notebook

Poetic license. John Warden was not a particular friend of mine.

Wheeew..

He was a pompous ass.

Can I get an AMEN?

Note for your background that Chuck was an F-105 driver

Yep, he had bomb load envy as well when I met him for the second time at KBAD
in '96

MiG trapped at six hosing your
brains out with his 37MM the memories are very explicit.

The more emotional the situation, the less likely for memory accuracy....at
least according to psychologists.

Since it was me engaged with the MiG and not the flight lead, I'll
lean heavily toward my perceptions as correct.

Unless coroborated by other eyewitnesses, you may have the edge in accuracy,
but not good enough to be used as a factual reference.

Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8

Buying your book this weekend.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

The more emotional the situation, the less likely for memory accuracy....at
least according to psychologists.

If that is the case, then that tends to negate all the firsthand interviews in
all the books on the war.

Conversely, my Linebacker recollections are among the most vivid in my life.
Some of the exact details are a little fuzzy but it diesn't take much to recall
them. As far as Ed goes. he is one of those guys with a steel trap memory the
rest of us wish we had. I'd take anything he said to the bank.

Ed, you can send payment for my endorsement to my bank account, # to be sent in
a privagte email.

Steve

On 23 Apr 2004 02:21:58 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:


MiG trapped at six hosing your
brains out with his 37MM the memories are very explicit.

The more emotional the situation, the less likely for memory accuracy....at
least according to psychologists.

I think if you review your psych books you'll find that traumatic
experiences (near-death events) can either result in partial
amnesia--blanking of the unpleasantness; or at the opposite extreme,
near photographic recollection. To this day I can recall voices,
phrases, images of my F-105 tour, but six years later during my F-4
combat experience I have much less vivid recollections of the tour.
Quite often I can't recall the members of a flight or even who was in
my back-seat on a given day. Some of the missions are very clear
(particularly the LB II,) but other droners into Laos, lower Route
Packs or SVN just didn't register with the same intensity.

Since it was me engaged with the MiG and not the flight lead, I'll
lean heavily toward my perceptions as correct.

Unless coroborated by other eyewitnesses, you may have the edge in accuracy,
but not good enough to be used as a factual reference.

That's a leap in logic. Let's say I'm a witness to a murder. I'm the
only one. I report my facts during the trial. While I may not be
supported, the accuracy of my observations is not diminished. If no
one else sees the event, does it somehow lose factuality?

Buying your book this weekend.


BUFDRVR

'Bout damn time! Your book report will be due in ten days.



Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8

I think if you review your psych books you'll find that traumatic
experiences (near-death events) can either result in partial
amnesia--blanking of the unpleasantness; or at the opposite extreme,
near photographic recollection.

However, according to numerous psychologists (highlighted recently), chances
are much greater that you will not accurately recall information that occured
under stress. This has been highlighted recently in light of eyewitnesses to
crimes who have been used to put the wrong person in jail. I'm not a big psyche
guy, but I do watch Dateline

To this day I can recall voices,
phrases, images of my F-105 tour

And I can close my eyes and see and hear my first strike against Belgrade, but
according to some shrinks, what I remember may be far less accurate then what
really happened.

Let's say I'm a witness to a murder. I'm the
only one. I report my facts during the trial. While I may not be
supported, the accuracy of my observations is not diminished.

If you were watching from the safety of your bed room window into an alley,
according to shrinks, you're right. However if the murder you witnessed was of
the guy right next to you, odds are your description of the assailant and the
circumstances and details will be inaccurate.

'Bout damn time! Your book report will be due in ten days.

How many pages?


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

On 23 Apr 2004 21:57:13 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:

I think if you review your psych books you'll find that traumatic
experiences (near-death events) can either result in partial
amnesia--blanking of the unpleasantness; or at the opposite extreme,
near photographic recollection.

However, according to numerous psychologists (highlighted recently), chances
are much greater that you will not accurately recall information that occured
under stress. This has been highlighted recently in light of eyewitnesses to
crimes who have been used to put the wrong person in jail. I'm not a big psyche
guy, but I do watch Dateline

And, I stayed last night in a Holiday Inn Express. Seriously, the
eyewitnesses to crimes comparison isn't relevant with regard to the
recollection of details by an experienced combat operator. Certainly
on the first trip or so there might be some elements of "buck fever"
but the level of efficiency goes up and the tendency for tunnel
vision goes down over multiple exposures.

If you go to the woods on day one, there's a good chance you won't see
a lot of the deer that are there. By day four of the hunt, you spot
the flick of an ear, the tip of an antler and suddenly realize they've
got you surrounded.

Part of what makes a survivor in aerial combat is much the same as
what air traffic controllers have---situational awareness or the "big
picture" view. Your mind integrates the plan, the clock, the view, the
radio calls, etc. into a three dimensional structure. You know your
position and the relationship of your flight to the others relative to
the ground and the mission timeline. You integrate MiG calls from
Disco or Teaball with location, direction and even intention. You know
from the RWR which radar is looking at who and when missiles are in
flight you know whether they are a threat or not.

To this day I can recall voices,
phrases, images of my F-105 tour

And I can close my eyes and see and hear my first strike against Belgrade, but
according to some shrinks, what I remember may be far less accurate then what
really happened.

What you remember, if your "big picture" was as well developed as
mine, is probably a whole lot more accurate than what some ACSC
plastic-shoed slick-pocketed staff puke gleans from reading the Op-Rep
4s and the frag order.

Let's say I'm a witness to a murder. I'm the
only one. I report my facts during the trial. While I may not be
supported, the accuracy of my observations is not diminished.

If you were watching from the safety of your bed room window into an alley,
according to shrinks, you're right. However if the murder you witnessed was of
the guy right next to you, odds are your description of the assailant and the
circumstances and details will be inaccurate.

If you'd logged a dozen or so witnessings, your ability to recall the
details will be pretty darn good.

'Bout damn time! Your book report will be due in ten days.

How many pages?

Pages? My gawd, I've been working with community college students for
so long, my expectations are down to words not pages.

Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8

Ed Rasimus wrote:

On 23 Apr 2004 21:57:13 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:

I think if you review your psych books you'll find that traumatic
experiences (near-death events) can either result in partial
amnesia--blanking of the unpleasantness; or at the opposite extreme,
near photographic recollection.

However, according to numerous psychologists (highlighted recently), chances
are much greater that you will not accurately recall information that occured
under stress. This has been highlighted recently in light of eyewitnesses to
crimes who have been used to put the wrong person in jail. I'm not a big psyche
guy, but I do watch Dateline

And, I stayed last night in a Holiday Inn Express. Seriously, the
eyewitnesses to crimes comparison isn't relevant with regard to the
recollection of details by an experienced combat operator. Certainly
on the first trip or so there might be some elements of "buck fever"
but the level of efficiency goes up and the tendency for tunnel
vision goes down over multiple exposures.

Oh, damn. Here I've been unable to reply for almost a week, and the discussion has
moved on so far, with so much back and forth, that there's no way I can ever get
back in sync with the rest of you if I go back and reply to old posts replying to my
old posts. My apologies to all who I haven't replied to (You, John, and anyone
else). I hate it when that happens.

I will say that personal perceptions are just that, and while training and
experience can influence their accuracy, so does an individual's biases and
outlook. "Rashomon" applies. There's a reason that accident investigators want to
see the recorded and physical data instead of relying on eyewitness accounts. The
latter are almost always wrong, wholly or partially so, no matter how experienced
the witnesses are. Kind of like when they installed gun cameras in fighters; they
were finally able to compare reported results as to target type, range, angle,
effects etc., with those captured on film; only the latter could be objective.

If eyewitness accounts were considered accurate, there would be little reason for
the elaborate recording devices found in modern combat a/c. Only when you have a
large number of independent accounts in essential agreement, FROM ALL SIDES, with
no opportunity for the witnesses to be influenced by other people's accounts prior
to giving their own, can you assume accuracy. Even then it should be considered
unverified if you lack direct hard evidence of the event. Once you add in the
further effects of time and outside influences on memory, the accuracy degrades even
further.

The one constant I've found when trying to correlate accounts of the exact same
occurrence is that if two accounts agree completely in all essential details, one of
them was based on the other. I could, for example, give you both Steve Ritchie and
Chuck DeBellevue's accounts of the same double kill mission (Paula 01, 8 July 1972),
with the two men separated by six feet or less; even so, their recollections of the
order of events, colors, spatial relationships etc. differ slightly, and the
accounts of each man change slightly depending on the audience and the passage of
time, no doubt influenced by hundreds of tellings, and hearing each other tell the
story. And that doesn't even get into the accounts of the 3 other U.S. crews
directly involved, or those of the Vietnamese side, etc.

I've heard some of the radio tape of Cunnigham/Driscoll's 10 May triple MiG kill
mission, as well as read their accounts. When it comes to timing of events, who
said what when, etc., the tape's 'memory' is completely accurate, the men's
perceptions and memories are of lesser accuracy. Why should this be a surprise?

OTOH, when I read Keith Rosenkranz' book "Vipers in the Storm", where he gives exact
times, radio calls, altitudes etc., I'm going to put the highest accuracy as far as
those items are concerned, because he had copies of his mission HUD tapes and used
them when writing the book; if you go to his website you can watch and listen to the
tapes yourself. Here's one from the big attack on the nuclear complex at Osirak:

http://www.vipersinthestorm.com/html/chapter_24.html

But anything that isn't on those tapes and which he didn't personally experience and
have 'non-volatile' evidence of, gets a much lower reliability rating pending
similar confirmation.

Guy

Ed Rasimus wrote:

If you'd logged a dozen or so witnessings, your ability to recall the
details will be pretty darn good.


The NTSB puts very little value in eyewitness reports and I'm
inclined to put a rather high value on their opinion. That said I
agree that the less stress the more reliable your witnessing will
be (to a point of course) one tends to be a poor witness again
when boredom sets in.
--

-Gord.