You know, the risk 'thing' was something I was so ignorant of as a brat.

My parents kept in touch with another Navy wife whose husband had died on a carrier landing before their second child was born... But that family was the only one I was ever directly around who had lost a parent.

I was at a airshow when a A-7 didn't return and we all heard how he rode the plane in with everyone telling him to eject... leaving a young pregnant wife. They were always stories though... someone faceless who lived somewhere else on the base.

Then I joined the Navy after college. After AOCS I was in basic flight training in Pensacola and managed to get a week off to visit the folks. My dad and I broke out some old slides and started flipping thru them on the projector. Then we came to a series of crisp shots of his class of 1961! 12 young men just graduated from Aviation Officer Candidate School and ready to take to the air. I'd seen these slides dozens of times as a kid... all the faces meant nothing to me. It was just a chance to laugh at my father looking so young.

This time was so different.

I hoped to keep up with some of my friends from AOCS as we were about to branch off into different parts of the Navy, and I asked him, quite naively,

"did you keep up with any of these guys?"

He knew everyones name. There were only 12. My class had 52! He proceeded across the front row of 6...
"This one died at Whiting Field about 2 months after this photo. This guy died in helo training. So did this guy. This guy ended up fighters and was shotdown in Viet Nam when I was on ships company on the Enterprise. I think he was a POW. This guy died in helo training. Come to think of it, all these mar-cads (marine cadidates) went helos and they all died in training accidents."

I was shocked into silence to say the least. 5 of 12 had died in Pensacola within 2 years. Another he knew had been shotdown, and hopefully lived as a POW. Another had been a X.O. of a P3 Orion (4 engine sub hunter) squadron when we had lived in Pax River Maryland. The others he hadn't really kept up with... they all went other directions but he hadn't heard that any had died while serving.

By the way, modern helo's do a lot better than the old piston engined models the military used in the early 60's! My dad had never liked helo's and I finally understood why.

I had always sort of chuckled at little quotes in movies, Top-Gun for example where they say something like "a military pilot has a 1 in 4 chance of dying during his career". I always thought "if thats true, why don't I know more kids who lost dads?" In retrospect, it looks like those kids probably weren't born... I never met them.

I felt so lucky to still have a dad that day.

I sat there wondering how many my class would lose. I believe it was only 1. Troy Moore, killed in a midair in late 1990 or early 1991. He didn't have any kids for others to meet.