To the right is another cool image, but this one has nothing to do with astronomy, though you will likely be hard pressed to figure out exactly what you are looking at without some study. It is clearly some broken metal object inside a forest, but identifying its exact nature is not obvious.

What you are looking at is the remains of a propeller plane (likely flown on a reconnaissance mission) that crashed in the jungles of Vietnam during that long and tragic war of the 1960s and 1970s. Most amazingly, despite its twisted nature, the pilot survived and was fortunately quickly rescued by American troops before the arrival of the Vietcong.

That pilot’s name was Francis James Floyd. His son Jeffrey, a regular reader of Behind the Black, sent me the picture to illustrate that guys who fly wingsuits are not the only ones willing to do crazy things in the air. As he wrote,

Our dad fought in WWII, Korea and Vietnam as an Air Force pilot. While he had to learn how to parachute jump, he hated it. Even if the engine(s) failed, as long as he had his wings attached, he would not exit (jump). He said “There are two kinds of people that jump out of airplanes: idiots, and people in the armed services.”

So, the attached photo is what was left of his plane in Vietnam. He used the tops of the forest trees to try to slow down, like skimming the water. Fortunately, the good guys reached him first, and he came home.

Francs Floyd however was not an exception or rare thing, like the wingsuit fliers are today. He was one of a massive generation of Americans who, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, quickly enlisted to defend the United States and — more importantly — its fundamental principles of freedom and limited government.

Floyd was only twenty when he enlisted in 1942. He had no flight experience, but was quickly trained to become a pilot who flew fighter bomber missions over Italy. Later he returned to fly in the Korean War, and then again in Vietnam. As his son adds,

Dad had a drawer FULL of medals he never wore (that we remember). I believe Mom made him keep them in the drawer. One day, I had pulled open the drawer with the medals. Like most warriors, he did not talk about it often. He stated that those medals just meant he was lucky. He stated that the real heroes did not get to return home.

According to his son, Floyd was “fiercely anti-communist.” That description however is likely incomplete. I suspect that Floyd was instead fiercely hostile to all dictators, whether communist, fascist, or Nazi. He enlisted immediately after Pearl Harbor to fight both the tyrants in Japan and Germany, and then later continued to fight against the dictators in North Korea, propped up by the Chinese dictators, and then finally in Vietnam against what Floyd perceived as its own communist dictators.

As Jeffrey notes, Francis Floyd was like most of the Americans who fought in World War II. These fighters for liberty did not brag about their achievements. Though today’s holiday is meant to honor their memory, these men and women in subsequent decades would rarely go about in parades displaying their medals. To honor them you almost had to drag them from their homes. From their perspective, they simply did what was necessary to defend liberty and the Constitution (that served to limit the power of power-hungry politicians) and the Bill of rights (that served to protect the rights of ordinary citizens).

In fact, their effort as soldiers and pilots was in the long run merely a distraction from what was to them far more important. “Dad returned home to help raise his three sons and four daughters,” Jeffrey wrote. His wife, family, and the building a new life as a free American was what really counted to Floyd and his generation. One story his son tells for example illustrates well Floyd’s dedication to these values.

In the 1960s, before Vietnam, Dad was often stationed at Travis Air Force Base. Sometimes, he was flying those wonderful C-130 Hercules aircraft, which are still in use today. Our house was in Menlo Park. Being a Colonel, Dad could/would do things that others might not.

On his way back to Travis, he would make sure to fly over our house. But not just fly over. He would fly lower (not too low), and do something with the four engines to change the sound.

When we would start to hear that noise, we all ran out to the front yard. There he was above us. Most of the time, after the flyover, he would appear in our driveway about two hours later. If he did not, it was those rare occasions when they closed down the base, but we knew he was okay.

The Liberty Bell. Photo credit: William Zhang

I have read many similar stories from many other pilots of the World War II generation. They might have been having fun flying airplanes, but always in their minds were the kids and family back home. And it was this dedication to these very basic human values that made my generation, the baby boomers, the luckiest people ever to have lived. We were born in wealth and prosperity and complete freedom to follow our dreams wherever they led us, because men like Francis James Floyd were willing to risk their necks for simple things like family, freedom, and the American way of life.

This is what Memorial Day is really about. We honor the courage and dedication of these men, but in doing so we must also remember why they did what they did. They were not simply defending their country, they were defending the right of every single person on Earth to freely live their life as they dreamed, without some petty dictator smashing his or her boot into their face.

Or as the Bible says, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”