![]() ![]() ![]() He began the description of each engagement by reading off the date, then he described the details of the air battle-the location, flying conditions, number and types of aircraft, maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, and how the fight ended. I turned on the tape recorder, thinking that we’d go through his seven claims first and then I’d see what I could find out about Robbie.īay read from a tattered piece of paper, which, according to the interpreter, listed all his dogfights, including seven victories. We regarded each other through a haze of blue smoke. He’s a heavy smoker, and I noticed as I sat down across from him the brand he was smoking was 555, the same number as my old squadron, the Triple Nickel. He grows mangos and raises fish for a living on a small farm near Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), the capital of the South, where he moved after the war ended. At 63, he is a small, frail-looking man with a deeply lined face. I was the first American pilot either of these men had ever met.īay is credited with seven kills. That’s how I came to be sitting across a table from two VPAF pilots in 1997: Do Huy Hoang (pronounced “doe wee wong”) and Nguyen Van Bay. They also eventually put me in touch with several fighter pilots from the Vietnamese People’s Air Force, the air force of North Vietnam. The Vietnamese officials we talked to promised to investigate the photograph, which turned out to have been a hoax. There was a rumor that Robbie had survived, based mainly on a soon-to-be infamous photograph, which Quinn had brought with him, of three POWs alleged to be alive and captive in Laos. The squadron could get very little information about his crash, and Quinn and I were hoping to find out more. On a strike mission on September 16 that year, Robbie’s flight was ahead of mine. In 1966 we both flew F-4Cs from Ubon Royal Thai Air Base in Thailand during the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign. servicemen who were classified as missing in action, and one of them, Major John “Robbie” Robertson, was a friend of mine, a squadron mate. Quinn was searching for information about U.S. ambassador to Cambodia from 1996 to 1999. I was on a kind of mission, one that really got started seven years earlier when I went to Hanoi with state department official Ken Quinn, later the U.S. On that trip I met North Vietnamese ace Nguyen Van Bay (pronounced “win von by”). “It probably lasted between 45 seconds and a minute, banging on the door,” Mattingly said, before police broke in.Many of my trips to Vietnam have run together in my memory, including some of the 180 I made in McDonnell F-4 Phantoms during what the Vietnamese call “the American war.” But one I took in 1997 will always remain distinct. ![]() In a police interview on March 25 that was played to the grand jury last week, the officer who was wounded, Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly, said police banged on Taylor’s door six or seven different times, repeatedly announcing they were police there to serve a search warrant. ![]() “Juror deliberations and prosecutor recommendations and statements were not recorded, as they are not evidence,” Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, the special prosecutor in the case, said in a statement. Strikingly absent were any recordings of prosecutor recommendations that might have revealed how prosecutors guided the 12-member panel’s thinking. The recordings also demonstrate grand jurors were engaged with the investigators presenting the case, peppering them with questions about why police did not wear body cameras, and whether police in the raid were aware that other officers had already located the central suspect in the investigation, Taylor’s ex-boyfriend.įILE PHOTO: A man pauses at the memorial of Breonna Taylor before a march, after a grand jury decided not to bring homicide charges against police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Taylor in her apartment, in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. One officer said he did not realize he had fired his weapon until after the fact, while another who opened fire mistakenly feared his colleagues were being shot by an AR-15. The recordings made over three days of proceedings show police were confused by the burst of their own gunfire. Hours later and with his voice breaking with emotion, the recordings showed, Walker told police he and Taylor were “scared to death” at the banging at the door, with Taylor yelling “Who is it?” at the top of her lungs but hearing no response. Police then fired 32 rounds, six of which hit Taylor. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who was with her, has said he believed the plainclothes officers who burst in might have been Taylor’s ex-boyfriend. ![]()
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