A short entry. A short fuse. A different kind of post.

Ukraine's intelligence agency reports that for "the first time in warfare history," one of its naval drones shot down a Russian Su-30 fighter jet over the Black Sea using a sea-to-air missile. The event triggered a sour memory.

"The Russian Defence Ministry has not issued a formal response," writes NDTV World. I have an informal one. Bear with me.

A date once dragged me to a theatre to see the Clint Eastwood film, Firefox, a classic waste of 35mm to also waste my time. (Well, it did pay off later that night, heavy on the wink.) Anyway, Eastwood played, of course, a rugged, headstrong, plucky former fighter pilot brought out of retirement to foil the wickedly monocled Russkies. Did I mention that Ronald Reagan was president at the time? And that he screened the movie at Camp David and said it was "darn good"? Yeah, it was that bad. But I'm getting offtrack.

If you're a regular reader of this site you know I have no love for today's Russia. Allow me to amplify on that. I hate Russia, I hate everything about it, I hate its leader, his followers, Russia's cruel, barbarous invasion of Ukraine. Nor did I have any particular love for the Soviet Union, including its flyboys. Nevertheless they courageously did their job for their country, just as U.S. fighter pilots did. The same holds for today. And that much should be respected, regardless of government-employing ideologies.

In the above video I see no pilot ejecting; it appears there wasn't time. The same was true in the Eastwood film when he blasted a Russian pilot from the skies. It was shortly thereafter that I was appalled. As the scene wrapped up in the theatre, the audience exploded in self-celebratory hoots, hoolers and applause — whereupon I exploded, shouting, "Jesus Christ a brave pilot loses his life for his country, and you people cheer?" Silence fell throughout. My auditors might have thought I was a lunatic on the loose, and might get violent if confronted. I prefer to think they quieted out of enlightened shame. Who knows. Maybe they did.

My point being? Anyone who needs to ask would never comprehend the answer.

***

That concludes the post about Thursday's event. What follows is a related personal angle that might help explain my outburst of years past. (I don't do autobiography all that well, so you may want to move on, anywhere but here.)

I'm an aviation enthusiast, always have been. Indeed after college I applied for Naval flight training with the sole intent of flying fighters. (My father entered Naval flight training as a teenager during the Second World War.) I passed the written entrance exam "with flying colors," said the punning Navy lieutenant recruiter for probably the 10th time that month. Then the physical. That too I breezed through — right up to the final few seconds: the color-blindness test. I had no idea, nor did anyone else. The examiner graciously ran me through it three times, he told me afterward, hoping I'd get it right.

An ophthamologist later said my "condition" was marginal; he'd pass me for commercial, but no way would I ever tolerate anything but an F-16. And the U.S. Navy would tolerate not even the faintest degree of color blindness. I must say, losing out was soul-wounding — nothing earth-shattering, for sure, nevertheless it hurt. (I had to concede their position, though. When approaching an aircraft carrier at 200 miles per hour in what was then a $13 million plane, the Navy really wanted to know the pilot could distinguish a red flag from green being waved on the tarmac.)

In view of all this, it's pretty clear I possess a certain sensitivity — perhaps an oversensitivity — toward the type of insensitivity demonstrated in the movie theatre that night. My emotions also come from having read widely about the short lives and harrowing times of WW II bomber pilots and their crews. In '43 only a fourth of Eighth Air Force bomber

crewmen finished their 25 missions, the complete tour of duty. "The other 75% were killed, severely wounded, or captured." Notes the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, "Despite knowing the poor odds of finishing their tours, bomber crews courageously pressed their attacks mission after mission."

Did they ever. God how I admire those guys. I would have volunteered for fighter-plane duty over Europe — in that, there's an element of control — but the thought of flying bombers would have frightened the hell out of me. The early B-17s were tin cans and sitting ducks for flak and Messerschmitt 109s, and B-29s weren't much thicker-skinned. American fighters eventually cleared the skies of Göring's Luftwaffe, but until then our bombers, and the men in them, were easy prey. How those young men managed to rise each morning when the odds of death or some horror akin each day were three out of four, I'll never know.

In my book, they were the greatest of the greatest generation. I wasn't there, but somehow my bookish memory of them haunts — and warring sides notwithstanding, I can cheer no death in the skies, whether real or fictional.