In Honor of the United States Armed Services

[blackcat]

I posted this on the baseball board, but here is appropriate too.

By Sam Laird13 minutes ago

Perhaps lost in the outsized legacies of two American folk heroes is that their remarkable lives intersected in the most unexpected place — as United States fighter pilots during the Korean War.

That's right, Ted Williams was once John Glenn's literal wingman.

Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth and a former U.S. senator from Ohio, died Thursday at 95 years old. He became a household name — and a subject of Hollywood's 1983 classic The Right Stuff — as an astronaut. He famously orbited Earth three times during the Friendship 7 mission, which launched in 1962.

But Glenn's life intersected a decade prior with that of Williams, a baseball Hall of Famer, legend of the game and still the last man to hit .400 in a season. While Williams was already a hero to schoolchildren across the nation, Glenn's biggest accomplishments were yet to come.

When the Korean War began in 1950, Glenn was a fighter pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps. Williams put his baseball career with the Boston Red Sox on hold to join the American war effort as a reservist in 1952. He was already a dozen years into his Major League Baseball career and had won two American League MVP awards to go with many other accomplishments on the diamond.

"By luck of the draw, we went to Korea at the same time," Glenn told MLB. com after Williams died in 2002. "We were in the same squadron there. What they did at that time, they teamed up a reservist with a regular to fly together most of the time just because the regular Marine pilots normally had more instrument flying experience and things like that. So Ted and I were scheduled together. Ted flew as my wingman on about half the missions he flew in Korea."

Williams' job, the Associated Press reported in 2002, was to protect Glenn's plane from enemy fire during combat missions.

Williams once recalled their days together in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.

"John Glenn?" the baseball legend said. "Oh ... could he fly an airplane. Absolutely fearless. The best I ever saw. It was an honor to fly with him."

More than half a century later, it's hard to imagine a more all-American duo. Glenn may have even saved Williams' life in 1953.

Williams' plane was hit during a mission on Feb. 16 of that year, he told a reporter in 1988. His plane was set on fire and his radio went out. But Glenn pulled his plane next to Williams' in the air, pointed a finger up and led them to higher altitude, where the fire was extinguished in thinner air. The two fighter pilots were then able to land their planes relatively unharmed.

After Korea, Williams went on to win two more American League batting titles before retiring in 1960.

Glenn, of course, went on to become an American icon.