This is Jocco podcast number 230 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Operation rolling thunder began in 1968. As we flew combat missions, striking secretary of defense, Robert McNamara's hand selected targets, we lost planes and men almost every day.

Flying from Yankee station, the area of the Gulf of Tonkin where the aircraft carriers operated, we learned what it was like to sit in a wardrobe and a wardrobe table surrounded by empty chairs.

Half the time, we never knew what happened to them.

Maybe another pilot noticed an enemy surface to air missile launch or caught a fleeting glimpse of a burning American plane heading toward the jungle below.

Sometimes we'd hear the air crew requesting help on the ground dodging enemy patrols and calling for rescue.

When the helicopters went in, the North Vietnamese were often waiting. They shot up the helicopters and their escorting planes.

We sometimes got our man and lost three more in the process.

We were flying not just for each other. We were flying for each other's families.

The man on your wing usually had a wife, maybe some children. You took care of him to take care of them.

We all faced moments where we risked our lives for each other to ensure the contact teams did not knock on our brother's door back in San Diego, Lamor or would be island.

When the enemy scored, the families were devastated.

You seldom see that written about. But we've all come home to tell widows and fatherless kids how sorry we were.

We gave them what peace we could. The truth is that loss never goes away.

It warps the rest of their lives as they wrestle with the pain.

That old adage time heals all wounds. No. 50 years on, I've seen those families still break down in tears as they talk of their fallen aviator.

You don't get over that kind of pain. You just learn to live around it.

It becomes part of who you are. And for us out on Yankee Station, that grief motivated us to sacrifice for each other.

Not everyone could hack it. There were days on Yankee Station where I watched Aircrews lose their nerve.

All of a sudden some mechanical, mysterious issue came up and a flight had to be scrubbed.

Sometimes it happened when the same plane was on the catapult ready to launch.

They just couldn't bring themselves to face it again, the most fearsome air defense network in the world, erected by the North Vietnamese with Russian help around Hanoi.

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