If I may, Horst Faus was probably one of the finest war journalistic photographers of Viet Nam, my war I did a paper on this pic. There are many things in this picture. The paper, by the way was given the Dean's Award for the Year Thanks, [MENTION=51314]KGB agent[/MENTION] for giving us this thread...............
The Chinese aircraft carrier is twice as big and carries jet fighters and bombers. The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Liaoning
Exciting stuff huh. Rafha airport terminal in Saudi Arabia taken in 1991...very near the border of Iraq. Another stop involving dropping off hard copies...(800+ pages per ATO) of the daily air tasking order All missions begin with an air tasking order which is the lead planning document commanders follow. Fax machines were somewhat slow at that time, so our job was to hop in a Lear jet and drop off these ATOs to various bases.. Somewhat redundant as the ATO was still electronically transferred. This was all during the Stormin' Norman era of the Persian Gulf war in '90 - '91. I never fired a weapon at a bad guy in anger...ever...or got shot at by a bad guy who was mad at heck...sometimes "war stories" are rather uneventful. If had to scrap book a military career, I'd say airport terminals would be the best way to sum it up. You look back and think, did I actually make a difference...the answer to that is found in a poem I read once...an excerpt if I may. Take a bucket and fill it with water, Put your hand in it up to the wrist, Pull it out and the hole that's remaining, Is a measure of how much you'll be missed. You can splash all you wish when you enter, You may stir up the water galore, But stop, and you'll find that in no time, It looks quite the same as before. Enough waxing poetic...back to photos of the war toys....for as Plato once said...only the dead have seen the end of war...each new generation always finds a strange fascination with it. Carry on.
I read a report that the deck and the elevators can't handle the stresses involved with fixed wing aircraft. The helicopter destroyers would need serious modifications and overhaul to become aircraft carriers.
Of course if the deck's welding is capable of taking heat load. It is also pretty cheap for the ship of this class. Only 1,2 billion$.
My last home in the Navy, USS Ranger CVA-61 Ranger appeared on television in The Six Million Dollar Man, Baa Baa Black Sheep and in the films Top Gun, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (standing in for the carrier USS Enterprise), and Flight of the Intruder
up until I was discharged, she had been considered the pride of the 7th fleet: Pacific, code name Top Gun.... years before the movie was even made. Duty was pretty good even in bad weather...............
I was on two of the Ranger's sister ships, CV-60 Saratoga for a Med Cruise in 87-88 and CV-62 Independence in 89 for workups and a two month cruise from the Philly shipyards to San Diego. I think all of them are now razor blades but haven't kept up.
This was the Med Cruise I was on. It was at the end of our deployment and the Coral Sea was in-chopping to take over, but first we were going to send a few destroyers into the Gulf of Sidra, across Khaddafi's "Line of Death" and see if he wanted to come out and play...again. The operation was called off because things were heating up in the Persian Gulf. Iran had been mining the sea lanes and CincNav didn't want to have two irons in the fire at once. [video=youtube;jLaVOoSuDcA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLaVOoSuDcA[/video]
yep...............the Japanese are good at making razors blades................Brother served on the Forrestal, which has gone the way of the razor blade as well
