Word: boyington
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...this long, rambling autobiography, one of World War II's authentic heroes does his best to prove that he was also a bum. Gregory ("Pappy") Boyington's saga begins in the summer of 1941, when he was a Marine officer and a flying instructor on the naval air base at Pensacola. He was, as usual, restless. "I was forever going somewhere but never getting anywhere. For the most part I was always leaving some geographical location just prior to my being asked to leave." Marine Corps Headquarters was getting tiresome about the growing difference between his debts...
...Boyington soon had learned to regret his impulse. The pay that had seemed so attractive-$675 a month, plus $500 for each Japanese plane-bought familiar pleasures: whisky and women. But though the Tigers were all technically civilians, Greg found himself jousting with superiors again. There was the old, retread captain who turned the boys out for a military muster every morning, and the group adjutant in Toungoo who threatened so many of his men with so many courts-martial that Boyington suspected "he must have been at least one jump ahead of a few himself in his military days...
...there were also P-4Os to fly. With terrifying shark teeth painted on their long, snarling snouts, they held their own and better with Jap Zeroes from Kunming to Thailand. And in them, Greg Boyington learned the unforgiving trade of the fighter pilot. He was an ace when he heard that the entire outfit was about to be drafted into the Army. By then, Boyington suspected that "Laughing Boy" Chennault was old-school Army, and had no use for marines. ("I shouldn't think he would even want a dead marine's body stinking up his precious China...
...marked. The company announced that the last propeller-driven fighter to be made in the U.S. was off the production line. It was the 12,571st Corsair, a descendant of the planes once flown from Guadalcanal to the Inland Sea by such hot pilots as Marine "Pappy" Boyington and the Navy's "Ike" Kepford. Corsairs, with their inverted gull wings, were the first fighters to exceed 400 m.p.h.; during World War II they splashed a total of 2,140 enemy aircraft, v. a Corsair loss of but 189. With its Corsair mission completed, Chance Vought will now concentrate most...
After a back-alley fight in Los Angeles, World War II Marine Ace Gregory ("Pappy") Boyington, now a beer salesman, was hauled into court and charged with drunkenness. Said Medal-of-Honor man Pappy, now 38: "I must be getting...