Isegoria

After surviving the Korean War, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Oxcart pilot Kenneth Collins returned with a fatalistic attitude:

“Fate is a hunter,” Collins believes. “When it comes for you, it comes,” and for whatever reason it was not time for death to come to him yet. This was a notion Collins formulated during the Korean War while flying reconnaissance missions and watching so many talented and brave fellow pilots die. How else but by fate did he survive all 113 combat missions he had flown? On those classified missions, the young Collins was armed with only a camera in the nose of his airplane as he flew deep into North Korea, sometimes all the way over the Yalu River, being fired at by MiG fighter jets. During the war, he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and also the coveted Silver Star for valor, the third-highest military decoration a member of the armed services can receive. Both medals were pinned on Collins’s chest before he turned twenty-four.

[…]

Accepting fate as the hunter made things easier for Collins, which is how he dealt with the memory of his closest friend and former wingman from the Fifteenth Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, Charles R. “Chuck” Parkerson. The two men had flown on many missions together, but there was one from which Parkerson never came home. “We had flown into North Korea and back out side by side,” Collins recalls. “We were almost home when Parkerson radioed me. He said the engine on his RF-80 had flamed out and he was unable to restart it. I saw he was losing altitude quickly and he knew that soon he would crash.” Parachuting into enemy territory meant certain death. “Over the radio, Parkerson asked me, ‘What should I do?’” Collins explains. “I said, ‘Fly out over the Yellow Sea and I’ll fly with you.’ I told him to bail out in the water and I’d send his coordinates back to base for a rescue team.” It seemed like a good idea, and Collins flew alongside his wingman as they headed toward the Yellow Sea. Parkerson prepared for a bailout. “But there was a problem,” Collins recalls. “The canopy on Parkerson’s RF-80 was stuck. Jammed. It wouldn’t open, which meant he was trapped inside the airplane. There was nothing I could do for my friend except to fly alongside him all the way until the end.” Collins watched Parkerson land his airplane on the sea. With Parkerson unable to get out of the sinking aircraft, Collins waited, watching from the air as his friend drowned. “When your time is up, it is up,” Collins recalls.

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