We did not have to fight the way the grunts did, eyeball to eyeball, with a continuous up-close awareness of human pain and suffering due to the horrors of war. When you get hit at that speed, unless it is a catastrophic hit, you could normally use all that kinetic energy to get to somewhere far away to eject so that you did not have to encounter the angry guys whom you had just tried to kill. One of the guys flew a good 15 miles on fire from the aft cockpit back in order to get into the South China Sea, where he and the back-seater could be rescued. Others were not that fortunate and were killed or captured. To most of us it was a combination of skill and luck.
Most fighter pilots take their skill as a given.
Hopefully luck can be improved by the skill employed on any day. The closure that can never come is that many, too many, of our comrades died for a cause for which the politicians lacked the resolve to win. We are starting to have to relearn the very basic rule that, once you make the decision to go to war, the politicians should turn it over to the professional warriors to complete the job quickly, and with the minimum friendly loss of life. Today Aside from the Communist propaganda in the war museums, the people have put The American War behind them. There is absolutely no animosity toward Americans or any other visitors.