We went on the deployment and we were in the Indian Ocean. This was in the late 80s. And we were one of two ships that were in the Baltic, off the coast of Iran. And we were in a sea battle with surface ships of the Iranian navy. And there were two inbound aircraft. And, I was the combat systems supervisor, so I was the one who was looking at these things trying to track them everything. And we, theVincennes shot down the first of those two aircraft. It was a civilian airliner. And the second plane was a civilian airliner.

All aircraft have IFF: International Friend or Foe. And that’s an automatic system that squawks so that any person with the hardware to decode the IFF can see that plane and they know exactly which plane it is, where it came from, where it’s going. And the second pilot saw the first plane explode and he went on the emergency radio circuit, you know, saying that it exploded. CO wanted me to shoot that one down, too. And I physically blocked my commanding officer from the firing console.

Now, ordinarily, that would be a severe court martial offense. And, and about the time when he was struggling to get past me, over the radio circuit came that second plane: “Mayday, mayday.” And identifying themselves and everything. And uh, but, terrible day. Terrible day.

But interestingly, several years later, 7 or 8 years - I think I mentioned earlier that I'm a birdwatcher. There's an international program called eBird where people enter their bird sightings from all over the world. And I had entered some bird sightings for that particular time frame. This person had contacted me because one of the sightings I had entered was considered pretty rare for the area and he wanted to verify it. That those were valid sightings.

And in the course of those communications, it turns out he was the pilot of the second aircraft. He thanked me for not shooting him down.