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Col. Stone
#3187339
08/09/20 07:23 PM
08/09/20 07:23 PM
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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 5,909 alex city
oakachoy
OP
12 point
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OP
12 point
Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 5,909
alex city
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My wife told about one of her clients having a truck for sale. Since I just hired an apprentice, We were invited to go see it and am really glad we did. Col. Stone is a real badass former fighter pilot, he got shot down above Hanoi and crashed. His wife Dale is 87 and very proud fine woman as you could ever meet. She would have and wanted to cook for us, I was very humbled and it was a blessing to spending a couple of hours with her. When she told us about Col Stone carrying the 96 Olympic Torch in Alabama she was sharp as ever. So, anyway send up an Aldeer salute to the real deal this evening. Oh yeah, I bought the truck and sending my new hire out to pick it up. I'm going to request that he ask about the medal shadow box where she can tell the stories as she enjoys it so much.
WM Hunter "Trump literally sacrificed himself, his family and all of his businesses for this country. He literally is a true American hero. And True American Patriot - warts and all."
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Re: Col. Stone
[Re: oakachoy]
#3187350
08/09/20 07:34 PM
08/09/20 07:34 PM
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Joined: Dec 2016
Posts: 10,409 northport
deadeye48
Booner
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Booner
Joined: Dec 2016
Posts: 10,409
northport
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Very cool getting to meet America’s heroes
When I need expert advice I tend to talk to myself The older I get the better I used to be
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Re: Col. Stone
[Re: oakachoy]
#3187421
08/09/20 08:44 PM
08/09/20 08:44 PM
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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 5,909 alex city
oakachoy
OP
12 point
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OP
12 point
Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 5,909
alex city
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Another one, the back side of my property was joined by Mr. Hubert Parker who died earlier this year. Mr. Parker and his wife who died four months earlier, they were both in their late 90's. Several years ago, my daughter was doing a book report on WWII, she went to Mr. Parker and asked about the War, he broke down and told her about landing at Normandy. My daughter will never forget that Sunday evening. We've lost something in our Country and won't ever get it back imho. '
WM Hunter "Trump literally sacrificed himself, his family and all of his businesses for this country. He literally is a true American hero. And True American Patriot - warts and all."
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Re: Col. Stone
[Re: oakachoy]
#3187980
08/10/20 02:55 PM
08/10/20 02:55 PM
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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 5,909 alex city
oakachoy
OP
12 point
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OP
12 point
Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 5,909
alex city
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Pretty good read on Colonel Stone.
Former Air Force Col. Robert Stone said he thought he had “died and gone to heaven” the day he was given his first combat mission as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War.
On his 61st bombing mission over North Vietnam, he nearly died when anti-aircraft bullets riddled the sleek F-105 Thunderchief jet he was flying and he bailed out deep in enemy territory.
The Navy man who plucked him out of the jungle and saved his life recently visited the retired colonel in Alexander City.
Toney Hanson, now 78 and a retired senior chief petty officer, hoisted a seriously wounded Stone from the jungle.
“About halfway through my dive-bombing run at a very high speed, the sky just lit up,” Stone recalled of the 1967 incident.
“It was a flak battery in there, a triple-A battery we didn’t know about. I could see the tracers coming up and I took two hits. I took the hits back in the fuselage area. The cockpit filled with smoke, my controls locked up and I had to bail out.”
These days, Stone and his wife Dell live a tranquil life in a comfortable, spacious home with a panoramic view of Lake Martin. If it’s not heaven, it’s certainly a heavenly existence.
They both turn 86 in January and have been married for 65 years.
It would have been much less if not for Hanson. Stone suffered a broken leg, a dislocated shoulder and serious internal injuries in the incident. And the enemy was closing in on him.
That was a far cry from his childhood in Mobile, where he met his future wife in the fifth grade.
Stone said he joined the Air Force in 1951 at 18. They married after he finished flight training and was awarded his aviator badge, better known as pilot wings.
According to Stone, he soloed in a Piper Super Cub in 1953. His goal all along was to fly a fighter jet in combat. He quickly mastered the prop planes and transitioned to the Thunderchief, known by fighter pilots and their crew as the “Thud.”
Stone quickly rose in rank as he mastered new aircraft. He was 33 years old and flying a Thunderchief when he volunteered for duty in Vietnam.
It was 1966. He and Dell had three children and she was not as excited about Maj. Stone’s deployment to Vietnam as he was. He later was promoted to colonel.
“It was shock to all of us, including Dell,” Stone said. “I set them up in Mobile. Her parents were in Mobile and my mother was in Mobile, so I put her in a house in Mobile.”
Stone said of his assignment to Vietnam as a fighter pilot, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. That’s what you train for your whole career. You are happy about that.”
But at the same time, Stone said he was anxious because it was his first experience flying combat missions.
Stone said he and his fellow pilots flew out of Thailand and into North Vietnam.
“I remember my first mission over Hanoi; that got my attention because of the flak,” he said. “It was just boom, boom, boom. We were flying through it the whole time. For the bombing, we would be going through it at 18,000 to 19,000 feet. … It was a real education because, man, it was heavily defended, real heavily defended.”
Besides flak guns, Hanoi and the surrounding countryside was defended by surface-to-air missiles (SAMS).
Stone recalled one scary, close call.
“We were en route to Hanoi,” he said. “They had them set up all over the place. If you could see it (coming up after launch), it was like a big telephone pole. It usually tried to get in front of you and the standard procedure was as soon as you caught sight of it, was go into a steep dive and then pull up sharply to dodge it.”
Stone said his Thunderchief’s payload included six, 750-pound bombs. Even though the Thuds were equipped with air-to-air missiles, the colonel said he never got into a dogfight with enemy planes.
Pilots were required to fly 100 combat missions before they were allowed to return to the U.S., Stone pointed out. The colonel’s luck ran out on his 61st mission.
Stone and his wingman, also piloting a Thud, were about 100 miles south of Hanoi. It was early in the day and they had been assigned what was supposed to be an easy mission. Stone said their main target was a makeshift crossing over a stream along the Ho Chi Minh trail. En route to the crossing, they took out trucks hidden beneath the thick jungle canopy.
“It was supposed to be undefended,” Stone recalled. “When I got to the North Vietnam border, I dropped down to treetop level. We followed the road to see if there were any trucks under the trees or whatever and we would strafe along there.
“When we got to the target, I pulled up to bombing altitude. For that kind of target, it was about 10,000 feet. I had my wingman go in first and I pulled around 90 degrees so I would not go down the same path.”
After being hit, Stone had no choice but to bail out over thick jungle. Stone said he jumped out of airplanes before but had never been catapulted from an ejection seat and had been warned if he did he would sustain injuries.
“It was like someone had put a cannon under me and fired it,” he said. “I had a broken left femur, a dislocated shoulder, internal injuries. I was pretty well beat up.”
Stone said he was traveling close to 700 mph, landed in a tree and got hung up 40 feet off the ground. His injuries got worse when he hit the ground and, to make matters worse, U.S. aircraft had to drop napalm to keep enemy soldiers from shooting Stone.
WM Hunter "Trump literally sacrificed himself, his family and all of his businesses for this country. He literally is a true American hero. And True American Patriot - warts and all."
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Re: Col. Stone
[Re: oakachoy]
#3188269
08/10/20 07:25 PM
08/10/20 07:25 PM
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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 5,909 alex city
oakachoy
OP
12 point
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OP
12 point
Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 5,909
alex city
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second article
By RON COLQUITT
Air Force fighter pilots are the brave ones but their wives must be the strong ones, Dell Stone said.
Her husband, retired Air Force Col. Robert Stone of Alexander City, was critically injured when he was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967. She sweated out 18 days awaiting word on his condition.
The mother of three children said famed CBS television journalist Walter Cronkite broke the news about her husband.
Mrs. Stone said in a recent interview that Cronkite didn’t mention her husband by name during his TV report of the incident. Cronkite had interviewed Toney Hanson, the heroic Navy man who helped rescue Stone from the jungle and who recently visited the Stones at their home on Lake Martin.
“He was shot down on July the second, and that night Walter Cronkite was on television and I watched it because every one of our friends were being shot down, being killed,” Mrs. Stone said.
“We watched it every minute. Toney was on television that night with Walter Cronkite and he was telling about the pilot he had picked up, and he was alive and critically injured, but never said his name.”
The next day, Mrs. Stone said she got a telegram informing her that her husband, Maj. Robert E. Stone, had been shot down over North Vietnam on July 2 and he had been critically injured with an undetermined prognosis.
“And for 18 days, his prognosis was unknown to me,” she said. “I didn’t know where he was or what condition he was in or what was going to happen to us, and I had three children,” ages 12, 9 and 5.
Mrs. Stone frantically began calling Air Force friends after her husband was shot down over North Vietnam.
“A friend was able to confirm he was in Da Nang (South Vietnam) and he was being sent to California and then to Walter Reed (a military hospital in Washington, D.C.),” she said.
Military officials later told her Stone was being transferred to a hospital at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, about an hour’s drive from Mobile.
Stone said he requested Keesler when given a choice of where he wanted to recover from his massive injuries.
After learning her husband would eventually recover, Mrs. Stone said she “was alive again. I was renewed again because I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was just very, very difficult, I can tell you.”
Stone was at the Keesler hospital for about 10 months, according to his son, who said he was happy to witness his father’s slow recovery.
Stone Jr. said he was about 16 years old when his father volunteered for another tour of duty in 1973. That year, America’s involvement in the Vietnam War was slowly ending.
Once again, Stone was stationed in Thailand but this time he flew C-130 planes to the North Vietnam border. According to the colonel, the crew of the C-130 directed air strikes throughout the war-weary country.
“I admire him the most because he went back and commanded that bomber squad in Thailand,” Stone Jr. said. “To go back after all of that, and to stay in for another series of years, that’s dedication. That’s that fighter pilot mentality.”
Mrs. Stone also had to live up to her name.
WM Hunter "Trump literally sacrificed himself, his family and all of his businesses for this country. He literally is a true American hero. And True American Patriot - warts and all."
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