Jim Koder of Port Charlotte, Fla. spent more than 20 years in the Navy. Much of the time he served aboard six aircraft carriers—the Ranger, Bennington, John F. Kennedy, Saratoga, Forrestal and the Lexington—as an Aviation Ordinance-man to begin with, then he became an Explosive Ordinance Disposal Expert starting with the Cuban Missile Crisis in…
Long before he joined the 82nd Airborne Division as a peacetime warrior in the mid-1950s, Lou Drendel of Venice was fascinated with things military. It began when he was a kid and his father built balsa wood airplane models for him.
The cheap, cerise-colored, aluminum bracelet on her right arm was battered and worn. Every day for the past 25 years, Vera Creed of Port Charlotte, Fla. has had it on.
After graduating in 1936 from Naval Aviation in Pensacola as an ensign, Capt. Al Boyd’s first assignment aboard the Battleship Tennessee was as a catapult pilot flying a pontoon spotter plane. Twenty –five years later, as a captain commanding a Navy base out west, he flew an F-4 “Phantom II” jet fighter-bomber faster than Mach-2…
War Tales 