Gene Patriot

John Levitow was bleeding from forty wounds when he threw his own body onto a burning flare that was about to blow his aircraft and everyone on it out of the sky. He weighed about 145 pounds and he was twenty three years old. He was born in November 1945 in Hartford, Connecticut, into a Jewish family. He first thought about joining the Navy, then changed his mind and went into the Air Force in 1966. He did not start out as anything glamorous. His first job was in civil engineering, and only later did he cross train into the loadmaster field, the enlisted man who rides in back and handles the cargo and the gear. In July 1968 he was sent to Vietnam with the 3rd Special Operations Squadron, flying aboard the AC-47 Spooky gunship, the same slow, deadly old transport packed with miniguns that prowled over battlefields at night. On February 24, 1969, Levitow was not even supposed to be on that plane. He was filling in for the regular loadmaster on a gunship called Spooky 71 over Long Binh. His job that night was to set the timers on the big magnesium flares, powerful enough to light up a battlefield, and hand them to the gunner to drop out the cargo door. A flare like that burns at around four thousand degrees. Then a North Vietnamese mortar round hit the wing. The blast tore a hole two feet across and punched more than three thousand holes through the fuselage. Everyone in the back was thrown down and torn up by shrapnel. Levitow took over forty wounds in his back and legs. And in the chaos he saw the thing that would kill them all. An armed flare, its fuse already lit and smoking, was rolling loose across the floor among the ammunition cans that held nineteen thousand rounds of live ammo. He could not grab it. It kept rolling, and he was slipping in blood, and the plane was pitched over at a hard angle. So he did the only thing left. He threw himself on top of it, pulled the burning flare against his own body, and dragged himself and it toward the open cargo door, leaving a smear of blood the whole way. He shoved it out into the night a second before it ignited fully. The flare went off clear of the aircraft. The crew lived. All of them. The pilot got the shredded plane home. Levitow recovered and actually went back to fly more missions. In May 1970 President Nixon put the Medal of Honor around his neck, and he became the first enlisted airman in Air Force history to receive it. He carried that honor quietly for the rest of his life and spent years helping other veterans. He died of cancer in 2000, at fifty five, and was buried at Arlington. The Air Force gave his name to its most important enlisted award, the Levitow Award, handed to the top graduate of Airman Leadership School. So every year, the best young airmen in the entire force learn the name of the skinny loadmaster who hugged a four thousand degree flare to his chest so that eight other men could go home.