War & conflict · People & lives

His wingman crashed on purpose trying to save him

Jesse Brown's Corsair went down on a frozen North Korean mountaintop, and what happened next is one of the strangest acts in American military history: another pilot deliberately wrecked his own working aircraft to land beside him and try to pull him free. The rescue failed, Brown died in the cockpit, and Hudner received the Medal of Honor anyway. Layered under that is Brown's own path — a poor family in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a segregated high school where he finished second in his class, and a Navy that had only just begun to let a Black man near a fighter cockpit. He had 20 combat missions behind him when he was killed at the Chosin Reservoir.

Brown was the first African American to finish the Navy's basic flight training — but not the first African-American Navy aviator, a distinction that says a great deal about how the service handled race.

Read the whole of Jesse L. Brown on Wikipedia

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