The sun was setting, and swarms of Chinese troops were likely headed his way. He tried to climb out of the cockpit but he was pinned inside – and flames were starting to rise from the fuselage. The impact of the landing raised a cloud of snow and crumpled his Corsair. He spotted a small mountain clearing and took his plane in. “Losing power,” Brown calmly radioed to his squadron. He scanned the icy slopes for a place to crash land because he was too low to bail out. The Marines appeared so doomed that newspapers back home dubbed them the “Lost Legion.”īrown had been flying low over a remote hillside looking for targets when ground fire ruptured his fuel line. Marine division encircled by 100,000 Chinese troops at the Chosin Reservoir. Now he was in another conflict, part of a six-man squadron dispatched to defend a U.S. For years, his own people had tried to destroy him. It was the beginning of the Korean War, but Brown was already battle-tested. “Jesse, something’s wrong,” one of the men in his squadron radioed him. Jesse Leroy Brown was hurtling over the North Korean countryside in his Corsair fighter 17 miles behind enemy lines when he discovered that he was in trouble.
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