Lt. Col. Richard Taber, the pilot who the report indicated dropped the bombs, had flown 90 hours in combat since arriving in Vietnam roughly three months before. Taber flew with the call sign Hellborne 526-1 and commanded a Marine Corps A-4 squadron in Chu Lai. The mission did not find the missing men, and Cook surmises that their bodies were vaporized in the blast. “I have been dropping Snakeyes exclusively in my last 15 or 20 launches from the alert,” his statement reads. “I can recall no reported miss distance as great as 50 meters in range, and nothing approaching that in azimuth.”

Source: New York Times January 31, 2019 09:56 UTC