The Crash
This is not a place you will be able to visit. This is a place that used to be, that disappeared, and has now been built again, and built so thoroughly that only a missing tree would give you a hint that the building that stood here before experienced what can only be described as a catastrophe.
In one night, in a few moments, this place was forever changed, and it did not happen quietly, but rather with a boom.
Here are three versions of that thunderous boom. Three ways to see that night.
One. From the air.
His name was Lieutenant Robert Lee Ward. A sunny-faced Southerner from Mecklenburg, North Carolina, he would enlist in the U.S. Navy in 1967, just after graduating from college and getting married. Though this was during the Vietnam War, he would be sent to Pensacola, Florida, where he became a flight instructor, spending five years there. At that point - in 1972 - he would be transferred to a Navy base in California, near Fresno, called Lemoore.
It was from Lemoore that he would take off, on the night of February 7th, 1973, in an A-7 Corsair II. The Corsair was a plane that had been developed during the mid-sixties for use in Vietnam. It was fast. It was cheap. It weighed almost ten tons. And it could reach speeds of up to Mach 1, when tragically crashing into apartment buildings, in small towns in California.
Two. From the ground.
The planes were always there, as part of the background noise; it was the way the entire base permeated daily life. Many of the people who lived in the Tahoe Apartments, a four-story complex on Central Avenue, had some connection to the base. It was a Navy town. There was a steady hum as their children played, as they brought their groceries in from the store. They were so close to the base that they might even have recognized the sounds of the different planes without looking up, or known the men who were flying in the skies above them. Everyone was so used to the sounds that it wouldn't even have registered as something unusual. Until it became, suddenly, at 8:13pm, on a chilly February night, a boom.
Three. From the perspective of opportunity.
It had been a bit of a rough year for Gilbert Atencio. The coke business was doing fine but the court dates had started piling up, and it seemed like a good time to disappear. So when a tragedy came hurtling out of the sky, and offered a way out, Gilbert decided to take it, with a little help from a butane torch.
