They did more than little

I had the pleasure of meeting some no-kidding, by-God, true-(red white & ) blue heroes yesterday at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.
8 of the 16 surviving men of the original 80 crewmembers who comprised the "Doolittle Tokyo Raiders" were on hand to dedicate a memorial in the museum's monument park, and hundreds of folks and muckity-mucks and a full AF band were present to hear one of them, a gent in his late eighties, tell us how proud he was to see us. Imagine!

As shown in the last hour of the movie "Pearl Harbor", then-Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle trained his team to get 16 B-25 medium bombers to take off from an aircraft carrier in order to bomb Tokyo and retaliate, if not extremely militarily but emotionally, for the attack on Hawaii. The attack was a success, though due to a lack of fuel, one crew had to ditch in Vladivostok, the rest had to bail out or crash in China. Two men died in a crash (drowning, actually, off the coast of China), and three of eight captured by the Japanese were later executed.
Though I didn't witness this ceremony (it was the next day), those present also commemorated the permanent relocation from the U.S. Air Force Academy the goblets upon which all the raiders' names are engraved. At each annual reunion, the remaining raiders toast those that have passed, and turn over the ones that belong to anyone who may have died since the previous reunion. The last two who remain will open an 1896 bottle of brandy and toast all the Raiders. Click here for the www.af.mil story.