Jesse Brown was the original top gun – a navy fighter pilot whose heroism in the Korean war earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross, the loftiest award the US military pins on high fliers. That he was also the first Black pilot to pass navy flight training puts him in rarified air.
Brown, 24, never made it home. While supporting UN ground forces engaged in the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in December 1950, Brown suffered artillery damage to his F4U Corsair aircraft and crash-landed in a remote mountain valley. When his wingman, Tom Hudner, saw Brown struggling to come unpinned from his cockpit afterward, he defied orders and intentionally crash-landed his plane nearby to help Brown. But in the end Hudner, after calming a fire on Brown’s plane and hacking away at his cockpit with an ax for 45 minutes in the subzero weather, couldn’t free Brown from his aircraft, was ordered into a rescue helicopter before night fell (and visibility with it). Brown lost consciousness shortly thereafter; two days later, a squadron returned to pepper the crash site with napalm to keep Brown’s body and aircraft from falling into enemy hands. Hudner was left physically and emotionally bruised.
