November 2020 THE CHARBONNEAU VILLAGER 5
Vietnam veteran Bill Moir holds a model A-7 Corsair II jet he flew in the Vietnam War .
Eyes
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as soon as he flew upside down for the first time , “ multi-engine wasn ’ t very exciting ,” he said . “ I went jets instead .”
Bill said he spent most of his time on the USS Saratoga — a Lexington-class aircraft carrier .
On one of his deployments , they went to Vietnam .
“ We actually left Florida and sailed around the tip of Africa in order to get to the Philippines and finally to Vietnam ,” Bill said . “ Whenever we were deployed , we were on a ship . You get into a routine but the real hard part about that one is that we loaded the airplanes on the ship , we left Florida and we didn ’ t fly for 35 days . So when we got to Vietnam we were kind of out of practice . The first few days were less than sophisticated for flying .”
Bill said he went on 135 combat missions and only had damage to the airplane on three of them . He suffered no injuries . “ Combat flying is more exciting than other kinds of flying ,” he said . When he was in Vietnam , Bill remembers being shot at and having his airplane badly damaged .
“ You ’ re just awfully darn busy trying to keep it flying and get back to the ship ,” he said .
Bill said being in the Navy impacted his life immensely .
“ You go in as a young lieutenant , junior grade and because of my enlisted time , I was always senior in the rank — seniority means a lot in the military ,” said Bill , adding that he was a maintenance officer of a squadron and had 200 people working for him — a huge responsibility at a young age back then . “ I think that experience has served me really well .”
When Bill left the Navy , he continued down his mechanical engineering path and spent almost 46 years working at power plants , rebuilding steam systems .
Six years ago , Bill moved to Charbonneau to be closer to family and he retired in August of this year .
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