If you have never had the opportunity to read this speech that John Kerry gave at the ADL's National Leadership Conference, it's packed with a lot of gems of wisdom and wit, including this story about a little flying lesson the senator took in an Israel fighter jet.
Senator John Kerry
Address to the Anti-Defamation League
National Leadership Conference
Washington, D.C., May 3, 2004
(excerpt)
But at Ovda Air Base -- I'm a pilot, and I was longing to get up into Israel airspace. And I made several requests of Tel Aviv, and Tel Aviv kept saying, "No, we don't think this is a good idea, for the senator to go flying."
Finally, I sort of nudged the colonel that I was with. And he was an ace from the '67 war. And I said, "Colonel, is there no way we could arrange this? Would you mind going back and calling Tel Aviv and see if we could do a flight?"
So lo and behold, he gets up from the table. And we're starting to eat. And he comes back about 10 minutes later, and he says, "Senator, I hope you don't eat too much. We're going flying."
So the next thing I know, I'm whisked out to the airport, which is right there, out to the airstrip, and he tells me, "Look, I'm not going to have time to give you all the instructions, but the minute we take off, it's your airplane."
Now I had never explained to him whether I'd ever flown a jet before or anything.
And he was very trusting. And I got out to the tarmac and I got into my suit and my helmet and jumped into the airplane. It was a trainer, a Fuga trainer. And I got in the front seat, he got in the back. He was indeed very trusting. That's why he was an ace! And we take off.
And literally, you know, we're about five feet above the runway and he gives me this signal with a stick, says, "Your plane." So I take it off. We go up into the sky. Climb up, head down towards Aqaba. And I wanted to look at Aqaba, so I'm coming down over Aqaba, and I suddenly hear this voice in the intercom and he says, "Senator, you better turn faster, you're going over Egypt." So I started to wrap it in and do a faster turn.
Then I asked him if I could do a loop, a little aerobatics. And he said fine. So I went up to about 12,000 feet and proceeded to go in and do a loop. And I want you to know, ladies and gentlemen, that to be able to come out upside down and look down and catch the horizon in back of me, and see all the way down into the Sinai, to the old base that had been given up, all the way across into Jordan, all the way out into the Gulf of Aqaba, and to see Israel beneath me, and the lines contained, and to see it all upside down was the perfect way to see the Middle East and Israel.
But in all seriousness, it was an extraordinary lesson to look off into Jordan and Syria, to see the Mediterranean, to see the entire Sinai, to get this tiny sense of how compacted and small it was -- reinforced, may I add, by a drive along the green line looking down those eight miles or so at the thinnest spot, to see the ocean and to recognize how just absolutely extraordinary it is.
read the rest here:
http://www.adl.org/adl_in_action/conference_2004_kerry.aspMan oh man. This is the guy I want for my President! Shades of Bill Pullman in
Independence Day!