Aero-Foiled

She looked so much like a lady
But she was so much like a child
A devil when she held me close
An angel when she smiled
--Baby Blue, George Strait

History, U.S. or otherwise, has proved one thing to us.
Man does not do anything that is not for his own good,
--Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Cameron Crowe

I am making this statement as an act
of willful defiance of military authority,
because I believe that the War
is being deliberately prolonged by those
who have the power to end it.
--Siegfried Sassoon

This is a war story that should've
been true
--The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)
______________________

The press ever so quietly released a shocking report this week on the actions of the pilot charged with taking down passenger Flight 93 on that fateful day a decade ago: The pilot -- Heather "Lucky" Penny -- was prepared to kamikaze her F-16 into the planeload of passengers.

This is the 21st Century, and we are to believe that the F-16 guarding the airspace around Washington D.C. could not even perform as well as Baron von Richthofen in WW I (F-16 Pilot Was Ready to Give Her Life on 9-11)? HELLO?

And yet what should be a horrifying reality has been morphed into a feel-good, schmaltzy tale of Jessica Lynch II, yet another blonde-blue-eyed Bambi with pluck (co-passengers Lori Piestewa and Shoshana Johnson didn't quite fit the runway look) :

Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.

The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

Because the surprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent age, faster than they could arm war planes, Penney and her commanding officer went up to fly their jets straight into a Boeing 757.

“We wouldn’t be shooting it down. We’d be ramming the aircraft,” Penney recalls of her charge that day. “I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot.”

Jessica and Heather -- the Dynamic Duo, 2002-style. Better than James Bond and Miss Moneypenny, these are some fighting mothers. (Forget that true gender equality has yet to occur in marketplace earnings; we are talking Hollywood potential, here.)

Are we really to believe that a newly-minted Lieutenant pilot and her field grade (04) partner are the first -- the only -- line of defense of our nation's Capitol on 9-11-01? The U.S. has five carrier groups and an entire Air Force, and the best we have for National Defense is a pair of deuces from the Air National Guard?

Do we really believe that an armed response could not have been activated from Cherry Point, N.C., or Norfolk ... or from the hub of air bases to include Navy assets in the D.C. area? Can we further suspend disbelief to imagine that these two erstwhile kamikazes would then shift to flying cover for the Commander in Chief? This is like believing in witches.

Why does this fairy tale inspire anything but disgust at our apparent lack of a protective posture? Why have a Department of Defense if it is not defending us? Why is it heroic for two of our pilots to be suicide bombers, yet lambaste the Islamists for using the same techniques?

Why do we glory over U.S. invasions of Panama, Grenada, Iraq and Afghanistan when we can't even control our own backyard? The WaPo labels this grotesque "fact" the first "counterpuch" in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), when it was anything but.

The Bush administration had already been alerted in an August intelligence summary to the possibility that al-Qaeda would use U.S. carriers as flying bombs. Is it even conceivable that the only protection above Washington D.C. was an unarmed F-16?

Too horrifying to contemplate are the implications: That the U.S. would shoot down innocent passengers; that a lady pilot would so bravely sacrifice life and limb to keep Old Glory Flying. That our only response to an airline hijacking is to ram a plane into a passenger plane. Yet we are complacent in the face of such a story.

It is both too much, and too little.