Just a reminder: the last time a GOP/actor/POTUS ordered a clusterfuck airstrike against Syrians...
Two Navy strike aircraft were shot down.
One pilot was killed
An A-6 navigator was captured - and freed by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/06/world/83-strike-on-lebanon-hard-lessons-for-us.html
WASHINGTON, Aug. 4— The only time the United States sent its bombers over Lebanon, as President Bush was reportedly prepared to do again this week, the mission ended in a fiasco, with two planes shot down and one damaged, one pilot killed and and one crewman captured, and little to show for the effort.
The memory of that December 1983 raid, which came only six weeks after 241 American servicemen were killed in the bombing of their barracks in Beirut, remains vivid among senior officers in the Pentagon as they await the outcome of diplomatic efforts to end the current hostage crisis.
The ill-fated Navy air attack on Dec. 4, 1983, was against Syrian anti-aircraft guns located around the village of Hammana, east of Beirut. It was launched in retaliation for Syrian anti-aircraft fire the day before against an American reconnaissance plane supporting the Marine peacekeeping force.
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Inexplicably, the attacking squadrons also massed their planes for the attack - a tactic that made them further vulnerable to ground fire and that had been discredited years before in the Vietnam War. Two planes were shot down, with the pilot of one of the aircraft, a single-seat A-7 attack plane, parachuting into the Mediterranean Sea, where he was rescued. The pilot of the other plane, a two-seat A-6, was killed, and his navigator, Lieut. Robert O. Goodman Jr., was captured. He stayed in a Syrian prison for a month, until the Rev. Jesse Jackson went to Damascus and obtained his release.
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