Colonel Ed Has Died

For those of you who miss Paul Harvey's rest of the story, here is a good one.

Ed wanted to be a Marine fighter pilot. The US was building up their military force, but they were not at war yet and the Navy required all its potential Navy and Marine pilots to have two years of college. So Ed started classes at Boston College.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked the Army and the Navy both dropped the college requirement and Ed applied to the Marines. His primary flight training was in Dallas and then he went toPensacola , Florida. He was carrier qualified, which means he knew how to perform a controlled crash of his single engine fighter, onto the rolling deck of a Navy floating runway.

It took Ed almost two years to get through all the Navy flight training. His problem was he was a very good pilot and the Marines needed flight instructors. He had a great command presence and public speaking ability, which landed him in the classroom, training new baby Marine pilots.

His orders to the Pacific fleet and the chance to fly combat missions off a carrier came in the spring of 1945, on the same day the Atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Of course his orders were changed. He never went to sea and he was out of the Marines in 1946.

Ed stayed in the USMC as a reserve officer. He became a successful personality in the new TV medium, after the war. His Marine command presence helped. He was recalled to active duty during the Korean War. He never got to fly his fighter aircraft, but he saw his share of raw combat. He flew the Cessna O-1E Bird Dog, which is a single engine slow-moving unarmed plane. He functioned as an artillery spotter for the Marine batteries on the ground and as a forward controller for the Navy and Marine fighter bombers who flew in on fast moving jet engines, bombed the area and were gone in seconds. Captain Ed was still circling the enemy looking for more targets, all the time taking North Korean and Chinese ground fire.

He stayed with the Marines as a reserve officer and retired in 1966 as a Colonel.

One night I was watching a show when the subject of Colonel Ed earning a number of Navy Air Medals came up. The host, a former Navy officer, understood the significance of these medals, but Ed shrugged it off, saying that if you flew enough combat missions they just sort of gave them to you. Ed flew 85 combat missions over North Korea; he earned every one of those Air Medals. The casualty rate for flying forward air controllers in Korea sometimes exceeded 50% of a squadron’s manpower. Ed was lucky to have gotten home from that war.

Once a Marine, always a Marine. When the public was spitting (taking their personal safety into their own hands) at Marines on the streets of Southern California during Vietnam, Colonel Ed was taking Marines off the streets and into his posh Beverly Hills home. I spoke to a retired Marine aircrew member the day Colonel Ed died and he personally remembered seeing Ed at numerous Marine Air Bases in California in the 1960s. He was known for going to the Navy hospitals and visiting the wounded Marines and Sailors from this country’s conflicts, even in the last years of his life.

Colonel Ed presented awards and decorations to fellow Marines and attended many a Marine ceremony and the annual Marine Corps Birthday Ball. He stayed true to his Corps as a board member of the Marine Corps Scholarship Fund and as the honorary chairman of the National Marine Corps Aviation Museum. After retiring from the Marine Reserve, one night on the Johnny Carson show, members of the California Air National Guard came on stage.

Colonel Ed was commissioned a Brigadier General in the Air Guard in front of millions of Americans who watched it happen live. You will not see anything like that on TV anymore.

The three core values of a United States Marine are honor, courage and commitment. This is what a Marine is taught from the first day of training and this is what that Marine believes. That was Colonel Edward P. McMahon Jr. USMCR Retired. Of course we knew Ed as Ed McMahon of the Johnny Carson Tonight Show. Before he was a national figure he was a true combat hero and a patriot the nation needed then and this country needs now.

Your war is over. Thank you Colonel McMahon. Semper Fi sir.

23 June 2009
Major Van Harl USAF Ret.
vanharl@aol.com

No one in the press and TV seem to understand one iota about the above. Hence no coverage worth a plucked nickle about Ed's passing. But we sure got a case of the most industrial strength bullshit like the last days ad infinitum of the passing of the nations biggest insecure nincompoop ever. Makes one wonder where we as a nation are heading.