He flew through Midway and Guadalcanal, became the Marine Corps' first recognised ace, and was briefly the fastest man…

He flew through Midway and Guadalcanal, became the Marine Corps' first recognised ace, and was briefly the fastest man alive. He survived three wars and came home from all of them. He was killed at 82, in his own living room, stepping in front of his wife. This is the story of Marion Carl..🧵 1/4

🧵 2/4 Marion Carl was born in 1915 on a dairy farm near Hubbard, Oregon. He learned to fly while he was at college and went solo after two and a half hours of instruction, when eight to ten is normal. He took an engineering degree at Oregon State and went into the Marines. His first day of combat was the Battle of Midway, 4 June 1942, flying with VMF-221. His squadron put twenty five aircraft into the air that morning against the Japanese carrier strike. Fifteen of them were destroyed. Carl shot down a Zero and came home. It earned him the first of two Navy Crosses. Two months later he was on Guadalcanal with VMF-223, the first fighter unit ashore with the Cactus Air Force, flying Wildcats off a muddy strip under attack almost every day. On 26 August 1942 he became the man history records as the Marine Corps' first ace of the war.

🧵 3/4 He was shot down himself over Guadalcanal and had to bail out. One of the Japanese pilots killed over Henderson Field that autumn was Junichi Sasai, one of the finest Zero pilots of the entire campaign. Carl has often been credited with shooting him down, though the identification has never been certain. He finished the war with 18 and a half victories. And then he started again. Carl became a test pilot, and the list of things he did first is absurd. First Marine to fly a jet off an aircraft carrier. First Marine helicopter pilot. Commanded the first Marine jet squadron. Formed the first Marine jet aerobatic team. On 25 August 1947, over the dry lakebed at Muroc in California, he flew the Douglas Skystreak at an average of 650.8 miles an hour and took the world speed record, which had been set only five days earlier. For seven weeks, Marion Carl was the fastest human being on the planet. Then, on 14 October, at that same airfield, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1. Carl's moment was over. Yeager became a household name, and the man who had held the record before him went quietly back to work.

🧵 4/4 He kept going anyway. On 21 August 1953 he took the Skyrocket to 83,235 feet wearing a full pressure suit, an unofficial world altitude record. In the mid fifties he flew U-2 reconnaissance missions over China. He went back into combat in Vietnam, and retired in 1973 as a major general. His wife Edna had spent all of it waiting. She said afterwards that as the wife of a fighter ace and a test pilot, she had lived in dread of coming home and seeing the lights on and a chaplain's car in the driveway. Through the Second World War, through Korea, through Vietnam, he had always promised her he would come home. He always did. On the night of 28 June 1998, a man broke into their house in Oregon to rob it. Carl was 82 years old. He moved to put himself between the intruder and his wife, and he was shot and killed. Edna was wounded but survived. The man who did it was convicted and sentenced to death. Marion Carl came home from Midway, from Guadalcanal, from the stratosphere, from three wars. And he died in his own living room, doing the same thing he had done his whole life. Standing in front of somebody else. This was the story of Marion Carl. I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.