There is still another side of the story.
I had entered pilot training through the Air National Guard pilot training quota. If you quit or washed out, you would revert back to civilian status.
Halfway to completion, I started to have second thoughts about flying as a career, and decided to quit. I never did really have a reason, except maybe difficulty hearing during frequent altitude changes. I've spent the rest of my life going over the decision and saying: Why?
Nobody likes a quitter but if you aren't in it 100% then something needs to be done.
Anyway, I told my upper classman Tom Tuttle and we stayed up one night until 2:00 in the morning. He said I was crazy to throw away the gift of a lifetime. He tried and tried to talk me out of it, without success.
The next year Tom was landing a F-84 fighter at Detroit Wayne-Major, now Detroit Metropolitan.
There was a T-33 on the runway and mobile control told him to go around. When he brought up the gear and flaps, somehow he lost the hydraulic pressure, and the aircraft went into vertical flight near the airport.
It then rolled over on the back, and did a Split-S into the ground. The flight path looks like the top part of the letter S.
Tom Tuttle was killed.