Lieutenant Robert Redmond, flight instructor at Meridian Naval Air Station
Lieutenant Robert Redmond had three nicknames: Red, Redass, and Refly. He wasn’t a screamer. He had his own way to make a student pilot’s life miserable. The rumor mill promulgated a number of Refly stories. In one of them Refly asked an ensign what he was.
“Sir, a student naval aviator, sir,” the academy grad had responded.
The student was a couple of inches shorter than Refly, and Refly had stepped very close to the student and looked down on him. With a soft, totally controlled voice, he’d said, “A naval aviator wears wings. A naval aviator is something. You are nothing. It’s not likely you will ever not be nothing.”