RevenantWriter

The Marine Corps almost court-martialed one of its best pilots for stopping a mass shooter. His crime was not asking permission first. New Orleans, January 7, 1973. Sunday morning. A 23-year-old named Mark Essex gets into the downtown Howard Johnson's with a .44 carbine and a bag of ammunition. Police already knew him, they just didn't know his name. A week earlier, on New Year's Eve, someone had ambushed New Orleans officers and vanished into the night. That was him. This time he isn't planning on running. He moves floor to floor shooting whoever he finds. A couple from out of town. The hotel manager. The assistant manager. He lights fires in the rooms as he goes. Then he climbs to the roof and settles into a concrete stairwell enclosure that might as well be a pillbox. From up there he can see the whole street, and the whole street can see him. They just can't hit him. Cops fire up at the roof all afternoon. Essex waits, leans out, shoots, disappears. Officers go down. One of them is the deputy superintendent of the department. Ten miles away, at the Marine air station in Belle Chasse, Lt. Col. Chuck Pitman is watching it on the news. He's a Vietnam helicopter pilot with three combat tours behind him. Silver Star. Purple Heart. Four Distinguished Flying Crosses. He looks at that rooftop and sees the obvious answer nobody on the ground has. Get above him. Pitman doesn't wait for orders. He finds three Marines who'll go, takes a CH-46 Sea Knight and flies it into the middle of a major American city. He lands near the unfinished Superdome and picks up a team of police sharpshooters. Then he goes to work. Pass after pass over the roof. Essex keeps hiding when the helicopter comes in and stepping out to shoot at it as it leaves. Pitman notices. On one run, instead of flying off, he spins the helicopter around and comes straight back. Essex is out in the open with nowhere to go. The shooters on board and on the nearby rooftops all fire at once. When it was over, the autopsy counted more than 200 wounds. Nine people were dead across the week, five of them police officers. Nobody else would be added to that list. New Orleans made Pitman an honorary police chief. The Marine Corps opened talks about a court-martial. A lieutenant colonel had just taken a military aircraft into a domestic shootout on his own authority. It took F. Edward Hébert, the New Orleans congressman who happened to chair the House Armed Services Committee, to recommend the Corps let it go. It did. Pitman went on to help plan the 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran and retired a lieutenant general. Not bad for a guy who once stole a helicopter.