LETTERS: PILOTS KNEW THE RISKS

To the editor:

Scenario A: Burglar on the make sees house shrouded in tarpaulins. Sign on house says, "Danger! Deadly poison! Do not enter! Apex Termite Killer Co." Burglar reads sign, shrugs, breaks in anyway, is found an hour later, dies in hospital two days later of liver damage. Every bystander's comment: "What a total idiot."

Scenario B: Sergeant is walking in war zone. Private, very alarmed, yells out, "Watch it, Sarge, you're walking into a mine field!" Sergeant: "You're just a private. What do you know about anything?" Couple of more steps. KABLOOEY! A couple of months later Sarge gets out of the hospital -- and the military -- on two artificial legs. And, because of his new voice, is recruited into the Vienna Boys Choir. Every bystander's comment: "What a stone moron!"

Factual scenario C: Airplane pilots are skirting the northern boundary of Cuban air space. They radio Havana Center air traffic control and are told that what they are doing is dangerous in the extreme. Pooh-pooh, they say. We're doing it anyway. They are shot down. The response of the U.S. government and of the revanchist emigres up to whom the government sucks: Oh, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, you son of a strumpet, the blood of martyrs is on your hands, blah-blah. (Not a word about the risky behavior of the honored dead.)

My reactions are that the demises of the protagonists in all three scenarios are concrete illustrations of evolution in action and that the people of Cuba are getting their money's worth from their defense pesos. Viva Darwin!

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.