{"id":17597,"date":"2012-05-01T00:42:33","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T03:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=17597"},"modified":"2012-05-01T00:42:33","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T03:42:33","slug":"future-fighter-pilot-af-cross-recipient-credits-higher-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/01\/future-fighter-pilot-af-cross-recipient-credits-higher-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Future Fighter Pilot, AF Cross Recipient Credits Higher Power"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Capt Barry Crawford was recently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.airforcetimes.com\/news\/2012\/04\/air-force-cross-awarded-barry-crawford-afghanistan-041312\/\">awarded the Air Force cross<\/a> by US Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz for his actions in Afghanistan in May 2010.\u00a0 The Air Force cross is second only to the Medal of Honor, and Crawford became only the third living recipient of the award since September 11, 2001.\u00a0 The Air Force special tactics officer and his small team fought a pitched 14-hour battle with more than 100 Taliban insurgents &#8212; with Crawford exposing himself to fire to assist in the evacuation of wounded.<\/p>\n<p>Crawford credited &#8220;someone higher <!--more-->than us&#8221; for their safe return that day.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cIt was completely random,\u201d he said. \u201cThere were so many close calls that when we all got back, we realized that someone higher than us was looking over our shoulder that day. The situation was just something you can\u2019t explain.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There may be atheists in the military, but there weren&#8217;t any in Crawford&#8217;s foxhole that day.<\/p>\n<p>General Schwartz had high praise for Captain Crawford:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cIt is not hard to be utterly impressed by his bravery and inspired by his selflessness,\u201d Schwartz said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Capt Crawford is reportedly going to UPT to fly the A-10 for the Maryland National Guard.<\/p>\n<p>As an aside, it&#8217;s worth noting that Crawford&#8217;s deployment didn&#8217;t end that day.\u00a0 During the ceremony he was also awarded a Purple Heart &#8212; which he received for another mission a month later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Capt Barry Crawford was recently awarded the Air Force cross by US Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz for his actions in Afghanistan in May 2010.\u00a0 The Air Force cross is second only to the Medal of Honor, and Crawford became only the third living recipient of the award since September 11, 2001.\u00a0 The Air Force special tactics [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[58,134,2334,20,3229,2695,5285,3231,2,1945,497,32,2564,10,3230,2895],"class_list":["post-17597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-and-religion","tag-afghanistan","tag-air-force","tag-air-force-cross","tag-atheism","tag-barry-crawford","tag-chief-of-staff","tag-fighter-pilot","tag-higher-power","tag-military","tag-no-atheists-in-foxholes","tag-norton-schwartz","tag-pilot-training","tag-purple-heart","tag-religion","tag-special-tactics","tag-upt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}