Spaw, one of my favorite military authors opines that "Oh Shit!" are the last words of a pilot who has really screwed up, causing the accident, while the really competent ones talk the problem out with folks on the ground to the very end.

As a career military person, the most scary words are a new officer or enlisted man saying, "I wonder what this does?"

True Story - The Air Force has a "summer camp" for AF Academy cadets, a sort of makee-learnee couple of weeks during the summer when they are not otherwise employed - if one can ever say this about cadets from ANY military academy. One time about 35 years ago when computers lived in large wall cabinets and were commonly loaded by running punched tapes containing the desired programs through the readers, we had a bunch of cadets visiting our aircraft simulator, a computer run carnival ride used to train pilots without losing the aircraft at the end of a baad run.

The cadets were spread out waiting their turn at trying to pilot a large cargo aircraft around the unfriendly skies, and generally poking their noses into everything, when one opened the door into one of the cabinets to watch the blinking lights. "What are you doing there, Sir?" inquired one of the simulator NCOs.

"Nothing Sergeant." replied the cadet, slamming the door, thus confirming he had been doing something, which dumped the computer running the simulator, which then had to be reloaded - a 40 minute procedure, as no one had ever connected all the bits of tape together so they could be run as one long line of programs rather than threading each tape bit through the reader individually.

   Dave