Pivotal Moments in Air & Space: A Six-Kill Ace and that Time We Shot Down a Satellite
September 23, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Tobias Naegele:
Good afternoon. I heard someone said last week, I heard this phrase and it struck me as appropriate to this conversation. He said, history makes you smart and heritage makes you proud. And we’re gonna try to do both today. We stand on the shoulders of giants is another famous phrase that’s often repeated around AFA. And one of the things that I have learned in my time is that those giants are actually regular people who rose to the occasion and conquered a challenge. Today we have the honor of having Colonel Chuck DeBellevue, the last ace on active duty, and Major General Doug Pearson, the only man to shoot down a satellite with an F-15. He’s probably the only man to shoot down a satellite, period. These stories may not seem the least bit related, but they are, they have a lot of things in common. They have problem solving, they are teamwork, they are risk taking, they are innovation, and they all lead to triumph. I’m not gonna waste any more of your time. Chuck DeBellevue, please join.
Col. Chuck DeBellevue, USAF (Ret.):
It’s indeed a pleasure to be here with you. Southeast Asia, I arrived in country the 30th of November, 71. To say I was not well trained is probably a misnomer, I guess. I was trained in what I was gonna be doing, but not trained in what we were gonna evolve to, which was air to air. I had never seen another airplane in the vicinity of my jet. All I saw were the F-4s. That didn’t teach me anything. So, Bob Lodge was our weapons officer. He did some great things getting us ready to go into Hanoi every day. He brought down ten F-4Ds that had modified radars with them for combat tree. That was an IFF system for the MiG-21. The unclassified code name was classified. We didn’t want them to know anything about what we had. Our missiles were crap. We had M-4s. It had a hit to kill. If it missed the target by a sheet of paper, it was a miss. Plus, you had to be a piccolo player to arm the missile. And once you armed it, you had two minutes. So they didn’t want you to arm it until you got into the fight. Well, that doesn’t work. Got rid of the M-4s, got in M-9Es, and then M-9Js. The Js had just come out of the developmental test, and we got them. The M-7s we had were bolt-ons. Most of them were ballast. And it didn’t take long for those missiles to go just degrade. So we got rid of those. We got in M-7s with improved fusing and dogfight mode in them. And things got better. Lodge had one kill on February the 21st. It was the squadron’s 21st kill. It happened on February the 21st. The MiG died in the 21st hour. And what more could you say? It just wasn’t his day. The next day in Tokyo Shinban, the English-language newspaper in Tokyo, state line Hanoi. They were not happy. That was his first unarmed training mission outside North Vietnam. On the 8th of May, Roger and Bob Lodge got a second kill. On the 10th of May, we merged with the enemy. We were lagging behind a little bit. Lead and two fire and get two kills. We fire. And the missile– well, the smoke’s bad. The missile pointed at the target. He was high enough to leave a contrail. And his contrail did a 180. So that missile was no good. His buddy came by us. We rolled out behind his buddy, fired two M7s. One of them hit the MiG. And by the time we got to the debris, he was already in a parachute. And as we turned back around to find out where everybody else was, I saw two MiG-19s saddled up on lead, Bob Lodge and Roger Locker. And about that time, the MiG-19s destroy Lodge’s F-4. And he takes it down. And he decides he’s not going to get out of the airplane. He’s going to stay in it. He knows too much. He knows that they will beat it out of him if they have to. So he stayed in the airplane. And we’re trying to get him the Medal of Honor, upgraded Silver Star, which is a nondescript Silver Star. Because all it said was, “Killed a MiG.” And not much else, all classified. So it’s not an easy thing to upgrade a Silver Star to the Medal of Honor. That’s a two-step upgrade. But we’re working on it and hope to get that finished. Thank you.
Tobias Naegele:
General Pearson.
Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson, USAF (Ret.):
Okay.
Tobias Naegele:
Batter up.
Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson, USAF (Ret.):
Well, good afternoon. Thank you for being here. And thank you for what you do for our great nation. I am an American warrior. I’m an Airman. And I followed my father, who served in World War II on B-24s. I have two sons and a daughter-in-law who serve in the United States Air Force Army. And I have two grandsons. We have two grandsons, Teresa and I. One is active duty in the United States Army today, driving a tank. Couldn’t convince him to go to the Air Force. I have another grandson who’s soon to be on a path to go to the Air Force. We’re a family of warriors and proud to serve this great country. A good friend of mine used to tell me I’d invite him down to Edwards and have him tell stories of the grand days of early flight tests. And his name was Chuck Yeager. And he would start some of his presentations with I will tell the story the way I remember it, not necessarily the way it was. And I always like that because all of us have great memories of the things that we’ve done. And I’ve flown in combat and I’ve flown in operational tests. I sat nuclear alert in Europe. I sat air defense in Europe. I was a member of the first group of pilots to take the F-15s across the ocean to Bitburg. And we stood ready to counter the Soviet threat that was on the borders. So after the ’70s, ended up in operational tests and then over to Edwards and to the formal flight test training. And ended up after a couple years on a very fascinating program with the intent to deny the high ground to the mortal enemy of the Soviet Union. You have to understand the environment, I think, that was going on in that day and age. In the mid ’80s, we were– the Cold War was about as hot as it had ever gotten. The Soviet Union was starting to flounder. They were feeling the pressures of a system that was doomed to fail. And they were trying to reach out and grab anything they could. They saw the value of space ops as much as we did. And from the ’50s, when the satellites first went up, started going up, Sputnik 1, 1958, and on, early ’60s, end of the ’70s, the Soviets and the Americans were trying to figure out, how do you deny your enemy the high ground? We had several programs. Some were ground-based missiles to go up and intercept the satellite. Others were air-launched nuclear weapons. Can you imagine sending up a nuclear weapon to blow up a satellite? And the mess you would create, because all of that nuclear energy doesn’t care what kind of satellite or hardware it destroys, yours or his. So that was kind of a bad idea. But it was an idea and perhaps a concept. And thank goodness we didn’t go with that. So along came the concept of an air-launched rocket that would be very precise and target only the intended satellite. We called that the F-15 ASAT. The missile was the airspace munition, ASM-135. It was a purpose-built rocket, two-stage, a SRAM rocket motor on the bottom, first stage, and an Altair rocket motor on the second stage. And really, that’s the second and third stage. Some thought the F-15 was actually the first stage. So the real heart of the system, though, was a small, what we call miniature vehicle. It was the high-tech end of exactly what we were trying to do in that time frame. It was about 75 pounds, 12 or 13 inches long, and about 12 inches in diameter. It had an array of 64 little rocket motors, each one with a potency of about a 12-gauge shotgun shell that it would use to maneuver once it was free of the rocket and guiding to closure on the target. The target was seen in infrared spectrum. So we had an infrared sensor, which was the latest and greatest and high-tech device we could build at that time, cryogenically cooled so that it could detect IR signatures at very, very great distances, maybe 2,000 miles. So we could guide on that, and then it was a null-void sensor, but very high dynamics. It would spin, and these little rocket motors would fly, and it was kind of bang, bang, bang, bang, bang all the way in until it got closer and closer to the target. I’ll tell you a couple more of those numbers in just a few minutes. But that’s what we were trying to do. The Soviets knew it was very hard. They had tried to do intercept programs at the time, unsuccessfully. They had developed and were trying to develop, rather, a co-orbital system, which would take much longer. But you could put up another satellite and maneuver and close to your target satellite, and then detonate a warhead and destroy that warhead, the other satellite. So that was another competing concept, but it took a long time to have that happen. Ours was rapid. We could set alert. The concept was to set alert, launch, go after a specific target, and in a matter of a fairly short period of time, destroy that target. So this program was highly concurrent. Because of a sense of urgency, we really had to try to develop all of the elements of a new weapons system at one time. And for all of us in the acquisition business, you know how difficult that is to determine the logistics system, the support. How do you do that at an operational base? We intended to have two operational bases, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, with 24 F-15s modified for the ASAP mission in each of those units. We thought that could defend the United States at the time, and I think it could. So we were developing the support, the logistics, the storage, and the big deal was how do you put together an object that’s going to fly in space which needs perfect cleanliness because the target, a speck of sand or a speck of glass at four feet might look like your target at 2,000 miles. So it would ruin your mission if you have debris in front of your sensor. And I mention that because the sensor was encased in glass to protect it while it was coming out of the atmosphere. Once it got into space, we would rotate the miniature vehicle, break that glass, and then rotate the miniature vehicle back to on path. It would wake up and using its super cool sensor detect the target and start to guide on the target. So it was pretty complex for those day and age. Today you can do that with relative ease, but the computing power we had on board that little vehicle was probably less than you have in your watch today. So it was quite a challenge to do all that. So the show day, I’ll just kind of skip forward. There are hours and hours of things you can talk about on a program this complex, but I’ll skip forward a little bit and talk about Friday the 13th, 40 years and nine days ago. And some elements of it are a little fuzzy, but most are crystal clear. And it was a spectacular day. There were some big deal things that had happened in the lead up to that in terms of developing models. I’ll tell you two or three of them have contributed to today’s warriors. We developed a timing system that would get the airplane and me to exactly the spot you see. Is that up there? No, it’s not. There’s a picture, actually. I took one photo chase airplane, and he actually got some spectacular pictures from side of the actual launch. The launch critical point was a spot over the Pacific Ocean, about 200 miles off the coast at 35,000 feet and a certain attitude at a certain velocity. And that was the piloting challenge, to get to that spot at exactly that right time. When the clock counted down and you were at T equals zero, you had to be at that launch point. You couldn’t circle around and come back and try again. There was just no tolerance on time. So you could be plus or minus the altitude a little bit, plus or minus the heading a smidget, but basically that was the challenge. So we developed a system that would help guide me there and guide the time. The other challenge that had not existed before this program was the guidance algorithm on the miniature vehicle that would take it to a hit to kill. You could have used a warhead, but that needed weight, heavy fusing, those sort of things. The simplest way was to get smart enough, fast enough, and hit to kill. So the little miniature vehicle, 75 pounds, was plenty enough of a bullet to destroy any target satellite we were going after. So we very cleverly developed a very dynamic algorithm that would guide this thing. The good news is in space, the target satellite is relatively stable. It doesn’t maneuver against you like the MIGs might have against Chuck. And so once you get everything set up, you had a pretty good chance to hit it. You just had to get in front. Trouble is it was moving at 23,000 feet per second and the bullets coming up at about 13,000 feet per second. So very, very, very high velocities, never done before. Today over Israel, today over the Ukraine, you see bullets hitting bullets rather routinely, in part based on the work we did 40 years ago. So we were able to do that. So back up to the mission planning that had never been done before. This was the first time that we had an air-breathing, man-rated system paired up with space operations. So the folks up in Cheyenne Mountain did a wonderful job developing systems to collect the ephemeris data from an orbiting satellite, put that into their thinking cap, and figure out what time we needed to launch a rocket that had these kind of performance parameters and hit the target. So we developed that mission planning system and they would, they could, the operational system was, if we could look at about three orbits of a satellite, we could predict where it was going to be and attack it. So we did that. That’s in use today and there was some great math work done up in Cheyenne Mountain that was very, very helpful. Friday the 13th, we started about 24 hours ahead of time with loading the missile, pre-flighting it, and loading the cryogenic fuels that were on it to cool the sensor. And I showed up about four hours, well, I was there for most of it, but it was my turn at about four hours prior. I accepted the airplane, inspected the missile, pre-flighted, did all the appropriate checks and things. They all worked just exactly the way they should. Taxied out and took off with a chase airplane, a photo airplane, and we were going to meet a tanker out over the Pacific. So we took off out of Edwards. I’m told we actually took off two seconds early and that was a good start to a mission that depended on time. We flew the profile out and I won’t bore you with all those details, but we did that, got to the tanker, had a little built-in time there, stayed on the tanker the right amount of time, separated from the tanker and flew this profile out to the point in the Pacific about 200 miles off the coast. At 30,000 feet, leveled off and accelerated, full afterburner, accelerated to supersonic speed, about 1.3 Mach number, and at the right point initiated a pull to about 60 degrees climb and the airplane slows down to about 0.96. It’s about a 3.8 G pull, so it’s very smooth but firm. And going through 35,000 feet, I initiate the release. I’d already received permission to fire basically from the control center and the missile goes through about 210 checks, electrical checks and pressure checks and everything, battery checks. We had a fairly sophisticated little computer in there. It goes through all those checks and if they’re all good, it’ll release and launch. And I call that the 210 miracles because each one of them has to be exactly correct, binary with the computer. It’s either good or bad. It was all good on show day. The missile separates, the motor ignites a second or so later and the rocket is off to space. Time of flight to intercept was just over five minutes, so it was a very anxious five minutes. But I’m going up at supersonic speed. I end up rolling over on the airplane to recover, stay below 50,000 feet and get ready to return to base. What a relief. This thing went off and started its intercept, but I wanted to know if it hit. And I had pretty good eyes in those days, but I couldn’t see an intercept at 300 miles, so the altitude of the target. So I’d worked out a little code with the folks in the control room. We did not have a classified computer on the radio on the airplane, so I couldn’t talk about success or failure. So after I recovered, I’ve leveled off and I make a radio call at five minutes and 34 seconds after the launch and I said, “Vandy Control, Eddie 01, I’m going to level off at,” and I gave him a number, 35,000 or something. And his response was going to be, “That’s a good altitude if we hit it.” And if we missed it, he was going to recommend some different altitude. So it was pretty sophisticated. Nobody could figure that out, I’m sure. So, nervous as I was, “Vandy Control, Eddie 01, I’m leveling off at 35,000 feet.” Scott Flood, the controller I had picked, was in the control room and as he keys the mic button to say something, all I could hear was, “Yay!” And I knew we had hit it. So it was a great day, Friday the 13th. We had had a direct hit. We had made sure the Soviets just happened to know we were out on that day doing that thing and there were several fishing boats out over the Pacific. I don’t know what they were catching at 200 miles, but I’m pretty sure they got to see what they needed to see. So that was the day it was. That’s pretty much exactly the way it happened. Came back to Edwards, landed, and you can imagine we had a few celebrations. We planned to operate these systems, so we pressed right on. We actually had two more launches after that. One was, neither was against a target. They were both against stars. And I sometimes got the question, “Did you hit the star?” Well, no, we didn’t. But it was a great program. There were a lot of politics involved. There were some high stakes involved. And within about a year, the president decided to suspend the testing in space, so we did that. And stood down, we had a capability to do certain other things, but we gave that up. So that’s the way it was 40 years ago. And I thank you for your attention and I’ll turn it back to you, Tobias.
Tobias Naegele:
Thanks, Doug. So, a couple of things that come to mind as we listen to these two stories. The first one is that we’ve got a trend going right now that’s just to devolve authority down. And I think in the story of Bob Lodge, which, Chuck, you told really tremendously well in a recent issue of Air and Space Forces Magazine, you really talk about how, well, eventually, General Gabriel, Colonel Gabriel at the time, gave him full responsibility to tackle this problem. Similarly, Doug, this was handed to you as a major, as I recall. So let’s kind of, one after the other, just talk about the power of giving the young Airmen the responsibility to innovate and solve a problem.
Col. Chuck DeBellevue, USAF (Ret.):
Well, what were they gonna do to us? Send us to Hanoi? We’re already scheduled. So we had our own briefing style. We handpicked the other six guys that flew with Steve Ritchie and I. And we had two pack-aft Stanny Vals come in to observe. So we went over to Intel, got a coffee and a donut, sat down, Steve introduced everybody. And he said, “This briefing is standard. “Any questions? “No, that’s it.” What we didn’t tell the two colonels was we had briefed this mission twice and then weather canceled. We hadn’t changed any of our code words. And if it’s standard, it’s standard. I don’t need to tell you about it.
Tobias Naegele:
Doug, there’s a mic right there.
Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson, USAF (Ret.):
Oh, you wanna repeat some of that?
Tobias Naegele:
Yeah, so what I want you to, you were entrusted, just as Bob Lodge was entrusted as a major, you were entrusted as a major. Here, we wanna shoot down a satellite. You got six months to do it. We’re gonna get presidential authority to make it happen. But it’s your problem. And by the way, not everybody on this involved is getting along. Good luck.
Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson, USAF (Ret.):
Well, all these programs are really challenging from a variety of different aspects. Logistics people, one of the challenges, big challenges we had was culture. I think we still deal with some of that today between the air breathers, if you will, and the Space Force folks. We’re working through that, I think, handily. But in the ’80s, it was a big problem. And so we work very diligently to pull people together, to get ’em in the same room, use a common language. It’s amazing, you know, when an airplane driver talks to somebody who launches rockets and spacecrafts, how the words might mean entirely different things. So we worked through a lot of that, built some great teams from around the world. On show day, Friday the 13th, we had actually about 1,000 people collecting data and watching systems and making sure everything was proper, feeding data into Cheyenne Mountain so that they could create the mission plan that allowed us to go be successful. And that was one of the big challenges, if you will, on the program. There was leadership involved at all levels, from the President of the United States down, that wanted to see this be successful. And what happens when you involve humans, sometimes you get one level that wants something to happen very, very diligently. And when it gets down to the middle level to try and make it happen, there might be some different agendas. So we had people in America that were trying to not let us be successful, trying to stop us, stop the program, and those are just things you have to deal with. We still have some of that today, I think. So maybe less.
Tobias Naegele:
The trust that is put in you in these circumstances, the go forth and be successful, requires a level of teamwork. It requires you to break down barriers. It requires building of a team to solve the problem. In the end, the work that Bob Lodge did converted your skill set to be able to be air-to-air fighters who could really seize air superiority. And I think that wouldn’t have happened without partnering, and the partnering was across the boards. I’d like you to talk about the different ways that he reached out and where he went to solve those problems.
Col. Chuck DeBellevue, USAF (Ret.):
Well, he brought in the F4Ds out of Kunstholm that had an EFII interrogator in it. It could interrogate a MiG-21. There were 10 airplanes. We got ’em. We got no tech data. So I’m sitting in the airplane, right engine running, and the test navigator that’s in charge of the program is on the left intake, telling me, you do this, you hit that, it comes back with this, and that’s your clearance to shoot. So it was a system that we used, and you could not use the unclassified code name because they would know we had something. So we just didn’t talk about it.
Tobias Naegele:
You also worked with the Navy to help you train against opponents, which you really hadn’t done before.
Col. Chuck DeBellevue, USAF (Ret.):
Right. We brought in three F8s from the Navy. They flew two-ship Soviet tactics against us, and after two weeks, they were still beating us. So we decided that if we didn’t get engaged, we were gonna launch the F8s and meet ’em west of the field, and–sorry–beat ’em west of the field, and the fight was gonna be on. And by the way, it’s big boy rules. Everybody’s on it hot, so don’t squeeze the trigger. So–sorry about that. So we were able to capitalize on the systems that we needed to, and Colonel Bill Kirk brought in T-BOM, and it was a system that listened in to North Vietnamese.
Tobias Naegele:
Bless you.
Col. Chuck DeBellevue, USAF (Ret.):
Sorry about that. It was a system that, they were able to listen on North Vietnamese GCI and gave us real-time information, and that paid off big time. And then, we got in A9Js. Bob had set that up, so as soon as they came out of developmental test, we got ’em. And when I look at the results of A9J, it wasn’t necessarily that good, but you know, you only have to be lucky a couple times. And the missiles did wonders for us.
Tobias Naegele:
So it’s really that combination of technology, people, a little innovation. Let’s try training with these guys in an atypical situation. Do things differently. Doug, you, similar, had to tackle, had to do some things that were radically different. You had contractors who didn’t necessarily think that anything was their fault. Tell us, when we were talking earlier, you described how they would blame each other, for example. You mentioned also the space folks who didn’t necessarily know the air operations and vice versa. How did you tackle those disconnects? How did you tackle the disconnects between the different sides, people’s different perspectives?
Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson, USAF (Ret.):
I’m struggling, I can’t hear.
Tobias Naegele:
No, okay. How did you solve the problems of communication across these different communities, the companies and the air and the space guys?
Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson, USAF (Ret.):
Sure. Yeah, the problem of communications, as I plotted earlier, was significant. So I like to get the young folks who were doing the work in the same room. I traveled to all of the sites. We had the Boeing and Lockheed, I’m sorry, LTV were the prime associate contractors developing the rocket and the miniature vehicle. So we got them together, they were co-equals. So every time we had a problem, they would point to each other. We tried to up the ante and said, it doesn’t matter who’s at fault, we gotta solve the problem. So we would encourage the contractors to work together. We had nine different organizations to pull this together. So we really had to raise the effort to a team effort and not worry about the, and try to get the leaders to not worry about the individual organizations. And I think we had some success with that. I personally went down to Space Division in Los Angeles on numerous trips and tried to spend time with them to explain to them what requirements there were for the airplanes and for the ground systems and the things that they were not familiar with. And I would listen to them to understand what was really important to them in terms of space operations. Cheyenne Mountain, same thing. Went up there, talked to the folks that were going to help us develop the mission systems planning. And that was just communicating what we needed and why. Turned out to be really, really important. And I think that’s still important today. And when I give this more technical presentation to the test pilot school two or three times a year, I have a cohort who comes from Space Force now that helps with that. So we’ve integrated the testing efforts, the Space Force testers and the Edwards Test Pilot School have come together and we now have one course and we teach the principles of testing together. And so that we understand those basic principles and then we apply them to our particular domains. This particular test, the ASAT test, was the first multi-domain test that I was aware of and I think that we had ever done in the Air Force where we were testing air breathing and space breathing systems as a weapon system. So that was it. But it’s all about teamwork and that prevails today. A fundamental principle of getting things done, especially as warriors, is teamwork. None of us do it alone, either at the organizational level or individual level. It takes all of us to get it done. And get it done we must.
Tobias Naegele:
We’ve got a couple minutes left. I’d like to give each of you kind of a minute or two to address, you’re talking to a largely young audience. If you can give them one or two pieces of advice to walk away that’s going to make a difference to them as Airmen, Guardians, leaders, what would that be?
Col. Chuck DeBellevue, USAF (Ret.):
Well, the first time we went to Hanoi, 16th of April, the curtains were covering the briefing boards. Our intel officers weren’t talking, trying to get us awake to listen to the briefing. It’s about 4:30 in the morning. Gabriel walks in and sits down and they pull the curtain away from the briefing board and point to Hanoi and say, “Gentlemen, your target today is downtown.” Nobody had ever been. You don’t know what fear is till something like that happens and it’s fear of the unknown. At the end of the briefing, Gabriel stood up and said, “Guys, we’ve been waiting for this for a long time. “Let’s do a good job. “Take a look at the guy sitting next to you.” Well, he says, “He might not be coming home.” And you go, “Damn, that’s too bad. “Can I have your stereo gear?” Just matter of fact, we didn’t lose anybody that day. We lost a lot of people, but that first day did wonders for our morale.
Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson, USAF (Ret.):
Cool. So one thing that made a difference.
Tobias Naegele:
Pick your mic up.
Maj. Gen. Doug Pearson, USAF (Ret.):
So on this program, there were a lot of things that made a difference internal. The biggest rock, I believe, that got moved was demonstrating both the American will to get something done and the American ability to get something done. Shooting down a satellite changed a lot of things. It changed the Soviet outlook. They were planning on using the high ground. That was immediately denied. We made every effort to make it look easy, as difficult as it really was. They never saw a sweat. So we conveyed to them that we could do this at will. There might’ve even been a few stories that were embellished about our true ability and how easy this really was and how many weapons we might’ve had or not had. So that was a big deal. And I think the President of the United States traded something that he desperately wanted to preserve peace because of that mission. I know it was discussed at that level. And I know that the President of the United States, President Reagan, personally had to sign his name that the test was approved. It took his authority. It took an act of Congress and presidential authority to conduct the mission and test in space. So I think years later, I appreciate the fact that what we did, what this great team did, changed the state of affairs to some degree. So I think that was probably the single one big thing. It also demonstrated, I think, probably a second big thing was that we really did need a better integration between our air and space. And I think it pointed to the fact that we needed a separate Space Force. If you believe, like many of us did, the growth of space was inevitable as operations in space. And I think 40 years later, it’s pretty obvious we needed to do that and we needed to do it probably sooner. So those are the two big things that have come to pass that were a consequence of this mission. So there you go.
Tobias Naegele:
Well, I’m gonna add one more thing to what you said to both of you. And that is that one thing that I have learned over time watching you guys, people like you, is that you never know when history is gonna come to you and you’re gonna have the opportunity to respond. And I think this nation owes both of you an enormous debt of gratitude for rising to the occasion when your name was called. Thank you very much.