It was humid outside, so John Sanford was riding around on a tractor, cautiously monitoring for wildfires around his family's South Carolina plantation when he received a call telling him that a fighter jet had crashed and exploded on the property.
John, the brother of former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and himself a civilian pilot for 31 years, drove to a nearby field to examine the crash site. He saw a white parachute dangling from one of the hundreds of grand live oak trees on the plantation, and hopped off the tractor to run toward it.
“I assumed the worst,” John Sanford told Military.com, “I knew what I might be seeing, and I knew it might be ugly.”
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When he arrived at the tree line, he saw a young man in uniform and a woman with a cut near her mouth, walking towards him out of some nearby bushes.
“I knew it was the pilots because they were carrying their survival gear, their seat and their helmets,” he recalled. “They walked up to the fence, and the man asked me, ‘Are there any civilians where the plane went down and do you think anyone got hurt?'”
“He just got ejected out of an airplane and had the presence of mind to ask that question, which I thought was very impressive,” John Sanford continued. “When the pilots popped out of the bushes, I just could not possibly have been more happy.”
Around 3:15 p.m….
