ZakuTwo

There's a radical Communist movement in China called the New Left that tried to gain power in the early 2010s, only to be purged in "anti-corruption" campaigns aimed at them by the mainstream CCP. Read about Bo Xilai if you want to know more. But the point is that they profess economic and social views more in line with Mao himself compared to the CCP orthodoxy.

Sorry you're getting so heavily downvoted, phonies always win on the internet :<

Aside from the decorations being out of order, other things seem to check out more than I expected, though. His flag is from the 16th SOS, which did fly AC-130E sorties out of Ubon, as he claims here (I'm looking at AC-130Es because they were the first to be deployed with 105mm, which he mentions using). I know this is all publicly available info, but people who lie about their service tend to make mistakes about these sorts of things in addition to screwing up decorations, so I'm erring on his story being true here.

(Although saying that the crew composition of an AC-130 is classified raises a few warning signals for me. Also, the Military Times hall of valor doesn't have a DFC citation for a Michael Murphy, but I don't know how comprehensive their records are.).

Considering that you were in San Diego around the right time, did you know Joe "Hoser" Satrapa, and do you have any good stories about him? He's become legendary among Tomcat enthusiasts, especially with the whole Toeser ordeal.

Also tremendous lulz @ SA-3s. Maybe his dad meant SA-2s and he forgot the name (since he's calling them SAM-3s anyway). One SA-2 did kill an AC-130 and they're way easier to spoof than SA-3s.

Yeah, I know he could have looked for the same info, I'd just expect less consistency. As for the altitude thing, attack profiles might be sensitive but unclassified; a lot of really mundane stuff pertaining to military aviation falls under that category (remember the Mike Showers debacle?). I'm definitely suspicious about it being the son's "lol dunno" response too, though. Same goes for 1970s NVDs and IR imaging. In that same post, though, the rate of an AC-130 lost every 4 months is pretty consistent with 1972 statistics.

Also, regarding the DFC citation's text, did we ever actually acknowledge combat ops on the Ho Chi Minh trail?