Near Miss

Heading northwest across the browns and greens of the pampas toward Cordoba one day last week, Argentina's Vice President and Strong Man Juan Domingo Peron looked out from his airplane seat at fleecy clouds and the three-plane fighter escort close at hand. Suddenly one of the fighters veered away from a fog bank, shot toward PerAlemann's DC-2. The fighter whipped overhead, barely missed crashing squarely into the transport's fuselage. There was a sharp bump and it thundered into a spin. One of the transport's propellers had cut off its tail assembly.

Three miles beyond, the DC2 landed. There PerAlemann learned that the fighter pilot had been killed. Said the Strong Man, chalk-white and shaken: "We have been born a second time." Later he took a train back to Buenos Aires, where imaginative Argentines, with no foundation in fact, were already calling the fallen pursuit pilot a home-grown version of Japan's Kamikaze pilots. One proposal that was bandied about: a monument to the man who had scored a near miss.

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