Originally Posted by
orca
FWIW - and far more emotively I hold the belief, rightly or wrongly, that only a subset of those with campaign medals will actually be combat veterans as the criteria for award rarely features combat. I would define a combat veteran as anyone who was within effective weapons range of hostiles during fighting, or similar.
Excellent programme.
I'm interested in your definition Orca (and certainly not wishing to pick a fight), but by extension to your definition, most RAF FJ pilots from the Shader era are not "combat veterans" despite having dropped live weapons on to hostile forces (who may indeed be in contact with friendly forces at the time). I think a few people (not least a few DFC recipients) might choose to disagree?