Salute!
Don't know about many of you folks, but the safest place I ever served without worrying about a Jihadist was in South Vietnam during the sixties. Oh yeah, maybe some Charlie with a death wish, but they were not Muslims.
Being an Air Commando, we "carried", unlike the F-100 troops at our base or a few other folks when we deployed to Pleiku. Almost everybody "carried" almost everywhere. So some nut that started shooting would have had maybe two shots before his head was blown off.
The Fort Hood episode should have been a warning. I would take my chances with everybody being armed and one whack job around, than the whack job being the only one with a pistol. I am not all that sure that the perp bought the pistol by himself, as the background check is required for the pistol. OTOH, he could have bought an AR-15 or shotgun at a local store and walked out in 10 minutes. Meanwhile....
Our local offices in the Panhandle are all flying flags at half mast. The hero Ensign that warned everyone, then died was a local troop who dreamed of flying neat jets like I did almost 60 years ago, when I took my physical at Pensacola Naval Air Station to get an Annapolis admission. We are all mourning.
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I flew with and trained many folks from all over in the A-37 and then in the Viper. I flew with the only IAF group and Paki group to check out in the Viper at Hill. Had one Egytian colonel in my back seat for orientation ( family model Viper), but was getting out and never flew with any of them. As others have said, except for those Paki folks, most of the non-NATO pilots had "connections". In fact, our Paki pilots told many war stories about checking out "priveleged" pilots from the fiefdoms in the Mideast. Their opinion of them was low. They constantly reminded us that they were Muslims, but not Arabs. Take that any way you wish. Politics never came up.
Gums sends...
Last edited by gums; 11th Dec 2019 at 02:11.
Reason: added verbiage