No problem SASless. While I'm busy confessing my guilt-ridden angst, your mention of "my war" (which I assume is Vietnam?) produced even more. While you flew:
support missions for the troops on the ground, taking them into the fight, supplying them while they were there, retrieving their dead and wounded, and flying them out afterwards.
I was enjoying the tour of a lifetime in Changi on Hastings (4-engine gooney birds as we were ever obliged to explain to your disbelieving countrymen). With the many US bases in the Far East we were for ever dropping in, and enjoying generous and overwhelming hospitality when we did so. Never once was mention made that we should have been fighting alongside you and your Antipodean Allies, which I for one then thought we should. In my dotage I think I was wrong and Harold Wilson, our PM, right to refuse even so much as a "Scottish Bagpiper". From that experience I learned that the Americans are generous to a fault, that if wars are entered into they must be fought to win, and that it is far far better to avoid entering into them in the first place if at all possible. If the Falklands are attacked again it will not be possible and consequently this country will again be at war. Perhaps a few lessons learned in the '60s need to be re-learned?