re: #188 dell*nix

108 sounds about right with a full internal load out and MER’s on the wings.

This should be a familiar sight for anyone that has been to U_T. flickr.com

I went to art school with a North Vietnamese guy who was born by the side of a road during a B-52 raid. I’m not sure if it was Linebacker I or II, but I’m leaning towards the first Linebacker because his birthday was in the fall. He’s an extremely skilled artist and sculptor - Communist Vietnamese art schools are intense! - and the guy here in DFW who helped him come to the U.S. was an air traffic controller.

I soundtracked my graduation animation with the Russian song “Katyusha” and he knew it because he had learned it in school…

It’s really a trip to meet somebody who was on the “other side” of these things, as an infant while bombs are exploding, as a receiver of a Communist education, and now as an artist living and working in the U.S.

Yesterday’s enemies and casualties of war are tomorrow’s immigrants and neighbors.

Edit: I’m reminded also of a fellow in a nearby town who fixed my car a couple of times… Turns out he was an H-34 pilot for the 219th VNAF “King Bee” squadron. He had a couple of eyebrow-raising stories, and on the wall of his office is a commendation letter from MACV-SOG and a map of a unified, non-Communist Vietnam on the wall, in which the capital is NOT “Ho Chi Minh City”.

I knew both of these people simultaneously. Capitalism sucks in many unique ways, but free markets do make strange things possible.