“My guess is that most of us would much rather face a little chick fighter pilot than one of those old sailors if it came to a bar fight and especially if it was a get down nasty bar fight to the death.”
Indeed.....see, I knew it was obvious!
Have you ever seen a bow-legged fighter pilot? I rest my case. These were men among men, God bless ‘em. And God bless this guy for cleaning up their little patch of ground.
Something that gets me about old soldiers and sailors was the courage that would be required to go to an unknown enemy force with no intelligence or chance of assistance from anyone, whatever you found there was what you had to deal with on your own, if it turned out to be 200 or 5,000, it was just a crap shoot and it meant instead of perhaps dying in combat that everyone of you was definitely going to die.
Military units face that in the American west, Africa and other places through history. They had to go it alone in ways that we don’t now.