I didn't know how much ordinance they held, but there were a lot more than 26, although IIRC 26 seems about the amount at Utapao. AFAIK (and of course I can't really know, something like that would be a need-to-know basis and I just hauled stuff around the flightline there) none of the B-52s there were armed with nukes.

It could have been that the year I was at Beale they were bringing back BUFs ("big ugly fucker") from Vietnam; the bombing stopped shortly after I got to Thailand and I was there a year. Maybe 26 were all that were armed and the rest were being temporarily stored there, back from deployment from the three Thai bases and afaik bases in other countries in the area.

According to Dr. Odin (that really is his name!), the surgeon who performed my vitrectomy, there are only two causes of detached retinas - a very severe blow to the head, or severe nearsightedness. I was severely nearsighted before I had a lensectomy in my left eye. The danger of a detached retina is still there; the cause of nearsightedness is that the eye isn't perfectly round in a nearsighted person, which puts stress on the retina when the eye moves. So it isn't a design defect, it's a manufacturing defect.

A severe enough blow to the head could more easily cause blindness from brain damage than detaching both retinas. People often get concussions without damage to their eyes.

It's been years since I've had a web page and haven't kept up with the newer language features. If that does give full justification, why aren't the newspapers using it? Paper editions do.

Most of my 4 years I worked my ass off towing stuff on the flightline. Hard work, some of that stuff was really heavy and hard to connect to the pintile hook.

His best story involved someone who thought it would be a good idea to get out with a dishonorable discharge by sitting on top of a Titan missile silo and lighting a joint. I think he got 5 years for it, but they wanted to give him 20

A stupid friend stupidly and illegally brought a gun to base and accidentally shot another friend. Chuck was out of the hospital and healed before Stan's trial was over. Stan was sentenced to 6 months in Leavenworth and a dishonorable discharge.

That's wild, one guy gets 6 months for accidentally shooting someone in the belly button, another gets 5 years for a political statement.

If I may add my 2 cents, one of the trickier parts of Buddha's message seems to be how to live with care, lightness, and compassion, whilst knowing it is all just dust blowing in the wind.

Yes, I learned quite a bit about Buddhism while stationed in Thailand (the B-52s there weren't nuclear-armed). I was once admonished for swatting at a fly. Oddly, the Thai boxers (surely Buddhist, every Thai I met was) had no problem at all with sending Chinese Kung-fu fighters to the hospital. Thais taught me how to use nunchucks. Practicing was good exercise until I hit myself in the funny bone with one.

Some of the priests did some stuff that was unbelievable.

I close my eyes, only for a moment, and the moment's gone
All my dreams, pass before my eyes, a curiosity
Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind
Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do, crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind, All we are is dust in the wind

Don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away, all your money won't another minute buy

Dust in the wind, All we are is dust in the wind

-- Kansas

It's only a tiny percentage of Christians (the least educated ones) who don't think evolution is real. Even the Catholic church accepts evolution.

After all, over half of all scientists are religious. It's impossible to deny what one has experienced.

Yes, you could install an alternate OS even before Windows. I was running FreeDOS for a while before DOS 6.2 came along, it was vastly superior to the DOS 3.3 that came with the computer (on two floppies).

But when you buy a computer it has an OS installed, and that's either Apple or Microsoft.

I wasn't talking to you, Grandpa.

Anyway, look on the bright side: we aren't currently in a nuclear cold war. It would seem we either actually learned something and aren't repeating it, or got lucky enough for the moment to not make enemies with anyone else who could blow up the world.

Probably both, and it does indeed engender optimism.

Hearing the sonic boom of the B-52s based out of McCord AFB as they passed overhead

The B-52s were (and are) subsonic. I heard the booms, too, from aircraft at Scott AFB, and that was a MAC base. Probably in both cases they were fighters that were stopping off for fuel or something, because cargo and transport planes were subsonic as well.

Structural weakness. The retina can detatch under mechanical stress.

That's happened to me. A vitrectomy is no fun, but I don't see how having the retina on top would make it stronger.

There's a blind spot where the neurons poke through, requiring an interpolation mechanism in the brain to fill it in.

And the blind spots are in different places in each eye, so it's really only there if one eye is closed. Pretty good hack if you ask me.

No, I had no idea how many bombs they held. My job was to drive the pilot to his war machine if the Ruskies attacked.

Best duty I ever had. Fuel, clean, and check out the vehicle and spend the rest of the day reading, playing pinball, shooting pool, and eating damned good chow.

The worst duty I ever had was driving a busload of drunken high ranking officers to town.

Ah, the younger generation.

"The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us," wrote one of them (John F. Carter in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1920), expressing accurately the sentiments of innumerable contemporaries. "They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don't accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 'eighties."

--Only Yestarday, Frederick Lewis Allen (1933)

Some things never change, folks in their twenties are now blaming us geezers, using the same rhetoric that youngster who is now certainly dead from old age used in 1920. Of course, my generation was no different.

If it had gone off and you were outside you'd probably have been blinded, and died of cancer within twenty years, along with your neighbors.

This book will scare the hell out of you (I was a teenager when I read it).

Here's a PDF of the book. I wish someone would OCR it.