Recently, Matt Barrow posted:

Okay! What I took his two statements in conflict to mean was "Navy"
and "Vietnam vet".

That makes no sense whatsoever. First of all, that is _one_ statement, not
two. And, there are plenty of Navy vets who served in Vietnam.

My bad!

Indeed! ;-)

Yet, as a few others have pointed out, unless you're into aviation in
some way, the Missing Man Formation would be totally meaningless,
regardless of what non-aviation branch you were in.

To them, it's just a bunch of planes flying close together.

Well, that's why I posed it as a question, not a statement of fact. ;-)

From my perspective, anyone old enough to have served in Vietnam, vetran
or otherwise, should be rather familiar with formation flybys (it's not
clear that the Missing Man was executed at the time). If there isn't an
air show going on, it would be the first thing that would occur to me.
And, given the number of casualties in the Vietnam conflict, I would have
thought that any vet would have had many opportunities to witness such a
flyby. But, then, that's my perspective and not a matter of fact, ergo,
the question.

Neil