Really? And your vast experience is based on what? I guess it's easy for someone like you who has seen scores of war movies to call us wusses for coming back with the flinches.
Here's a clue for you: when a bullet hits someone, it makes a loud crack - just like a pine board breaking. Movies would have you believe that it makes a little, polite "wfft" sound but no, it's a loud bang.
I was standing talking to a Sergeant King in January 1967 at Hill 55 listening to him talk to me about his wife and kids when a sniper shot him through the lower part of his face mid-word. It was so loud that I thought that my slinged M-14 had gone off somehow but when I looked up from the ground I saw that Sgt King was lying in front of me, dead. That bullet had passed maybe an inch over my left shoulder to kill him.
As manly as I am sure you are, don't you think that might have made an impression on me, even after all these years?
Or how about that booby trap made of a dud 155mm round that was suspended above a trail as we approached Phong Tien and it detonated and killed and wounded 22 Marines from Foxtrot Company 2/1 a few hundred meters in front of us. I remember one young guy blown in half and screaming his life away. Any idea how that may have made you flinch each time you heard an unexpected bang?
Those of you who didn't experience these things have no right at all to denigrate what happened to those of us who did. Enjoy your damn fireworks but keep your insults to yourself.
Thank you so very much for your service. My family and I appreciate it.