Our attendance last week was 45%. I suspect it was about the same yesterday when Colonel Steve Bullard spoke. For those of you who missed, you missed a good one. To be more accurate you missed a GREAT one! Thanks to our own Air Force General (ret.) Dan Cherry and Carroll Hildreth our January programs have revolved around aviation. Dan had heard Col. Bullard's program at a meeting and invited him to present it to our club. Steve is stationed out of Louisville and is attached to the Kentucky Air National Guard. He was deployed to Afghanistan and returned a little over a year ago. WOW did he have some things to show and tell us.
Col. Bullard began by showing one of those videos you see on TV taken through the windshield of a moving vehicle. The driver was another Guardsman from Louisville who was traveling with a companion. They were driving through a small village in Afghanistan. The scene was dry, dusty, dirty and dangerous. Cars and trucks parked along the road were potential caches of improvised explosive devices. People walking along the road could be homicide bombers. Col. Bullard said that traveling in the country was fraught with danger but necessary anyway. As the guardsman was leaving the village and heading back into open country there was a man walking on the right side away from the camera and another walking on the left back toward the village. Suddenly there was a flash from the left and the camera went dead. The man on the left had gotten nervous and detonated himself prematurely. The driver and his passenger were unharmed.
Col. Bullard was eventually put in charge of operations at the Kandahar Airport and effected the return of commercial aviation there. He told the story of a senior Taliban leader that was taken out by a drone operating at 24,000 feet. He talked about President Karsai's brother being the biggest exporter of opium in the country. Col. Bullard remembered our continuing presence in Japan and Germany and said that likewise we will need to be a presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time. After taking questions from the audience our club rose to give Colonel Steve Bullard of Kentucky's Air National Guard a standing ovation.
