I'm on a roll now. I don't watch much TV, but I just turned it on to check the weather. Saw uniforms, so I stopped on the channel to see what was on. Turns out it's an A&E channel show about the siege of An Loc, part of the so-called Easter Offensive during the war in Vietnam.

One of my pet peeves is people who get paid to write news about the military and get it wrong. Recently the local paper wrote a piece about the "82nd Engineer Armored Tank Division". Anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of the military could tell you there's something wrong with that name. There are no engineer divisions, engineers and tanks are two different things and "Armored Tank" is redundant. The writer was actually referring to the 82nd Engineer Battalion (SEP). Oh, and the editor never responded to my note regarding that article...

Anyway, I decided to watch the A&E show for a moment and the first thing I hear is that So and So was flying an OB-10. Ain't no such thing. They meant OV-10 Bronco. O stands for Observation and I think the V stands for Fixed Wing, but I'm not going to swear to that. But I know for absolutely certain it's OV and not OB. Then to cap it off, they showed footage of an OV-2 Skymaster. There are some similarities in the empennage, but that's about it. They're two entirely different aircraft.

If you're going to get paid big bucks to write about the military, get it right, dammit.

The OV-10, by the way, bears the distinction of being the only US Army aircraft, past or present, to have ejection seats.