"That included at least one Vietnam veteran eager to see the A-10 Warthog fly.

'I saw one, one time, in Vietnam,' said Greg Moore, now an Ottumwa audiologist known for his dry sense of humor. 'We called one in for air support. I don't know that they called them Warthogs at the time. It was rare for us to request air supports. We always called in artillery.'

Often, those shells came in from sea. When the A-10 came in, it caught the ground troops attention. It wasn't a strafing run, it came in to drop bombs. Moore remembered ing how the aircraft was avoiding the shells from the US Navy ship guns.

Had the paratroopers called for an A-10 specifically?

'No,' he said. 'They don't let you pick the plan you want. You get what they send you.'

He was seated with his family. To the left of their chairs sat a clean, ready to fly A-10. While Moore waited, he enjoyed the other parts of the show, including what he called 'daredevil biplane pilots.'

He also liked the demonstration version of paratroopers.

'The jump team was really great,' he said.

His airborne unit would have been really great, too, right?

'Not quite the same. We had sergeants shouting at us and sort of -- pushing us out of the airplane. It was very different.'

He turned more serious about the last jumper Saturday.

'To watch that, with those accurate parachutes as he came down with the American Flag, it was glorious,'" wrote Mark Newman of the Ottumwa Courier.