Ambush in Nice

"After the slaughter in Nice, are we safe anywhere?"

The headline, as intended, caught my attention.  My immediate answer "No we aren't safe anywhere."  As long as people are sufficiently warped to want to kill other people and the means are available, sooner or later the killers succeed.

That fatalism comes to me from jungle patrol in Vietnam.  We knew there were people out there who wanted to kill us and we more or less expected it even as we hoped to just luck out.  The world seems to feel the same these days.  Whenever I hear of a mass murder I always think of the victims being ambushed in the course of what used to be normal life. 

In infantry school we were taught how to respond to an ambush.  The first lesson was that if you know that you are being ambushed, the enemy has missed its best chance to kill you.  If you were in the killing zone, you would already be dead.  Second, the last thing the ambusher expects is for the his targets to attack.  He wants you pinned down so he can get another chance to kill more of you.  Charging the ambushers is your best bet for staying alive.  End of lesson.

A simple lesson. 

If it were only that simple.