One of the challenges of writing this column is that I sometimes find myself intruding on a serviceman’s darkest day, asking him to recall events he’d rather forget. That was certainly the case when I spoke to Andy Brown, whom I told you about back in April after I’d watched him talk about his book Warnings Unheeded.

Senior Airman Brown was an Air Force security officer on bike patrol at Fairchild Air Force Base on June 20, 1994. He’d stopped to visit a friend and enjoy the air conditioning at a guard shack when the call came over his radio, “Fairchild Police to all posts and patrols, we have an alarm at the ER. Informational, we have an individual in the hospital running around with a shotgun.”