Alvie Ledford was my first "stick" mate in Flight School at Ft. Wolters, Tx. I ran into one of our class mates in the summer of 1969 in South Vietnam and he told me that Alvie had been killed in combat. He was flying a cobra when it was hit by a missile. There were no tracers, so it was suspected that he was hit by a Russian "strella" shoulder mounted heat seeking missile. Alvie was a natural pilot. The great pilots got to fly gunships. The "lucky" ones lived to come home!