Pardon me for intruding, but perhaps it's less where and when they were, and more what they are...? The two people here than I knew before coming here and I are all commanders of some sort in our respective military organizations, for example, and several of the other people I've met have been trained in combat before coming here, a higher percentage than I would expect from a random sampling of people.

Of course, it's obvious enough that not everyone here has been trained to fight, but everyone has seemed to have led an interesting life of some sort.