Cake-eating civilian here. I dabbled in a law enforcement career back in the mid-90's but aside from a few scuffles and bruises wouldn't say I ever saw anything that approached actual combat. I would have rated myself on the high side of enthusiast ten years ago, but these days I barely have the time and energy to keep up with the state of the art in my day job. I'm perfectly happy leaving the tactics, doctrine and number crunching to those who either have the inclination or have been there and done that.
I developed a real anti-vet gaming bias in college during the early 90's mostly because I played RPGs as a form of amusement and distraction from real life and not for re-enactor level simulationism. I found that the ROTC cadets and Spec-4s that my game attracted locally were almost uniformly incapable of suspending disbelief or processing such abstract concepts as the need to roll dice to see if your PC could hit a target.
There were some shining exceptions to this, but there did seem to be a sense that one wasn't qualified to play Twilight unless you'd been to the infantry school and shouldn't be allowed to run it unless you had personally been checked out on all the equipment found in an OpFor weapons platoon. And it was very Twilight-specific; this notion that one must have a mastery of the Soldier's Manual of Common Tasks in order to play or run a game had no corresponding analog in the world of D&D, Champions, Cyberpunk or Shadowrun.
Now, those guys were only just as irritating to me as the pencil-necks who would cart the entire Jane's library around in their daypacks, but at the end of the day I got far more enjoyment both playing and running with folks who had no military affiliation. But that is all ancient history. The group I play with FTF now is me, two cops and two Army vets and we all get along just fine. I chalk it up to the maturity of everyone involved.
We also play 2013, which does a far better job of modeling modern small arms combat than any of the previous versions, so we don't get bogged down debating results or plausibility of a lot of crappy rule mechanics. We maintain a healthy respect of each other's backgrounds and are able to fully distinguish between the actions of a player and those of his character. We also all mutually agree that the decisions of the GM stand whether they make any sense or not. We have fun and that's kind of the point.
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