It’s been two years since the shooting and stabbing incident that took place on board a Thalys train going from Amsterdam to Paris, where a Moroccan gunman was foiled by three Americans, two of which just happened to be off-duty US Armed Forces servicemen.

On 18 August 2015, a few days before the incident, the two servicemen were cycling around Amsterdam. They approached an Italian friend of mine and asked how to get to the Amsterdam Arena. My friend said “It’s quite a ride away”.”Not a problem, Sir!”, said one of the Americans and my friend proceeded to explain how to get there from downtown. “They thanked me profusely using the over-polite language typical of the USA military”, which is all too often the polar opposite of what one normally hears in Amsterdam.

On 22 August 2015, the morning after the incident, my Italian friend read the news that the brave guys prevented a carnage on the Amsterdam Paris train. “Two years ago I wrote the story on Facebook about giving directions to stranded American tourists who days later turned out to be heroes. My Facebook post was even picked up by local media”.

“The whole story is now being filmed by Clint Eastwood, but my bit of course not in it”, he said jokingly. And that’s too bad, it would work in the film. The funny thing is, my friend’s been in the film business for over a decade if not two in both Italy and the Netherlands, and works with major international directors. The announcement of the film was made months ago, but Facebook’s memory posts brought this all back up for him recently. And to add even more plot to the story, The Guardian wrote that one of the men who foiled the attack, Spencer Stone, needed open heart surgery after being stabbed in late 2015 in an unrelated attack.

(Link: Thalys train attack of 2015, Photo from Facebook)