rlc27
Posts: 306
Joined: 7/21/2001 From: Connecticut, USA Status: offline
|
A year or two ago I was standing in the conning tower of the battleship Massachusetts, which is now a museum moored in Fall River, MA. This has always been a kind of holy site to me, a kind of shrine in steel and wood, where, if you listen hard enough, you can almost hear the voices and feel the presence of her long-gone crew. Standing on the foredeck, you can look up and see the huge pyramidal shape of the citadel, with battle flags waving, and wonder what it felt like to cruise the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific onboard this titan with the sixteen inch guns.
Anyway, there I was in the conning tower. There is a pair of binoculars mounted on a metal pedestal there, through which I imagine you can see a good twenty miles away. How many times did a midshipman gaze through it to see the ensigns of some far off merchantmen, the coast of Egypt, or the peeking periscope of a submarine? I saw a teenage boy and his girlfriend looking at it. The girl asked him, "what's this?" He, without hesitating, said, "It's a piece of sh*t."
To me, that about sums up the attitude of many young people today. I'm not so old myself, only 28, and the furthest I've ever gone in the military was two years of ROTC, but I've always had a great respect for the men and women of all nationalities that have given everything for their ideals; and moreso for those who fought so that others might be free.
_____________________________
"They couldn't hit an elephant from this dist--" --John Sedgwick, failing to reduce suppression during the Battle of the Wilderness, U.S. Civil War.
|