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Woo-hoo!
So,
back from three weeks at sea aboard one of our newest aircraft carriers. An
amazing technological marvel, to be sure, compared to my last ship, which was 42
years old when we brought her home and has since been de-commissioned.
Now, the last ship was actually
mine,
I was not a visitor, merely on her, but
of
her: ship's company. Even when I was flying, as a squadron member and part of
the embarked air wing, the carrier was more of a hotel-cum-airport than home. So
the ship I walked off of yesterday was just a place I had come for mentoring and
evaluation with the rest of my staff, we were (not always welcome) visitors. The
ship was emphatically not mine.
And
it's always hard to compare, because no one else's thing ever seems to be as
good as your own thing. So it was that I was there thinking, yes, yes - nuclear
powered, everything works, perfectly enormous - fine, but at the same time
thinking, "this ship doesn't hold a candle to my old boat." There is an almost
spiritual aspect to a ship, they almost have a soul. From my perspective that
soul is an accretion of all the things that the people who have served on her
have left behind them through the years. The Sailors who have worked in the
crucible that is the engine room, even those scrubbing the decks and polishing
the knee-knockers and brass fittings (one of the most ridiculous uses of paid
labor ever designed, in my view), the pilots that have launched off her
grime-smeared decks through decades to vault through the ocean skies - carrying
their own lives in one hand and death in the other, the surface warfare officers
who have stood countless hours of watch through all the long, quiet nights. All
of these have left a part of themselves behind, a sort of echoing excellence.
This new ship just didn't have as much experience, as much soul, as my old one.
And anyway, like I said - it wasn't
mine.
And of course it was great to be
home. Up late the night prior preparing the out-brief, and then handed the task
to write a message to the fleet commander on our results during the briefing.
Ugh. Skip lunch, back to the keyboard, tap-tap-tap. Finished the draft by 1600
(on a Friday afternoon!), knowing full well that no one will read this thing
over the weekend, wondering why I wasn't on the way
home.
Smiling faces, welcome homes,
back to the routine - re-integrating into lives that have moved on
ever-so-slightly in your absence. Didn't see the last volley ball game, the
championship, missed the parent-teacher conference (she's doing great!), wasn't
a part of the college essay that had to go out.
Sometimes you have to wonder if it's
all worth it - could have been a banker, could have left ten years ago to be an
airline pilot, most of my friends did. But then one of them had his throat cut
and his airliner crashed into what had been one of the tallest two buildings in
the world up until a little over two years ago.
It would be nice if we could split at
every decision point, college, marriage, career, and meet again at the end of
days to compare notes: how was it for you? Life's not like that of course, so we
take the best course we can fashion, weighing all the tangibles and intangibles.
For my own part I knew that no one ever makes enough money, no matter what you
do - life has to be a measure not of what you've bought, but what you've
accomplished.
Everyone thinks of
getting out when they're young, retiring when they're eligible. I myself had an
approved resignation letter back in 1990. Took it back, I was having too much
fun and great things were in the offing. I had a chat with one of our junior
officers (JO's) at sea, he's "on the fence," which really means he's preparing
me for his resignation, since he wouldn't talk about it unless he was most of
the way out the door. Too hard, misses his family too much, too much BS. The
wife wants him out, wants him
home.
He's young enough to want
perfection in a human institution, old enough to see it will never happen. He's
brilliant and energetic, a good officer and a great pilot and we will probably
lose him to someplace where the bottom line has a dollar sign beside it, where
hard work results in a little more in the pocket. Where he'll make the last
volley ball game, and the parent-teacher conference. Someplace where he will
undoubtedly be liked and valued, but they will not love him like we do, as one
of
us, made by us and forged into a dependable weapon, a leader, a naval officer. I
have so often seen it before.
This is
getting long, much longer than I intended, and has gone off in a different
direction than I had started down, so if you're still with me, thanks. The words
are writing themselves.
There was a
scene in the movie "Glory," where the Col Robert Gould Shaw character played by
Matthew Broderick asks of his regiment prior to the (ultimately unsuccessful)
assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner, "if this man (the color bearer) should
fall, who will take his place?"
Now
that can't have been a very good job for an infantryman, I should think. Up
front, no rifle, symbol to the enemy. But some one had to do it, and someone had
to be ready to step in when the color bearer dropped. And mostly someone did,
and when no one did, then the battle was going very
poorly...
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The
closest historical parallel to the current status of the US seems to me to be
that of the Roman Empire. Rome stood astride the western world as a colossus,
and was at its best a flare of light in a world of darkness. It was not
comprehensively good of course: Roman senators sent their speeches to the mob in
the hands of slaves, taxation to support the occupying legions, bread and
circuses destroyed the landed gentry. The legions themselves were never allowed
inside the city walls, were not to cross the Rubicon. But taken as a whole in
the context of its times, Rome was a power of good, of civilization, even of
hope.
The Roman Empire fell not because
of a lack of power, but a lack of will. The Romans became fond of their luxury,
stopped serving as citizen-soldiers in their legions and hired other men to
stand in the line for them. They depended upon their superior tactics and their
superior culture. And when they died, they died upon their superior couches. And
when Rome fell, what a fall was there. The west collapsed for a thousand years
into the tyranny of those with the bloodiest hands. Vast volumes of knowledge
were lost, some of it forever. Not for nothing were those known as the Dark
Ages.
Now, in spite of the
hyperventilated shrieks from the Euro-left, I am convinced that the US is no
empire, unless it be an empire of ideas. One of those ideas is that freedom
means something universal, that it represents the noblest aspiration of all
peoples, even those who have not received it as a birthright. For me, that idea
is worth fighting for, against the barbarians at our gates. Not just for the
families I don't know in some Iowa town I've never heard about, but for my
children, so that they shall have the same freedoms that were handed down to me
by my father's generation, and his before
him.
I am convinced that as long as we
collectively decide that what we stand for is worth preserving, we shall not
fail in preserving this light, this beacon to all humanity, this hope of what
could be. But that collective will is expressed in individual decisions all over
the country - at army posts and Navy bases, in check-points in Iraq and in the
halls of Congress, in the sky by tanker pilots and in the ballot
booths.
At some point, God forbid, when
the last critical man will decide that it is too hard, that he misses his family
too much, the line will fail, the colors will fall, and the barbarians will
break through the gates. I do not know who that last man will be, but I know it
will not be me.
So we talked of these
things, the disappointed young junior officer and I. And he told me that I had
given him a lot to think about.
I guess
we'll see.
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