10/18/10 Fleet Week 3

I can think of few deeper ironies

Last weekend, after seeing the Blue Angels practice above the city in preparation of Fleet Week, I decided I’d go explore the event. On the first day I went to board a naval ship. As I approached it I saw someone wearing an 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit t-shirt. My gut turned and chills ran up my spine. This was my old Marine Corps unit. I sailed around the world with this unit, on a boat just like this. It’s been 7 years now, all the people I knew are gone, but walking onto the ship was like walking back into 2003. I think my face turned pale white. The smells, the textures, it all came back. I remembered that time I got a concussion on the tarmac after someone leg-sweeped me too hard. And the time I got hazed in the storage den after I earned my blood stripes. And the time I snuck out onto a gun turret at night to smoke cigarettes and stare at Hawaii as we approached it in the dark. I remember the shooting drills, the fast-roping, the anthrax shots, the constant moaning and swaying of the ship. I remember the heat and stink and the possibility of never coming home. And that peculiar feeling of seeing ocean in every direction. It was all the same way I left it. And I found it hard to take pictures. I felt ill.

I soon became overwhelmed by the civilians, the parents with their children, they were everywhere. Kids climbing tanks, playing with guns, sitting in cockpits. The irony was almost intolerable. It was an unsettling experience, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to take pictures. Feeling that this was something I had to capture, I came back another day, more prepared.

The mothers giggling and taking pictures. Their boys and girls posing with automatic weapons, imitating the sounds of machine gun fire. I could not comprehend or shake it from my mind. “This is too much,” I told myself. These people seemed to be oblivious to the fact these weapons just returned from war. Either that or they found that to be a good thing. I wonder though, did they stop to think about the possibility that the 240 Golf they were posing with might have killed a child? Did they understand what that Mk-19, the one their child was playing with, can do? I invaded Iraq with this Unit. I have disassembled, carried and fired these weapons. They are not toys. They are tools for war. They are for killing.

Watching the Marines, who had recently returned from Afghanistan, I could see in there pursed lips and restrained behavior how they really felt, “These people have no idea.”

This entry was written by Peter Earl McCollough, posted on October 18, 2010 at 3:38 pm, filed under Americans, Personal and tagged Fleet Week, Guns, Marine Corps, Military, San Francisco, War. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.