The Marines are busy

Posted on January 28, 2008

I’m told that an MEU is preparing to ship out from Camp Lejeune, but then I really didn’t need to ask. The evidence is pretty clear.

For the last couple weeks they have been illustrating why they call this “Boomtown”. The tanks and artillery are practicing just a short distance away and round the clock the garage door shakes, the dishes in the cupboards rattle as the ordinance explodes. It sounds like a car driving into the house nextdoor - without using the garage door.

A few days ago a C17 came in low and slow from over the ocean toward the training area, I couldn’t see past the tree tops if they dropped Marines by parachute, but that seemed the probable activity. The plane then circled and moved away at an increasing speed. They did it three times that I saw.

The Cobras and Hueys have been flying in formation in and out and the occasional CH53 flies over. Seems like all the Osprey’s are deployed to Iraq, haven’t seen them for a while now.

I saw in the news that one day this week a convoy will make travel from here to Wilmington more difficult as it heads for the naval terminal in Brunswick county and that traffic will be disrupted.

I like being here where I can see and hear all this going on, it reminds me that we are at war, that there is a serious threat to this nation and that the Marines (and others) are constantly preparing for their parts in it.

I’ve been reading “Flags of Our Fathers” about the flagraisers on Iwo Jima. It brings back what I have long known about WWII. That the entire country know, on a daily basis the hardships and sacrifices made to save the world from a few madmen who wished to change it forever.

They felt daily the fact of the war. Not just in the news of the battles and the word of friends and loved ones lost or injured. They felt it in so many other ways.

The high school football team that qualified for the state championship but did not go to the tournament because using the tires and gas would be a subtraction from the war effort. No new cars were built. Gas, sugar, beef and tires were all rationed. My mother’s favorite slogan, learned by her as a child in the Depression, served her and all well in the war years - “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without!”

So yes, the Marines make their presence known here in NC and other places. The noise they make might disturb sleeping babies or interrupt our routine. We might have to follow a slow moving convoy for a few miles, but there is an enemy out there that wants to destroy us and our way of life. The alternative, murderous terrorists invading our shores is no alternative at all.

So go ahead Marines, shake my walls, rattle my dishes - but thank you for protecting us.

» Filed Under War on Terror, Veterans, World politics, North Carolina, Marines, National Politics