Escape Plan

By lex, on September 25th, 2009

Had lunch today with an old bud who works for one of the major defense contractors here in Sandy Eggo. Catch up a bit, see what’s shaking and baking. That sort of thing.

We’d flown together during one of my refresher tours at the FA-18 training squadron. He’d been senior to me, on his way to his XO/CO tour, while I was en route to Japan for a department head tour. We had one of those “memorable” flights together, a night bombing hop in the Chocolate Mountains near El Centro. Led by a first tour instructor pilot, a young Marine captain if I recollect, with three more senior officers on his wing. It’s only a matter of 20 miles or so from the airfield at NAF El Centro to the bombing range, which can make for a hasty, agitated mission. You barely have time to get dash four aboard before dash one is breaking up into the circular bombing pattern. Six laps around the pattern for the bomb deliveries, and then it’s rejoin time again overhead the target and head back towards the field.

Credo

"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me."

— John Paul Jones

"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature"

— George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."

— Edmund Burke

"Μολὼν λαβέ"

— Leonidas

"Blogito Ergo Sum"

— Neptunus Lex