The U-boat mystique

Why don't we give our SS the same lov'n? We don't come even close to a mythology like this. We don't have a song anything like it.

Anyway, everyone loves the Beautiful Loser....and the German U-boats and their men were, professionally, beautiful.

Re: U-505

John, thanks for that post. The new structure and refurnishing of U-505 is a great exhibit, and the docents do a good job of trying to explain what it's like on a diesel boat--they even got most of the smell out. Too bad they couldn't have popped your ears when they simulated launching a torpedo, and let kids move levers and things!

The first time I saw U-505 was in enlisted 'A' school, when U-505 was at the museum with sold out tickets...and USS Silversides, an American WWII boat, was moldering on a pier downtown, supported by vets and a few visitors. Silversides eventually left Chicago (lack of interest, maybe?), which is a pity.

We tend to forget our own, sometimes. USS Requin in Pittsburgh has a good exhibit built around it as part of a science museum, and Bowfin is an attraction to Pearl Harbor visitors to the Arizona memorial, but more often it's more like the poor USS Marlin, on blocks in Omaha at some distant place and locked up (due to bums relieving themselves and sleeping there in the winter) and behind a locked fence (a squabble with the park owner and the city has closed the exhibit such that I've never seen it open).

Put visually and overstating the case, here's how we memorialize the Nazi sub, with a big building and exhibits and tickets in the middle of Chicago:

and here's how we memorialized USS Bullhead, a WWII boat that has a park named after it in Tampa in the bad side of town, unimproved since the seventies as far as I can tell, with a couple of Mk-14 torpedoes on sticks and a brass listing of the dead mounted on flaking painted concrete:

Of course I overstate the case, but sometimes we don't do so well at remembering what's important.

Naval Milbloggers, look what I saw.

I took advantage of the 4 day weekend to take the kids to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. While there, I made sure we went to see the new hall for the U-505

Darn hall is as dark as I imagine a sub pen to be...

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Civil War

Various news agencies are throwing the word "Civil War" around.
I wish such an innocuous description of Iraq could be correct.
IMHO The war in Iraq is a regional proxy war.
The fear should not be that it somehow morphes into a full fledge civil war.
After all, if it is merely a civil war, then eventually the Iraqi's will either tire of killing each other, or there won't be any Iraqi's left. Either way, the impact on the comforatable lives of the American tribe would be limited, and US Congressman only care about the comort of those that can vote in US elections.

Nope, the danger in Iraq is that the two prominent regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, will end up going nuclear.
(The Saudi's have money and oil, if they wanted to be a nuclear power, it would merely be a matter of signing some oil contracts and writing a few checks with the Chinese ,North Koreans or Pakistanis)

If we are going to toss terms around and talk about such things as "strategic redeployment", then we should toss another term around.

Armageddon

Remember Tarin Kowt?

At Tarin Kowt, the 11 members of U.S. Special Forces A-team 574, with a few dozen Afghani fighters, called in airstrikes to defeat a convoy of hundreds of Taliban forces on their way to attack the village where Hamid Karzai was based. It was a pivotal battle, and a crushing psychological blow for the Taliban. Team Captain Jason Amerine tells the story and Lt. Col. David Fox analyzes the battle's significance.

RE: 1968 Mindset

Looks like all things old are new again.

Rep. Charles Rangel joins "Jon Carry"

What is it with the 1968 mythology mindset lately? See what I mean here.