30-06
I have, in my posession, a couple hundred 30-06 cases. There are five boxes of R-P on my desk as we speak. I had a box sitting on the shelf in my closet that I hadn’t looked at for ages, and yesterday I took it down, and opened it up.
There were twenty rounds in it, plus one loose round. It was all mil stuff. Wierd primer crimp, and the cartridge mouth looked fucked up. I tried to remember where I’d gotten them and then I noticed the headstamp- “FAPS”. They were blanks.
Where the hell would I have come across blanks?
then it came back. I was visiting a friend’s gravesite a couple years ago, and as I stood there thinking about him, I heard rifle fire. Across the cemetary, an honor guard saluted a fallen soldier. Seven shots, three times. I walked over, and saw the honor guard walk to their cars- some with canes, some walkers, all had white painteed dress rifles, enfields and springfields. The undertaker lowered the casket into the ground alone, no mourners stood by. I stood and watched as the attendants packed up the casket lowering winch, rolled up the astroturf. Nobody around. The gravedigger started the backhoe.
I picked 21 blank cartridges off the ground.
It started to rain. I walked back to my car and got in, started it, waited for the fog to clear off the windows.
A lot of boys- too young yet to be called men- will come home from Iraq in the next couple years. Some, like this ww2 vet, will die alone, having outlived all their family and friends, only their comrades in arms there, at the end, to see them off.
Earn the work they’re doing for you.
There’s a mistake I keep making.
I keep seeing 19 and 20 year olds coming back from their first tour… and I keep calling them boys and thinking of them as kids.
No man who has volunteered to serve in combat deserves to be called a boy. If nothing else, they’ve earned the right to be called men.
Had a kid (close friend of my boy)come back about four years ago after he spent a bunch of time in Walter Reed and San Antonio for rehab.
He was not quite 19 when he rolled into Baghdad. Constantly stayed in one fight or another the entire time and two months in got nailed hard by a stray RPG into his vehicle. Cost him a big chunk of his shoulder and a couple of friends.
He didn’t mind me calling him kid, but he did wonder why some other Americans looked down upon him.
I told him to simply smile at the fucking idiots and if they got close enough to lay ’em out.
And yeah, he knows when I cal him kid, it’s simply a term of endearment.
I’m talking age and not experience. the point still stands: they are doing things that deserve our respect.
Amen, Og.
Not to get off the main point of the post, but I’m surprised the honor guard you saw didn’t pick up their brass. When the honor guard came to my cousin’s (Navy LCDR, retired) funeral a couple of years ago, they searched around and picked up all they could find — in the middle of a driving snowstorm.
I’ll never forget how my wife jumped about five feet in the air when the first volley went off. I asked her later about it and she said she wasn’t expecting it. I said, what did you think they were carrying guns for? She admitted she hadn’t really thought about that :)