The real USS Enterprise (revised)

As big a fan of Star Trek as I may be, it’s really, only because Gene Roddenberry seemed to have captured something that was very real in the eyes of thousands of the breed known as Navy brats.

Being a Navy brat myself,  I got hit with a double whack of nostalgia this week, starting with this:

Impressive as it may be, the second and hardest whack came when I got a call at work and the discussion progressed to the caller’s mailing address: USS Enterprise CVN-65. We started swapping stories, since I spent a significant chunk of my childhood just across the inlet from his ship’s pier.

The Big E is less than a year older than me.  She is one of 14 supercarriers built just across from where I grew up. The father of one of my good friends sailed around the world on her in 1962 I didn’t get to see her physically until the early 1990’s, when she was finally homeported in Norfolk for the first time since the early 1960’s.

Three carriers suffered major onboard fires during Vietnam, including the Enterprise:

The fact she’s still in the fleet four decades later speaks as much to her crew as it does her construction

The sailor mentioned earlier was burtsing with pride as he told me that the Big E had been fitted with old destroyer screws instead of her standard speed propellers because her reactors were too powerful for her hull to stand the strain.

“She still outran our battle group,” he said.

“Not bad for a ship almost 50 years old,” I said.

“She’s still got the same reactors,” he added.

With that conversation rattling around in my head, I’ve got to wonder why American popular culture is so fixated on a fictional class of starships when there’s a whole series of Enterprises that somehow have eluded the grasp of at least two generations.

So, when the neighborhood geek starts prattling on about Enterprise A, Enterprise B, Enterprise C and so forth, gently shush the little twit and remind him that Enterprise H is alive and well and that her crew and generations of American carrier sailors made green, blue, red and yellow shirts fashionable long before Desilu Studios did.

Just for reference, here’s the real Enterprise A:

and Enterprise C:

And Enterprise G – the original Big E long before Elvis claimed the the initial:

and the Big E off the Solomons (the music isn’t quite appropriate, but the crew wasn’t shaking their own chairs and the director wasn’t shaking the camera to fake the action):

The Guns of February

If Barbara Tuchman were alive, she’d be shaking her head in familiar disgust.

 Downtown Thursday Night in Belgrade

 Being a history major, I see absolutely perfect sense in today’s happenings. It makes perfect sense in the same way that it makes sense that serial killers kill, child molesters love Halloween and neighborhood parks, and that World War One was merely a precedent and not the war to end all wars.

Just about every cultural segment that was once Yugoslavia has more than its share of blame in the centuries of bloodshed that preceded the region’s inclusion in the Austro-Hungarian empire and eventual ‘unification’ under Tito.

Even Tito realized that unifying Yugoslavia was an exercise in threats, cajolery and bribery. No wonder that his death was like tripping 10,000 dominoes.

Like all of this background excused the horses**t Serbia tried to pull in the 1990s and after 2000. I don’t think it’s culturally insensitive at all to call that remainder of a nation a collective group of violent, sociopathic, murderous, special education students.

And despite whatever historic guilt that Kosovars might ever be accused of, Serbia started it in the 1990s and Russia is guiltier than hell of aiding and abetting it.

You’d think that Soviet and Russian leaders might have learned something from August 1914. Maybe they have – it’s a great place to stump up and start unholy hell. Yeah, maybe Russia has endured centuries of threats and invasion from the west. Maybe they feel threatened because the various eastern and central Europeans they tried to enslave have made it clear that they are sick of it.

And maybe Russia needs to be reminded of Katyn Forest before it goes on about how the West is threatening Mother Rus’s existence.

The one thing I’ve found lacking in today’s news coverage is translation of what the Orthodox Church has been saying about all this except for brief mentions of prayer services for Kosovo’s peaceful retention in Serbia.

If the Yugoslavian/Serbian Orthodox Church’s official line is that Kosovo remain in Mother Serbia, then that’s the best argument I’ve ever seen for separation of church and state. After all, the Russian Orthodox Church kissed the czars’ asses and ‘encouraged’ Russians to submit to the czars’ various whims.

I truly hope that the Serbian Orthodox Church learned something useful in the 20th century.

As for Russia? Russia is behaving exactly like Russia, except that this time they actually have foreign currency reserves sufficient to allow Russian and former Soviet leaders to be they cheap thugs they’ve always aspired to be.

I hope that we certainly show the sense not to allow those scumbags to draw us and the world into another 1914. On the other hand, I hope we develop the sophistication to let the Russians know quietly and coldly how much fun they could have with a return to the good old days of 1917.

Hospital medevac and airspace denial – who’da thunk it?

One of the hospitals in my general area of residence has just decided that it should be the arbiter of airspace in my region.

Thanks to the good folks at Mountain States Health Alliance (motto: ‘The only good competing emergency medical helicopter service is a non-flying one’) has decided that only one private emergency medical helicopter – the service it contracts with – is more than sufficient to provide air medevac services for a remote mountain area whose road access to a major trauma center is more than an hour. Read more here . . .

The Wise County Board of Supervisors could decide soon whether to approve a resolution that would allow Wellmont Health System to operate a medical flight service in the area.

Mountain States Health Alliance, Wellmont’s nearest competitor, is opposed to the plan.

The Code of Virginia requires local governmental approval for any emergency medical services organization operating in a locality.

Wellmont officials want to use a Wellmont medevac helicopter from Northeast Tennessee to transport Southwest Virginia patients, often to its facilities in Tennessee.

Ron Prewitt, senior vice president of business development for Wellmont, told supervisors during a Thursday work session that Wellmont One – based in Greene County, Tenn. – would be able to take patients in severe medical need or those suffering from serious trauma to various Wellmont hospitals in the region. It would be a fast transport from the Wellmont primary-care hospitals in Lee County, Norton and Wise County in Virginia to facilities in Kingsport or Bristol.

Mountain States Health Alliance officials cried foul and asked the supervisors to deny Wellmont’s resolution request.

MSHA representatives and workers with the company’s Wings Air Rescue, based just outside of Wise County in Jenkins, Ky., said they do just fine providing medevac service in the county.

MSHA has Norton Community Hospital and Dickenson Community Hospital in its alliance.

While the relationship between Mountain States Health Alliance and its longtime hospital/health care rival Wellmont Health Systems can be likened to two vampires fighting over a used Band-Aid, it still strikes me as odd that the owner of one hospital in our immediate community has decided that it deserves air superiority over the owner of two hospitals in the same immediate area.

 I think I see a mobile radar and several surface-to-air missile transporters on the highway nearby . . .

Recycling McCartney

God I love it when Paul and Heather’s marital troubles rise to the tabloids’ oily surface tension, beacue it means I can wheel out this hoary old chestnut from my Blogspot days:

Top ten specifics of Heather McCartney’s divorce filing:

FFE’s Way

For the last five weeks, I have suffered from what at first glance appears to be a recurring nightmare.

The banality of evil

This is pretty much how I’ve imagined conversations in the Oval Office, the Justice department and the Naval Observatory the last seven and a half years