Sunday, November 11, 2007

Veterans' Day

We spent Veterans' Day with some actual Vets....

We went to Red State's new and pretty amazing military museum. It has been out there between here and Grad School city for quite a while, but we never managed to make it out there, until today. It wasn't crowded, so we had plenty of time and space to look at the displays of aircraft and missiles. Hubby knows a lot about this stuff, so he kept a narrative going the whole way.

At one aircraft we ran into an older vet who told Hubby a bunch of stories about his time in the service. He was wearing his Red State VFW hat, jacket and shirt. His wife was in a well-worm t-shirt with a huge US flag splashed across her chest. She completed the look with some flashy flag earrings.

The old guy was in for a big chunk of the Cold War and had some tales to tell, he'd been stationed some of the same places as Hubby, only about 20-30 years before him... As they compared service stories, she told me she was his second wife. She confided that she married him after he got out of the military, but that she gets to use his retirement benefits.

At another aircraft, a very distinguished older gentleman and his country club wife told Hubby about flying the first intercontinental flight guided by inertial guidance (whatever that is...).

Inside yet another aircraft, we met some guys who are currently assigned to work on that aircraft. They were climbing around to see how their model differed from the one in the museum. It seems that their generation of aircraft (6 out from the one we saw) isn't much different than the museum piece...

I have to say, the best way to spend Veterans' Day is with a Vet or five...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i agree! spent my morning with a former POW who still has a machine gun slug in his leg.