Sweat and Celebration #reflection
Sweat and Celebration
I don’t believe I am about to say this… Apparently, we have reached information overload. This is something I never would have expected from my brain; something that shouldn’t even be a thought. But I honestly don’t know what to think about this other than, Gah!
See, yesterday was the 4th of July, American Independence Day. I was thinking of going into some thoughts of one of my favorite days in the past. And then I ran into a slight road block of too much information and none of it leading down a clear path. Maybe I should take this back a bit and give some clarity and we could enjoy the thoughts together.
The favorite day is one I might have spoken of in the past around this same time. It was a moment in Marine Corps boot camp. The date was the 4th of July, three days before graduation. It was the last duty day of our Senior Drill Instructor (maybe that shouldn’t be capitalized but I am going with it because they are important people). Anyway, our squad bay was on the third floor of a three story “H” shaped building. And the windows looked out toward the San Diego Airport and San Diego Bay.
The normal celebration at the time meant that fireworks were shot off over the bay. Really cool if you are near them to see them reflecting over the water, I’m sure. But for those of us in Boot Camp, you were lucky of you could even see the display at all. Like I said, we were on the third floor. It gave a decent view of the show.
It didn’t matter that we were about to graduate and the 4th is a national holiday. We still had a lights-out time, which meant we were in the rack when the fireworks were going off.
And being our last night in the care of Staff Sergeant Minci, meant that it would be his last time to talk to us before we graduated. By that I mean talk to us, unlike every other moment in boot camp it was a moment to reflect on training, and our future in the corps.
He put us to bed that night quoting from one of his favorite pieces of writing. And of that I can only remember the one line, “The more we sweat in peace time, the less we bleed in war.” I remember it because of the snapshot in time his words were a part of but also because he told us that on a regular basis.
Now this is where the issue of the morning comes in. I did a quick search for the origin of the words. And now there are so many different voices giving off their own bullshit to the words or their own misinformed information, that I couldn’t find the original piece. Sure, I might have found it eventually through digging. But that was a bit more than I wanted to do today.
And that leaves me with another thought. Sometimes, finding the truth can be a moot point because it takes a bit more digging than we are willing to do. The misinformation and crap are always the easy choice. It’s the training and preparation and digging through the flack that always makes the ultimate difference.
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