Eulogy For A Fighter Pilot

This Was Passed to me a few minutes ago, which was the eulogy Pat Conroy gave to his father, Don, a.k.a. The Great Santini .

Pat wrote the book about his father that became the movie.

As I was reading this there were excerpts that I thought could be applied to Lex.

….”The children of fighter pilots tell different stories than other kids do.  None of our fathers can write a will or sell a life insurance policy or fill out a prescription or administer a flu shot or explain what a poet meant.  We tell of fathers who land on aircraft carriers at pitch-black night with the wind howling out of the China Sea.  Our fathers wiped out aircraft batteries in the Philippines and set Japanese soldiers on fire when they made the mistake of trying to overwhelm our troops on the ground.

     Your Dads ran the barber shops and worked at the post office and delivered the packages on time and sold the cars, while our  Dads were blowing up fuel depots near Seoul, were providing extraordinarily courageous close air support to the beleaguered Marines at the Chosin Reservoir, and who once turned the Naktong River red with  blood of a retreating North Korean battalion.  We tell of men who made widows of the wives of our nations’ enemies and who made orphans out of all their children.

     You don’t like war or  violence?  Or napalm?  Or rockets?  Or cannons or death  rained down from the sky?  Then let’s talk about your fathers,  not ours.  When we talk about the aviators who raised us and the Marines who loved us, we can look you in the eye and say “you would not  like to have been American’s enemies when our fathers passed  overhead”.  We were raised by the men who made the United States  of America the safest country on  earth in the bloodiest century  in all recorded history.  Our fathers  made sacred those strange,  singing names of battlefields across the Pacific:  Guadalcanal, Iwo  Jima, Okinawa, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh and a thousand more.  We  grew up attending the funerals of Marines slain in these battles.   Your fathers made communities like Beaufort decent  and prosperous and  functional; our fathers made the world safe  for democracy…..”

reblogged from usna63.org