Official Motto: Semper Paratus. 

The Coast Guard was diligently engaged in peforming its function; it conducts serious training exercises on many days -- including red-letter ones, at many sites, including sensitive ones.  The criticism it has come in for, because of one conducted on the Potomac River on Sept. 11, 2009, is trivial.  On a panel with Brett Baer, the seemingly untrivial Charles Krauthammer opined that the Coast Guard 'should be given calendars' so that it knows not to conduct training exercises when and where it does not belong.  However, in simple truth there was nothing untoward about that exercise.  It was entirely fitting that the boats in question be present and visible on that river, on that day.    

Rather, it is Dr. Krauthammer and the others  who should be given a copy of All Available Boats  (www.amazon.com/All-Available-Boats.../dp/1889793116) an account of the largest-scale marine evacuation since Dunkirk, that of lower Manhattan by the Coast Guard in a non-training exercise eight years earlier.  That this endeavor is unheralded, this account unknown, even to members of the public-intellectual elite is not suprising.  But one would have hoped that some among those luminaries would understand that as a matter of common decency the Coast Guard does not deserve casual sarcasm, even if they mistakenly believe that sarcasm is in itself somehow appealing when delivered with an impeccable and droll understated air -- i.e., by them.  But apparently such hope would be empty.

 

It is disappointing that the 'conservative elite' as a class is generally snobbish and effete (PLEASE see michellemalkin.com/.../emetic-of-the-day-the-david-brooks-barack-obama-love-story).  It is very disheartening if/that Krauthammer is among that quite-so-understatedly self-regarding, contemptible crew.  

 

They do not realize that the reason that the Coast Guard is unheralded is the same reason the heroes of 9/11 went unregarded until that day, and alas since that day, by those who -- on that day -- passed by in mute terror in the stairwells those who clambered upwards in bounden duty; the latter adhering to a code like that of the Coast Guard -- [think Alaska, February night, 30-foot swells]

 

Unoffical Motto: "You have to go out; you don't have to come back."

 

A Coast Guard Father