Rotary Thursday and the Bush "Aircraft Carrier Landing Stunt.".

It was a great Rotary meeting today. My club was honored to have as its speakers the Commandant for the Lemoore Naval Air Station and a squadron commander who had just returned from a tour of duty on the Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf.

During Q and A, someone asked about the Bush visit and whether the sailors resented it, did it delay their shore leave and was it a waste of money. The squadron commander - who shook the President's hand and then led approximately thirty planes back to Lemoore that afternoon - told us that it was a singularly memorable day for him and that he wished all cruises could end that way. He rejected the idea that Bush's visit to the Lincoln was a political stunt. He felt that the President was honestly trying to give something back to the people who had carried out his orders and was sharing his valuable time. Athough re-enlistment rates are now at an all time high, there is some concern about the effect that ten month deployments may have on re-enlistment. Consequently, he felt that the President's visit could give about 5,000 sailors something to think about when it came time to re-enlist. So, how do you figure that moral benefit in critiques based on cost and benefit? The sailors and aviators generally appreciated the fact that the President was commending them for a job well done. As for the charges that money was wasted, his point was that the pilot would have been flying some other mission and so the notion of squandering money was simply "idiotic." [The speaker - being a military officer and, therefore, officially apolitical - didn't use that term to describe critics, but he didn't agree with the description in Q and A either.]

By the way, this is an opportune moment to share some incredibly trivial, but, I think, interesting military history trivia. My father was on the aircraft carrier Valley Forge when it went on an around the world cruise in 1946. According to the cruise book, the visit by the Valley Forge to the Persian Gulf was the first time an American capital ship had been in the Persian Gulf since Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet in 1908. Since I suspect that there were no carriers in operation at that time, I reckon that my father was on the first American carrier to ever enter the Persian Gulf.