Saturday, March 29, 2008

Survived Mess Night Without Becoming Part of the Mess

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Ladies, does this look familiar, only in gender reversal? Yes, that would be a line to the MENS' room. Now you don't see that very often do you? Why the line? It was Command and Staff College's Mess Night. From what I am told, it is usually more commonly a night of drunken shenanigans and roasts. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being dinner at your grandma's and 10 being "Marines Gone Wild on Spring Break", this evenings Mess night rated about a 3.

And you will be proud to know that I did not get dragged into the middle of the mess. I promised our docent services manager that would never happen again. It would never happen again because I had nightmares for two weeks. Now, as you might remember from my post last year, all I did was take a drink to someone. But I had nightmares that I was standing naked in the middle of 300 Marines and they were all laughing at me.

This year, I actually knew people. Brad was part of this class, so I knew him and his room mates. My associate pastor is also part of this class. My associate pastor was introducing me to the men at his table. He started out with "RG goes to my church, she's an escort, or what do they call you?"

"Um, don't introduce me as an escort, that has kind of a bad connotation." To that all the men laughed.

"I'm a docent" I replied.

Here are some photos from the event.

Now, some may be wondering where the women were since there was no line to the ladies room. Well, this would be it for the ladies. There may have been a couple more milling about but these gals all seemed to know each other. One of them was Brad's room mate. So it looks like we have two naval officers and three Marine Corps officers. Those are the female dress mess uniforms.

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Below, the F4U Corsair from the Korean War era appears to be diving down on party goers. The bugle has been sounded and they are all finding their seats, that is why the bar is so empty. Trust me, earlier in the evening you couldn't even see the bar unless you were on the second deck.

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This photo must have been taken earlier than the one above because there are still a few people around the bar.

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Below, the AV8B Harrier 'dives' down onto the tables below. This was taken during the guest of honor's speech.

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Another angle showing the entire Harrier and the SR1-Chicksaw helicopter.

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In this photo we have the Curtis Jenny and the Harrier and the HRS-1, along with the students in Command and Staff College.

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In this photo, we are under the right wing of the Corsair looking down.

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This photo shows the "Ship Super Structure" staircase, the Jenny and the LVT-3 landing at Tarawa. (o.k. there will probably be some history buff that will say, that can't be an LVT-3 landing at Tarawa, those were LVT-1s. Yes, they would be correct. Here is a bit of Museum trivia for you. There are no LVT-1s in the Marine Corps collections. They had an LVT-3 - - so it is representing an LVT-1 landing at Tarawa. Did I confuse you?

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How was this one different from last year's? This year they actually did some silly slide shows and they did the charges and fines. There was no 'grog' and no carrier deck landings. I'd say a little more relaxed than last year's event. I wonder how next year's will be?

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