Welcome back and remember: Inline tracks backs are working! C’mon…show me your work!

Today’s “sea story” is not one of humor, but one of finding out I was in the presense of a man who almost was one of the original Project Mercury astronauts….

It’s a repeat, but from my earlier days of blogging, and a story I think is worth sharing once again. Capt Hawkins was quite a man. I include why such a fine leader never made flag rank, either….

Posted in the comments by Station Commando as a “war story” (he’s in the Army):

Being that I’m in the Army I don’t have any sea stories but here’s a good story along the same lines as yours. When the movie Tears of the Sun was being filmed I was stationed in Hawaii (where they filmed the movie.)

We received a request for any black Infantrymen who we thought we could do without for a few weeks to go be extras for the movie. They wanted black soldiers because they were playing the Nigerian soldiers in the movie. Our company sent four people over. One of them returned later that day because the movie people didn’t think he had dark enough complexion to pass for a Nigerian soldier, the other three were accepted.

They were going to be working on the movie all day every day for about 4 weeks. About 2 days into it they kicked one of our guys back. This guy was the biggest, dumbest klutz you’ve ever seen. Whenever the movie people would film a scene he would always be falling down or losing his fake AK-47. In one scene where all the Nigerians run through a small river bed he actually ran the wrong way, realized he was going the opposite direction as everyone else, and then promptly dropped his rifle in the river and had if float away. While everybody else was charging ahead he was chasing his rubber rifle down the river, falling down the whole way.

They gave him his check and sent him on his way.

The rest of the guys got paid pretty well (about $700 a week if I remember right) and got to tell everyone they were in the movie. They did say that for all you hear about Bruce Willis supporting the troops he never once came and said a word to any of the guys there and they were instructed by someone with the movie that if they said anything to him, even in passing, they would be promptly fired.

They also said that Bruce Willis didn’t so much as run up a hill. They had the stunt double do anything that would result in so much as breaking a mild sweat. I guess that’s Hollywood for you.

Who knows…link here and yoiu just might get read by a few more readers…:)

Trackbacks now display as “in line,” meaning they will show up in the post, and also in the comments.

There is now a link at the beginning of the post that you can copy and paste and get the proper shortcut to send your trackback here.

So, come one, come all. Link til you drop.

Here’s my “sea story” and….due to hurricane hysteria locally, I’m just going to link to one from about a year ago:

Great! You’ve been to Legal School!”

It was said on my first full work day on my first ship, as a brand new officer and, it was “instructive.”

I think it’s time to share my meager readership with others. Lord knows I’ve filched enough for my sitemeter through the graciousness of others in the blogosphere, most notably GreyHawk at Mudville Gazette. I still can’t get a ping thru to his blog with WordPress, even with standalone pingers….:(

The “event” will be weekly and appear Wednesday afternoons (when the sun is over the yardarm). I’ll make an attempt to post a short “sea story” and you will post links to your postings to that post!

This is in the vein of “Full Bore Friday” from CDR Salmander, “Flight Deck Friday” by SteelJaw Scribe, and others who have a special category of writings weekly (Hey, guys….what’s with the friday thing? Run out of work to do?)

Check back after noon local (EDT) this Wednesday for the first one…..

Oh…to place a trackback, copy the link to the post, then append “/trackback” to the link in your trackback pinging tool of choice. They then show up as comments. I’ll dig about to see if there is a way to pull them up into the main post automagically via some WordPress plugin (and if you know how…please share the secret!).