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The Circus in the Sky |
Seacoast History Blog # 94
September 01, 2010
Whoever said the Blue Angels spectacular air show is not about war has never attended one. "Welcome the men that strike fear in the hearts and minds of our enemies," the announcer shouts as the pilots take the field. "Our enemies tremble at the very sound of our mighty warriors who have brought us victory in Kosovo, Grenada, Iraq and Afghanistan." I’m paraphrasing here, but that is the true gist of the message as the heavy-metal music blasts through the loudspeakers and the daredevil pilots thunder past tens of thousands of screaming onlookers gathered on the sweltering airport tarmac. Oops, sorry. These are not stunt tricks, but "professional maneuvers" learned by every pilot, the announcer reminds us. Because we all know that flying jets upside down in formation 18-inches apart at over 400-miles per hour is a highly effective method of dropping bombs on enemy targets. (Continued below)
I’m not knocking the military. We all want these phenomenally brave men and women in their high-tech machines defending our freedom. I’m knocking the circus that surrounds that service. The Blue Angels have been making power turns around my house for days now, rumbling just over this office. For those of us who lived in Portsmouth when Pease Air Force Base was open, it is a familiar sound. Night after night we used to awakened by the mighty engines throbbing on the airfield of the Strategic Air Command Base. I personally delivered Domino pizzas to the men smoking dope in the secret underground bunkers. We learned to pause in our dinner conversations as the jets roared overhead. We ducked as they zoomed toward our cars on the highway, landing gear down, wings vibrating.
And then they were gone. And as an historian I am fascinated by our city’s transition from a military outpost to a sprawling industrial park and sometimes commercial airfield. I want to know more about how the government took the land by eminent domain, tearing the little town of Newington asunder, then disappeared, leaving their hazardous waste behind.
It’s a powerful story that, someday I hope to tell. But last weekend’s air show starring the Blue Angels (the first in 20 years) cannot help but stir all sorts of memories. As a local, I certainly felt less safe having the air base nearby. Our nuclear submarine yard and nuclear power plant, combined with an air base flying bombing missions to Asia, put us high on the list of enemy targets.
Not to mention the risk of planes falling from the sky. One did in 1981, sailing right over my house after its pilots ejected, and crashed into the housing development nearby, spewing jet fuel and setting homes on fire. Miraculously, no one was killed. Strangely, no one really wrote about it for 30 years until a reader of this Web site dug into the story and I posted it here in a two part series. Although the pilots of these modern jets are too young to recall the incident, this neighborhood still trembles with the memory of the FB-11A crash in Mariner’s Village.
I spent three hours trying to take a good photo of the jets flying over my house. It’s ridiculous to say I had no reason to be fearful. Portsmouth has every right to be scared. Every local I spoke to admitted that he or she kept waiting to see a plume of smoke rising up from my neighborhood. That fear is natural. That fear Is healthy.
And it does not mean we cannot also feel proud. The Portsmouth Air Show of 2010 was a thrilling event. It’s impossible not to admire the technology that allows "Fat Albert" to go from 400 mph to a dead stop in moments, then taxi backward. The fact that these guys get up in the morning, eat breakfast, and then fly in precision formation faster than the speed of sound – it has to take your breath away.
So does the sight of little kids playing with real machine guns next to armed men in camouflage suits. Or young men with their shirts off pumping the air to head-banger music as the narrator on the sound system talks about crushing our enemies into dust. The recruiters with the clipboards knew exactly when to rush the crowds and gather signatures as the music shifted from acid rock to patriotic American anthems.
It’s a circus out there, and no one would say otherwise. But the circus has not been to town in many years. And as we sat (for three very long hours) in traffic leaving the former Pease Air Force Base the other day, I had plenty of time to think about it all. I think I am both frightened and fascinated, perplexed and proud, engrossed and grossed out by what my country is capable of. But it’s not the military that frightens me, or even the military industrial complex that fuels our jet-bowered economy. If anything, the Pentagon seems to be getting wiser, more open, and introspective.
What scares me are the people who believe that all this might makes us right, wherever we go, whatever we do. They are the dangerous ones because they think the circus is real.
Copyright © 2010 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved
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