The Mind of ~Ifer

Ok, one final post about Fredericksburg, although this is more a post of random thoughts and images that we saw there…

First, let me start by saying again that the museum was phenomenal, and they obviously spent a lot of money putting this thing together… however…

There was one moment of epic fail in there.  Around the top of the first part of the exhibit, there is a timeline showing the events leading up to and explaining the initial conflict between the Japanese and the Chinese.  Near the beginning of the timeline is this date…

Now, from the small picture, you cannot really see the failure that this is… please.. take a moment and click on the picture and look at the enlarged version.

Back?  Ok… apparently, someone screwed up, and they never took the time to go back and fix it properly.  I guess they were hoping nobody would notice, but come on, how do you not notice that?   Also, what you can’t really see in this picture is that the “5″ they put up on the timeline has a slightly different sheen than the rest of the numbers.  That was initially what caught my eye.

Next up, a genuine, honest-to-God, “What the Hell” flag…

The story of this flag goes back to the story of the Sino American Cooperative Organization (SACO).  It was a group of Chinese and American soldiers working together behind the lines in China to basically attack Japan from another front, and to help defend the Chinese.  The history of this particular flag is pretty interesting.

As found in the Military Postal History Society: “As a junior officer aboard the USS Wickes in 1934, Milton Miles often found a ship making an unexpected move during tight fleet maneuvers and had an urge to send a pennant up the mast asking, ‘What the hell?’.  In order to create a flag without the use of obscenities, Miles and his wife, Wilma, devised a series of question marks, exclamation points, and asterisks (the universal substitute for an obscene word) for the large pennant.  Actually used in his pre-war days, the homemade pennant was adopted as the unofficial flag for Naval Group-Chine teams and copies often flew off the flagpoles of several SACO camps including the Happy Valley HQ compound.  The Chief taking his cue, surely must have more than once during his China tour exclaimed the SACO motto; “What the Hell!”.”

The funny part to me is that when we were in the museum, I saw the flag, pointed it out to Mike, and laughingly said “look, its a WTF flag”.  Only after taking this picture did I actually read the little plaque and see that I was actually very close to the correct meaning of the flag.

Finally, Mike and I actually remembered this time to take pictures of ourselves on our trip.  Neither of us is exactly camera-shy, we just usually don’t think to take pictures of ourselves, opting instead for lots of pictures of our surroundings.  But we were disciplined this time:

My sweet husband, standing outside in the memorial courtyard:

And here I am, inside the museum, near the end of our tour:

(I apologize for the wild crazy hair, it was really windy outside that day)

So there you have it, the pictures are done, the story is done… tomorrow I will be back to my normal blogging.

(or maybe I will actually get back on track and write a few book reviews!)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 10:28 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.