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MAF Blogger Danny
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Friday December 7 – Pearl Harbor Day
Montgomery, Alabama
9:00 AM

So I wake up this morning in the bunk in the bus. It was all dark, I had no idea where I was. I realized finally, after a few minutes of disorientation, that I am still in the bunk on the bus. But I don’t hear anybody else. There’s something not right here…I look at my phone, its 4:00 in the morning. I am thinking…what the heck is going on here? Well I mysteriously found a key to a room at the hotel laying next to my head, so I took it and went to the room and laid down. At breakfast that morning when Buzz came down, he told me how everyone had tried to wake me up. But I guess I just flat out REFUSED to wake up!

Ha Ha, I thought that was amazing I’m usually a pretty light sleeper, but apparently I was just REALLY exhausted. It was just kind of scary waking up at that time and being so disoriented. But everything was fine and we got to our rally at Oak Park okay. We were supposed to be set up at the ‘band shell’ but when we found it, the band shell turned out to be more of a band skeleton…or a band outline….there was nothing shell-like about it, there were just bars around the outside of a semicircle making sort of a cage. But it wasn’t even a filled in cage, it was just a really loose exposed platform with bars around it really. In either case, it still served our purposes and gave us a spot to set up our equipment.

We had one local TV camera and a local country station out at the rally, and among our visitors were several of the Patriot Guard Riders. These motorcyclists are some of the most dedicated people you could ever meet. They will go on long trips and show up in the most inclement and hazardous weather. They’re also really good at escorting big buses and caravans into town in style! Oh and as we learned in Berkeley, they’re good at drowning out the incessant whining of code pink and their hippie friends with their powerful and loud V-twins!

One of these riders had a set up which I thought was particularly genius. It was this sort of retractable flagpole that started out like pocket sized but when he extended the thing it came out to a surprisingly long flag pole that probably stood at least six feet tall. With the flag attached and all it was a formidable flag, and it even had an American Flag pattern ON the flagpole instead of a fake wood grain that one might expect.

I spoke to a woman whose brother-in-law was in Iraq and her son was in the army training for what she knew was almost certainly deployment to Iraq. He is infantry and when his training is complete he will join the ranks of the only 16% of our military that is involved in combat. These are the bravest we have and they have the toughest jobs, but for every one infantryman in a combat zone there are 60 support soldiers behind him ready to supply the weapons, ammo, technology, logistics, intelligence, transportation, fire support, and medical attention that her son will need to fight the terrorists in Iraq.

E-mail any questions/comments/corrections to mafbloggerdanny@gmail.com. Thank you for reading