After a year in Korea, it was a nice vacation. Although I'd never spent any time in a state with Blue Laws before, and was still being surprised two months later, when I left, that nothing off post was open on Sundays.
I made Sergeant there, and two class-mates made Staff Sergeant--I recall one of the new SSGs looking at me as we walked off the stage after the ceremony and saying "Now when I go back to Korea I can afford two yobos!"
{"Yobo" is more-or-less Korean for "dear", or "Sweetie", and is used by GIs to mean "mistress." Or was; prices in Korea have increased to the point that I don't think anyone can afford it anymore...}
Anyway, it being Taxachussetts, April 19th was Patriot's Day, which we got off. I disgusted my roommates by getting up before the crack of dawn, and visiting Lexington and Concord.
On April 19th the Crack of Dawn is very loud in Lexington, especially if one is standing on the Green, since it comes herald by some guy in a cocked hat yelling "If they mean to have a war, let it begin here", and some popinjay fascist oppressor of the people calling "Disperse, ye rebels!"
I have got to find my photographs! In the meantime, here a couple from the Web:
Lexington Minute Men Memorial: Inscription: "These men gave everything dear in life, yea, and life itself, in support of the common cause."
Memorial to Captain John Parker, Commander, Lexington Minute Men. Arguably the first hero of the American Revolution.
And it was all downhill for a while, and then uphill. Although it has certainly had it's ups and downs...
The reenactment at Lexington and Concord is pretty elaborate, actually, with Revolutionary War units from all over the United States coming in. Standards of accuracy in some of these units demand that any visible seam on any clothing be hand-sewn, even though it can be demonstrated that a good tailor in that era would sew a seam that is nearly indistinguishable to the non-expert eye from a modern machine sewn one. ("Thread-counters", the accuracy nazis are called...)
A few years ago PBS ran a show about the reenactment, in which it would have been easy to get the impression that one side or the other were cheating, because people dressed as colonists were using walkie-talkies to "warn" the Rebels that the Redcoats were coming; a better description than "cheating" would have been "choreography."
When I went--1983?--I did not see such an elaborate event. As I recall there was a recreation of the Battle on Lexington Green itself, and another at Concord Bridge, but I don't recall a recreation of the march from Lexington to Concord.
Nor was there a recreation of the Battle Road, along which the Redcoats marched back to Boston, getting ambushed along the way. Battle Road was where the British really took most of their casualties, and got their collective confidence shaken to the point that for the rest of the war they often failed to pursue a victory, which allowed the rebels to "fight another day."
This was also the birth of an inflation of the utility of the Militia which would serve the United States ill in every war it fought for the next century, i.e, that standing armies are not necessary, all you need to do is call out the militia. Unfortunately, it ignores the fact that, for the militia to be effective in war, it must be highly trained, and effectively led. The Minute Men were both those things, as they arose from the necessity to defend the settlements against Indian raids--which were a recent memory in that part of Massachusetts--and then revived in recognition that the American Colonists' grievances with the Crown might come to blows. But if your militia only train when there is a fight coming, will they be ready when they are taken by surprise? Or have no interest in the fight that does come? Experience from the War of 1812 and the Civil War, not to mention theaters of the revolution which had less active support than in Massachusetts, suggests "no".
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