When A Few Good Men are In Charge of Fireworks

Saturday Mr. B and I spent the day bumming around his hometown - showing me the house he grew up in, schools he went to, the swimming pool he went swimming in. It was fun learning about his history and where he comes from.

We finished off the day with a trek to Fort Benning where the base was having a big 4th of July celebration (on the 3rd) and promised a LARGE fireworks display. I'm a big fireworks fan, so we headed to the base and found an area that, judging by cars with open trunks and lawn chairs spread around, seemed to be a promising fireworks viewing area. Being the geeks that we are, we got out our Google sky maps and started identifying stars while we waited for the big show.

It wasn't too long before we were treated to our first big bang! A beautiful green burst - perfect height, perfect shape! And then another - green burst! And another... green... burst... and... another..... green..... burst.... about 12 in all. Then... a red burst! Oh, something new! And then... a red burst... and then.... another..........red...................................burst. About 12 of them.

Then purple... 12

White with ends that flared...12

Smiley faces....12

Hearts......12

Red with white shoots in the middle....12

At that point I realized what was going on. Clearly there are soldiers stationed here who are trained to handle munitions so rather than pay a company to come in and set off the fireworks, they bought them from a supplier and had their guys set them off. But... let's think about your standard Army soldier. Average age... probably about 21 or 22. Trained to follow orders. The orders were "take these fireworks and set them off, about 10 seconds apart." So... they took the boxes of fireworks - the green box, the red box, the blue box, the red with white box, etc... and they set them off. They weren't going to be bothered with aesthetics. The guy in charge didn't say make it pretty, he said "set them off". So they did. One box at a time.

I was laughing SO hard at this point. Because there was something so endearing about it. And the best was the finale. Clearly you buy a finale "kit" and with one fuse you set off a WHOLE bunch of stuff. And I would guess they bought 4 "kits" and again, just following orders, they lit all 4 fuses... at once. OH holy crap. The ground was shaking, you could have read fine print by the constant light from the display... car alarms were going off all over. It was AWESOME!!! The shock & awe of fireworks!!

So... thank you, Soldiers of Fort Benning, for a fireworks display that I will not EVER forget!