Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

What was the feeling from the squadrons on the whole "Mission Accomplished!" political chaff after the fact?

I heard the banner was pre-planned by the ship as a celebration for the completion of the cruise, but then it was prominent in the photo ops and Bush got attacked as though he were celebrating victory in Iraq.

Curious on thoughts from someone who was there, or if you all even had opinions about it afterwards.

View on HN

Excellent question. I worked in politics after the military and when I was in the West Wing during the Bush admin it came up once! They said the same thing, that it was the ship's idea. I reminded them that aircraft carriers don't have printing presses so it would be a little hard for the sailors to put that kind of banner together.

It could be that the ship's leadership wanted something like that (they are politicians too). But at least in my squadron we were all furious the president was coming because we had been out at sea for the longest nuclear and F-14 cruise of all time (10 months) and we just wanted to go home to our families but now we are delayed another week for a political stunt and have to spend the next two weeks cleaning the ship in preparation.

It's fun to have been a part of history in that way though. And when I have some kind of career advancement I always throw up a "mission accomplished" banner as a joke.

290 days with prep for a presidential visit at the end is a helluva deployment. Nice to see Wikipedia records the sacrifice: https://web.archive.org/web/20120328094805/http://www.av8rst... And looks like the captain made flag, so apparently someone was happy. ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com