The Bourne Destination

Well, I'm packing up a rucksack, a duffel bag, and a "three-day pack," and getting ready to trek down to Camp Edwards (sort of Bourne, sort of Sandwich, sort of Falmouth) for thirty days of playing in the woods, setting up tents, learning/honing basic soldiering skills, wiring computer systems, and goodness knows what else.

I might take a bit of a blog holiday during this time. But then again, I might not. If we have some downtime at night, and I've got a chance to get online, I might try to capture some of what's going on. As I've gotten way more into the habit lately of using my iPhone to photograph my surroundings, I may try to just capture what surrounds me -- the single biggest Army training exercise on the Cape since World War II -- and save the proverbial thousand words for the reader's imagination.

In the meantime, thanks, as always, for reading.

Of course, there is much talk of *service* on this solemn holiday, and no shortage of eloquent, moving, and sincere words written, typed, or spoken to mark the occasion.

The one thought I'll leave you with here is that there are many ways to serve your community, state, nation, planet, etc. and that military service is just one of them. I recently caught a newspaper headline stating that the percentage of our overall national payroll coming from the public sector is the highest it has ever been in our history. Far from being a self-loathing government employee, I just think that's worth noting, and that it might not be a good recipe for long-term sustainability.

Military servicemembers, teachers, police, and firefighters are usually the first who come to mind when we're crediting people who protect and/or make our society as great as it is. That praise is absolutely deserved, as those are noble professions and they really do enable pretty much everything else we do to happen.

But I would also add dozens of other professions, groups, and people to my list of those who make us cohesive, great, and strong. Entrepreneurs who bear personal risk to provide goods or services in a newer, better way, and provide jobs for other people in the process, rank very high on my list.