Adm Collins was struck by a driver very early on the morning of 7/29/2010. It was an accident. Details are in the St Peterburg Times article here.
Leroy Collins in 2006. Photo credit: Melissa Lyttle, St Petersburg Times
I spent a few days with RDML Collins in Oct, 1988. The USS CARR (FFG-52), at the request of the Tampa Navy League, of which ADM Collins was one of the major voices, had asked for a ship visit for Navy week. In 2007, I chronicled that meeting, as well as with CAPT Bruce McDaniels, USN (Ret).
The port visit to Tampa was wonderful, and I was amazed at the people who would stand in the sun for 2-3 hours to take a tour of the ship. The community, led by the Navy League and ADM Collins did it up right for us.
When we left Tampa, to return to Charleston, ADM Collins and CAPT McDaniel sailed with us as guests. I gave up my stateroom (which I was just barely betting used to, as I had just relied LCDR Tom Brown as XO while in Tampa, so those two retired officers had a place while we sailed the Florida Strait to Ft Lauderdale, where they would debark.
The two retired officers spent the few days all over the ship, meeting the crew and seeing our gas turbine engineering plant, which was just about 5 years old then. I’m sure ADM Collins nuclear Navy background caused so much time to be spent below decks.
Those two guests were happy to be a minimal burden on the crew and the Wardroom. They were great o have aboard.
One of them is now gone. I should probably look up CAPT McDaniels and buy him a cup of coffee.
If you’re a fan of “24,” then “Unthinkable” is for you. I picked it up on Friday, not having paid attention to what it was about. It was a good blind choice.
I’ll not say much of the details. Samuel L. Jackson played his role masterfully. The supporting actress, Carrie-Anne Moss, in the role as an FBI agent did a fantastic job, too.
It’s a thinker. Be ready to wrestle with significant questions from start to finish. I’m going to pray no one ever has to face a reality posed in the movie, which is exceptionally plausible at every turn of events.
I felt the balance of the opinions of how the circumstances should be handled never got to a point of preaching to the audience, but manifested a real struggle to walk a knife edge in decision making under onerous circumstances, with the real possibility of the people in the pretend scenes, if they were real government personnel, may well be dragged before the world as having done unthinkable things.
“Unthinkable” has the same quality I found in “Crimson Tide,” where both the CO and XO on the sub were right, and yet they still were on opposite ends of how to handle the circumstances.
Different from what had been. Some very insightful men drafted the documents to make something new, that drew on the good that had come before, and blended it together.
I often marvel at those who would think we want it “our way.” I consider the things that have become a part of our everyday lives, drawing the best from around the world. It comes in saying, in chai tea, in jazz and rock and roll, which Elvis pretty much stole from the African American style of Gospel singing and made it something “new.”
Look at the plethora of types of food from all over the world in just about anywhere you go. We saw them, and had them imported by immigrants, or brought back by those Americans who traveled abroad, and yes, sometimes because of war. We are the melting pot, culturally, at many, many levels, subtle and some very obvious.
Well, one bad thing: We’ve been really slow to adopt the GSM cell phone standard, so our phones work when we go outside our national borders.
It’s what America does: Takes the best and absorbs it and makes it a part of the American experience. What’s not to marvel about that?
So, I will point you now to an incredibly well done HD video on the FaceBook page for the US Navy. It’s a moving tribute to our flag, in the many places it is flown or used as a symbol of this great Nation.
