FRIDAY FOTO (October 3, 2021)

Son of a Sailor.

(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Spencer Fling)

Seaman Dominick Mazuera, with his father at his side, lifts his son Mateo in the air after seeing him for the first time since joining the Navy and graduating from Recruit Training Command.

More than 40,000 recruits train annually at the Navy’s only boot camp based at Great Lakes, Illinois.

In addition to the technical difficulties that delayed this week’s FRIFO, your 4GWAR Editor was faced with some tough choices for this week’s subject matter. We try to give each of the services their fair share of attention, we also try for a really beautiful photo, or else one that may not be great art but has an important story behind it. Nothing like that leaped out at us until we saw this sweet little image. The caption provided by the Navy gives the basic information, the imagery itself does the rest.

Your 4GWAR editor has been on the road a lot over the past two months from Pittsburgh, PA to the rocky coast of Maine and most of the mid-Atlantic states in between. In every city and town we visited there were vacant, boarded up businesses, big hotels empty as ghost towns and local restaurants and night spots struggling to survive with a skeleton staff. And yet everywhere — literally everywhere — we saw help wanted signs.

During this time we visited with old classmates, family and friends, all of whom have been through a rugged year and a half, battered by fire and flood — literally — long hours with little respite as nurses, teachers and other critical workers, all manner of physical and mental health challenges from depression and stress to COVID and cancer. (If you click on the second highlighted item above you’ll see the pains the Navy has taken to protect its recruits and other personnel from the pandemic) To paraphrase Thomas Paine, These are the times that try people’s souls.

So this little happy moment in time made the final FRIDAY FOTO cut. We hope you experience some of the joy, optimism — and a bit of pride — it gave us.

On that note, we leave you with the Jimmy Buffett song that inspired the headline for this week’s posting.