One thing I found particularly amazing was the huge shipboard
machinery for preparing Talos missiles to be loaded onto the launcher.
A Talos missile is about as long as a telephone pole and it's a couple
feet across; they have this big armored enclosure on the rear decks
where they mate the booster section with the main body of the missile,
and at either side there were hatches through the deck that led down
to the warhead handling room, with cranes above them to lift the
warheads.
Think of being inside the guts of a giant vending machine, and you'll get a good idea of what the missile room looked like.
Later I went to the souvenir shop where I got a set of dog tags. The salesgirl showed me the standard format you get your dog tags made in when you join the Navy. Names changed to protect the innocent - and also because I forgot what her name was:
ROSS BETSY ANN 123-45-6789 PROTESTANTI don't know if you get a different serial number when you join the military or whether they just use your Social Security Number. The IRS calls it, with their characteristic bluntness, the Taxpayer Identification Number. I think using it certainly would make being interrogated by the enemy a much more surreal experience. I mean, can you imagine being tied to a chair in a POW camp and every single time you answer a question it's just like you're standing in line at the University Registrar trying to order transcripts?
The salesgirl said that dog tags are particularly popular souvenirs when the Boy Scouts come to stay overnight on the ship. She took a metal blank from a box and put it in a little clamp on the front of a machine that looks like a typewriter on steroids, and flipped a switch. An electrical motor started running, turning this big wheel with a belt drive, and she typed the letters on an old mechanical keyboard. THUNK THUNK THUNK and my dog tag was made. She wrapped little black rubber things around the edges so the tags won't jingle, strung the tags on a chain, and there you are. It turns out that the tag-punching machine, which was so solidly massive that I figured it would emerge like a white-hot meteor from the heart of a nuclear explosion, is actual military-issue that came off of an actual Navy ship.
Later, Elisabeth said she wondered what the choices were that you could put down for religion.
I said that I didn't know of any restrictions. One of the displays I'd seen at the museum was of noted black soldiers and sailors; tucked in among the descriptions of valor and courage under fire was an official photo of the U.S. Army's first Black Muslim chaplain. Elisabeth mentioned that some people she knew in the local religious community had been approached by the Department of Defense for assistance on making one-hour training videos. These were for chaplains who might be unfamiliar with some of the many diverse religions that people have in the U.S. (and therefore, have in the military).
Another piece of information they put on your dog tags in the military is your blood type. I didn't have mine put on my tags though; it slipped my mind, partly because the salesgirl's tags didn't have blood type on them either. I've been wondering about why that was; surely a veterans memorial park has enough veterans passing through that somebody would have mentioned this fact, and she'd have punched another set with her blood type on them, for true authenticity.
Maybe it's because if all the other kids are getting theirs punched with blood type then some kid would probably make up a fake one if he didn't know the right one. Then, when that kid is in an accident and they give him a transfusion, nasty things could happen. As they say on comp.risks, bad data can be worse than no data. Then I remembered the one unbreakable rule about religions.
15 characters or less; no exceptions.