When a commercial came on, I got up from the chair to go get a glass of water and a wash cloth to wipe my face, except something told me to watch the commercial.

General Reagan R. James joined the Commonwealth Minutemen in 2288. Within her first year of command, she drove recruitment efforts for both infantry and structural positions. Through this support, settlements grew steadily with sustained populations. Gen. James established core specialties in medicine, agriculture, and civil engineering; while also instituting an education system for the children of settlements. Her efforts greatly contributed to increased quality of life across the Commonwealth.

🔥🔥Happy Sunday! 🔥🔥

I’m like 90% certain that mav and ice listened to In The Navy by the Village People once, only heard “Where can you find pleasure” and said okay bet

Masterlist

Carte de visite of a young Italian sailor who has style and knows it, c. 1865

COMPACFLT, ma’am, you’ve absolutely wrecked me with: “My father—my father was kind”. I can’t even tell you exactly why, but that just struck right in the chest with the force of a sledgehammer, gosh. If it’s alright with you, could you please share your headcanons about Ice and Mav’s fathers? I know I’m, like, quoting your own work back to you but I can’t help it: “Well, dead pilot dads, that’s one thing we have in common.” —But do they? Or is one dead pilot dad vastly different from the other?

ice’s dad (Thomas kazansky sr.): asshole army major OH-6 and UH-1 pilot who got shot down over Vietnam in 1967. son of far-eastern-european immigrants. anti-commie. wanted ice to ALSO be a chopper pilot in the army, so ice went navy instead. daredevil dipshit who died & left ice’s mom alone with two young kids & whose death encouraged ice away from breaking the rules or being unsafe (esp. in the air). not necessarily a great person or a great father but died when ice was 8 so also not a huge influence on his life (i know val kilmer has said ice’s father was a big influence… I’ve written elsewhere about why i personally shifted ice’s narrative away from daddy issues and more towards Navy authority in general issues, in light of ice’s character and rank in tgm. GOD i need a master post sorry, but i think you can find it if you search “edts notes” on my blog and scroll for a while). ice’s LACK of a father -> no man to model himself on -> overcompensating & not getting it exactly right (doesn’t know how to talk to other men) -> maverick immediately clocks him as gay -> the plot of my fic.

Maverick’s dad (peter “duke” mitchell sr.): a genuinely awesome person. funny & kind, warm & loving, a truly good father & a great fighter pilot. big american patriot. Comes from a long long line of us navy personnel—maverick has the navy family name & the pedigree ice, as a second generation american, does not. Im still not sure who raised maverick—it’s one of those things I don’t have a strong opinion on, so it could go either way (i posited in the airplane one-shot that he was raised by relatives, aunt & uncle, but I know it’s a popular hc here that he was a foster kid—all equally plausible to me) but I do think he grew up exceedingly bitter, hearing about how great his dad was and how there was just no way! his dad could’ve failed the Navy the way he supposedly did, because he was just such a good person… there’s a real bitterness about original maverick that TGM maverick kind of lost. His bitterness only shows during the “it’s not the plane it’s the pilot” “EXACTLY” exchange (incidentally the scene that gave me the idea that Bradley thinks mav pulled his papers bc he’s openly gay…it’s the pilot not the plane, ouch). but i still think maverick is like deeply deeply bitter about how the navy handled his fathers death, which is what the excerpt i posted on wednesday is actually about—he confesses to ice how disillusioned he has been with the navy as an institution since he found out the truth about his father’s heroism. I know i just just just said that Maverick’s patriotic conservatism is his reason for existence in the meta “why we make mil propaganda movies” sense, and i stand by that, but i think on a human character level there probably has to be a little bit of deep-seated resentment towards the Navy for smearing his father’s good name and his own good name in the process. My maverick grew up a good Christian kid, called himself peter jr. after his good guy father, who never broke ANY rules until he was radicalized by not getting into the academy (“punish the son for the sins of his father”) and basically lost his mind for 30+ years. “If my family name automatically makes me a sinner in the navy’s eyes, then I might as well sin anyway.”

an endless list of films i love   →   top gun: maverick

“It’s not the plane. It’s the pilot.”

More retinue WIP. I also worked more on the psykers, but I didn't grab pics before putting away the paints

Evading Impressment

Escaping from a pressgang was not an easy thing to do. You might manage to escape a crimper and not take his shilling. And maybe you were even exempt from pressment, which meant that you had a letter from the admiralty (rather from the sick and hurt board) exempting you from service because of a serious health problem. However, this was dissolved in 1803 because there were simply too few men and so those who were considered unfit were allowed to be forced back into service. This process was called Hot Press.

The Neglected Tar, c. 1800, evokes the effects of impressment on a seaman's family and home. (x) 

But now we come to how you could actively escape a pressgang and you had to be very creative, because the men could not be tricked so easily. As in this case from Cork, where a desperate man tried to fake his own escape to avoid being caught by the active pressgang of a local warship. However, the poor soul had not reckoned with the Lieutenant on duty. He had gone so far as to go into the church and, surrounded by all the mourners, open the coffin and pull the not-so-dead man out of it and take him with him. Bell, an already experienced sailor from Newcastle, was caught in 1813 and briefly stored in a room of a government building while the press gang went on with their business. Bell almost ended up back in the Navy if it weren't for his sister. She had managed to gain access to him and was there with him to tase the clothes. Now a rather tall and much stronger woman than before left the building and disappeared. A little later it came out what had happened and since women were not allowed to be pressed, she was released.

The liberty of the subject, by James Gillray, 1779 (x)  

 Thanks to a jack trick, a young sailor who had just been discharged from the navy escaped a press gang in 1815. They picked him up in London and just as they were about to take him away, he slipped out of his jacket and ran away. Of course, the press gang ran after him and right into the arms of a group of workers who had placed themselves protectively in front of the fleeing man. Eventually, a big brawl broke out and both groups parted badly battered. The victim himself managed to escape and was not seen again.

 The Pressgang, by George Morland, 1790 (x) 

Another type of rescue was the fictitious arrest. The pressed one was accused by his friends of having committed a minor crime or another minor offense against them, which required a trial and thus took him out of the press gang. It quickly turned out that there was no evidence against him and so he was released, hoping that the press gang had already moved on. But of course they were not stupid and some lieutenants were so smart and just waited in front of the prison to collect the seemingly lost loot. Out of about 10 fictitious arrests, about 5 were recaptured.

The press gang seizing a waterman of Tower Hill on the morning of his marriage day. Illustration from The Comprehensive History of England (Gresham Publishing, 1902) (x) 

Another method was to sign in as a fisherman. There were agents and lawyers who drew up these papers and were in contact with fishermen who earned some money with each new crew member, even if the member never showed up for duty. But this way the men were protected from serving in the Navy.

Out of the fire and headlong toward the firing line...

Staring out the window, waiting for Ed to arrive I found myself remembering the day we met, the day we fell in love and the day we made love, maybe Grandma could be right, that kind of love doesn’t disappear overnight. “He’s here” I said out loud to an empty house, I jumped up from the chair that was in front of the window, quickly gathered myself, looked in the mirror, and then went to the…

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i hate how normalized military is in the us im gonna rip my hair out

The Dagger Squad as things my dad actually did while being in the Navy

(In no particular order)

Rooster: Break into a closed zoo during a sixteen hour stop over in Australia because he and his friends had no where else to be and they wanted to see kangaroos but the zoo wouldn’t open before they left

Phoenix: Ate a live dragonfly to prove a point to a group of recruits he was training, then denied it any time a recruit that hadn’t been in the group asked if it were true, like “where do these rumors even start”

Coyote and Hangman: won too many free pitchers of beer during a competitive darts competition at a bar in the Philippines, to the point where the restaurant ran out of pitchers, they had to start giving away beer to random people, and were forcibly separated and put into new teams

Fanboy: stuck the end of a broom to the back of his helmet, put on a red shirt and painted his face to go to a Halloween party thing with his squad as Marvin the Martian, and ended up being the only person with a real costume

Fritz: Was out too late with a group of friends in San Diego and had like forty minutes to get back to his ship before curfew, but the taxi they called could only fit so many people so he opted to run back, ended up on a random trail going in the wrong direction and almost got caught by boarder patrol trying to get back into the country because he’d gone to far and ended up in Mexico

Yale: peeled an orange so that the peel was all one long piece, ate the orange and then spent several hours crazy gluing the peel back together because he was bored

Bob: was the only person to think to bring a change of clothes in his carry on whilst leaving for a deployment, and when commercial planes ended up getting their luggage mixed up and lost was the only person in his squad to have clean clothes for two weeks

Omaha: was approached multiplie times in multiple different countries by civilians speaking the native language because they had assumed he’d been from there

Payback: got into the officers line at dinner, filled a soup bowl with shrimp and a soup bowl with cocktail sauce and then went and sat with a group of recruits and kept telling them they needed to go up and get some shrimp just to fuck with them

Harvard: meticulously collected sand from ever beach his squad landed on a in little Tabasco bottles only to give up and throw them away because he decided that it was too much work and that he didn’t like Tabasco enough to keep finishing bottles of it

Halo: got so drunk at a bar in the Philippines that he started doing karaoke to a song in Tagalog; he does not speak Tagalog nor has he ever done karaoke since

Just thought some followers would enjoy a little bit of history😉