You might recognize this famous kiss. This is a statue based on a photograph taken when the surrender of the Japanese was announced, and the end of World War Two brought about a lot of random kissing. I seem to recall reading that the sailor in the picture didn’t even know the nurse he was kissing.

Yeah, the statue is slightly larger than real life…

The thing is… and this is a thing that struck me even through the haze of pain meds I am currently on… San Diego is a military town.

The zoom lens let me get up close and personal with a pair of Navy helicopters…

I took all these pictures as my wife and younger daughter and I walked back to our car at the end of the second day sightseeing with our visiting English relatives.

We passed by the Midway again, an aircraft carrier that was still being built as World War Two ended, but that served in other wars, and is now a floating museum…

And if you look across the bay, beyond the Midway, you can see nuclear carriers that are so new that they cover some parts of the ships with white tarps to hide the secret technology from spies… or maybe it is just like when your grandparents never took the plastic cover off the couch… somebody should Google that…

What I do know is that, if you look closely, you can see, stretched across the water in front of that carrier, a line of connected floats called a boom. These are used to keep vessels loaded with explosives away from the ships… and there are small Navy speedboats that zip around the Navy moorings… and they have loaded machine guns on them… to keep such suicide attacks from happening… because now we are engaged in a war that seems like it will never end.

And if you look way past the Coronado bridge, you can see the 32nd Street Naval Base, where I was stationed for two years back when I was 17 and 18-years-old. Back then, Russia and the communists were the big enemy. When I started this post, I didn’t know if it was going to end up being funny or not… but now I am actually a little depressed. Is there ever really going to be peace in this world?

I did take one random picture of a weird, big ship, on its way somewhere. I have no idea what kind of ship that is… somebody should Google that too.