Off We Go

[Del_Abe_Jones]

"OFF WE GO"

Really Borne at Kitty Hawk
In the year nineteen-0-three
When Orville rose above the Earth
And since, Man’s soared high and free.

Rickenbacker, General Mitchell
And Doolittle, (just a few)
Famous, on those early flights
When the "Air Corps" was new.

An Army branch through World Wars
With planes like "Enola Gay"
That changed our World forever
On that fateful, August day.

In Nineteen and forty-seven
President Truman decreed
The "Department of the Air Force"
To fill a very special need.

The "Berlin Airlift" fed a People
Caught up in the "Cold War"
With a quarter million flights
(And then, several thousand more.)

And there was "The Candyman"
With the sweets dropped with the ‘chutes
The kids thought him a Hero
(That’s a title he refutes.)

Then, we shot off into the "Space Age"
With the jets and the "X" planes
We put Man upon the Moon
And robots on Martian terrains.

We went "into the wild blue yonder"
But, it wasn’t without cost
To more than fifty-six thousand Families
Whose, loved one’s lives were lost.

"Aloft in solitudes of space,
Uphold them with Thy saving grace.
O God, protect the men who fly
Thru lonely ways beneath the sky."

(this last verse from the Air Force Hymn)

Del "Abe" Jones