and samuel dana green, the first lieutenant, is looking particularly unhappy. and the full weight of the ambiguity of the outcome of the encounter with the merrimac was then falling on green's shoulders. and it would plague him for at least -- well, not at least -- exactly another 20 years or so. and so this picture i have it up in sort of -- it blows up very well. i blew it up from the national archive. it's in my office at mit. and captures a lot of the clues that there is maybe a lot more going on here than the traditional heroic story. then you have captain jennifers sitting by himself next to an empty chair. he was of course not the captain who was in the famous battle, but was assigned -- actually there were a couple of captains between him and when he took over. he was the captain for the summer, most of the summer of 1862. interestingly, in may of 1862, he wrote an extremely good and very honest account of the strengths and weaknesses of the monitor before gideon wells, the commander of the secretary. he really nailed it on the head in a whole bunch of

samuel dana greene, who commanded the gun crew had this to say about being in the turret. the effect of one shut up in a revolving drum is perplexing and it's not a simple matter to keep the bears. during the battle i would continually ask the captain how does the merrimac bear? and on the star board beam he could say or on the port quarter as the case may be. then the difficult would be to determine the direction of the star board beam or the port bear organize any other bearing. he had no idea which direction he was pointing during the battle. now this comment by greene is often taken as a sort of aauthoritative account. in this article in the turret. we want to think than article in historical context as well. it was written for century magazine, which assembled a whole series of personal accounts that was later published in a series of volumes. they're very popular still called battles of the civil war. it was republished in 1956 in anticipation of the centennial. greene wrote this account. it was the first time he wrote his account of what happened during the battle o

and none of them actually said what samuel dana green said, but they said very many things that are very, very similar to that. and a few summers ago the air force held a symposium which i was invited to give the keynote for, called the future operator. who are we going to be, they asked themselves. because pilots are no longer the social -- who have always been the social backbone of the air force have suddenly -- they're changing into something and we don't know how our entire social structure will be organized. and this was about 350 -- basically mid-career lieutenants and above. many of them fighter pilots, bomber pilots. missilers. remote pilots. spent three days debating exactly this issue that had been raised in the 1860s surrounding the monitor." and i opened with that talk. so i'll close then with nathaniel hawthorne's really prophetic response. he actually did visit the "monitor." he came down. his college roommate. hawthorne had two college roommates. one of them was franklin pierce, who became president of the united states. and the other guy was someone named horatio bridge,