Fullbore Friday

Battle Kitty was the best kitty

 ...and there she goes. Laid down when Eisenhower was CINC. Commissioned when Kennedy was CINC. Decommissioned 49 years later when Obama was CINC.

The Vietnam War, most of the Cold War and almost two decades after it ended, was in movies such a Seven Days in May and The Final Countdown, from A-1s to F/A-18s, all the way through to the conflicts in Africa, Southwest and Central Asia of this century.

Our last conventional carrier to be decommissioned, and now she's off to the breakers;

 The USS Kitty Hawk, the nation's last oil-fired aircraft carrier, departed Bremerton on Saturday for a 16,000-mile journey around South America for its ultimate fate: scrapping at a Texas shipyard.   

Onlookers, many of them former sailors aboard the "Battle Cat," watched as tugs pulled the rugged warship into Sinclair Inlet on a foggy Saturday morning. At more than 1,000 feet long, the Kitty Hawk won't fit in the Panama Canal, so the warship will be tugged through the Strait of Magellan en route to Brownsville, Texas.

Let's not leave you with that visual of the old girl, here she is with a bone in her teeth;

 

Fullbore Battle Kitty ... Fullbore.