Yesterday we arrived in Atlanta and stopped at the Cyclorama in Grant Park. I am standing by a civil war cannon in front of the Museum. The Museum describes General Sherman's March to the Sea and the Atlanta campaign.
The second photo of me seated on the gun is really significant in my life. This is one of the the two 40MM twin gun mounts that were on the USS Polk County LST-1084 - the very ship I served on in Vietnam. Since there were two such gun mounts and we don't know if this was the forward gun or the after gun, there is  a 50% chance that this was the very gun and the very seat that was my General Quarters post on the ship. I was the trainer and it was my job to manually crank the gun mount in the horizontal plane. The guy on the other side controlled the vertical plane. A third guy called a Fire Control Technician controlled the twin 40MM that I sat on and two additional single 40MM guns. He was the guy with the trigger. When General Quarters was sounded -just like in the movies - we ran to our posts while tucking our pant legs into our socks, buttoning our shirts all the way and donning a life vest and steel helmet. Everyone had to be in place in about one minute. The one thing absent in our gear was hearing protection and you can see that my left ear was about 20" from the gun. It was very loud and fortunately we didn't fire the guns very often.
This is all that remains of our ship. It now resides at an American Legion memorial park in Alpharetta, GA so it was so cool to see it and feel it for the first time since 1966.