An elegy thought over the carrion of a nighthawk

This was really such a startling picture to come across. The F-117 Nighthawk was certainly for me, and I think at least for many boys growing up around the collapse of the Soviet Union, the quintisential icon of the infinite possibility of American military technology. It was The Stealth Fighter, invisible, invincible, built of a super high tech material that would absorb radar and make the whole plane look no bigger than a sparrow upon an enemy’s screen. It was super top secret, and even knowing about it gave one the sense of some how being included in all of that intrigue and magic. But, if WE know about THIS, can you just imagine all the things they are not telling us? They must even more fantastic things, maybe even X-Files and secret UFO technology. They did, after all, develop and test it at Area 51.

But now here it is. Torn apart by an ordinary Caterpillar excavator, reduced to a formless tangle of industrial material, like one saw in the pictures dispatched from New Orleans, or South Ossetia. Giving up the ghost, the spell is broke, the charm is flown. There was so much promise in you, oh Nighthawk. Yours was a special place, a harbinger from the coast, signaling the floods would soon recede and Eden would be reclaimed. But as they have stripped you of your feathers, we too must go naked for a season.