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thedrifter
03-03-09, 06:44 AM
Retired Marine: ‘Future is in good hands’
By Cierra Putman
The Baytown Sun

Published March 1, 2009
Lt. Col. Claude Lott sees examples of patriotism around him all the time.

“We think we know what patriotism is but it is more than just a love of country,” the Marine Corp veteran and longtime ROTC instructor said as he spoke to a meeting of Baytown’s Evening Pilot Club last week.

“Sure, it means love of country but it also means love of each other because we are this country,” he explained.

Lott spent more than 26 years in the Marines and then 15 years as the Senior Marine ROTC instructor at Baytown’s Ross S. Sterling High School. He is now retired.

“You are patriots,” he told the Evening Pilots, a club whose main focus is on brain-related disorders, traumatic brain injuries and teaching children to protect their brains. “You are going out and helping others who can’t help themselves. Patriotism is helping others for the good of the country and the good of the community.”

Lott said he saw numerous examples of patriotism in the Baytown area as people from all over the country came to help after Hurricane Ike.

“I was in Louisiana when the hurricane hit and I couldn’t get back until after the storm passed,” he said. “All the way here, while I was driving, all I saw was a long stream of trucks – trucks with license plates from other states, coming to help, bringing in supplies and manpower.”

Those people who came to help are patriots, he said.

Lott saw many examples of patriotism among those teenage students that he taught in ROTC.

“Judging by the kids I worked with, the future is in good hands,” he said.

He has seen many of his students go on to serve in Iraq, not because they had to but because they wanted to, because they are patriots.

He said he has seen young military personnel come back from Iraq and choose to go back, not because they had to but because their buddies were still there and because they are patriots.

“They didn’t join the military for money or fame or glory,” he said. “They joined because they are patriots.”

Lott directed his audience’s attention to another guest, the husband of a club member.

Don McFarland, a former commander of Baytown’s VFW Post 912, was there during a Korean winter in 1950 when a U.S. Marine Division faced what would become known as the Marine Corps’ defining moment – the Frozen Chosin – where Marines fought through seeming insurmountable odds, in temperatures that reached to 40 degrees and even 50 degrees below zero, to reach other Marines surrounded by enemies and then fight their way to the safety of evacuation ships waiting some 74 miles away, getting all their wounded and many wounded enemy soldiers out, as well as 100,000 refugees desperate to escape certain death at the hands of the North Koreans and Chinese.

“They put their lives on the line. They did what they had to do because it was the right thing to do. That is patriotism,” said Lott.

Ellie