Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture.

Thanks for joining us today on the Wild Builder show.

Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton.

And we're going to do something a little different here.

So normally we have Good News Friday.

That's almost every Friday.

Sometimes we have some interruptions with special programming or whatever.

But we have not been able to catch up with all the good news in 2025 that has happened already.

Of course, last weekend, an amazing weekend with Easter and the celebration of the shot heard around the world,

250th of Lexington and Concord, just so many good things. But last Friday, we didn't get to anywhere

near the amount of good news you guys wanted to cover.

And we said we might do a good news Monday. Well, let's do it. Let's have a Monday. What could we call this? Start the week? I don't know. I'm not even going to try. Let's just jump in and pick up where we left

off last weekend. David, get us started with some good news at the beginning of the week this time instead of the end of the week. Well, this one's going to start with kind of an unusual story, a historical story. And it goes back to, we've mentioned a couple times over

the last few weeks, that one of the books are working on right now in the American story, the next

one of the series deals with World War II, especially World War II and stories with World War II

and things out of World War II. And one of the things that I think most Americans know very little about would be the

merchant marine.

You know, we know the branches of the federal government, get the Army, the Navy, the Air Force,

the Space Force, et cetera.

The Marines, very few people know that the merchant marine is actually one of the services

and they have a service academy like

you have west point or like you have annapolis etc there's the merchant marine academy and so there

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