Air Force Brat (9 page)

While we kids now had a
television set for the first time in a year, we were only able to
get Armed Forces Radio & Television programs:
Ed Sullivan
, the
Andy Griffith Show
and
Combat
.
And while we loved
Combat
, we couldn’t help but wonder
why it was available to us while we were in Germany. I always felt
guilty watching it since the people it was really created
for—viewers sitting in their living rooms in the United States—had
the luxury of viewing the Germans as one dimensional bad guys and
we did not.

During World War II, more
than 60% of Kaiserslautern was destroyed by bombs from Allied
aircraft. By the time we got there, construction for newly
established garrisons of American troops had already brought
significant economic growth to the area. The difference between the
France we had just left—the victors in the last war—and the Germany
we were entering—the losers—was astounding. France was poor,
backward and still peeing in the streets. Germany not only
still
made all the
trains run on time, but it was rebuilding what it had before the
war and was constantly adding new technology. Plus, from my point
of view, they had the best street bratwrusts, the most magical
Christmas festivals, and some of the friendliest people I ever
met.

President Kennedy was
assassinated while we were living in Germany. My parents had many
experiences of being stopped in the streets by Germans
with tears in their eyes
to say how sorry they were to hear about our President. I
will always love France, but I can’t imagine that scenario
happening there.

EPILOGUE

It’s possible that the term “military brat”
is only considered a derogatory label if you weren’t one. Most
military dependents and ex-military dependents are happy to refer
to themselves Navy, Marine, Air Force or Army brats. The tag
alludes to the inclusion of a special club, but I think it also
connotes a spunkiness that, perhaps, the appreciation of which,
only resides in the collective childhoods of boomer military brats.
It’s very likely that whole idea of being a “brat” was a part of an
age belonging to the Jackie Coopers and Spanky McFarlanes of the
world, when a child with gumption wasn’t automatically considered a
monster or disobedient, but actually the hero of his or her own
story.

The military structure is, by definition, a
warrior culture. That’s its purpose. And it is this culture that
military brats live within and by which they are inevitably
shaped.

One way or the other.

I believe that a part of that culture is the
acceptance of loss. While I don’t have a formal study to back up my
view, I have found that the typical ex-military dependent reacts to
loss one of two ways later in life. Either they are very good with
things being taken from them and, unlike their civilian
counterparts, are able to shrug off the need to replace the lost
thing (or person) or they become completely stalled by the loss,
unable to move forward in any real sense.

I’d argue that now, as an adult, I tend to
shrug off loss quicker than my peers because of a childhood habit
of seeing so many things go away on a regular basis—homes,
schedules, schools, best friends—my whole world really (although
not my infrastructure since the military was always there to take
care of us whether it was Okinawa or Tullahoma.) I think the debit
side of this ability can be seen by the fact that I don’t tend to
become quite as invested in things, as perhaps I should.

It can go very strongly the other way too. I
know ex-dependents who have a striking fear of loss in
relationships. This fear can end up causing them to either avoid
relationships or break them off prematurely.

Not surprisingly, most military brats tend
to have a strong affinity for the military. We ex-brats don’t just
have a tolerance for the sounds of heavy aircraft but a downright
preference for it. This love of things military is born from being
in the “in” crowd for so long—the special passes, the gate guards
saluting your car as you entered the base, the wave of your ID card
that got you admittance into the Commissary, the BX or PX, the O
Club—all of the privileges of the special club to which you
belonged.

I have lived in thirty-four different places
in my life, sixteen of them before the age of twenty. When I buy a
house now and look lovingly at it with the key in my hand and the
ink barely dry on the mortgage, I do not imagine my grandchildren
bounding down the front porch or an endless parade of beloved pets
piling up in a backyard graveyard. I comfortably hold in my mind
the idea that this place is not permanent at the same time I think
of what trees and bushes I want to plant. Getting used to living in
temporary quarters is something military dependents understand.

Even if they never quite get used to it.

It doesn’t take much self-knowledge to
figure out that if one moved less, there would be an increased
likelihood of having a more established place in a community, and a
sense of belonging. Unfortunately for some Brats, and I am one of
them, the constant moving from my years as a military dependent set
in motion a continuum of needing to continue to move throughout my
life. It is a restlessness that had no real cost to me when I was
young, but has become increasingly inconvenient the older I get.
(Moving a lot, especially if it’s not backed by the US government
is expensive.)

Most military brats, especially the ones who
experienced overseas tours of duty with their families, have a
mechanism in place to explain why they are the way they are and how
growing up in the military may have shaped or affected that. Like
many of my adult friends who were ex-military dependents, I had pat
explanations for my impatience with sloth or tardiness. In fact, in
most cases, one didn’t need to even offer up an explanation, you
just needed to mention that your Dad was a retired Colonel. If you
were restless, the reason was because you moved a lot as a kid. If
you chose, tenaciously, to stay in one spot for the rest of your
life, the reason was the same—you moved around a lot as a kid.

Today, my brothers and I all share the
indelible markings of ex-military dependents. We have dined off our
stories of growing up in Europe our whole lives long. We have
chosen to either dig in at one location for the physical stability
that was always just out of reach growing up, or to continue the
journey of relentlessly moving, over and over again.

Most military brats find they have the
ability to mimic accents or pick up whole languages easily. There
is a larger percentage of ex-military brats who prefer to work for
themselves—like all three of my brothers and myself do—and who
would refuse to consider the idea of working in a
closely-supervised situation within an organization.

When we moved back to the States in 1965, we
settled back at Patrick A.F.B. My father built a home for us on the
side of AIA facing the Atlantic Ocean. We lived there for seven
years until we kids launched in different directions, looking to
find who we were meant to be, and until the Cape coasted to a
standstill when the space program transferred its focus to the
Shuttle program.

I traveled the world, married late and had a
son in 1994 who is crazy for jets and all things military. While I
still move around too much, at the request of my very patient
husband I’ve recently limited our moves to within the city of
Atlanta, where I work as a writer.

It seems it doesn’t matter where you come
from in this country or where you live. It’s hard enough to find
the home of your childhood in America. And yet, in Europe, you can
still stand on a lonely runway in a rural section of southeastern
France at the site of an abandoned American airbase, forty years
after you used to ride your bike alongside it, and nothing is
changed. The weeds, to be sure, trees, even, sprout from the cracks
in the tarmac—some even as tall as the control tower—but it’s still
there, not a window broken on either side.

My Dad, who retired in
1966, and became a first-tier engineer on all the Apollo moon
launches after leaving the Air Force in the mid-sixties, died in
1987. The following year, my mother and I returned to Chambley,
thirty years after we’d left it. We found Ars-sur-Moselle a tad
more modern and the wash house no longer in use. We drove to our
house and had lunch with the sweet old couple who had rented the
house to my father in the early sixties. The sewer was covered now,
making access difficult if not impossible, but the
boulangerie
, the
stationary shop, the
charcuterie
were exactly the same. My school had put in
bathrooms for the students.

At Chambley Air Force Base, the Americans
had taken the trailers. They had taken the F-84 Thunderstreaks. And
they had left everything else, from the popcorn boxes in the base
theatre, which I could clearly see when I looked in the door, to
the drape on the chapel altar. It had not been molested or touched,
since the day the Americans locked the front gate and walked
away.

I sat on the front bumper of the rental car
with my mother, looking out over where the playground still sat,
the swings and monkey bars an absurd sixties sculpture of rust and
rampant weeds as the wild French pasture attempted to reclaim its
own. We sat at the site of our trailer, and stared out over to
where the jets had come and gone in a constant, reassuring
background drone of engine roar the whole time we lived there.

And maybe, for a moment, hearing them
still.

###