Air Force Brat

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  I loved living in the trailer. I remember a cozy little bunk bed built into the trailer wall and the trailer was close to the playground. I remember being able to lie in my bunk, my window inches from my face, and blissfully watch the moon dip in and out of the night clouds while I snuggled in my bed. I remember dropping bath oil beads in my bathtub in that tiny trailer, dressing up, and meeting my new base friends for square dancing or bingo or games at the base rec club. Today, when I see pictures of that trailer, looking like something the Okies would drag behind them on the way out west, I think how appalled my parents must have been with their dress whites, cocktails and little-black-dress lifestyle. Even now, when I see the pictures, I’m stunned because I don’t remember it like that at all.

  For us kids, it was all heaven. Military heaven.

  Every day at four o’clock, a tape of Taps would play over the loudspeaker. We kids were usually on the playground at that time, but no matter where you were, you’d stop, face in the direction of a nearby flag and salute or place your hand over your heart. Cars would stop where they were, purchases would halt in mid-transaction, the base movie would freeze, the bartender at the O Club would pause in mid-pour, and all of us would be reminded of who we were and what we represented.

  Our Camelot lasted a brief six months before we were transferred in June 1963 to Germany and what would be a whole new set of adventures. Chambley Air Base closed for good on March 1967 when DeGaulle ordered all American forces from French soil.

  Chapter Nine

  A Conquering Army in a Conquered Land

  Our move to Germany was marked by a sort of foreboding in that we were stopped at the border between France and Germany and not immediately allowed to proceed. I should say, not initially allowed to proceed with me. Although I had quickly gone back to American ways and styles of dress once we lived on base at Chambley, when I found out we were leaving France for Germany, my loyalties to France came surging to the foreground.

  While we were living in France with the French point of view we kids could maintain a philosophy about France as our ally and Germany as, well, not. Most kids prefer a black and white view on things that is easier to hold and defend. The idea that we were moving to Germany totally translated in my mind into the idea that we were moving to the enemy country. To Hitler’s country. To where the Nazi’s came from. As a result, once we knew we were moving, I dug out my old tabliers, tied my hair back in its customary long pigtail down my back, and reverted to speaking French again. My father noticed and simply mentioned to me as he tucked us all into our ancient Nash station wagon that would take us to Kaiserslautern in Germany, that he would greatly appreciate my not speaking French to anyone outside the family that day. I instantly agreed to this somewhat cryptic request and set my eyes on our new life across the border in l’Allemand.

  The border was a busy one, similar to the one between America and Canada that we’d been to a few times. The German soldiers were the first German soldiers my brothers and I had ever seen that weren’t in the movies or on television. They seemed officious but pleasant enough.

  Our car was packed to the gunnels with bags and boxes. While we had no furniture overseas, my parents had been collecting sets of crystal, china and other special touches to add to their future home back in America. Airmen had swept into the tiny trailer the day before, wrapped and boxed everything and swept out like packing-fairies. Most of our things would be waiting for us at our apartment in Germany.

  The excitement of finally reaching the border, seeing the German soldiers, and realizing we were about to enter Germany for the first time totally knocked my father’s quiet request from my memory. So when the nice German border guard poked his head in the car window and chatted with my parents so pleasantly and then asked me the very innocent question of “So, are you happy to be going to Germany?” in French, I responded immediately. In French. After that, we sat at the border for nearly four hours, our things stacked and piled up on the side of the car, while my father convinced four German and two French officials that I was, in fact, not French. My French schoolgirl outfit and country accent certainly made it appear that he was trying to take a French citizen into Germany. To my Dad’s unending credit, he never gave me a cross word or even an eye roll for all the trouble I’d caused. Maybe he knew what a good story it would make down the road.

  Kaiserslautern, Germany is eighty miles southwest of Frankfurt and 295 miles northeast of Paris. It’s nestled in the hills west of the Rhine River Valley, on the edge of the Pfalz forest, a one hour drive from the French border to the west, an hour and a half from Luxembourg and Belgium to the northeast, and five hours from Switzerland to the south. Our new home was in the Western Area Command (WACOM), then known as the French Zone of a Germany that was divided among the four occupying powers. The Kaiserslautern Military Community, a combined branch community, (Navy-Army-Air Force) is now and was then the largest overseas US military community, with 58,800 Military personnel and their dependents. The name "K-Town" was used by the Americans as shorthand for “Kaiserslautern.”

  While our family was billeted at “K-Town,” my father worked at Sembach Air Base. This was a Front-Line NATO Air Base during the Cold War which housed a variety of USAF Tactical Reconnaissance, Close-Air Support and Tactical Air Control units. Located in rolling farm country ten miles north of Kaiserslautern, just off the Mannheim/Saarbruecken Autobahn, amid the vineyards of the Rhine Valley, the Sembach was constructed in the French Zone of Occupation under French direction, for use by NATO forces and intended to be an American Airbase from the start. Less than five years after the war, US authorities officially took over the construction site from he French and named it Sembach Air Auxiliary Field. 1

  On any Rhine river cruise trip to Germany you will see mile after mile of medieval castle ruins dotting the horizon. France has a bunch, too, but they seem (like most things left to the French to maintain) to be in far worse shape than the castles found in Germany. We kids were lucky in that, while, it’s true, we didn’t have bombs and dead bodies and bunkers in Germany, (as I mentioned before, the Germans tidied everything up before we got there) we did have a very large, very cool castle in our backyard.

  This area of Germany was similar to the area we had just left in that, historically, it had been continually invaded and occupied—this time by the French. Our castle was a magnificent specimen of this constant antagonism with France.

  Hohenecken Castle was a spectacular ruin with a moat, a dungeon and peripheral turret walls largely intact and situated about two miles from our apartment. We kids probably played in it once a month of the full two years that we lived in Germany. We would pack up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a blanket, and sometimes a transistor radio, and head out to spend the day at the castle. We never saw anybody else at the castle the whole of the time we lived there, and so claimed it as our personal playground.

  Built in 1149 at the top of a very steep hill studded with boulders and sharp rocks and wayward bushes, Hohenecken Castle was hidden from view until you turned the last corner and it suddenly loomed up on you.

  Hohenecken was an amazing experience for a kid. To look at it today, that’s hard to imagine. It’s just an old ruin. Just boulders and dark, creepy windowless dungeons. But you could stand on one of the stone stools in the narrow towers and look out the slits and imagine an archer standing just where you were, sweating with fear and excitement, and preparing to defend the castle. You could imagine the cooks laboring in the hot, dark kitchen that ran nearly the full length of the castle to feed everyone while you munched your Frito-Lays and drank your Coca-colas or thermos full of Kool-Aid. And because we felt so proprietary of the castle, and spent so much time there, we began to feel how earlier inhabitants must have felt toward it—admiring how the rising sun striking off the western rock face of the castle (we camped there a couple times) and made the whole west side turn rose-pink. We built campfires in the middle of the Castle floor and sat around it.

  On
ce, I stupidly jumped ten feet from a top parapet to an interestingly looking ledge on the outside of the castle and was stuck there for two hours while my brothers tried to figure out how to get me down without my breaking a leg. The ledge was at least fifteen feet up from the ground. Eventually, Tommy fashioned a fireman’s net out of our picnic blanket with Kevin and Terry holding a side. I jumped into it, immediately ripping the blanket out of everyone’s hands and skinning my knee as I landed. But we still counted it as a great day.

  As you approached the castle, there was a large statue of a German soldier hidden in the bushes off the pathway. The soldier was complete with helmet and potato masher gripped in an upraised fist. While it was hidden, it appeared that someone was tending to it since the weeds were pulled from the base and there were often flowers set around it in small vases. My brothers and I all felt that it was an unusual statue to be found in a country so determined to pretend that nothing had really happened during the war. We loved the fierce expression on the soldier’s face, and, of course, the “potato masher” that he seemed to be caught in the act of throwing. As a child, the statue and the fact that someone tended it appeared as a guilty declaration that the Germans weren’t really sorry for what they had done. My father explained to us that the statue was a village’s determination to honor its war dead. After that, it saddened me that the people who felt strongly enough to erect it and take care of it, felt they also needed to hide it.

  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 direc
tions, 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.