Growing Up as an Air ForceMilitary Brat
I am the son of a man who started out in life as a private in the Army Air Corps and retired as a Chief Warrant Officer in grade 4 after thirty years of service in the United States Air Force. He was a "Mustang" in the military parlance—enlisted to officer without a college degree.
My mother was once a teacher in a small school in Idaho. She moved to Denver and taught photo reconnaissance interpretation to pilots and aircrews at Lowry Air Force Base. Mom and Dad met at a USO dance in Denver, got married in Boca Rotan, Florida, returned to Lowry, and bought a small house in the Denver North Park Hill neighborhood. Living "inside the fortress" started when Dad was moved from Lowry to Sandia Labs and Los Alamos and then moved again to Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, Texas. We next PCSed (Permanent Change of Station) to a Nato base in Morrocco for three years, then back to Lowry, then again to a Nato base in England—RAF Marham in East Anglia.
I went to school at Lakenheath AFB — a one-hour-long bus drive each way. We lived in England for four and a half years and then returned again to Lowry in the summer of 1964. So, I was a boy in the Air Force "Fortress" for seventeen years. I had my final high school senior year in Denver, went to college for four years, and opted to get a master's degree in computer science. Following that was the USAF, Burroughs, US Customs Service, and finally Trusted Communications Products.
My college and AF years were all during the Vietnam War era in Southeast Asia—a time when the "draft" was the MAJOR driver of what most of us did. People born after the shutdown of the war can read all they want to about it, but such people can never really know what the experience was at the level of body and mind. As it turned out, however, my draft number in 1968 was 351, so had I not taken AF-ROTC in college, I could have escaped the draft and gone on with my life.
I am not going to try to fully explain what growing up as a military-dependent was all about. Mary Edwards Wertsch does that better in her book of "Military Brats - Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress." She does a better job of explaining what being a dependent actually means and how the experience places its stamp on all who transit the process.
I will say that, in retrospect, being a Brat really did prepare me for my software career in a way that no other process could do. This is despite all the trials and complications that came from regularly moving around and not having a real "home life."
My first real visual memory comes from being four years old at our meager clapboard house in the enlisted housing project just off the southeast end of the Carswell runway. I am looking at the front door from the living room and realizing that Dad was not there with us. He rarely was with us; instead, he was off on TDY for long flight training and shake-out trips. I did not know it at the time, but he was with training groups preparing to carry nuclear bombs to be dropped from B-36 aircraft.
You can see them in the 1955 "Strategic Air Command" film starring James Stewart and June Allison. The film story identifies the same Carswell AFB as the one seen in the movie. There is one place in the film where the camera view almost shows where we lived. There was a huge tornado that ripped through the base one night while I was sleeping in the house, but I must have blocked the memory out, given the terrifying damage of the winds to the base and aircraft out on the tarmac.
Our family moved around so much that we got into the mindset of, "Well, after five years here, it is now time to move again." This is an ingrained emotion that is in constant conflict with the desire for stability in life—regardless of the costs or consequences. I have better memories of Morocco than Denver or Texas. It is a beautiful country. Full of deserts, flat plains, green rolling countrysides, and even mountains that have ski resorts.
We lived in an olive plantation main house on the outskirts of Petijean — within driving distance of Roman ruins, shanty towns, abject poverty, and Muslim cities that we could go into during the day but were forced to leave before sunset. We lived in an Islamic country—something that the vast majority of Americans will never, ever do.
My mother almost got killed one day when she accidentally hit a man's donkey with the family car; when she was the only person in the car, the local people started beating on the outside of the car and threatened to pull her out and stone or beat her to death.
Lowry was our sort-of "home base," which we came back to after an overseas assignment—so-called "accompanied" postings. Fun fact: BRAT is an acronym for British Regiment Attached Traveler. We lived for a while in the Lowry family housing project in the corner between Lowry proper and the east-west runway extension.
These were large two-story multi-family buildings arranged around a central dirt or scratched grass area. We had communal fire boxes in each area for incineration of trash. I do not really recall seeing any trash barrels that were for pickup by the Denver sanitation department.
There was a time in Denver when everyone had their own outside incinerator in the backyard. Somehow, Mom and Dad raised the money for us to move to a never-previously-occupied brand-new house in the Virginia Vale neighborhood southeast of Leetsdale Drive and east of Holly Street.
We lived there for five years before being posted to England. Dad was assigned to a Nato detachment (2000) on RAF Marham. We lived out in the country in the little hamlet of East Bradenham for a year or two, then moved on base to Officer Housing just off the major East-West runway. Dad's place of work was visible from the backyard, which was adjacent to the base fence line. Dad's PCS posting ended in June of 1964, and we returned to Lowry.
We got a different house in the same neighborhood, and I graduated from GW High School in 1965. My father had a younger brother who was a professor of Veterinary Medicine at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. So, that was the natural place for me to go for college. My grades were not good enough for admittance at CU Boulder—despite the fact that the perception was that my parents could not afford my going there.
So I applied to CSU, signed up for AF-ROTC, graduated in June 1969, and was commissioned a 2nd Lt in the US Air Force Reserve. Normally, such new graduates, being commissioned, immediately went on active duty—this during the Vietnam War. I requested a stay to get a master's degree, but the Air Force acquiesced and gave me a two-year delay.
So, I drove out to Corvallis, Oregon, and joined the Mathematics Department at Oregon State University, which had a fledgling offering in Computer Science. I met the first love of my life—Marianne Carleson (1944-2002), lived with her for a few months, finished my orals, got my degree diploma, and pissed her off to no end when my orders to report for active duty arrived in the mail. I did not exactly get kicked out, but the parting was difficult.
I saw her once again some four years later in San Diego, where she told me flat out, "Don't expect to be getting back together with me again!" Marianne was an accomplished amateur astrologer, and she got me into dipping into the rabbit hole of understanding the depths of working astrology. See my related notes on "Know Thyself" elsewhere on this site.
Being a military dependent in the Air Force, the Army, Navy, Marines, or the US Foreign Service is a life-stamping activity that people on the outside can never really understand. I wish Hollywood or maybe some indie studio would make a movie about the experience, but I doubt that the cost of the effort would ever be recovered in ticket sales or residuals.
My mother was once a teacher in a small school in Idaho. She moved to Denver and taught photo reconnaissance interpretation to pilots and aircrews at Lowry Air Force Base. Mom and Dad met at a USO dance in Denver, got married in Boca Rotan, Florida, returned to Lowry, and bought a small house in the Denver North Park Hill neighborhood. Living "inside the fortress" started when Dad was moved from Lowry to Sandia Labs and Los Alamos and then moved again to Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, Texas. We next PCSed (Permanent Change of Station) to a Nato base in Morrocco for three years, then back to Lowry, then again to a Nato base in England—RAF Marham in East Anglia.
I went to school at Lakenheath AFB — a one-hour-long bus drive each way. We lived in England for four and a half years and then returned again to Lowry in the summer of 1964. So, I was a boy in the Air Force "Fortress" for seventeen years. I had my final high school senior year in Denver, went to college for four years, and opted to get a master's degree in computer science. Following that was the USAF, Burroughs, US Customs Service, and finally Trusted Communications Products.
My college and AF years were all during the Vietnam War era in Southeast Asia—a time when the "draft" was the MAJOR driver of what most of us did. People born after the shutdown of the war can read all they want to about it, but such people can never really know what the experience was at the level of body and mind. As it turned out, however, my draft number in 1968 was 351, so had I not taken AF-ROTC in college, I could have escaped the draft and gone on with my life.
I am not going to try to fully explain what growing up as a military-dependent was all about. Mary Edwards Wertsch does that better in her book of "Military Brats - Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress." She does a better job of explaining what being a dependent actually means and how the experience places its stamp on all who transit the process.
I will say that, in retrospect, being a Brat really did prepare me for my software career in a way that no other process could do. This is despite all the trials and complications that came from regularly moving around and not having a real "home life."
My first real visual memory comes from being four years old at our meager clapboard house in the enlisted housing project just off the southeast end of the Carswell runway. I am looking at the front door from the living room and realizing that Dad was not there with us. He rarely was with us; instead, he was off on TDY for long flight training and shake-out trips. I did not know it at the time, but he was with training groups preparing to carry nuclear bombs to be dropped from B-36 aircraft.
You can see them in the 1955 "Strategic Air Command" film starring James Stewart and June Allison. The film story identifies the same Carswell AFB as the one seen in the movie. There is one place in the film where the camera view almost shows where we lived. There was a huge tornado that ripped through the base one night while I was sleeping in the house, but I must have blocked the memory out, given the terrifying damage of the winds to the base and aircraft out on the tarmac.
Our family moved around so much that we got into the mindset of, "Well, after five years here, it is now time to move again." This is an ingrained emotion that is in constant conflict with the desire for stability in life—regardless of the costs or consequences. I have better memories of Morocco than Denver or Texas. It is a beautiful country. Full of deserts, flat plains, green rolling countrysides, and even mountains that have ski resorts.
We lived in an olive plantation main house on the outskirts of Petijean — within driving distance of Roman ruins, shanty towns, abject poverty, and Muslim cities that we could go into during the day but were forced to leave before sunset. We lived in an Islamic country—something that the vast majority of Americans will never, ever do.
My mother almost got killed one day when she accidentally hit a man's donkey with the family car; when she was the only person in the car, the local people started beating on the outside of the car and threatened to pull her out and stone or beat her to death.
Lowry was our sort-of "home base," which we came back to after an overseas assignment—so-called "accompanied" postings. Fun fact: BRAT is an acronym for British Regiment Attached Traveler. We lived for a while in the Lowry family housing project in the corner between Lowry proper and the east-west runway extension.
These were large two-story multi-family buildings arranged around a central dirt or scratched grass area. We had communal fire boxes in each area for incineration of trash. I do not really recall seeing any trash barrels that were for pickup by the Denver sanitation department.
There was a time in Denver when everyone had their own outside incinerator in the backyard. Somehow, Mom and Dad raised the money for us to move to a never-previously-occupied brand-new house in the Virginia Vale neighborhood southeast of Leetsdale Drive and east of Holly Street.
We lived there for five years before being posted to England. Dad was assigned to a Nato detachment (2000) on RAF Marham. We lived out in the country in the little hamlet of East Bradenham for a year or two, then moved on base to Officer Housing just off the major East-West runway. Dad's place of work was visible from the backyard, which was adjacent to the base fence line. Dad's PCS posting ended in June of 1964, and we returned to Lowry.
We got a different house in the same neighborhood, and I graduated from GW High School in 1965. My father had a younger brother who was a professor of Veterinary Medicine at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. So, that was the natural place for me to go for college. My grades were not good enough for admittance at CU Boulder—despite the fact that the perception was that my parents could not afford my going there.
So I applied to CSU, signed up for AF-ROTC, graduated in June 1969, and was commissioned a 2nd Lt in the US Air Force Reserve. Normally, such new graduates, being commissioned, immediately went on active duty—this during the Vietnam War. I requested a stay to get a master's degree, but the Air Force acquiesced and gave me a two-year delay.
So, I drove out to Corvallis, Oregon, and joined the Mathematics Department at Oregon State University, which had a fledgling offering in Computer Science. I met the first love of my life—Marianne Carleson (1944-2002), lived with her for a few months, finished my orals, got my degree diploma, and pissed her off to no end when my orders to report for active duty arrived in the mail. I did not exactly get kicked out, but the parting was difficult.
I saw her once again some four years later in San Diego, where she told me flat out, "Don't expect to be getting back together with me again!" Marianne was an accomplished amateur astrologer, and she got me into dipping into the rabbit hole of understanding the depths of working astrology. See my related notes on "Know Thyself" elsewhere on this site.
Being a military dependent in the Air Force, the Army, Navy, Marines, or the US Foreign Service is a life-stamping activity that people on the outside can never really understand. I wish Hollywood or maybe some indie studio would make a movie about the experience, but I doubt that the cost of the effort would ever be recovered in ticket sales or residuals.