A Memoir to My Son

 

A Memoir to My Son

3/14/2015

 

1/5/2015

Dear Son,

            Hi baby boy. I want to first of all tell you how much that I love you. As your father, I can’t even begin to express how much you mean to me and how much I want for your good. I figured it is time to start writing to you. First of all, I’m a writer at heart. It took me a long time in my life to realize this. I honestly can say that I have no other idea how to express myself so clearly. Secondly, what better way for you to get a history lesson about myself, but you as well? I absolutely do not want you going through the world, not knowing who you are.

            First of all I need you to know that there are a lot of things I can write to you. But I will spare you the time and keep things written in sections if I can. The most important thing that you need to know is these couple things: you and I are Jesus’s boys. By that I mean I took you to church every weekend that I had you from the time that you were roughly a year old, up until this current time. As of today, you are four years old. I taught you how to pray. I would read to you bible stories. I also picked you up from the church daycare every Sunday. I know your mommy was involved with taking you to church, but just know that as your daddy, I felt it was first and foremost important for you to know that there is at least something bigger than us out there. I would love you to believe that in fact there is a God who loved you before I ever laid eyes on you, and in fact he is the only one who loves you more than me, your mommy, and the rest of your mommy’s family does.

            Secondly I want you to know that I felt like I always needed you just as much as maybe you needed me. I’m going to write to you all the time about my memories from the time that you were born, up until the times that I write these letters. I’m going to show you that I made it through some pretty rough times because of my love for you.

            Finally I want you to always realize that even though life will not go how we want it to, there is an ultimate plan for your life just as there was a plan for my life. Luckily for me that plan included you. As your father I need to always be honest with you also; I will not always be around. Our bodies are just not meant to withstand the test of time and everyone eventually goes back home. The day you are ever left here and I don’t see you anymore; I want you to know that it will not remain that way forever. Jesus will reunite his boys together. You are my boy, and you’ll always be my boy forever. We’ll be together forever. So knowing that, I don’t want you to be sad. I want you to in fact be happy. I want you to always do things in life that make you happy. If you ever find yourself doing something that makes you unhappy, I want you to figure out what it is you need to do to change that. But I know you are a tough boy and will figure things out. We all eventually figure things out and better understand what we need to do. So I’m not trying to be sad or morbid here, I just want these few principles to always be a part of you. You can do what you want in this life. It may be hard and you will have to work hard at it, but that is what will be unique.

            So let’s move on to some history. I want to first tell you about how I met your mom. I met your mother from my time of doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I trained at a place called Easton Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I trained at their Denver location on Broadway and 3^rd avenue. That location closed, but that is where it was during that time. Your mother was working at the location down in Boulder Colorado. She worked for the head guy, Mr. Amal Easton. Well there was an Easter party for the academy up near downtown Denver, in which I met your mother. I’ll be honest, your mother was beautiful. I think a lot of the guys thought the same thing about her.

            I pursued your mother and I eventually started staying with her even though I had my own apartment down in downtown Denver, just off of Broadway and Center St. Your mother was going through a really hard time financially after a divorce. I was going through a really hard time because I had just come back home from Iraq and I was having a great deal of hardship adjusting to normal life again. I think me and your mother comforted each other through those difficult times. I felt like a loser because I couldn’t connect with people. Your mother had been abandoned by her then husband, leaving her with massive bills and other such things.

            Well I loved your mother very much. We got a place up here in Westminster, and if you ask me, I was more than willing to get her pregnant because there was just that strong desire in me. I wanted a son of my own. That desire turned out to be you. Of course, about a year later you were born. Things didn’t work out between me and your mother. That’s just the way things happen. I don’t blame her. I was good to your mother and I don’t think I was at fault. One thing that we both shared was our common commitment towards you. We both loved you dearly. Because of that, I decided I would take you as much as I could and raise you as best as I could while your mother raised you the rest of the time.

            Here’s the interesting thing to consider; when I had met your mother I had begun college. I first started out at Red Rocks Community College. I then transferred to Front Range Community College where I finished out my two year Associates degree. When that happened, I figured I’d go to Metropolitan State College. But after certain teachers recommend that I instead apply to the University of Colorado, I did that instead. I not only got in, but I also did very well there. I majored in Economics. I graduated with a 3.5 g.p.a.

            But that is not what I want to brag about. There are lots of people who go to college. What I want to brag about is that I did all those things while changing your poo poo diapers, feeding you, teaching you how to pray, teaching you how to walk, and taking you to church every Saturday night like clockwork. That is why I brag about college. I brag because I was with you the whole time. I think you got me through some of those tough nights when I could have easily quit. But I wanted you to be able to see me as your dad in the best light possible. I also wanted to accomplish something that so many people told me I was not good enough for. Now when I look back on it, those people who at first doubted me, and then those same people, who tried to bring me down after the fact, do not dishonor me, but they dishonor what all that meant to me. It was about you and me.

            Tonight I will leave this letter where it is. We have a lot to talk about. We have a lot of history to go over. This is very fun for me indeed. I love the shit out of you boy.

 

Until next time.

 

1/8/2015

A Mother’s Love

 

Little-Son,

            My boy, I would have written to you a couple days earlier, but you know that job that daddy always tells you about; the “Airplane Work”. Well I had to go out of town for a few days and do some work that kept me most days away from the computer to write to you. But here I am again. I even spoke to you early this morning. I called your mommy so that we could speak. That conversation, and that memory, brings up my next point in this history lesson that I your father, will be giving you. This part is about a mother’s love.

            This morning I called you from Peterson Air Force Base, down in Colorado Springs. Talking to you the first thing during the day, instantly made that a good day. The joy that you express to me because you know it’s me calling you instantly makes me feel like the most important human being on the planet. I told you that I was at my airplane work and that I would be picking you up in a few days. You were excited and asked me if we were going to play some of your favorite games on my IPad. I told you of course, and that I was looking forward to it. You then began to tell me how your day was, and how you and your mommy were out doing stuff. I assume mommy had some errands to run and she had brought you with her. I think I tried to explain a little bit about my day to you, but I think at this point we are keeping our phone conversations rather simple. I told you goodbye and that I loved you. You told me the same and then I heard you with excitement talk to your mommy about your daddy.

            Son, my earliest memories in life are exactly at the age you are in right now. And they were with my own mommy. I was four years old. I remember almost exactly to the day when my memory began. Or at least I know what I remember and what was going on. Your grandmother, or at least my momma, and I lived in a place in downtown Denver. Her name was Susan. I remember how much I loved her as a little boy. She had bright reddish hair. I was her world back then. I remember we didn’t have much. In fact I would bet to say we had very little besides each other. My mom worked at a car wash and we lived near what is called Five-Points in what is today considered the rougher part of town.

            I remember going all over the city with her. She would take me with her to work. I don’t know how that all worked out but I also remember her taking me out on errands too. We didn’t have a car so we walked everywhere when the weather was warm enough and I also remember we rode the bus when it wasn’t warm enough. I remember the warm days and I remember the cold days. I remember us visiting friends. I remember mom used to take me to her favorite hang outs. Those hang outs included local dive-bars and pool joints.

            There was one thing that I could always remember; I was extremely jealous of the idea of another boy in her life. I didn’t want her to have any boyfriends. Even at such a young age I remember that I wanted to be the number one and I think for a while I actually was. There is one thing that poverty will do to a person; it will make you value a person and or person over possessions. Or maybe it’s just in every boy to not only love his mamma, but to need that unconditional love. It’s kind of interesting that as a man, my earliest memories are of those memories. I bet even now, you yourself are going through that exact moment with your own mommy. For that I am glad. Boys are designed to love their mammas, good, bad, old, ugly, or not. Even if the relationship changes, I think that initially, that’s the way it is.

            Your Grandma was 23 when she had me. I was born in Denver General Hospital, located on 6^th and Broadway. Whenever I walk downtown, there are certain things that I may notice, that remind me of this time in my life. Sometimes when a building downtown is undergoing upgrades or construction, they build protective barriers for the pedestrians to walk through. They are covered so that the workers above don’t drop tools or other foreign objects on pedestrians. The walkway also usually has a sidewall, facing the street, and protecting the pedestrian as well. So it’s basically a tunnel that you are walking though that has open views or windows if you will, so that you can still see the area around you, like the cars on the streets nearby. When I see these or walk through them, today, I remember your Grandma. I remember her because I remember thinking those tunnels were the neatest thing to walk-through as a kid.

            What I also remember as a kid walking through downtown, were the very pretty business-ladies. I also remember the men in very nice business suits. But I mostly remember the ladies. My mother used to tell me stories when I got older about how I would always try to flirt with these ladies and talk to them. Of course you are the same way. When I go to public with you, I can almost guarantee that if a pretty lady walks by, you will say hi and begin by telling them your name. it’s amazing the reaction that you get because you are not even 5 years old yet, yet you are doing the very thing that ladies love and many a man are either afraid to do, or don’t know how to do. In your innocence, you show your interest in beauty and flirt with it. I will tell you that most ladies love this on any given day. So this is always a fun show to see when you do it because you are also a handsome little guy, and they nearly trip over themselves when you do it.

            So we will talk about your grandma some more. Tonight, I leave you with this beautiful image of innocence from every angle; the innocence that is of the way you love your momma and the way she loves you, the innocence of the relationship that I had with my own mother that I experienced when my memories started to remain with me. And I rest that with the innocence that you take me back to when you answer the phone and scream hello daddy, and tell me about your day. I love you boy.

Yours,

Daddy

1/9/2015

Ode To My Family

 

 

 

Little-Son,

            How are you my boy? Today I just worked, worked out a lot and then went and trained some Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. You know the Jiu Jitsu Academy otherwise as, “wrestling school”. Well my boy, it’s back down to this history business. Last time I spoke to you, I spoke about a mother’s love; both the love that you experience and the love I long ago experienced at your age. It’s a beautiful thing. It is now time to move along.

            Son, right now you are four years old. There is no way you should be reading any of this anytime soon. As a matter of fact, I want you to do nothing but enjoy a long time of playing with your toys, hanging out with me and the other people who love you and being the child that you are. I write these letters because one day you are going to want to know who you are, where you came from, and where you are going. I personally do not know what is in the cards for either one of us. Right now I just know that I will live out the remaining years of my life loving you, your sister and doing the best to provide and protect the both of you.

            Having said that, I must as your father/writer/historian write with as much honesty as I can. First of all, it does you no favors if I hold back. Secondly as a writer, I can’t do it with a clear conscience and you will be able to tell that it is not honest writing. Thirdly, it’s when you get to the ugly truth that you can see the true beauty in life. The truth is what sets you free. I am not here to lie to you.

            The first person in this family history that I want to talk about is your Grandmother. I’ll write to you everything I know about her. Let’s get started. Your Grandmother’s name was Susan Florence. She was the daughter of the late Kenneth Florence and the late Mary Jane Kane. She was born in Virginia. Her birthday was October 29, 1954 (I believe). She was born in a navy hospital as Kenneth Florence was a Navy man. I’ll get more into your Great Grandpa Kenneth later. I will be writing about Great Grandma Mary as well. If someone off the street were to ask me to describe my mother in one sentence, I would say this, “My mother was a real life gangster”. I’m not here to glorify anything. I’m just here to say it as it should be said.

            To understand my mother, you have to go back to her mother. May Jane was a former Marine. Like all Marines, once a Marine, always a Marine. She joined when she was not even old enough to buy alcohol. She was 15 years old when she joined and she got a medical discharge for cancer at a very young age. The military and other doctors told her that she only had so long to live. I think it was like a year or so. Her running joke was that she outlived all the doctors who told her she only had so long to live. To tell you the truth, I believe her because she was one mean as lady. But she was also a raging alcoholic. If men can be considered womanizers, then she could have been considered a manizer. She could manipulate the system, men, and family, to get whatever she wanted. Her survival skills were apparently the likes of any Danielle Steel book. But she was a miserable woman, and she dragged, destroyed, and humiliated each one of her kid’s lives by her alcoholism and destructive life style.

            They all lived back in the time when people didn’t generally lose custody of their children unless they were severely injuring or nearly killing them. Your Grandma told me countless stories of her coming home from school to find her mom black out drunk. Food was never cooked. There were always different men around. Alcohol was always present. Your Great grandma had sic kids. There was Grandma Susan (my mom), Uncle Ken, Uncle Allen, Uncle Tom, Aunt Pat and Aunt Jean. In some way or another she made it her damndest to destroy each and every one of her kid’s lives.

            Focusing on your grandma, your grandma spent nearly all of her teen years in and out of the foster system, juvenile hall, or moments of time back home with her mother who was cruel, mean, cold, and manipulative. The stories my mother told me would horrify even the hardened of people. My mother was usually going in and out of juvenile hall for doing things like running away, small time offenses of thievery and not going to school. Mom would tell me about incredibly shy she was around boy because she got used to being around only girls in the jails. When she would get out, she’d be around boys again at school which terrified her, and so to her it was easy to not go to school. She spiraled into a life of low self-esteem, drugs, crime and criminal boyfriends.

            By the time she had me, my own mother had done some prison time in the Federal System for escaping from a New Mexican jail. Her boyfriend helped her escape. They were able to cross state lines which automatically made her a Federal fugitive. I honestly don’t know how many times my mother was incarcerated by the time she had me. She was a white girl who grew up in the streets of San Diego, California. She had gang tattoos removed from her body by the time I knew her, but she had the triangular 3 dot tattoo on her arm representing, “Mi Vida Loca”. She ran with the Hispanic girls. Your grandma told me about what it’s like to stab a big black lady in prison who tried to steal from her.  She told me about the time when she would have court dates and the Judge wanted to let her go, but her mother would never show up because she was too drunk to give a shit, so she’s always go back to the custody of the state. She grew up in the system so that by the time I grew up remembering her, she was the hardest person that I not only ever knew, but the hardest person I think I will ever know. She had the heart of a killer, but people also loved her very dearly because she didn’t put up with no bullshit.

            Son…sitting here writing about this, I don’t know how anyone could have survived that kind of stuff. The one story that probably sticks out the most is the story about her coming home after being released from juvenile hall. I think by this point, there was already quite a few disappointments in my mom’s life when it came to your great grandma. I still don’t think that prepared her for coming home and her seeing her mother passed out at the bottom of the stairs and her nearly dying from an alcohol induced stroke. I don’t know the full story but for some reason they had to remove a large portion of her mother’s stomach. The stroke also left her paralyzed on half her body. My mother ended up saving the life of the woman who had abandoned her and the other siblings all their lives. The natural love that a child has for her mother came into conflict with the person who hated everything she represented, and I think that moment broke and destroyed my mother.

             Now I don’t want to write so much in one sitting. There is a lot more to talk about. How do I reconcile this? How do I justify writing this to you? Your life is full of love. You are a precious gem to not only me, but so many people. Maybe the only person who has been trying to reconcile this is me, because all this nasty stuff has nothing to do with you or me. I am just the historian here.

            This is just one part of the story. I will be writing about all the people from my side of the family. Yet I will also abandon that part eventually to go onto my own life and the adventures I have been able to live. This is not meant to be a sad story, and this is not meant to glorify or to put down any of the members in this story. It is meant to exist for the sole purpose of knowing what the past is, yet knowing your ability for the future.

            I am going to close for tonight. Just know that when you read this, that I love you very much. I have never let you leave my site without telling you that, and making sure that you always knew that your daddy loves you…and always will

 

Love, Daddy

 

1/10/2015

Paradiso. A Memoir of my Cuban Step-Pops

 

“World politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended; ‘a war to end all wars’. But it merely ended art. It did not end war” ---Jose Lima. Cuban Poet, Novelist, and Essayist.

 

Little-Son,

            Que Pasa y Yo te qierro (How are you, and I love you!). My boy, today we go into some history of the time that a man of Hispanic origin entered my life. His name is Pedro Del Rio. In the last essay, I wrote about the humble beginnings with your grandma. I spoke of her background, and where she came from. Up until this point I have mentioned what it was like to be nearly your age and my first recollections of her. Now it’s time to move on to the time when we had a new member added to the family.

            So Pedro to me was always “Peter”. He met my mother sometime around the time that I can remember my earliest memories. I must have been roughly 5 years old. Your grandma and I were living in our place in Downtown Idaho Springs. Back then I don’t think he could fully speak English. Now mind you, I am writing all of this from my own witness accounts, and from word of mouth from the people that have been in and out of my life. If I get any of the facts wrong, I do apologies. I’m now writing to you from the viewpoint of a 5 year old little boy.

            I don’t know exactly how they met. I just know that as much as I can remember, they were a couple right away. Peter’s family origin is Cuban. He really did live in Cuba as a young child and witnessed what life is like as a member of a communist society. Now his mother and other parts of his family eventually were able to move to Venezuela. From what I remember being told, someone in his family married into politics with a Venezuelan official and somehow that is how they got asylum to Venezuela. Eventually Peter, his mother, and his siblings would move to the United States.

            That being said, I need to explain to you that most Hispanic men are no bullshit kind of men. Life in Central and South America is very harsh and not full of entitlements that most United States citizens are used to affording themselves. Peter immediately took the father role. We were a family and living together. He got a job up in Idaho Springs working at the mill, on the side of the mountain that is located just off highway 70, to the north side. We lived in the Apartments located blocks away. I still remember what it was like playing on the playground in those apartments. Peter had this huge German Sheppard named Tusko. He brought the dog with him from Venezuela.

            I don’t remember a whole lot else about those times specifically. I do remember that we had come home once and the dog had broken out of the Apartment through the window. There were some teenagers teasing him and Tusko jumped through the window to chase them. There was blood all over the window from that. Besides that I can’t think of any adventures. The real adventures follow later on when we moved from Idaho Springs, Colorado to Miami, Florida.

            I was 7 years old. I think my mom was pregnant with my sister Lisa when we moved. We lived in a high rise apartment in the city of North Miami Beach, for a little bit. Then we moved down south on Biscayne Blvd. we lived in a trailer on what is called KOA, Kampground of America. Campground is intentionally misspelled here. We pretty much lived there for the next five years. Peter had gotten a job at a professional boat racing plant. He was a boat manufacture for them. He was working around fiberglass and that sort of thing. My mom eventually got a job at the campground. She worked the reception desk at first. She handled the transactions for the vacationers that poured in year round. She eventually moved up into the management position. Finally she was doing the accounting books for the Jewish man who owned the campground. I don’t lie when I say that his name was Mr. Diamond.

            Mr. Diamond was a very wealthy man of course. Jewish people seem to have that tendency to be good with money. He was owned some of the property which contained homes in the neighboring property. As part of my mom’s salary, he allowed us to live in that home rent free. If I remember right, the place was fairly big for the 4 of us. By the time we moved in there, my mom had my younger brother, Tony.  

            So now that some of the details are out of the way, let me tell you what I thought about that experience. I didn’t like moving away from Colorado at first. I haven’t introduced them yet, but I very much missed my Aunt Jean along with her husband Curt and my Cousin Ace. I also missed my cousin Shawn and my Aunt Pat. They were all I knew at the time and here we were living in another state where I knew no one. Change like that always seems hard, but I eventually adjusted.

            Down in Miami, Peter has his mother, Yolanda, whom I always referred to as Grandma, if not, “Grandma Yolanda”. She was a classy lady. She lived near a lake just south of Miami. She always had nice things at her house and I remember that I always had to be on my best behavior at her house. Then there was Peter’s sister, Marissa. She was always my aunt Marissa. I loved her very much. First of all she loved to tell me about Cuba. She also loved to cook good Cuban food. Here was the cool thing that I learned about this newly gained culture of family members; the men lived tough lives, but the woman loved their tough little boys. To me, that was the epitome of Aunt Marissa. Even to this day, I can remember the sound of her voice with her accent. Everyone called me, “Jose” or “Joey”. The woman in Peter’s life made me gladly accept this new identity of mine.

            Aunt Marissa had a husband whose name was Jesus (Pronounced He-sus, the Spanish pronunciation). This man was the most gracious man that I had ever met. Just like in the bible, he was also a carpenter. But he loved working hard, and he would tell me stories about building houses and other such things. He would tell me about Cuba. He had a son named Jesussito (Little-Jesus). He had a daughter named Manuela. Both of them were just a little bit older than me which meant I got to hang out with them a lot. Jessusito and I would ride bikes together everywhere. And then Manuela would tell us boys how dumb and dirty boys were; the typical prissy girl attitude of course. Manuela would eventually grow up to design clothing up in New York. I guess her attitude was where it needed to be.

            During that part of my life, I was ingrained into the Cuban heritage. It was a strong part of my life at this point now. There was one ultimate fact about Cuban men; the loved to go fishing. We were always fishing. I can’t remember how many weekends we went to the southern Florida beaches to fish for cat-fish. We also crab hunted. There is a sign down in the most southern island of Key West, Florida that says, “Cuba 90 Miles”, followed by an arrow. I was seeing this at maybe 10-12 years old. I can say that wildlife in the jungle and fishing on the seas was a major part of my life. I would go down the street from the house that Mr. Diamond let us live in and I would be in jungle so thick, that you could cut down the banana trees and in a few weeks, they would already be growing back.

            For the most part, it was Peter, my mom and us kids, but I also remember Uncle Jesus with us too. There were times when Peter would be pulling hard on the fishing line and off in the distance you would see a huge cat-fish jumping out of the water in its agonizing struggle to get off the line that Peter had thrown in. Sometimes they got away, sometimes they didn’t. The water wildlife was crazy. Crabs and hermit crabs were everywhere. The water was warm and green. You had to wear shoes because it was no hard thing to step on sea-urchins, crabs or sting-rays.

            So I had originally went down to Florida, hating to leave what I knew behind. There was a point where I never wanted to leave Florida. I now consider these moments as the “Paradise” moments in which I grew up. It was such a huge contrast from the mountains and snow of Colorado. It was a beautiful existence for a little boy of my age. I was chasing iguanas. I went to an elementary school where the white kids were the minorities. Most of my friends were either Haitian or Cuban. Because Peter was the man that he is, he taught me to be tough in the dangerous world. He brought me into his Hispanic world. Knowing what I know now, I eventually transformed into a boy who never wanted to leave that world. To this day, Peter is still in my life, and him and my mom separated more than 25 years ago. That’s how much this meant to me.

            I would like to end today’s history lesson with all this and continue with Florida next time. I Love you, boy.

 

Daddy.

 

Biscayne Blvd… The Sweetest Spot in Town

1/12/15

Little-Son,

            How are you doing, my boy? I just saw you a couple hours ago as I dropped you off for school this morning. We did our usual arguing about you needing to eat your cereal, getting dressed and eating your breakfast. After all that, we finally go into the car. I drove you to your school and walked you to your class and got the biggest hug from you. I told you that your Mimi would be picking you up and that I would see you in a couple days. In the meantime, it’s time for more of your Daddy’s history. This time, we go back to Miami, Florida; more specifically, Biscayne Blvd. See you soon.

            Biscayne Blvd is the major street that runs from Key West, Florida on the east coast, all the up through Southern Georgia. It’s a very long highway. Your daddy lived in the county known as Miami-Dade County. It is located in the most southern/eastern part of mainland America. That part of Biscayne Blvd is really the only part of the strip that matters. It’s the part where many older people come from across the country to enjoy the warm weather in their last days. It is also a place for many younger people to go to mingle with other young partiers such as themselves. When my mother was a manager at the KOA, it was like clockwork when the French-Canadians would make the long trek from Canada and stay at our campground during the winter. 

            The winters made Miami a very good place to vacation for the winter. The temperature hardly ever dipped below 70 degrees. The humidity, although constant, was at least bearable during this time. The mosquitos and bugs usually did not come back around until the spring. I do remember that during the spring, there are huge migrations of frogs and snakes on our parts. For two weeks straight, it was as if a plague of frogs was on the land. They were everywhere as they left the creeks to mate and then return to their dwelling places. It was pretty fun because as a boy, I and the other boys would go chasing frogs all day. I have been known to throw a frog or two at a screaming girl. If you were more inclined, you could stick a firecracker up a bullfrog’s butt. I never did this, although these things were massive. My mother just always told me not to pick them up because she was afraid of me getting warts. Who listens to their moms when it comes to frogs?

            During that time, the campground filled up to not only full capacity, but was overfilled and some RV’s double occupied single spaces. The French/Canadians were usually a very tight group of people, so most of them didn’t mind. I always liked it when the Canadians came down. I would pick up a delivery route for the campground. This entailed me putting flyers on all the trailers that had news and other information on them. The French loved their Bingo nights. That flyer was never without the current weeks bingo times and locations. Because of my route, I actually made lots of friends with the Canadian’s. I was always interested in their culture and where they came from. They were more than eager to speak French to me or talk about how cold it was in their hometowns and why they instead loved Miami.

            True to their nature, when the French came around, so did the season of love. One of my first girlfriends was the daughter of one of the Canadians. I don’t remember her name. I do remember that I must have been about 9 or 10 years old. When I say she was my girlfriend, at that time it meant that we walked to the pool together. I would show her how I could back-flip into the deep end off of the edge. I would also bring my boom box and tape cassettes. I played some Metallica, Motley Crue, Van Halen, Metal-Church, Ratt, Def Leppard, and any other hair band groups that I could bring. She loved listening to music with me and I loved showing off for her. I considered myself highly cultured at that time. I wanted to be a rock star one day and I would tell her of the times I would be traveling around the world and maybe I could visit her in Canada.

            She was a very lovely young lady. She had black hair. She was whiter than me. She came down with her mother and her father. The parents were always doing something together. Either it was time at the pool, the bingo place, or driving around Miami checking out the beaches. The French usually stayed around the campground from November until late February. As an adult now, I assume these were all retired Canadians. When they would leave, the campground would empty out like the creeks empties out during the frog’s mating season. Many of the French were regulars, including my French girlfriend. When she would go home, I would write to her all the time. She would also write me back. This happened for two years. Finally on the third day, I received a letter from her saying that she would not be able to make it back to see me anymore. If I remember correctly, it was because of her age and her school schedule at the time kept her from being able to travel like she used to. I was heart-broken of course.

            As for my own schooling, I walked to school every day. Our Campground was located right on Biscayne Blvd. When mom moved up, we lived in a house just adjacent to the campground. It was a nice house, surrounded by banana trees, a pool down the street and at the end of our driveway, was the most amazing jungle. It was a growing boy’s playground, especially if he liked adventure just as much as I did.

            Biscayne Blvd, at that time and at the location where we lived, was a very seedy part of town. South Florida in general is kind of seedy with a lot going on. Back then there were major drug wars. Ethnically you had the Haitians, the Cubans, the Puerto Ricans, the Jewish, and then the minority white people. So at school, I was part of the minority. I was fighting all the time as a kid because I had no other choice. The first time I came home from school with bruises, my mother asked me about them. From my previous writing about her, you know more than anything that she was a tough lady. I thought I was going to get into trouble for fighting at first. I realized that with my mom, I was going to get into trouble for not fighting.

            To walk to school, I had to walk along Biscayne Blvd for a couple blocks. I would then cross the street at a point where Biscayne Blvd was six lanes wide 93 each way). When I crossed, I would walk over a set of train tracks. I remember the tracks very well because during some parts of the year, black scorpions were usually found around the tracks. I don’t know why, and I am glad I never got stung, but yes I would go hunting for them at times. Once you crossed the train tracks, there was what I would guess a 1 to 2 mile walk until you got to the elementary school that I went to. There was nothing special about the walk. It was a walk where I passed vacant lots, small businesses and some warehouses.            

            The name of the school was, Natural Bridge Elementary School. I remember it very well. The principal was a very tall and skinny black lady. I went to elementary back when the principle would whip children with a wooden paddle. You would go to the principal’s office and if the offence was bad enough, you’re bent over her desk and she whipped you with this massive weapon. I think if that kind of thing happened today, people would have had her head. But I grew up in different times. Kid’s fought in school. The hardest thing about going to school back then with all the humidity and bugs down there, was that the school would come down with a lice infestation. Whole classrooms of kids would be sent home by the nurse because the kids had lice.

            It was so gross. Usually if it happened to me, my mom would just shave my head. Otherwise you had to buy this very expensive medication shampoo and wash your hair with it. It burned very badly. Then you had to take this fine tooth comb and comb these eggs out of your hair. There would be millions and millions of disgusting eggs for each brush stroke. That is literally how bad the bug problem in Florida is. I think part of the problem is that we didn’t live in exactly the nicest part of town either. In fact I think it was a gross and culturally depraved part. I remember as a kid in the back seat of the car and my mom telling me to duck because someone was on the street shooting a shotgun. I remember as I walked to school that if I continued down Biscayne Blvd, instead of crossing the street, there was a gay bar. The name of the gay bar was, -Sugars. The Sweetest Spot in Town-.

            Back then, homosexuality among men was still considered a very taboo thing. AIDS was just making the scene and society as a whole did not accept it as an acceptable form of behavior. So when I asked my mom what the name on the bar meant, I think I got a giggle from her and she just said to stay the hell away from that place. My mother had very strict rules about me walking home. I always knew the rules on talking to strangers or accepting rides or anything from strangers. My mother would role play things that a stranger might say to earn my trust, and then she would tell me how to defend against that and to not trust anyone. She made sure that I knew a code word in the event that she did need to send someone to pick me up. Other than that, I was to bite, fight, run, or do whatever else I needed to do to get back home and to scream for the police. She would then tell me that there are kids missing from their parents because of evil and sick men who promised them treats and then lied to them about their parents not caring and/or that they would kill them if they told anyone anything. Biscayne Blvd was a dangerous place to live for sure.

            I love you boy. Love Daddy.

 

The Apple of My Eye

1/13/2015

Little-Son,

            My son, today I would tell you that I am writing to you with probably the heaviest of burden. It’s not many times that I feel it so hard, but today my strength is nearly sapped from me. My confidence is highly questions. My resolve is shaken. My doubts rise up. I know this is just a phase. I know exactly what has caused this too. As someone who enjoys writing, I will tell you that sometimes you come upon a terrible place where you see face to face the demons that you deal with. As I have been writing to you about your history, from my side of the family, I realize I am highly anguished. The reason is that I have come so damn far. I’ll explain what I mean.

            Today, I was going to continue with my time down in Florida. I was going through old pictures in my life. Some were from when I was a child. Some were from when I was just a young adult. Some were as recent as only a few years ago. I also ran across some pictures of you and then of Joanne when she was very young. All those years seem like only yesterday. I have decided to take a little break from the history and tell you my goals for you at this point. I think it’s a nice break while I wrestle with my thoughts for a little bit.

            I know that one day you are going to grow up and be your own man. You’re going to do what it is that you want to do, eventually. Even though I may be your daddy, you will not belong to me forever. It’s a fate that all parents must face. Maybe you might be curious as to what I’d like for you. Well I can promise you, that it is only good things.

            I want you to do well in school. From what I see so far, you are exceptionally smart. I do not worry about this in the slightest. You already know your ABC’s. You can read most words because you already recognize what letters sound like what. You are good with numbers and your communication skills amaze everyone around you. So of course I would like you to eventually go to college. It doesn’t have to be right out of high school. I don’t want you to go to college to think that it is so you can make money, because that is not what it’s about. I want you to better understand the world in which you live.  I don’t want this world to take advantage of you. Or better yet, I want you to know how to intellectually defend yourself against the moronic shit that people will try to pull.

            I want you to have a lot of people in your life who love you. I want you to cast away the people who would take advantage of you. That is one of the reasons why I am keeping you up to date with your daddy’s history on his side of the family. I want you to stay away from them. The ones that are alive are not worth pursuing. They will only be first off, an embarrassment and also a source of cunning foolery. I don’t know how to say this without bringing up deep scars within my life, yet also to warn you. There is a reason I keep to myself. There is a reason that I don’t bring you around the bullshit. Sometimes people choose to live in Disneyland, and I chose not to pay the admission fee.

            You and Joanne are so smart. You’re both highly loved and valued. You have all of your mom’s family who deeply love and cherish you. You have me. I have made it my life’s goal to make sure that I provide, protect, teach, and love you the best that I can.

            I want you to eventually find the woman of your dreams. I want you to love her and have a family of your own one day. I have been married before. The closest thing you’ll ever feel towards heaven is the time when a person of the opposite sex loves you completely for who you are. You will at that moment feel safe, protected, and thankful in your journey in this life to have made it into those arms. You will also realize at that time that the closest you ever come to hell are the times when we are left to our own devices. Luckily we are also protected even in our most ignorant of times.

            My son, when I was a young man, I first read that bible. I was looking for answers. I was growing up around deep despair and with not a clue in my life about how to be a man, let alone a human being. Now I Sit here and I think about how far I’ve come, and it is extremely painful because I know where I used to be.

            Yet there is still so much that I want to do. I want them for different reasons though. I want to do things, for the love of doing them. I want to write for the rest of my life, and to be honest, I don’t know if I could really stop if I wanted to. Even if I get lazy, writing to me is when I feel at my most powerful. I could take breaks, but I will always be called to do it. I want to continue to see you grow up. I want to be that bridge in your life. By that I mean that I want to be the foundation for you to gain your support so that you can walk to the goals and successes for your life. I want you to walk the high ground, using my painful toil as a sacrifice.

            My apologies, for this dark letter. Who knows if you will ever see it? Just know that I always get emotional when it comes to your benefit. I’m going to keep writing as your historian, but I do so as a way to provide you the map of some of the dangers in life, so that you will be able to successfully navigate your way to your own dreams and goals. I love you boy.

Love, Daddy

 

The Tail of Kenneth “Bones” Florence

1/14/2015

Little-Son,

            My special boy, I was thinking about you today. I was thinking that I may need to pick up another IPad so that you can have mine to play your games on while you are here. That way I can read my stories while you are playing your learning games next to me. We won’t argue about who’s getting the IPad next.

            Anyways, it’s time to move on to another history of your crazy dad’s life while growing up. I don’t expect that you will be reading this anytime soon. There will be some adult content to this and I write these history lessons for you to enjoy later. Today, we go back to Biscayne Blvd, deep in the heart of Miami, Florida. There are other things that migrate during the spring, besides the bullfrogs on a hot Florida afternoon. My Uncle Ken would migrate down to visit us.

            So during this time, there was My Cuban pops, Peter. There was my mom, my sister Lisa, my brother Tony, and then me. I believe the first time uncle Ken came to visit was when we all were cramped in a trailer on the campground. This was before my mom’s Jewish boss, Mr. Diamond, let us move into one of his properties. The first time Uncle Ken came to visit, he had just finished doing a lot of time for bank robbery.

            So imagine this tall, skinny biker looking guy. He had long beautifully braided hair. He had a bushy mustache. He was built from all those years of weightlifting while incarcerated. He was a full blooded Arian Nation member in the prison. He did his time in Corcoran state penitentiary. He was a mad mo-fo. He was also artistic as all hell. He was a tattoo artist. I remember the many tattoos that he had. He had a wizard on his back. He had a huge castle on his back, which I would later understand to represent his time in prison. He had the pink panther on the inside of his ribs. He had two tear drops coming from his eyes. I would later learn that those tear drops would mean that he killed two people while in prison. He had the NAZI swastika on his back as well. He was a very dangerous man, and we welcomed him with open arms to stay with us.

            Now I need to go back to his mother, my grandma Mary Jane, to paint a better picture of Ken. Grandma was a messed up Marine who got discharged, drank and abused weak minded men for their money, and she damaged her kids. If her kids could be blamed for being sociopaths, it was because of her. Grandma stabbed your uncle Ken when he was only 15 years old. I don’t think a young man gets over that kind of thing very easily, if at all. Grandma of course neglected all of her children as she drank and manipulated men for the majority of her post Marine Corp life.

            My uncle Ken ended up in some of the youth authorities down in San Diego. He would be in and out so many times, that it was no surprise that he would graduate into the adult system by the time he became an adult. Now although I’m painting the life of a hardened criminal, there is this weird thing about respect that guys like my uncle Ken lived by. Even when robbing his first bank, I remember him once telling me how he told her to, “Please give me your money, ma’am”. Yet he was by no means a nice guy. To be very honest, he scared the shit out of me. It wasn’t the kind of fear where I thought he would hurt me, but the kind of fear where I better listen to him when he talked to me. He grew up in the 50’s and 60’s. Men were fearful back then to a much grander scale than they are today.

            So anyways, this big, muscular biker guy comes to stay with us, and I thought he was the coolest dude in the world. It was during the summer time. So I wasn’t at school. He was fresh out of prison. He hitch-hiked, rode the bus, whatever he had to do to get down to see his baby sister, my momma. She would work during the day, and I would hang out with my uncle Ken. Mom put him in one of those ten man tents in our front yard. I always wanted to see him draw. He was freaking amazing. He would draw the most beautiful pictures that even to this day, I had ever seen. You would think a guy like him would be drawing something dark or evil all the time. It was actual quite the opposite. He drew beautiful ducks on a lake, with the reflection in the water, with an enormous castle in the distance. He would draw flowers, dragons, angels, mountain scenery, and the ocean. I had even begun a game with him where I would try to test his skills by saying he couldn’t draw such and such. For example, I’d tell him to draw me a big bear fighting in the woods against a lion or something crazy cool like that. He would blow my expectations out of the water. He had such an imagination. He was incredibly talented.

            He was also a ladies man. I don’t know how a man straight out of prison would right away have a girlfriend, but he always had someone by his side. I’m not saying they were the best, but he was not a lonely guy ever. So when he wasn’t drawing, I would go places with him. I remember him taking me to a biker party. He told me they were Hell’s Angel’s. Now I can’t verify that because I was too young to know even what that meant, but I know they were a lot of people who rode motorcycles and got tattoos from my uncle Ken. That’s how he made money (There were some other ways, I’m sure, but we’ll leave it at that). I remember he would take me to the rough parts of Miami and talk about life with me. I don’t remember a lot of what he said. I do remember some of it was about respect. I also remember he told me how to pick up chicks. He was very brutally honest. He talked to me like I was going to be a man myself in about five minutes. He joked about how to pick up the ladies. From what I remember, you just have to be very forward.

            There was only one thing that I didn’t like. Sometimes my mom and him would drink and talk about the past. I was too young to remember what was being said, but it made me uncomfortable as a young boy to hear my mom and him so angry. When I say angry, I mean anger because of very deep seeded pains in their lives that they had a mutual connection to. Inevitably they spoke of grandma. I always grew up hating the conversations that entailed her name being brought up because it meant people I loved at the time were hurt because of that name.

            I remember a few weeks would go by and Uncle Ken would tell us goodbye as he would go do his thing wherever that was. He talked a lot about family. He would try to explain to me what being a man was about. And being around him, I just witnessed what it was like to be around a bad ass dude.

            He visited us again the next summer. There was more of the same stuff from the previous visit of his. He’d tell me not to be so shy with the girls and to be tough. He had these rubber nun-chucks, and he was always showing me how good he was on them. He would make the funny Bruce Lee sounds. He was actually really good at it. Here’s the scary thing about Uncle Ken: when he said it was time for him to go home, he wasn’t talking about a white picket fence. Prison was his home and he knew it. Even when he was watching me, he would explain that that lifestyle was in his blood. He also told me that if I ever ended up in one of his prisons, he’d beat my ass. He said he wanted better for me and my siblings. He really loved my mom and would have easily added another tear-drop under his eye by killing anyone who hurt her.

            He eventually did go back home. I don’t know all the details, and if I did, I would not talk about them too deeply here. He did rob another bank. He stole some cars. I think he may have killed somebody too. All I truly know is that he ended up getting a 25 year sentence in Utah for being a habitual criminal. Uncle Ken a habitual criminal? Of course. He spent more of his life locked up than he did as a free man. When I joined the military, and got stationed overseas, I used to write to him. He would always tell me that he was proud of me. He would always ask me what kinds of things I was getting into. He never once talked bad about the government. He knew his place. He never had a negative thing to say in any of his letters. In fact in all his letters to all of his family, he would purposefully write everything in old English lettering. When he would write my mom, or my aunt pat, or my aunt jean, he would draw them the most beautiful pictures. He drew lovely pictures even for my grandma (yes, the one who stabbed him).

            I took leave of absence one year to go visit my siblings and mom. At that time, the state of Utah had moved my uncle Ken from the main penitentiary to one of the county jails. I was told that my uncle Ken had too much power in prison among the inmates. They moved him to disrupt that. I visited him in this county jail. He asked me how I was doing. Thinking about it now, I think he was ashamed for anyone in the family to see him in that condition. He was a little stand-offish and when he asked about my mom and such, I could see his eyes swell up. I’m not trying to glorify an ugly situation here, but I am speaking the truth here. By this time, I was about 23. He was roughly ten years into his sentence. He would get denied parole every two years. Finally, when I was a junior in College, I got word that he got paroled. He was staying briefly in Colorado and I went to see him.

            For a man who had just done twenty years in prison, he did not seem to have a stress in his life. He was all smiles. He had his long, braided (but now grey hair). He was full of tattoos. He had the hugest biker mustache that I had ever seen. He had nothing but praise for what I had been doing in my life. We talked. He asked about the family. He asked me how my kids were.

            That would be the last time I would ever see him. He was supposed to report to a halfway house within a certain amount of time. He decided he was not going to do that. From rumors, I heard that he hitch hiked out east somewhere. He got himself a logging job. He did become a fugitive of the law. The last thing I ever heard was that he died in the desert of California. He died running from the law. One final interesting fact about my uncle Ken was that while he was incarcerated in Utah, his artwork was displayed in the governor’s mansion. He entered the Utah state drawing fairs and would always do well. I think the state would keep any moneys, of course. He also cut his hair and donated it for the cure for cancer. I’m talking about a man who robbed banks and had tears tattooed on his face. Uncle Ken epitomizes the fact that life can be cruel, ugly, and beautiful at the same time.

            I love you boy.

Love, Daddy.

 

Aunt Jeanie. A South Park Kind of Lady

1/16/2015

Little-Son,

            My boy, right now I just finished putting a beef stew together. I put the beef with some carrots, potatoes and a chopped onion in the slow cooker. It should be good for dinner, later on. In the meantime, I’d like to write to you about a woman named Jean Avery. I’m continuing with a long line of history essays for you. I’m your historian/father/protector/entertainment director/cook/wrestling partner, you name it.

            My Aunt Jeanie was my mom’s older sister. She was not the oldest, as my Aunt Pat was the oldest. Aunt Jeanie went through all the hardships of growing up under my alcoholic and abusive grandmother Mary Jane Kane. Yet if you knew her as a person, you would never have guessed. Aunt Jeanie was a hard working lady. She was also one of the funniest people I ever knew. But she was also able to relate to people and talk to them. She was very down to earth and never looked down on anyone. She also never felt sorry for herself for one second because of the trauma she herself felt while growing up. As a matter of fact, grandma never came up unless it was to talk about family history, or to bring up funny stories of her growing up.

            Aunt Jeanie shared in the history of being in and out of foster homes. Aunt Jeanie knew what it was like to sleep inside of a juvenile detention facility as well. I don’t know a lot of that history because like I said, it didn’t come up very often. I do know that my first memories as a young boy, not much older than you are right now (you are 4 at this time), were of me and my mom staying on the ranch that my Aunt Jeanie and Uncle Curt lived on. From my earliest memory, Aunt Jeanie was a leader and a woman of strong character and a sign of stability in a family full of dysfunctional folks, including my mown mother.

            The ranch that Aunt Jeanie owned was a huge plot of land between the mountain towns of evergreen and Idaho springs. It was up in the mountains. To get to the house you drove from Denver on interstate 70 going west. Eventually you would take the Idaho Springs exit. You drove west through town and then turned left as you went south across the highway. At this point you are driving past the high school and making a trek on a highway that went higher and higher in altitude, and had many parts of the highway in which you were looking down cliffs. Some parts of the highway had no guard rail to it. It snowed all the time during the winters. If you looked over the edge while going through the turns, you would see miles and miles of nothing but trees and other mountain tops. It is the most beautiful scene that I can remember.

            I remember as a little boy and driving with her from the city up to her ranch, asking her this question;

“Aunt Jean, what would happen to us if we drove over the edge?”

At that point in life, it was my Aunt Jeanie who would be the first person to ever explain to me what death was about. She would go on to explain to me that if we didn’t survive the crash, we would go to sleep. But it’s a sleep where we don’t wake up. Not only do we not wake up, but our spirits do not live in our bodies anymore. Now I don’t remember if she talked about where our spirits go after that, but she talked about it as being a beautiful thing. By beautiful, I mean as in there is something better or that our current state of being is not the end of the story.

            So Aunt Jeanie always had this amazing way of explain something to you so that you saw it in a different perspective. I guess you can call that wisdom, or smarts, or courage (all of which she had). But this would not be the last time that I would ask her questions. In fact, many people would pick her mind and I would go on to say that she was dearly loved when her spirit lived in her own body and when her spirit left her body. As a matter of fact, I was there for her when she did pass on to the next life.

            The ranch was beautiful. She had a horse named Boogie along with a couple other horses. She raised pigs, goats, chickens, and cows. She also had a couple farm cats and dogs that ran the ranch, or so they thought. The ranch was a sign of peace. It was a sign of heavenly wisdom. It was a sign of beauty and comfort in a tough world. It was also a sign of hard work that was required to take care of yourself.

            Aunt Jeanie and Uncle Curt owned that ranch for many years. My grandfather helped take care of the animals. My aunt Jeanie worked in the Coal mines along with her husband, Uncle Kurt. That alone should tell you of her life experience and her strength. She had to quit working the mines because the mines caused her throat to swell up from all the impurities that come along with working under the ground all day long in some of the most dangerous conditions you can think of.

            That brings up the fact that Aunt Jean was very much a tom-boy character. When she left the coal mining lifestyle, she entered into the world of being an electrician. She was good at it. She was also good at conquering a world dominated by men. Later on her and my uncle Curt would get divorced after nearly 20 years of marriage. They sold the ranch for a very big amount of money. Aunt Jeanie bought a condo, a house for her and her kids down in Green Mountain, which was located near Morrison Colorado.

            After Aunt Jeanie moved to the city, she kind of switched teams. By that I mean she would remain a lesbian for the remainder of her life. To be honest, I think she always had that predisposition, but after the hell she went through with being married, she said, “fuck it”. That’s how my Aunt Jeanie was with life in general. If you didn’t like her for who she was, she really didn’t give a damn, but she was not disrespectful to anyone

            Her two children were Ace Avery and Shawna Avery. I grew up with Ace and Shawna. Ace and I were always getting into trouble as kids and sometimes we would have to face the wrath from Aunt Jeanie, but then later on she would take us out to her favorite bars and life was back to normal. She was so laid back, that I’m not even sure if anything ever bothered her.

            Ace and I used to do A LOT of trespassing, stealing, and otherwise teenage boy mischief. Aunt Jeanie had to come get us when the cops had us for trespassing the golf course. She came down to pick us up, yelled at us in front of the cops and even smacked us across the head to show that she meant business. The cops would let us go and we’d drive down to her favorite bar called The County Cork. It was located on Colfax, in the city near Wheat Ridge. As far as dive bars go, it was one of the nastiest. She would tell us that that was a stupid stunt, but then she would laugh at how the rich people must have thought we were crazy because here we boys were throwing golf balls at them while they were trying to get their rounds of golf in. we were little dicks, but it was funny. What was also funny is that Aunt Jean made a lot of money and lived among these rich people. The golf course that we trespassed was down the street from her.

            So Aunt Jeanie never lost sight of who she was or where she came from. She worked hard to get to where she was. But she loved her family. Me and Ace were her boys. Her only vice was that she drank a lot of beer. As long as I can remember, she would come and visit us and pick my mom up with me and Ace with them, and they would bar hop from one end of Denver to the other. This was way before DUI’s were as serious as they are now. As a matter of fact, she never got pulled over for drinking. Now I’m not condoning this, but it is funny how Aunt Jeanie had her shit together, and would do her best to get us kids to be right yet adults can misbehave just as much.

            Ace and I always hated her girlfriends, though. We hated that her and Uncle Curt divorced and I’m sure it tore Ace up to realize his mother was a lesbian after that. I don’t care what society tells you to accept, if a lifestyle is aimed at destroying the family, then it is wrong. One time, being the pricks that we were, I and Ace were out to dinner with Aunt Jean and “Uncle” Chris. She was a nasty butch bitch, and she was trying to come into our family and in doing so, she was extremely fake. Ace tried to slip a sleeping pill in her drink while we were at dinner. I don’t think Ace realized that the pill would immediately start bubbling, but it did. When “Uncle” Chris noticed what happened, she freaked out of course. My aunt Jean thought it was the funniest thing in the world. No one got hurt accept her feelings, but this is the kind of treatment all of Aunt Jeanie’s girlfriends would get. “Uncle” Chris didn’t make it long.

            Aunt Jeanie eventually moved up to Fairplay Colorado. It’s the famous mountain town made famous by the TV show, South Park. It is so small and so cold up there. Aunt Jeanie made it into her 60’s but eventually got sclerosis of the liver. All those years of heavy drinking got to her and her liver had had enough. Even when she knew her time was up and her body swelled up due to the toxins in her liver, she was still drinking and making people laugh about the silly things in life. The whole town of Fairplay knew Aunt Jeanie. I held her hand shortly before she passed away and her body was in a coma. In the coma, she had shut her eyes and never opened them up again. Her spirit eventually went somewhere else. She was a good friend to us boys and the rest of her family who needed a strong character to look up to.

            Well my boy. That is it on this subject. I hope you like reading about the history of where you come from. I am having a good time realizing myself the things I had forgotten. Now it’s time for me to get ready and go pick you up from school. I love you.

Love Daddy.

 

           

The Day a White Belt Choked out a Black Belt

1/18/15

Little-Son,

            My young boy, as I begin to write the next story of this history lesson, I as your father want to open up by saying I’m very grateful to have you in my life. You are currently in the living room watching cartoons on the Kids Netflix. We just finished eating some chicken, rice, and caramel flavored popcorn. You’re such a good boy because when I told you that I was going to my room to type, you said, “Ok daddy”. I feel like if I write and follow my passions, that in turn makes me happy which in turns makes me a better daddy.

            The next chapter is about a woman named Patricia Duckett. I have to be honest when I say that I don’t truly know what her maiden-name is because she has been married quite a few times. I would say five or six times. That’s ok because I liked all the husbands that she ever had. In fact I will write about a few of them. If you were to ever be around Aunt Pat, you never want to say, “Who’s your daddy?” because it could create some real chaos in the room.

            Aunt Pat was the older sister among my Aunt Jean, Uncle Ken, Uncle Thom, Uncle Allen, and of course my mother. I don’t know exactly where she was born, but she was like the rest of her siblings in that she ran around the streets of San Diego California. Here’s an interesting fact about my Aunt Pat: she entered and won a few of the Colorado Beauty Pageant contests. I think they were for the older aged category. I would have to find out. The problem is that she and I don’t currently talk as of now and I don’t communicate with her kids, James and Buster, either. There’s an explanation to follow because of why.

            Needless to say, Aunt Pat has always been a very pretty lady. Her daughter Eva was also very pretty in beauty and in personality. I will always miss Eva. Eva wrote to me many times while I was lonely and distraught out in Iraq. Eva died in her sleep while visiting her adult son, Justin Kamikaris out in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. I believe it was about 5 or 6 years ago. It was a freak thing that happened. She went to bed not feeling very well and the next morning Justin found her non responsive. She died young and loved by a bunch of people, including her mother, my Aunt Pat.

            So I’m going to get into some really ugly history here. Son, you are young and innocent as I write this. I wish I could say that we all remained that way, but the world is very good at making us grow beyond our years of purity. When I was about three years old (rough guestimation), my mother was going through one of those rough patches in life. She was a recovering heroin addict. She basically dropped me off with my Aunt Pat under the pretense that she would be gone for only an hour to run some errands. Well she didn’t come back for over a year. My Aunt Pat along with her husband Uncle Tony and her kids Buster (George Kamikaris), James Music, and Eva raised me.

            I have very fond memories of Buster, James and Eva taking me through the neighborhood they lived in as kids. We played at the pool. We played in the tree house. I was like their peter pan that they hoped would never grow up. Yet in this case, I think that they hoped my mother would never return. I know for a fact that back then they felt like they could love me and take care of me the way I was meant to be loved and taken care of (at least in their minds). I think we were living in Golden, Colorado at that time. I remember the back yard very clearly. Buster and James (who were the two older boys) would wrap me up in a blanket and while each one held opposing ends, they would swing me in the air like some sort of circus show. We would jump on the trampoline.         

            I don’t remember specifics about Aunt Pat at this time. I only remember my peter pan lifestyle of playing with the kids all the time. I always looked up to Buster and James as my older brothers. I loved Eva as almost my second mother. My Aunt Pat was never rich, but she was always a classy lady. She held herself with respect. It’s a no wonder why she herself entered beauty contests and even afterwards she had great passion in judging those contests. She rubbed elbows with people of high society, yet if you remember, I wrote in earlier writings how she and all her siblings went through the hell of the foster and juvenile court system.

            Uncle Tony was an awesome man. He was an engine boats-man for the United States Navy. After he got out of the Navy, he basically hustled people for pool money. He was really good at both, pool and hustling. In fact he taught both of those skills to Buster who has taken top places at pool competitions in Las Vegas. Uncle Tony eventually settled down. He left the bars and he raised a family, including me when I found myself at the mercy of needing to be cared for when my mother left.                       

            Eventually my mother did come back for me and it wrecked not only me but also James, Buster and Eva. I would later be told that the kids cried for days because I was back with my mother. Buster climbed up into his treehouse and would not come down for hours and told my Aunt Pat that he hated my mom for coming back. To tell you the truth, I hated her for it too. I did not want to be a part of her life once I had experienced unconditional acceptance and love. Of course I always saw James, Buster, Eva and my Aunt Pat later in life, but it was never the same. I honestly think that the pain that that separation cause took away a part of their innocence as well as mine. They had scars because of it just like I did.

            At the same time, that was my mother. As messed up as her life was, there was a part of me that would always forgive her and always want the best for her. When I would come back around the Pat clan, I could sense their despise for her, which in essence was despise towards me as I was only born with one mother, and all boys want to love their mothers even if their mothers are bad mothers. I remember growing up hating that feeling of animosity.

            Son, you got to love your mamma. She gave birth to you and I was there the whole time. She was angry with me, and I laugh as I write this because I don’t blame her. That is a terrible amount of struggle and pain to bring another human into this world. But she did it and she loved you. I loved you. I knew then that I never wanted to be without you.

            So why do I not keep in touch with the “Pat-clan”? It’s very simple: you can only handle so much bullshit. Growing up I got tired of hearing people bad mouth my mother and my siblings. I got tired of while being a grown up with the talk of how I somehow owed anyone anything for the courtesy that was extended to me when I was a helpless toddler, not much older than you are now. If you do something for family, than you don’t demand a life of repayment. And that’s how I’ve always felt. I don’t owe anyone a god damn thing, but myself. \

            By the way, my cousin Buster is a black belt in Tae-kwon-doe. When I was a white belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, he started shit with me at a family bar-b-q. He literally kicked me in the mouth and then tackled me into the fence. I was then able to wrap what is called a guillotine around his neck. I wrapped my legs around him and caused him to fall to the ground as he choked. He was yelling for me to stop. It was a good time because there were a bunch of people watching.

            That’s another thing that happens in life, my boy: people’s relationships change. It is very possible to love someone after having first hating them and it is also very possible to despise someone with whom you used to look up to. Jealousy is a bitch as my Cuban Step pops would always tell me. I’m sorry if this chapter ends so negatively. That is not my goal whatsoever. My goal is also not to lie to you either. I love you boy. Now I will close up this chapter and go wrestle with you. I love you

 

Love Daddy

           

From Surfing to Space Trucking in Arizona

1/19/2015

We had a lot of luck on Venus. We always had a ball on Mars. Meeting all the groovy people we’ve rocked around the Milky Way so far. Come on, let’s go space trucking! ---Deep Purple. Space Trucking

 

Little-Son,

            My boy, let’s get right into it. By that I mean let’s talk about another family member behind his/her back while at the same time teaching you a lesson about life. This is a good one, though. This section of my writing is about my Uncle Allen. He was a good dude. He is still a good dude. I know only a little bit about his life. I consider that a good thing. It means he was able to keep himself out of the bullshit and under the radar. So I’ll also take you on an epic adventure of terror and frustration. It is all good, my boy.

            Uncle Allen was the oldest brother among my mom’s siblings, which included Aunt Pat, Aunt Jean, Uncle Ken, Uncle Tom, and of course my mother, Susan Florence. He went through the same bullshit of the foster care system that all his other siblings went through. His mother was my great abusive, always drunk, grandmother and former miss Marine Corp of the United States Military. “Once a Marine, Always a Marine, damn it”.

            I am fairly certain that Uncle Allen escaped many of the atrocities that befell his other siblings. By that I mean that he actually became a productive citizen of this commonwealth that we know tenderly as the United States of America. He landed himself in a foster home as a young teenager where his foster parents were good hard working folks. They actually looked after and took care of Uncle Allen instead of chasing a wicked incentive to take children in from the state, merely to pay your bills. The man of the house took Uncle Allen under his wing as a diesel mechanic. Uncle Allen learned a lot about not only how to fix cars but also how to fix big diesel engines. He also learned a lot about the trucking industry.

            Uncle Allen found much luck in staying with his foster parents (from what I gather). He was the opposite of Uncle Ken, in that he was not attracted to the system, but in fact did everything he could to escape the system that was not a remedy to my grandma’s abuse, but more of a guide to further abuse elsewhere. Uncle Allen stayed out of trouble. He eventually grew up. He married a very nice young Hispanic girl, who did nothing but protect Uncle Allen from the demons that haunted the rest of his siblings. Uncle Allen is in his 60’s and he has been married to her and only her.

            Being that he (along with his wife’s help) stayed away from the family, he was able to do good things for himself and his family. Uncle Allen became a surfer on the beaches of San Diego. He repaired diesel engines for some of the local trucking companies. He would eventually own his own trucking company and prosper very well. He has two children. I’ve only met him a couple times. The last time was at my mother’s death bed. I remember as a kid people in the family would talk shit about him. My son, this is where I’m going to teach you that family can be the absolute thing that either keeps you back in life, or helps you to go down a downward spiral yourself. All those people who talked about him never went on to do anything with their lives. It was pure jealousy.

            So that is really all I know about the man. He made something of himself. He worked hard. He took care of his family. He recovered from a horrendous past and looked at it like part of life’s lessons. So for the rest of the time, I’d like to take you down a little trip of my own, while being a dirty, hairy, foul-mouthed truck driver guy. It was a fun time in my life, but I would never do it again.

            The time was roughly September of 2003. I had just received my discharge from the active duty United States Air Force. I was stationed first in Ramstein Germany for 4 years, followed by 4 years at Edwards Air Force Base, in the Mojave Desert of California. The military was my first job, so I had no idea how rough it was going to be working in the civilian economy. I had no idea what I was going to do. I was 23 at the time. I had not gone to school yet so all I had was my military experience. In the outside world, that military experience is valued very little. It is usually too specific (there are very limited jobs where you can throw hand-grenades at people with towels wrapped around their heads).

            Before I left the military, I took the initiative to get myself a “Professional” truck driving license. By that I mean I paid $3000 to get my commercial driver’s license. It was about a two week school where you get training on everything from how to do pre and post trip inspections on everything on a truck and its trailers. You learn how to back a trailer into a dock. You learn how to parallel park a trailer in between two parked trailers. You maneuver around cones and finally you drive around major cities and highways and get taught some of the major differences between driving a vehicle that can haul nearly 80,000lbs versus your little green beetle bug car that anyone can drive.

            The guy who was the teacher was this red-neckish kind of guy who liked to chew and tell some really awesome stories about his days on the road. There were easy girls, long miles, decent pay, and the freedom of the road, baby. It sounded great. Army recruiters also sound great to a young and naïve 17 year old. It’s all usually lies.

            So I passed the test to get my license. I received my CDL in the mail not long after that, and I figured that once I got out of the military, it was going to be the life of my next and successful career. I could not have been anymore naïve. I was a young and inexperienced driver. The only trucking companies that hire new CDL drivers are some of the worst over the road long haul companies. They are bad because they will make you drive long hours. They will push you to the point that you almost always have to break log book rules, and so be at risk to get shut down by the highway patrol if they pull you over or if you get pulled into a weigh station. It’s a lot of stress. The lifestyle is terrible. You’re basically a homeless person who’s only means of income is in a vehicle that you are stuck in 13-15 hours a day. You are literally a prisoner of your job.

            The long haul company that I worked for was a company called Swift. I only worked there for a few weeks until I decided to reevaluate my life. I went through the initial 3 day orientation. Part of the orientation is where they tell you that you will be teamed up with a senior driver for a month straight, before they set you loose by yourself. I did not know what I was getting myself into at this point. I just wanted to make some money. There were about 30 of us new hires. There were not enough male senior drivers to go around so they asked the remainder of us if we cared if we’d be teamed up with a female driver. For some reason I should have screamed no, but the alternate option was not being able to start the job and having to come back when there were other male drivers available. So I took the offer to drive with a female. What the heck. Maybe I might even find my lucky next girlfriend. Again, I was very stupid at this age.

            So here’s where it got messy: I get through my orientation and finally get assigned to a truck and the female driver who was the normal driver for the truck. She was the nastiest woman that I have ever come across, even thus far into my life. She talked as if she came straight out of the dirtiest trailer park in the country. She had so many family issues going on that every hour one of her kids was calling her. She never showered regularly. Usually the truck is moving nonstop. When one person is driving, the other is sleeping and then vice versa. The companies like this because they get a better cut of money because the truck is always moving and always earning income. Yet there were times when you pulled over to a truck stop to get food and hmmm hmmm, take a shower!

            So anyways, I have Miss Hygiene with me on this truck. From Denver we traveled north through Wyoming. What you do is drop off a trailer full of freight to whatever company. It is either that or the company unloads you and then you call in to your dispatch and they tell you were to go next. You travel all across the country just following this simple model. It’s pretty easy. We went through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington and then made our way back towards Denver but never stopped in Denver.

            The trip with Miss Hygiene and me ended along highway 40, in the state of Arizona between Flagstaff, going east towards New Mexico. I was asleep in the back. She was driving. I could feel that she was pulling the truck over. I assumed that she was taking either a rest stop break, or was getting gas at a truck-stop. So I get out of the upper bunk in the back and inquire at to what we were doing. She was filling out her driver’s log and then said something about, “I think I hit somebody”. At this point my heart is racing. I look in the mirrors and don’t see any other cars. In fact we are out in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night. There is nothing but the stars and sand outside of us.

            Things really started getting interesting because I could hear someone outside banging on the trailer. I said, “What the hell is that?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to check”

“What the hell is your problem” I said back to her. “Don’t go out that fucking door. Call the cops first and wait for them”.

Before I could talk any sense into her, she was out the door and I could hear a man yelling at her. I was scared as hell, but I felt like I had no choice. I had to protect this dumb-ass that just now put the both of us in danger. It all felt like a bad dream. So I got out of the driver’s door as fast as I could.

            What I came across was a young guy about my age in jeans, a wife-beater, and tattoos all over. He was screaming that we killed his kid. He all of a sudden stopped screaming at her when he noticed me get out of the truck. When I got out, I said “What the fuck are you talking about, dude?”

From that point he was making no sense yet he kept pointing underneath the trailer. I looked multiple times. I was scared like I had never been scared before. I had only been awake for a few minutes before this point. I didn’t know the events that took place before Miss Hygiene pulled the truck over. For a few moments I didn’t know if she really did run somebody over or if this lady actually pulled over in the middle of nowhere, where this deranged and homeless desert wanderer was now making threats towards us.

            After minutes of looking and seeing no traces of blood or any other signs of a collision, I grabbed Miss Hygiene by her arm and dragged her back into the truck. I pushed her in, while yelling at the crazy guy to get the fuck back. He stayed back. I shut the door, locked it, turned the truck on and pulled back out onto the road and down the highway until the next truck stop came up about twenty minutes later.

            Up to this point I knew that I was in the presence of a woman who had a terrible life. She had multiple divorces. All her kids had messed up lives. She openly talked about her broken family life of which I had no care or concern for. So I decided to ask her some questions. First I asked her how after all her years of driving trucks, she would think it is ok to get out and confront a man in the middle of nowhere. I asked her where her gun was, considering she was extremely brave to do something so stupid. Of course she had no weapons unto which to defend herself. Then I asked her if this is the first time she had done something like that.

            I would later come to learn that during her career as a truck driver, she had been raped multiple times because of bad situations that she had put herself in. They were all fairly consistent as far as the way in which she made terrible choices as to her own safety. I told her it was time to get me back to Denver. I told her if she didn’t call dispatch and get the next route back home, I was hitchhiking. I was back home in Denver 3 days later. It was the worst job experience of my life.

            I would eventually continue to use my CDL for gas driving companies, but I would never do the over the road thing again. There are terrible lives lived that cross our highways every day. I guarantee you that if you drive a major highway and pass a truck driver, either he/she is part of that misery, or they have seen countless stories of misery on the road. I couldn’t handle it. It was disgusting and a worthless existence.

            So there you go my boy. I’ll say this again: I don’t expect you to be 5 years old and reading this. Hopefully when you become a man yourself one day, you can look back on an experience like this and think, “Hmmmm, maybe I will take that scholarship to Harvard”. Do I consider this a losing experience? It was a lesson for sure. As far as the ladies go, have nothing to do with anyone who is not ready to kill to protect themselves. Otherwise you may find that it’s your skin for theirs. So here’s another chapter in your daddy’s background. It’s not pretty. But whatever it is, I love you bunches.

Love Daddy

 

Uncle Tom and Daddy Were Once Gypsies

1/20/15

Little-Son

            My little boy; today is yet another adventure in this epic dysfunction that we all call, “family”. In fact, I am putting the fun in dysfunction. Today I will write briefly about a man I knew as Uncle Allen. I will then relate him to my own life. Son, it’s very important to at least understand where your roots are. That way you understand the manner in which you travel through this path called life. We are all wandering Gypsies trying to find our next circus.

            First of all Gypsies is what you might consider a racial slur against people of Romani decent. Another term for these people is, Bohemian. It’s a term used to describe people who follow their artistic yet impoverished lifestyle. So today, a Gypsy lifestyle is one used to describe a person who lacks both a legal or regular location of living. They just travel from place to place. Many times not knowing where they have been or where they are going.

            My Uncle Tom was what you would call a Gypsy. I only met him twice. He also traveled down to Miami Florida to visit my mother when she was working at the KOA. He was this strange hippie kind of dude. He had long hair, a long beard, and spoke about weird things of the world. He traveled with what I thought was just a homeboy of his. I would later learn that he was his gay hippie lover. Whatever, it’s all good. I kind of liked Uncle Tom. I don’t know why, but his freakish nature was always interesting to me as a young boy. He had many traveling stories to tell. My young memory at the time can’t recall those memories, to my everlasting shame.

            I do remember that he was one of those guys who thought society was moving way too fast in terms of technology and life was too fast. He was a hippie through and through. He had all these strange thinkings about how we would all one day be the reason of our own demise. That was the reason he enjoyed being not at all tied to the rat race and high paced life that everyone else lived. This was way before we had computers and cell phones and other such things. He would have lost his mind even more had he seen today’s technology.

            Uncle Tom either did not live very long after those visits with us down in Florida, or he is somewhere down in Costa Rica, sharing his ideas of non-conformation to the man. No one ever heard from him again. My Aunt Pat found a death certificate for him registered to the state of California, so the likelihood of him meeting his own end is more likely. Nobody knows what happened. I was around 8 or 9 years old when I saw him. That was 30 years ago.

            Since he fascinated my interests, I asked my Aunt Pat questions about him. She was sort of the family historian for me. She had boxes and boxes of family photos saved up. She had old pictures of Tom from back when he was a young teenager. One photo struck me the most. It was a picture of him, my uncle Ken, and my Uncle Allen posed together; the three brothers. They were each in suits and ties. It was a black and white Polaroid photo. Each of those boys were handsome dudes. Uncle Ken was without all the prison tattoos. He had short hair, no mustache or beard. His hair was brown and he had that young Indian kind of look to him. He still held his chest out and his arms wide as if to say, “I’m already a bad ass”. Uncle Allen had a very plain look with little expression to him. Yet he was a solid looking dude too.

            What surprised me the most is Uncle Tom? He was clean cut with short hair. He had no beard or other facial hair going on. He stood tall and skinny. He even had a look of class and style to himself. He looked like a very smart man. I inquired my Aunt Pat deeply about this man. She would go on to tell me that Uncle Tom suffered from a very high IQ. I asked her how you suffer from that sort of thing. She would go on to explain that he was too smart for his own good. His intelligence would go on to haunt him.

            I guess there are people in this world who are naturally born with high functioning brain capacities to where they can think at high levels but they can’t function within the normal realms of society. Storybooks call people like him, “madmen”, or “quacks”. His IQ was tested as a young man, and it was indeed known that his IQ was substantially higher than average. That makes perfect sense once I could take that information and look at him through the times that I saw him. He was always freaking out about things so small, yet he talked about things that no one could understand. He was socially awkward to the max.

            So now I unfortunately have to take this back to my Grandmother---that dear old saint known as Mary Jane Kane. God bless her dead and rotting Marine Corp corpse. “You wouldn’t have joined the Air Force if you weren’t such a pussy, Joey”. I literally got a letter from her with cookies, in which she finished the letter with such a warm greeting. Grandma was a mean lady, so much so that it was a way in which it was funny to make fun of her. Yet I am sure she tortured Uncle Tom because of his smarts. She tortured all her other kids. Uncle Tom, being as awkward as he already was—I bet he was further driven into madness by the lifestyle that his mother forced all her kids to endure. For that, I am not only glad that I didn’t join the Marine Corp and lean on such cult like thinking, as my grandmother did, but I am repulsed to always have to refer to her to gain a better understanding of the generation before me. She bullied her kids and I bet she was a coward who clung on to her Marine Corp existence because she lived such a miserable life, that she had no other form of prestige in her life, even the make believe one she created in her mind from the 2 years she spent in the Marine Corp before they gave her the boot.

            Sorry, my boy. I get a little emotional about this one. My grandmother had 6 kids--6 kids who had to escape the hell that was brought onto them without their consent. A couple made it out the other side ok. A couple of them did not make it out but became victims of circumstance. Some people make bad choices, to their own blame. Uncle Ken Chose a life of prison. Uncle Allen chose a life of hard work. Uncle Tom was pushed towards madness and in a way I consider his story the saddest. He could have been a student at MIT or Harvard or any other place of higher learning. He had that about him. Instead he finished out life as an unknown Gypsy; far from society and far from family. No one knows how he died. He probably died alone and that doesn’t sit well with me.

            So how can I relate this story to my own life? I too became a “Gypsy” for a little while. In my last letter I wrote about my truck driving experience down in Arizona. I finished by telling you that I made it home to Denver 3 days after I had to rescue Ms. Hygiene from getting herself potentially hurt again by another stranger. Well after I got home from Denver, I picked up my car from a cousin’s house. I stayed with him for a couple days and then I made my own adventure down to Florida. My brother Tony was living in Ocala Florida with his then girlfriend and her mother.

            I didn’t know what I was supposed to do in life. I was a military veteran at the time. I had school benefits that I could use, so I figured I could find a place to settle down and get my but in school and figure things out as I went along. Things kind of happened that caused those set of circumstances to be delayed.

            I got to the house that my brother was staying in. He had no job. He was basically loafing at the house with these two women, feeling sorry for himself all the time because he is blind in one eye and couldn’t find a normal job. To this day he still does not even have a GED. I soon realized that I would not be down there to visit him, but to try and save both his and my own ass from a life on the streets. This is another reason that to this day, I keep to myself and far away from the family. Family will do their best to deceive you and use the excuse of, “we’re blood, so it’s ok” to justify that bullshit.

            So I’m at the house. My brother is not working. The mother is sick of dealing with a leach of a man that he is. The girlfriend finds out that he is also cheating on her. I walked into a mess, and I was not fully established in a job or residency of my own at this point in my life. The rug was about to be pulled out from underneath me. I immediately asked the mother of the house if I could pay her some money until I got a job. I did not feel it was right to stay with her unless I was putting in my own economy. I also was disgusted by my brother’s lack of morals in this issue. The mother was ok with me giving her a few hundred bucks right away. The next day I was out looking for a job, even if only temporary. I was nervous at this point. I was in a house that did not belong to me. My plans of truck driving had failed because I decided that that was not the life for me.

            I would be out all day job hunting. I told my brother to knock his shit out; try to smooth things out with his girlfriend until we could get a place of our own, yet I could feel that time was slipping and it did. The mother started propositioning me with me sleeping in the bedroom with her. It’s funny to write about it now, but I refused. She was not terribly ugly, but she was not to my liking either, at least sexually. Plus I just did not want to put myself in that situation. I managed to put her off like that for about a week. I could tell more and more that she was not happy with me. I began to avoid her even more. When I wasn’t job hunting, I was trying to socialize with people around the area. I was in a desperate situation.

            Finally, after my last refusal, she not only kicked me out, but she threw the money at me—the money I had been giving her for rent. And she told me to take my worthless brother with me and get out of her house. I grabbed my stuff. I took my brother. And we were both in my car. My lowest moment was sitting in the car that rainy Florida afternoon and realizing, “Wow, I’m actually homeless now”. I think I even cursed God at that point. I wasn’t an alcoholic or drug abuser or lazy like my brother, and yet here I was with nothing but my belongings in my car with no idea where to go.

            So I took the money that was given back to me and I got the cheapest motel that I could find in Ocala Florida. It was so nasty. The place was full of drug dealers and prostitutes. I remember that for two days, all I wanted to do was sleep. I didn’t even want to face what I had to go through. I was so overwhelmed by hopelessness. I had no idea what to do. Yet somehow I snapped out of it. I credit part of that to my own attitude of having no choice but to get through this hard time, and maybe a little help from the same God that I had cursed a few days earlier.

            I was 24, 25 I think at this time. I went job hunting as usual. At night I went to some bars and clubs. I did that mostly to drink some beers to numb the harshness of life at that time. It was during those times that my luck would change. I met some college students who were going to the University of Florida, in Gainesville. I became a sort of acquaintance of a group of ten or so frat boys. They talked to me with much interest about my military experiences. One of them introduced me to a fine lady who worked in the Human Resources department of a local grocery dispensary for Ocala. She propositioned me for romance as well. This time I did not refuse, but was more than willing, and later that week I was filling out a job application in her office. She not only hired me on the spot, but she hired my brother as well. She even pushed his drug test through the paperwork (he probably had more marijuana in his system than Snoop Doggy Dog at the time).

            So I had a job, thank God. Even if all that job did was provide rent money until I could figure everything else out, it was a good start. My brother and I were both working and we stayed in that nasty hotel, so we had just doubled our economy. My boy…we were hitting the clubs up all the damn time, son! I met a lot of people. I made friends with some dirty south gangsters, some of which I worked with. They showed me all the cool spots in town to hang out at. I still talked to the frat boys on occasion. The HR lady even kept up on me, to see how I was doing. Things got better. I just had to stop feeling sorry for myself and push through the madness as hard as I could.

            I eventually saved up enough money to go back to Colorado and try to make things work again. Florida was not where I wanted to stay. For some reason Colorado was always in my heart. It was my promised land. My brother patched things up with his girlfriend, to which I thought he was an idiot. I had had enough of the Florida, dirty south life and made my way back home.

            So Florida represents many things to me. It represents the time I grew up as a young boy there with my mother, step dad, sister and Tony when he was much younger, down in Miami. It represents the times of seeing Uncle Ken when he was paroled from Prison. It also represents the times of meeting a madman I call Uncle Tom. Finally it represents a struggle that I endured when I wouldn’t sleep with a woman and the hardship because of that. There’s one more story about Florida that I will tell you about later. More than ten years later, I would find myself back in Florida. This time in Pensacola. I would go through the Air Force’s water survival training there, reserved for aviators and Special Forces guys in the event of a bail out over water. So Florida is not my enemy. We’ve just been through many times together.

            I love you boy. Today your mother texted me that we have a birthday party to go to for one of your friends in school. I better get to the store and pick out a gift. Maybe I so desperately left Florida back in 2004, so that one day I’d get back to help raise you. In fact, I know that is true. Talk to you soon.

 

Love Daddy.

 

           

Warheads on Foreheads, My Boy

1/24/15

Little-son,

            My boy, before I move on to any further history behind us and our background, I want to tell you some of the goals that I have been dreaming of for you. I feel that we have to start working now towards these goals. My goal is to somehow get you into the one of our country’s finest military academies. More specifically, I was thinking about the Air Force academy. I have direct knowledge from my working experience because I work for a majority of Air Force Academy F-16 pilots. I know the quality of education that it holds. I know the type of officers that it molds. I know the obstacles that even Academy Graduates face when trying to get their kids into this institution. Even a General does not hold automatic entrance for his children. That means the degree is worth gold and the work is tough for everyone. Sit back and enjoy this ride full of G-forces, adventures, overseas deployments, and overall bad-ass-ery. Warheads on foreheads, baby!

            So at this point in life, you know your daddy has a job at what you affectionately call, Airplane Work. That is true. More than that I work at Buckley Air Force Base. I have been there close to nine years now. I am in the fighter unit. There are a group of F-16 units on the base. One is the 120^th Fighter Squadron, and the 120^th Operation Support Squadron. I’m in the 120^th Operation Support Squadron. This consists of the logistical functions within the fighter mission. The 120 Fighter Squadron consists of the pilots, so both units are almost inseparable. We work together and only on paper is there really a separation.

            Within the unit of logistical support is Command Post, training, Aircrew Flight Equipment, Weather, Intelligence, and mission support. I am in the Aircrew Flight Equipment section. I help run the mission that maintains every article of pilot gear that goes either into or on the jet with them, or the equipment they need to do their mission. That goes from the flight gear that they are wearing, to the parachute that is in the ejection seat that will be used in the event of an ejection. It is obviously a very important job. We also do the required training that pilots must maintain to efficiently survive, evade, and escape enemy hostilities in the event of an ejection over land or water or other austere conditions. In order for us to properly train them, we ourselves have to have been through these trainings in the mother schools around the Air Force. We also have to know their gear much more that they do. In essence, F-16 pilots are our number one customer. We work with the other sections in the aid of making the pilots our number one priority. It is a good job, my boy.

            With that comes the ability to work hand in hand with Air Force academy pilots. Every day I work alongside Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, Colonels, and even occasionally the General for the Colorado Air National Guard will leave his desk job to maintain some flying hours. I don’t see lowly Lieutenants fresh out of the Academy. We have a couple captains, but they are considered to be sharp pilots in an atmosphere where they are hired by the whole group of pilots. In other words, it a very much, “good old boys club”.

            In the Air Force, the huge responsibility of Base or Wing Commanders almost always falls on to Academy Graduates. First of all, I am not an officer myself. Although I have my degree in economics from the University of Colorado, I have not been hired into an officer slot so as to then earn a commission. I am currently working that process. That being stated, I just want to let you know that I don’t fully understand the politics that goes into all this. I am just a third party recipient of this knowledge. How? Well I maintain the gear of not only the base commander, but also the group commanders all the way down to flight commanders. It’s a complex set of hierarchy that you may not understand, and that is ok. All I am saying is that I have pretty cool firsthand knowledge of how we can do our best to get you into the academy.

            Let’s get into that, now. To get into the academy, you have to have above a 4.0 GPA when you graduate high school. The way to do that is by taking advanced placement classes, or even college credited classes as you near the end of your high school career. You need to have community involvement. They want to see not just sports, but also community clubs, for instance FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America). Those kinds of clubs make an outstanding impression on your resume.

            The other hurdle is that you have to have 2 congressional recommendations. Those can be any two Colorado senators. Those are high hurdles to jump, but we would not be the only ones having to go through that hardship. The Academy is astronomically hard to get into because not only is the education one of the best educations that you will receive, but it comes at no economic cost to you or me as the parent. The government pays for it all. Now depending on what you choose to major in, you might have to give the Air Force some years of your life. If you become a pilot, this is one of those circumstances. It is still an awesome trade because you will graduate from the academy with more flight hours and experience than most junior pilots who apply at any civilian airline. You come out of the Academy worth a great deal not just to yourself, but the community as a whole.

            Once you get into the academy, you will go through a lengthy indoctrination process. Indoctrination is nothing more than a process in which you are taught how to think so that you can correctly act in the environment laid out before you. You will do about 6 weeks of “Basic training”. During this period, you will have senior cadets yelling at you on how to make your bed, how to properly march and wear your uniform. It’s pretty grueling at first but after a few weeks, you actually become very used to the strict regimen.

            Sometime after that, you begin your classes. But it’s not your typical college. You will be required to take from 15-21 credit hours a semester. You will also be undergoing intense military practices on leadership, team building, history knowledge acquisitions, and other “Officer” type of training. You will become a leader, my boy. But don’t fret; the Academy will become your bubble. By that I mean that you will be living on the academy where you will constantly be required to perform as well be monitored as far as your progress. There is an intense demand to display only the upmost of integrity, honesty, perseverance, and dedication. During your first year, you are allowed off of the base on the weekends to visit your family. I hope it would be then that you’ll be anxiously telling me, your mom, your grandpa and Mimi how you are doing.          

            From what I hear is that they make your first year the hardest. With every year they gradually give you more and more freedoms. The class load will get smaller and smaller with each year so that in your senior year, you can handle additional leadership type roles and responsibilities, or you can focus on your acrobatics as you take your newfound flying skills to the limit. Don’t take too many barrel rolls, son! I may get dizzy thinking about it.

            So here’s some more good news about all this, because I know the hurdles will be hard; many applicants do not make their first try. In fact some of the higher ranking officers that I have heard talk about their own experience will mention a thing called, “prepatory school”. That’s the process in which you almost made the cut, but you still need to improve your chances, you can get selected to go to a school to make your application what it needs to be. Some Academy students have had to spend their first two years in college in one of these schools to get in. It’s not the end of the world if we don’t get you in right away, and in fact it is very common.

            My boy, not only do I speak to you from the experiences that I hear about, but I speak to you from my own experience in life. By that I mean that I didn’t even graduate high school when I was supposed to. I screwed around some so that my grades were not good. I dropped out to work in my senior year. I even went and got a GED in hopes of not having to go back to school. Well I went back to school. I graduated so that I could join the Air Force. One day I would start going to the Community Colleges Front Range and Red Rocks. I did well enough to get admitted into the University of Colorado. I graduated with an overall GPA of 3.5 in Economics. I even made the Dean’s List my first semester. If I can make such a huge turn around, believe me when I say that we can achieve this. By the way, I have seen some young academy students who may have been book smart, but I am not so sure if I would send them to catch a bus by themselves. It’s a tough world sometimes.

I love you boy. Let’s do this.

Love, Daddy

 

Just You and I

1/26/2015

Little-Son,

            My boy, the last time I wrote to you, it was to go over dreams and goals for your life. Be happy that I set such high expectations for you. Through this letter, I will prove to you that those in life who don’t have anyone or anything pushing them, usually don’t get very far in life and instead do their best to tear others down. I as your father and a martial artist with nearly ten years of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai Kickboxing, and a little Judo, will teach you how to kick those pussies in their chest. But unfortunately, I need to also educate you on what family means and what family does not mean.

            So now I want to move on to my siblings. I have quite a dilemma. I can’t sit here and write pages and pages of examples of what I don’t want you to do as you grow up. Do I love my siblings? Only from a distance. By that I mean that I occasionally have “survivor’s guilt”. By that I mean that it hurts me that I can’t be part of a normal functioning family where people go madly insane because you decided to go do something with your life, period, end of story, no additional information needed.

            But with me it will never be that way. I was able to part the seas in my life and make it through to the other side. My promised land is not just a land flowing with milk and honey, as it was so promised from the LORD God, to his people Israel, by my promised land includes you. I am living in the Promised Land. The siblings that I speak of, never even left the land to which they are enslaved to. By that I mean choices after choices after horrible choices in which there is nothing to be proud of or to as their shield of accomplishment.

            My boy, even writing this, I feel ashamed to talk about it. I also feel like an asshole too, but I’ll explain why I have such a starch stance on this issue.

1.      By my own siblings, I have been robbed for petty things such as a PlayStation game console to pay for a drug habit

2.      I have been multiple times bad mouthed for having ambition in this life.

3.      I have been forgotten on holidays not only in this country, but in times when I was deployed over to Iraq, a long tour overseas in Europe for four years, and the few times that I was in other middle-eastern countries.

4.      I have even been wished for dead as a last phone call even as I was boarding a plane to a war zone and I tried to reach out to family.

5.      My fatherly skills have been bad mouthed. Not in a sense that I should stop being a bad father, but that I am crazy to be such a good father (who the fuck really says this kind of stuff? My side of the family does).

So my son, I need you to directly understand, that I do not for one second consider this as family. I just consider them as people that I am familiar with from a long time ago. So I’m talking about under-achievers, drug addicts, manipulators, liars, people who gladly accept from the state what they won’t for themselves go out and get. I would be much more forgiving if it only happened once, maybe even twice. But for the first 25 years of my life I constantly struggled with who I was and what was wrong with me. It took me this long to figure out that I was just the beautiful dove among ugly ducklings.

If anything ever happens to me my son, and I need you to know that I won’t be around forever, I do NOT want you going and seeking these people out. They are ugly people. They are dangerous people. They are manipulators and they will attempt to hurt you even if to only get at me one last time. If they attempt it while I am alive, I will severely kill their bodies.

My boy, that is what is so sad about the whole story. It was not always like this. I still love them but from very far away. I grew up with my brother Tony, and my sister Lisa. I helped my mother find my two older sisters Sophia and Christine. I occasionally talk to my brother Alex. I would like to talk to him more, but we are so busy. Alex is a good kid. He is going to college, and he has never hurt anybody. He loved your grandmother, even though he had no reason to. My mother put him up for adoption. She could not take care of him at that time. Hell, she could barely take care of the ones she had. Alex is good. Stay away from the rest. I will not have you be defiled from the toxic bullshit that inhibits the rest of the DNA from which I departed.

That being said, I want to move onto the things I did and the places I have been throughout my life. I want to move on to the time when I left home and became my own man and the person that I am today. Even through all the pain that I experienced and all the hurt that I still struggle with, I want you to know that it gave me the strength to be the man that I am today. I refuse to write about the past family adventures anymore because I consider those times of much inconvenience. It’s time to move on to why you are such a precious boy in my sight.

One final note: I took you to school today. You were in the back seat and you called my name. When I answered you, you told me, “Daddy, you are a super-hero”. A few seconds after that, you told me that you loved me. I am the only family you will ever need. Besides that, you have your mother’s side, of which a great many people love you. I Love you my boy!

            Love, Daddy

At Em Boys, Give Em the Guns!

1/27/15

Little-son,

            Off we go into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sun; here they come zooming to meet our thunder, at ‘em boys, give ‘em the guns! Down we dive, spouting our flame from under, off with one helluva roar. We live in fame, or go down in flame. Hey! Nothing can stop the US Air Force!

            My boy, don’t worry. That is just the fighting song for the United States Air Force. It’s a pretty cool song, although I must tell you that during my indoctrination period (basic training) I had to not only memorize that full song, but it was sung by thousands of new recruits every day. I start that song off by telling you that we are now moving into the history of you pops. I was singing that song 18 years ago. Part of me wonders where those years went. For today’s writing, I am going to tell you the story of why I chose the Air Force. Then I am going to write stories behind every medal that I wear on my chest. For me, it is a perfect guideline on how to steer this bad boy that I call the history of your pops. It will also help me to think about stuff that I may have not thought about in many years. It will be a ride for the both of us. Sit in your seat. Don’t pull that ejection handle unless you feel it’s your absolute last choice. Here we go.

            So why does one join the military? That question is kind of funny because when I was going through college, a young lady was asking me whether she thinks that her boyfriend should join the military. I asked, “Well what is he doing now?” She went on to tell me just odd auto body type jobs and such. She worked in a restaurant at nights. She was young, so I imagine they were fairly care-free. I asked if they had kids. She said of course not. I told her that he probably not join then. She asked me why I thought that way. I told her, “Unless you want to go to school or you are about to live under a bridge and have no better choices, I would advise against it” she was very surprised, especially because she knew I was a military meat-head.

            I said the military is a life full of rules, regulations, and harsh realities. Many people go into the military thinking it’s going to be like camp, and realize that it far from it. It is not your typical job, either. You really are signing yourself up to be the government’s property for however long you sign up.  If you decide right away that you do not like it, you have no choice after that. The choice then becomes to either learn to deal with it, or face serious consequences for not living up to your end of the bargain. There is a ton of bull crap that you have to deal with. You are going to deal with living under the military-law 24/7. Usually the most incompetent people will become your supervisor. And it’s not like you can just quit. You are stuck, like I said previously.

            That being said, it is a huge gamble. Over 90% of the people who join the military have no real world experience. You could be 18, 19 years old and living in a country or in a war situation where people are trying to kill you. That is a huge adjustment.

            Usually people who go into the military are not taking a pit stop before they continue on to Harvard. I’m exaggerating of course, but the enlisted force is comprised mostly of young people who don’t have many choices. There is an old saying about how it’s the poor who fight the nation’s wars, and that is very true. The military picks young people because young people can be easily molded. They won’t readily question authority, and they have the physical strength and endurance needed to battlefield combat. They need you dumb and strong. They also want to catch you before you have lived long enough to make bad choices in life. It’s very true that the older we get, the more baggage we make for ourselves. The military does not want anything holding you down. If the military wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one (I’m being very tongue in cheek).

            Well that’s where your dad comes in. I was of course young but also very stupid and naïve about life. I also did not have any choices. I was a high school dropout. I had no college acceptance letters waiting for me at home. I couldn’t sing or play basketball very well. A military recruiter could see me a mile away. So I joined. Now I didn’t consider the Air Force at first. I first spoke with the Navy recruiters. I liked those uniforms; I’m not going to lie. I did not try very hard on the Armed Forces placement tests that were administered in high school. I think I was smoking with my stoner friends that day. So they offered me a job as a firefighter on the ships. This all seemed cool, but it just did not sound very bad ass to me.

            So then I started talking to the Marine Corp recruiters. I was all about that gung ho stuff. They were pouring the Kool-Aid at full strength, and I was drinking it up. Every time you talked to a recruiter, he was talking about battles in Marine Corp history. I think he ended every sentence with “God-damn it, boy!” God forgive me for using his name in vain, but I am not exaggerating. I was loving the alpha-male, cult style type of organization that they were speaking of. They made you feel like a warrior just by thinking of joining their group of bad-assery.

            But I then began talking to the Air Force recruiters on the side. It was like I was cheating on a girlfriend. Yet I was attracted the Air Force’s way of life in that they treated their people a little bit better economically. There was no sleeping in ditches. You had the best training, got the best food, slept in the best accommodations, and got the best job training. That to me sounded more attractive than being a tough guy. They kind of reeled me in with that. I was like a girl looking for her best suitor. Did I want the boyfriend who promised me many months at sea in the name of adventure? Did I want to be the toughest war-fighting killing machine on the planet? Or did I want to be swept off my feet by the Air Force who considered themselves smarter and more attractive because they were allotted the most money from congress for new weapons, training and facilities? Well I was a material girl, living in a material world. So I chose the Air Force. By the way, I never considered the Army for even one second. To me they were either a bunch of dumb hicks or ex gangsters who needed a place to go instead of jail.

            For me to go into the Air Force, I just needed to go back to high school and graduate. I had dropped out about a month earlier. So I did just that. I graduated and I was on my way to basic training even before the ink on my diploma had finished drying. Off we go into the wild blue yonder.

            To finish this up, I will briefly tell you what each of the medals that I currently have are. I will go individually in future writings, about how I got each medal. It will be fun. As you look at the medals, the medals of higher precedence go from the top, down to the bottom. Likewise, I will list those medals here in the order of precedence, from top to bottom...

 

Medal                                                                                      Device

Air Force Commendation Medal                                            0

Air Force Achievement Medal                                               0

Air Force Outstanding Unit Award                                        1

Air Force Good Conduct Medal                                             2

National Defense Service Medal                                            1

Iraq Campaign Medal                                                             1

Armed Forces Service Medal                                                 0

Air Force Overseas Ribbon Long                                           0

Air Force Expeditionary Medal with Gold Border                1

Air Force Longevity Medal                                                    1

USAF Noncommissioned Military Graduate Ribbon            0

Small Arms Expert Marksmanship Ribbon (Pistol)               0

Air Force Training Ribbon                                                     0

***the device denotes any additional times I received the same medal. Some devise also mean added valor

            So there you have it, my boy. I’m going to leave it off with this. This is how I joined the military and the thought process I was experiencing about it back then. And these are the military medals that I have acquired. By the way, these medals only account for my Federal Unit awards. I also have medals from the state of Colorado. They mostly just coincide with some of the medals I already have, and did not feel the need to list those.

I love you boy. So for now until I finish every medal, I will write to you what they each meant individually, and how I got them.

Love Daddy

 

 

 

Trade School the Government Way

1/31/2015

Little-son,

            My boy, it’s time to transition some more. In the last writing, I spoke to you about the awakening of military basic training. Now I want to go from that scene to the next scene, which is trade school, the Air Force way. If I had to go through it again, I could, but I would absolutely vomit at the thought. This paper is to explain why. Man, I hope you do well in school, go to college, and don’t have to go down this route. If you do, it’s not the end of the world. A lot of people had fun, but there is a ton of continuing brainwashing that happens here. Witness this epic event….

            If you remember, military basic training is basically just one huge wakening event. It’s the government’s attempt to shock you into the person that you need to be so that you can effectively perform a mission on the battlefield (worst case scenario). The best case scenario is that you will one day be performing duties in support of other Airman in a combat theatre. Either way you are an important member of a killing organization within the government. That means you are not only being awakened, but you are being highly monitored and scrutinized to see if you can perform such details. You on the bathroom stalls with no door is the perfect image of a government monitoring you. You marching everywhere in a crowd of indistinguishable features because everyone looks the same with bald heads (the boys anyways), and everyone wearing the same uniforms, is a perfect metaphor for the government wanting you to be sheep. At least for now. Their job at this point is to strip you of all your individuality and conform you to their high standards and ability to work is a group with like-minded thinking.

            In the Air Force, we call the next phase, “Technical School”. In basic training you are told what job you will get based on your aptitude testings and the limited choices you have based on your results. You could be an Aircraft Controller, a Nurse, and Aircraft Mechanic, Cook, Intelligence Analyst, Military Police Officer, you name it. I didn’t score very high on these tests, because I took them in high school during a time when I wasn’t even considering the military. In fact, I think I volunteered to go take the test in an attempt to get out of class. I was very unfocused at that time in life. I did score high enough to get a job called “Survival Equipment”.

            My technical school was located down at Sheppard Air Force Base, Wichita Falls Texas. Like many other military bases, it’s located smack dap in the middle of economic crap. When a surrounding area depends on a military base for a majority of its economic stability, I guarantee you an ugly place, full of ugly businesses, full of ugly people with loose morals. I’m talking about strip clubs, shady car lots, adult movie outlets, all things fancy or higher established people would stay far away from because they are all an eyesore. Not for the military, though. We’re talking about an enlisted force where the majority of the recruits come from poverty. Remember, it’s a nation’s poor that fight the wars.

            Wichita Falls is a very ugly place. There is a movie called, An Officer and a Gentleman. It’s about a Navy ensign going through his technical school to hopefully become eligible for pilot school. The surrounding area is full of women who are on the scout for such men in the hopes that they can feign pregnancy in the hopes of luring a man to marry them and so take them away from such a dismal environment. My boy… that stuff happens all over military bases all over the world. And if a woman is looking for government men to latch onto because of his benefits and earning potential, you know she is of the lowest moral character. That being said, there are trailer park girls that abound the area of Wichita Falls Texas, looking for not even an officer, but an uneducated, young and horny 18-21 year old man to take them away from Texas.

            That is what I noticed while there. I was in a maintenance unit. It was a dormitory full of young guys like me who were working directly for jobs needed in the mission of flying the aircraft. I learned how to pack parachutes, life rafts, life preservers. I also became a “stitch-bitch”. I can not only sew to my heart’s desire, but I can also fix many a sewing machines. In fact, I have known a few people who got out of the military with that skill who opened up their own sewing or upholstery business. They usually worked on car and or boat upholstery. It’s a good skill to have, but I’ll be honest when I say that I kind of thought it was a sissy job to have. You don’t always get what you think you’re going to get in the military. Just stay away from the ladies on the prowl outside the gates.

            Life on base is full of boredom and ritual living as usual. There is marching, physical training, room inspections, weekend duties and other military type stuff. You have instructors, but as a young Airman, they kind of let go of the holsters a little bit as they slowly give you your freedom back. There are phases of freedom. It’s like probation. If you prove for the first few weeks that you can stay out of trouble, than you can do things like go off base, but only in uniform (which only gives the economic hungry ladies outside the gate an easy target). If you move up another phase, you can actually leave the area on the weekends. You can still only go to a certain radius distance outside the base. Usually this meant Dallas was an n opportune place to visit and hang out in.

            Move up one more phase to the highly sought after, “Phase 4” and you can actually live off the base and away from the dorms where everyone is monitored. This is great because there is one thing that is non-lacking on military training bases, and that is snitches. Think about it, you’re 18 years old (mostly). Your hormones are kicking in like crazy. There’s alcohol to pass the insane amounts of boredom. All you have to do is get someone to buy it for you, or hang out at either the arcade, bowling alley, or Noncommissioned officer’s club, and you’re getting sideways drunk before you know it. The problem is there are a million eyes everywhere. Not only are there undercover police and special agents everywhere, but there are fellow trainees and instructors who will turn you over in a heartbeat to make their plight much softer. Maybe they just don’t like you. What’s worse is that it’s an environment fostered by the government in the first place under the pretense of “Integrity in all we do”. It’s an honor system where no one who bends or breaks the rules is safe.

            So there are 2 things that are hard to do while being at these trade schools; to get through it without getting into any trouble and to get through it without getting mixed up with the woman on the prowl, such as the unfortunate officer did in the movie, An Officer and a Gentleman. When I first got to the school, I thought the school work was going to be the hardest thing to deal with. I realized that was the easiest. It’s the social life that threatens your very existence in the military and the ability to move on unscathed. I witnessed many a young man get married after knowing a girl for only a few weeks. I witness and heard of many accounts of young men and woman getting into trouble for underage drinking, sex in public, driving on base under the influence, fighting, stealing, you name it.

            My boy…It’s not like that all the time, I am just showing you the worst scenarios. A lot of it is funny. There are some clowns. Yet in no other way will you ever experience the government’s thumb on you outside of incarceration. It is truly a jail with no bars. And finding those bars is no difficult feat. Many of the instructors sound like corporate lawyers who without fail will remind you of the prison awaiting you for not making the right choice. For us at Sheppard Air Force Base, it was the threat of Fort Sill and Fort Leavenworth Army bases. They were very real threats too. So please my boy, if we can help it, let’s stay away from the military bases and the woman who hang out around said military bases. Keep your love-pistol to yourself. You will do your daddy some good. Go to college. But if not, don’t worry…I didn’t start going to college until I was in my 30’s. I love you boy

Love Daddy

 

 

Some Men Beat Their Friends Up in Bars

2/1/15

Little-Son,

            My boy, it’s time to move on to another adventure. I feel as I have a thousand stories written on my soul. It is only now that I begin to lay them out. For this one, I am home on leave after my technical school. I have received a 3 years set of orders to Ramstein Air Base, Germany. It was an awesome time, yet I made a mistake. I married one of those wolves, or woman outside the gate. I didn’t realize they were overseas as well. It is ok. Your lovely sister, Joanne was born because of that union.

            The transition from the military training environment to my first duty station entailed me taking a little over 2 weeks of leave-in-route. What that means is that I got to hang out at home for a while until I went overseas. All I wanted to do was stay out of trouble. Getting an overseas assignment like Germany for my first duty station was like striking gold. Many first term Airman did not even make it out of the States, let alone a cool place like Germany. There are a lot of bad places to get assigned. I can think of a few like anywhere in Texas, North Dakota where it is freezing all the time, high visibility places over in Virginia, and other places out in the middle of nowhere. There are very few places in the United States, in which I would want to be stationed, within the Air Force.

            Here’s the economic phenomenon with the military; people of lower class for some reason get insanely jealous if you are able to get a job in the military. People of upper class don’t much value or respect the military because they see the military as an act of violence towards other countries, and it’s also well known that kids who go into the military do so because they aren’t doing anything else with their lives. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen it on both ends of the spectrum. I’ve seen poor people mad and I’ve seen rich people snob their noses at the military uniform. The reason I bring this up is because for those few weeks that I was home, I instantly felt negative jealousy or animosity from not only my mother, but my younger siblings. I never understood why, and to be honest, I just wanted to pass through and go onto my next place in life.

            I truly did not like being home for those two weeks. My mother was a raging alcoholic and drug abuser by this time. She was also hiding herself in her room battling depression, probably from the low self-esteem brought about by the lovely ways in which she praised and raised her children. I say this of course in the utmost of sarcasm. I just wanted to avoid her. I felt so bad for my brother Tony and my sister Lisa. Looking back on it now, I think even then I realized that I was soon about to make my escape. I was about to go do my own thing. They had terrible times ahead of them. I was stricken with the greatest amount of survivor’s guilt (of which I still suffer from greatly). How do you cope with a mother who actually wants her kids to be failure’s like she was? It’s a hard demon to fight.

            So I just never stayed around the house. I had friends I went and visited. I began talking with a young lady my age and she invited me to her house to hang out with her and her family all the time. I was 18 and I can tell you that I don’t think we so much as kissed, yet I was grateful that she gave me a place to go to avoid the drama at home. I don’t remember her name, but I remember her family. She lived in south Lakewood, not to far from the Littleton area. She was 17 at the time. Her sister introduced her to me under the context of having someone in the military to write to while I was overseas. They brought me home to meet mom and dad.

            Mom was a sweet lady. They were of the middle class. I say that because they had a very nice house and it didn’t seem like the kids were wanting of too much. I don’t know what Mom did, I just know that the girls loved her and she loved those girls. She also loved her husband. Her husband was an interesting character. He was an ex Pararescue-men for the Air Force. Those guys are among the Air Force’s elite Special Forces that also consist of Combat Controllers. Pararescue guys are men (females not allowed) who go into enemy territory to rescue downed Airman and aircrew. They will scuba dive, climb mountains, jump out of helicopters, whatever is necessary to get to their objective. They are also expert field medics. The training they need to become a pararescue man, takes over a year with a very high wash out rate.

            So my new friend’s dad was a pararescue-men during Vietnam. That was a totally different war followed by totally different rules, than the wars that are fought today. With less media coverage and far less technology, troops acted in much different ways. He was a big man. I would say he was close to 300lbs. He had a very long beard and long wavy hair. He was a tough biker dude. Unless he told you, you would have never guessed that at one point in his life he was considered the tip of the spear for the Air Force, as well as in top physical shape to be able to withstand any objective in any whether in almost any circumstance. I think transforming from that way of life unto a civilian is a transition that never fully happens. From what I learned about the guy, he was still a Wildman, and probably is still one of he is alive.

            He told me stories about all the drugs that they did over there in Vietnam. He told me that during their down time, they were all on heroin and PCP, acid, whatever else they could get their hands on to get their head out of the war if just for a little bit. Back then, the commanding officers not only knew about it, but endorsed anything to keep their troops happy to kill and save lives another day. It’s crazy to think that’s how it was back then, but it was. That’s why a lot of those guys came back home and ended up on the streets with raging drug and alcohol problems fueled by untreated post-traumatic stress. I was fascinated by his stories. He was a little intimidating, but I think he was well aware that he knew anyone hanging out with his daughter and met him would not be trying to put any sexual moves on her. I treated her like an angel with a very big guardian angel.

            One night, when we were all watching movies at the house, I asked her where her pops was. She said, “Oh probably the bar”. I think I asked her if he goes there a lot. They laughed at me. They said that he was kind of like a big teddy bear. He would go to the bar, get drunk and beat his friends up. I was like, are you serious? They were. They said it as if they not only accepted it, but knew that he needed to be around his boys and to be a man. They loved him dearly and he worked hard at his job to take care of his three girls. I think I spent the majority of my time with that family. For that I am very grateful. I never wanted to go to my own home. When it was time for me to leave, I left. It was a rough goodbye, in that I had gotten close with the family. There was a security there. A protection and a love that was very foreign to me, yet it was something that I had craved. Every night that I went home I felt like I was leaving the sheep-dogs den in order to go back to wolves. It makes me sick to even think about it to this day.

            There you have it, my boy: a small piece of a story in which I tell you what happens next. That young lady and I wrote each other for a little while. I eventually lost contact with her. But I will never forget that family and writing this has only made me realize that maybe the reason I am such a watch dog with you, is because I learned from an Air Force Special Forces guy what it means to be a sheep dog (the guy who protects the sheep).  I love you boy.

Love Daddy.

 

Of Wolf and Man

2/2/2015

Little-Son,

            Oh my boy, what can I say about today? Today I’m taking a break from the military memories, because to be honest, I don’t like writing about the military that much, and I prefer tonight to talk about today’s experience. Tonight I took you to your first Jiu Jitsu class. For you I imagine it was sensory overload, and I could tell that it was at times. As an adult it’s very intimidating sometimes. So I’d like to talk about my Jiu Jitsu road for a little bit. Seeing you on the mat made me realize some things that I did not realize I would think about.

            First of all, Jiu Jitsu for kids is different than it is for adults in some respects, and it’s the same in others. Tonight you got to warm up with some physical exercises to wake the muscles up and to get the blood flowing. After that, the black belt instructor had you guys go over some simple shrimping out drills. After that, the professor (the black belt) had you in little stations with different techniques being practiced at each station. After a certain amount of time, everyone would rotate stations. Finally the professor explained a basic mount escape before he set up cones for live rolling and take downs. I worried that you may be blown away with sensory overload and when you came over to talk to me, I just wanted to somehow give you the skills that I have so that you wouldn’t be nervous out there.

            Son, besides the climbing of the ropes and the throwing of the big bouncy balls, we adults basically do the exact same thing. We have warm up exercises. We start the class with a technique and then we usually finish the class with time to practice those techniques with live rolling, or sparring. I have been doing this Jiu Jitsu thing for going on 7 years I would guess. I honestly have lost track but I think I am close with that guess. The first time I walked into a Jiu Jitsu place was after I came home from Iraq, and the Muay Thai Kickboxing place that I was training at had closed down. I had been training in that discipline for about two years before I made the transition, and once I found Jiu Jitsu, getting punched in the face all the time did not seem like so much fun anymore.

            When I first started with Jiu Jitsu, I was in incredibly good shape. I ran all the time. I weightlifted all the time. I was in my young 30’s so I was in my prime physically. I was the typical tough guy player in this new world of Jiu Jitsu. Knowing what I know now, I was nothing more than a dummy for the upper belts as they tested the true art of Jiu Jitsu. What is that true art? It is the art of being able to defend yourself against someone who is a lot bigger than you, stronger than you and faster than you. There comes a point where you actually start humiliating these guys with the ease of technique. But it takes a long time to get there. It takes years of getting beat up. Many people quit long before they reach this point because some egos just can’t handle it. Either you learn to let go of the need to win all the time and you start to learn why things don’t work, or you leave because losing is too hard to handle.

            In Jiu Jitsu and in life, if you can learn to accept failure, you’re not really scared of it happening. In fact you are ready for it and prepared to try the next step to not fail the same way in the future. You begin to realize that life is a lot of failing and getting back up. It’s about not only not being afraid of losing, but is also about not really caring about losing because you know that with losing, there is a valuable lesson.

            Let me point to a fighter named Mike Tyson. He was the youngest heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He was fast, incredibly powerful and his technique was far above the others. He dominated so much so, that people were scared of him, and he was as ferocious in the ring as he was outside because his ego began to take a huge hold of him. He crossed over from working incredibly hard to thinking he was always going to be unstoppable. Well it eventually happened. A man by the name of Buster Douglas beat him. When he beat him, he beat him very badly. This defeat crushed Tyson to the point that his career was never the same afterwards. Not even considering the legal battles that Tyson would come up against, his financial life came to ruin, his relationships were ruined, but the thing he probably treasured more than all of that began to slip out of his hands. This all happened because he could not handle defeat.

            With Jiu Jitsu, that is impossibility. I say that because you realize how easy it is to lose a fight long before you ever start winning. I’ll be honest when I say that there have been plenty of times when I wanted to quit. The first 3 competitions I ever did, I never won a single match. Meanwhile some of the other guys who in my mind did not train as much or were not as physically gifted as I was were winning their matches. It was brutal. I’ve witnessed guys who sucked so bad at Jiu Jitsu that people would make fun of them from the outside of the mat. Some of those guys are long gone. Meanwhile, that same guy who used to get made fun of is one of the best Jiu Jitsu guys I know from when I started, and he is not afraid to roll with anyone. Yet he is the kindest man I have ever met too.

            My son, tonight on the way to Jiu Jitsu you said that you were going to win. I was so hoping that you wouldn’t feel that way. I say that because you are a young boy, and they defeat that you will feel when getting defeated is not something you are yet familiar with. It is a crushing blow to the ego. In Jiu Jitsu as well as in life, there are three kinds of people. There are Wolves, Sheep and Sheep-dogs. When I first started Jiu Jitsu I was a wolf. I went for many years thinking that I was much better than I actually was. I felt like losing was the end of the world. I felt as if I could choke a guy no matter what, then I could go to sleep at night. I also did not care to help those who had less training than I did. I thought it was somehow my place to go hard as if I was going to get my next belt because of that role.

            Now after these years, I am very much not in the shape that I used to be. Part of it is my own laziness, part of it is that my body just can’t handle training for 5 or 6 days the way I sued to when I first began training. Yet when I train I feel as if I’m smarter. I don’t take it personally as much as I used to if I get defeated. The only time I take it personally is if someone is just trying to hurt me or disrespect me with dangerous moves (much the same way I used to when I first started). I guess the tide has turned. I guess I have over-repped the same moves into my body over and over that I no longer believe in the strength, speed or posture of my body but now I use all those things with an understanding that timing along with those things and proper technique will make any incredible hulk look like a clown. It is a long journey to get there. But I love Jiu Jitsu. The sheep-dogs in life are the ones who are not afraid of aggression, but they are masters of it and can kill the wolves if need be to protect the helpless sheep. In life and on the mats, you don’t ever want to be the Wolf who preys on the weak. Eventually your own teeth will get broken out by the sheep-dog, and he will hand you over to be shredded to bits by wolves much larger and scarier than you. You will go from predator to prey.

            To end this essay, that’s what Jiu Jitsu does; it breaks the wolf down so he is not so overly aggressive and it gives courage to the sheep so that they are not so timid. It produces the great equilibrium amongst the group so that those who need to get beaten down get beaten down, while those who need to get brought up get brought up. In Jiu Jitsu, you will get beaten for a long time before you get to do the beating. By the time you do get to do the beating, I imagine it’s not important to you to beat someone out of sheer want to beat someone to go home and feel good. You just love the art and how the art itself is working its way through your mind body and spirit because you have allowed yourself to yield to it over the years. My son, I am glad I got to take you to your first class. I love you

Love Daddy.

           

 

The Air Force Outstanding Unit Award

The 37^th Airlift Squadron. Blue-Tail-Flies

Time of Service: 1995-1999

2/04/2015

1800 Hours Local Mountain Standard Time

 

Little-Son,

            Meinen son, guten taq. Ich habe fur dich einem gute geschichte. My son, I have for you a good story. I’m going to tell you the meaning of the Air Force’s Outstanding Unit Awards, and then go into the history behind it. There are very few people who truly know where I have been. You are going to learn a great deal about your dear old Pappi. Sit back, grab your favorite German Lederhosen, go on top of any slanted roof and try yodeling as you learn the history of your father in the European theatre, United States Air Force.

            The Air Force Outstanding Unit Award is awarded to any Air Force Unit which performs exceptionally meritorious service, accomplishes specific acts of outstanding achievement, excels in combat operations against an armed enemy of the United States or conducts with distinct military operations conflict with or exposure to a hostile action by an opposing foreign force. (Source 1)

            Son, I don’t exactly remember what month it was. I just remember that it was near or on the month of my birthday month, in November of 1995. The reason that I remember this was because it was freezing cold when I had arrived at Frankfurt Airport, which was located about a half hour drive east of Ramstain Air Base, Germany. I was just hitting my 19^th birthday, and I was about to experience the coolest place of my life. I was also going to be a part of one of the Air Force’s prestigious C-130 units. I would not fully realize until many years later, how fortunate I was, and that I was a part of history that you can google, search for with Wikipedia, and the office of the Air Force historian. Germany was a good time for your father on many levels. The things that were missing from my life as a teenager, I would find over in Germany.

            I think writing a couple essays on this period of my life will do us some good. I plan on doing just that. When I arrived in Germany, I was picked up by one of my soon to be supervisors, or sergeants. In the military, your sergeant is like your dad. His words are to be headed, and his sole focus is to mentor you and transform you into a functioning member within the unit so that you can fit in the unit socially, and perform the overall mission. This not only belongs to your direct supervisors responsibility, but all Non Commissioned Officers within the unit are responsible for maintaining the espirit de corp. Espirit de corp is another word for unit family and cohesion. I will tell you right now, that within the 37^th Airlift Squadron, I felt I felt like a son in my young military career. As such, I’d like to take you on this journey. First I want to go over some history of the unit. That way you can see how I was directly a part of the overall mission and what that means.

            So I’m going to paraphrase what my sources say. The 37^th Airlift Squadron transported supplies and provided many humanitarian Airlift missions throughout the world. The unit was activated in June of 1942. After being transferred around to different training locations, the unit was dropping paratroopers into Normandy on D-day (6 Jun 1944). The unit received the Distinguished Unit Citation and a French citation for those missions. After the Normandy invasion, the unit provided supplies to the United Kingdom. They hauled food, clothing medicine, gasoline, ordinance, and other supplies to the front while also evacuating medical personnel to rear zones hospitals, such as Landstuhl medical center (of which, your father spent some time in).

            The unit dropped paratroopers into Nijmegen (home of your daddy’s favorite rock guitarist, Eddie Van Halen) during the time of the airborne attacks on the Netherlands. The unit participated in the Battle of the Buldge by releasing gliders with supplies for the 101^st Airborne Division near Bastogne. 

            Followed by some time in the United States, the unit did some missions over in Korea in which they flew airborne assaults into Sukchon and Munsan-ni and aerial transportation between Japan and Korea. While deployed to Taiwan, the unit had crews flying to Hanoi on 17 February 1973 for Operation Homecoming, which was the American reparation of prisoners of war from Vietnam to Clark Air Base, Philippines. The unit conducted airlift operations during operation Desert Shield in Southeast Asia 14 August 1990-29 Mar 1991. It airdropped humanitarian supplies in Operation Provide Comfort for the relief of fleeing Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq, April-May 1991. The 37^th flew airlift and airdrop missions to Bosnia and Herzegovina for Operation Provide Promise (The mission for which your daddy received the unit citation award) from July 1992-January 1996. (Source 2)

            My son, when I arrived in the unit, my commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel John P Bloom. He not only commanded the unit, but he was also one of the C-130 pilots who flew many of the missions during my tenure there. I remember he was a tall, lanky man with sucked in cheeks. He was a good commander as well as a good leader. I’d like to finish here with the overall history of the unit. The next time I write to you, I will go into day to day life in Germany, the mission at the 37^th, and my life in general over in Germany. I think you will like it. Ich Liebe Dich (I Love You). Auf Wiedersehen (the formal way to say goodbye until I see you again.

 

Love Daddy

 

Sources

1.      http://www.afpc.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=7785

2.      http://www.afhra.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=10208

 

            My First Weekend in Der Deutschland

2/5/15

Little-Son,

            My boy, I remember the drive from Frankfurt to the Air Base very clearly. From Frankfurt, the Air base is about an hour and a half drive southwest. Most of the drive is on the autobahn. The highway and roadways are filled with signs that are written in German and make absolutely no sense, until you have been there awhile. I was no longer in Colorado. In fact, nothing was at all familiar from the way people drive, to the culture norms to the way the Germans were very proper yet made a lot of sense. To this day, I miss Germany very much. This little adventure is to go over my first reaction, and to lay out some the norms of German culture.

            First of all, when you drive on the autobahn, you NEVER enter the left lane unless you are passing. Even then, you better be well aware if there are any speeding cars that will have to slow down to your merge. If you get into that lane and have to slow a car down, you will be dealing with a very angry German who will be showing you many hand gestures and facial expressions. Germans have this very direct sense of communication, for which I always loved. Their language makes so much sense. So if I cut a car off in the way that I have just explained, I will get a Germany who will be waving his hand in front of his face who will yell an explicit to me that may go something like this, “Bist deine kopf kaput?”. What he is literally saying is, “Is your head broken?” Their language is awesome for that kind of thing. So anyways, never get into the passing lane. First of all it is illegal. Secondly it is very dangerous because outside of the city, there are no speed limits on the autobahn. I have seen cars pass me on the autobahn that passed me as if I was a parked car.

            Secondly I noticed that the weather in that part of Germany is very cold during the November part of the year. It is also very dreary. I did not know this before then, but it is cloudy in that part of the world for about 9-10 months out of the year. The snow will stay on the ground from when it begins to snow in late September until mid to late march. You will never see the sun during the winter. During the summer months, the trees are so green and all the wildlife is so thick because of all the moisture. During that drive to the base, I remember it being cold and I remember that none of the signs on the autobahn made any sense. All the speed limits were in kilometers. They have different rules for yielding, city limits that are universal no matter what city you are in, and since there are small lanes in the towns and also traffic circles, you had to be very careful to know the rules. In Germany, your driver’s license is good for a lifetime unless you lose it for some reason like drinking and driving or too many speeding tickets or whatever. It is very difficult to get a driver’s license in Germany and you will never see a car on the road that is older than 15 years old. The emissions standards are so strict, that they nitpick the smallest thing, so that even rust spots on your car will cause you to fail an emissions test.

            Enough of that stuff for now. There was a van of us new guys that got to the base. I remember it was a Friday afternoon. This meant we had the whole weekend in Germany before we had to report for duty on the following Monday morning. One of the sergeants was going to pick us back up on that Monday, so all we pretty much had to do was just show up outside the dormitory in which we were dropped off.

            Out of the handful of new guys, there were two of us who were part of the 37^th Airlift Squadron. We were not put in a room together, but we were in the same hallway. Usually in the Airman Dorms, there are two people to a room while there is a single bathroom shared between two rooms. This meant there were 4 people using the same bathroom. It was your typical college style set up. There were 4 floors with 3 wings around a center CQ office on the first floor. Down each wing, were rooms on both sides. The CQ office was usually a high ranking sergeant whose sole job was to assign clean up details during the week, keep everyone out of trouble, and to report to any commanders any bad or illegal behavior going on by the tenants. He was essentially a fancy babysitter for military aged men. After a while, the place felt like a prison in which you reported after your duty day ended. But it had to be like that I think. People went crazy over there. It was like college but without any of the homework.

            People got into trouble ALL the time. You have to remember, you are dealing with young men and woman who have never lived outside of their parent’s homes before. The legal drinking age in Germany was 18. People’s hormones are out of this world, plus you mix in the fact that the military is a stressful lifestyle and full of occasional people with dark or disturbing personalities. It’s also fun because you’re making a lot of buddies. On the weekends, those dorms were complete chaos. So I don’t expect you to be reading this until much later, when you are of age, but I’ll write it down now. People are drinking like crazy. Girls from off the base are being funneled into the gang latrines/showers for group style loving. German woman loved the military guys, and would always find a way to get on the base. German beer is much more potent than American beer. You can drink less than half the amount of American beer that would put you into blackout mode. Plus you’re dealing with kids who don’t know how to handle their liquor.

            Bad things happened in those dorms too. People fell off top floor balconies. Property was always destroyed. Female Airman were raped or sexually harassed. In that culture, it was common for the younger woman to act very promiscuously and engage in group style sexual activity. It doesn’t take much of that kind of behavior and to know that a girl who has a reputation for being promiscuous and you have a very dangerous atmosphere where a drunk male or a group of drunk young males will discount the time when the young lady will say no. Or worse yet, a drunk and blacked out female who cannot say no in the first place, who will be taken advantage of.

            In the local Stars and Stripes military newspapers, they print out every single police blotter from the previous weekends. Many times you would read about the bad things that happened in those dorms, up to and including murder amongst military troops overseas, which included people from my base and in those dorms. I’ll foreshadow for you now, and say thankfully I met your sister’s mother and lived with her off base. My stay inside those dorms was short lived. But for the first weekend, and for the first few months, I lived in those dorms.

            The first weekend, I was there with a guy named “Smooth”. I’m not joking. That is what he called himself. He was a pasty white kid who talked like he was black. He came from the Midwest. He was your typical 18 year old like myself who thought he knew everything and was certain that he was going to be hanging out with all the ladies, here in about 15 minutes. We had the whole weekend to find ourselves something to do. So we unpacked our stuff and got ready to hit the town.

            So when it was dark I remember how lonely it felt not only to be in a different country, but to be in a different country where you knew absolutely no one. It is a very unsettling feeling. You feel very vulnerable and very not at ease. Maybe it is for that reason alone that the first thing that you want to do is get out there and to get some alcohol in you to numb that away from home feeling. It was rough being that far from home, no matter what you felt about home in the first place.

            So we called a taxi cab to come on base to pick us up. From the sounds of the base, and everyone else’s activities, Friday at Ramstein Air Base was a huge party. There are people everywhere drinking, playing music, playing pool, and otherwise making plans. Boyfriends and girlfriends are together. Groups of friends are together. Me and “Smooth” were about to go have ourselves a little bit of good ole German culture. We got into a cab and told the cab driver to take us to the closest night club off the base. And away we went.

            So clubbing in Germany is not at all what it is like in most places I’ve clubbed at in America, during my younger years at least. I don’t know how it is now. But we arrived in the city of Kaiserslautern, Germany and could tell where the big club was. The club has laser like “Batman” style lights shining into the sky from the building. You could see the lights bounce off the clouds for miles. When we arrived, we paid the driver. We asked what time the cabs stopped running and if he could try to be there at whatever time, I don’t even know if we told him because clubs over there don’t close at 130am either. Some of those places can stay open until as late as 4am. It all depends on the club. The music at this place was crazy. It was loud techno and other machine style music. You almost had to be a robot with lightning fast data processessing to even keep up with the beat of the music.

            There was a long line of people waiting to get inside too. From what I remember, the people dressed and acted like freak; more so to me at that time than I remember teenage Americans. It was a different culture. Guys wore heavy makeup. Everyone wore black. The German sounded amazing. People had very fast and expensive cars. When you get inside, there were smoke machines everywhere. You couldn’t see where you were going and you couldn’t hear the guy next to you even if he was screaming at you at the top of his lungs. It was complete sensory overload. I loved it.

            Club dancing over there in Germany is different too. Over here in America, people do this really disgusting, predatory type thing, that is almost kind of embarrassing, or so I have always thought. On our dance floors, young woman do what’s called, “backing that ass up”. Most of the time they don’t even look behind them and a complete stranger will come up behind her and rub his male parts all up on her booty. As a man I’m very embarrassed to see that stuff. I’ve never understood it. So as a man, I’m supposed to display this predatory behavior on a woman that would otherwise get authorities involved in any different location, and people are ok with it. Sorry, a little divergence on my part, but I explain this, because even as freaky as Europeans are, they don’t dance in that way. It’s not because they are uptight, it is just not their culture at least back then. It was more just people dancing and rocking out to the music. Your body and soul are displaying to the rest of the world around you how this crazy machine music has got you enchanted to the beats of thunder with billowing smoke that you can’t see through. Don’t back that ass up, baby! Instead see my robot dancing skills while I walk around the darkness with a lit cigarette hanging out of my ear hole.

            That’s how crazy it is over there in Germany. That’s how I felt experiencing my first night in a new culture. The rest of the night was very strange too. I’d tried talking to some ladies. The cross cultural signals got mixed up and before you know it, it is way past my curfew because jetlag had set in like a brick wall. Plus all this stronger alcohol had taken a tole on me. I was 18 years old and experiencing a major alcoholic black-out in a place where I did not know where I was, I did not know the language, and I did not know how to get back home.

            “Smooth” criminal had disappeared on me the same way Michael Jackson’s left handed glove always disappeared on stage. Ok that was not a good joke, but either way, I was lost and alone. There were no cell phones back then. The taxis had stopped running and the club was closing down. Not only that, but I was fearful of going back to the base and having to go through the military police while being this drunk. I just wanted to go to my room and go to bed. During my black out, I remember vomiting all the hard German beer out. I remember a German guy pulling up next to me in a very expensive and exotic sports car. He asked me if I was from the base. I guess the haircut and “dumb new American” behavior were his first clues. He told me to get in; he’d get me to the base. Sure, why not! Nothing bad could possibly go wrong with this kind of situation.

            Oh my boy, he drove up to about 200 feet from the base’s security checkpoint and told me he was too drunk to drive any closer, or the cops would do something to him too. I had to get out. It was now my time to do the walk of shame up to the security checkpoint, and somehow get to my room. This is craziness. Somehow I’m supposed to get past the cops and into my dorm room, where I have absolutely no idea where it is located. I don’t even know what room I’m in at this point because I’m dry-heaving all over the place.

            I eventually get to the gate guard who checks ids. As I’m walking down the road towards the cop station, there are cars driving past me. As I get within 10 feet from the MP (military police), he is yelling at me. He comes up to me and grabs me by the arms and drags me over to the other duty officer. I have to MP’s yelling at me about how they should arrest me for public intoxication on a military base. I’ll have to go report to the Base Commander, who is a General, by the way. They’ll put me in jail overnight. Yada yada yada…. During all this, I threw up in the bushes next to them. When I regained my composure and could speak again, I said, “Please sir, can you just take me to my dorm room? I promise I’ll never do this again”. I gave them the biggest sob story that side of the Black Sea.

            I don’t know if they were just trying to scare me with their speech or if they really meant to do the harm in which they threatened, but they had one of the desk sergeants give me a ride to my dormitory. I showed them my room key and they knew exactly where to take me. So my first night in Germany, I got a ride in the back of a military police car to my dormitory room. It was not my proudest moment. I just remember that I felt so horribly drunk and sick, that I would have given my arm to have a little bit of mercy extended my way. The lady MP who gave me a ride home actually thought my behavior was funny. She joked around with me and walked me up to my room.

            I never wanted to drink again ever in my life after that night. It took me the rest of the weekend to recover from that Friday night. I would soon learn that I was just partaking in a proud military tradition of partying it up in the Air Force. I would soon learn that the unit to which I belonged to worked hard and played equally hard. But the mission was amazing. Life had its ups and downs, but mostly ups. As I continue this story, you will see why I never wanted to leave Germany. I will continue in my next writing. My son….please never drink the way I did that first night. And please never go to the club with a guy named “Smooth”. You will get sick every single time. I love you, my boy.

 

Love Daddy

           

 

Meet and Greet the Airdrop Flight

2/6/2014

Little-Son,

            So I want to introduce you to some of the people that I worked with at my first military unit, the 37^th Airlift squadron. I need to tell you that I am going over memories that are 20 years old. I will not remember everyone’s name. I may remember some first names and I may only remember nicknames. I might only be able to describe a person and his title. In the process I will need to educate you on some military terms as far as rank, structure and military jargon; if needed. The tough part about writing this essay is that the technology back then was not what it is today. There was no Facebook, or a heavy use of cell phones. In fact, most people did not have cell phones. So I must apologies in that I am going strictly from memory. I will do my best to make it as accurate as possible.

            The Air Force uses different names for military units. The Army has what are called brigades, regiments, platoons, fire teams. There is a certain hierarchy: one reports to a higher authority. Well the Air Force’s units from top hierarchy to bottom are called Wings, Groups, Squadrons, and then elements. A Wing is usually a base with one main mission. The groups are units on that base that support the overall accomplishment of that mission. For example, the services group entails all the services units that support the base’s flying mission (A security forces group, a mission’s support group, a flying group). A squadron is a single unit. For example, my unit was the 37^th Airlift Squadron. It was the sole unit on the base with Hercules C-130s. We were an operational unit, in that we deployed and left the base on a regular bases to forward locations overseas, throughout the European and Asian minor theatre. Finally, an element is a glamorized name for a shop within the unit. For example, within the 37^th, there was a tire shop, an electronics shop, an Airdrop shop, the pilot element, and the mission support element. I know I am forgetting some, but I only list those to get you up to speed on the structure.

            I was in the Airdrop flight. The overall mission of the 37^th Airlift Squadron was humanitarian airlift and airdrop. This included airdropping of Army troops, military resources, humanitarian aid, and whatever else decided by military leaders as high up as the secretary of the Air Force. The unit I was in was a highly visible unit to the pentagon, in that our unit’s mission was very important because of the group, and wing’s missions. The wing was an Airlift Wing.

            So there you go with all the fancy-smancy military lingo. To be honest, it’s not that big of a deal because to be honest, it is not like I cared about what all of this meant when I was going through it. I just thought I would give you a backdrop before I get more personal and not so structured. The very first person I met on my first day of work would be the man with whom I would spend the most time under as a subordinate, during my time there. His name was John Wilcox. Staff Sergeant John Wilcox to be exact. He was a hard working Air Transportation Specialist. To the Air Force, the job title is known as that. To the common folks, he was a 2T2 (the military acronym for the job number). He was one of those salty dog kind of military supervisors. He had been in nearly twenty years by the time I had met him. He had a cigarette pack in his upper left pocket and many times his “Office meetings” were at the spoke pit just outside of the main building. He did not have a desk, as that was where all the guys in flight suits had their desks, with warm coffee and doughnuts at all times. John was a working dog, and he was proud of that. He did not care too much for politics but I guarantee you that if there were not guys like him in the unit, the place would fall apart, regardless of what the officers thought of themselves.

            John was a good guy. He trained us new guys with all the vehicles that we needed to get signed off on, so that we could do the mission of the Airdrop Flight. That mission was to load the unit’s C-130’s with pallets of either training loads or real life loads with tanks, howitzers, engine cans, fuel, whatever was needed by Army troops down range. The vehicles that I would eventually drive around on the flight line would be what’s called a 25k-loader, every kind of forklift that you can imagine, I drove the military version of 18 wheelers when we would go down range and travel to other parts of Europe (of which I will write about). John was basically daddy in the Airdrop element. He also reported up to mid-level supervisors who in turn reported up to pilots and other unit command officers who had the authority to either promote you, or bring about military punitive punishment in warranted cases.

            Indirectly John could help ruin your life or help make you go up through the ranks. Looking back, I will tell you that he took care of us. He was a hard man in that we worked till the work got done, but he really was like a father to us young guys. I see in my own life that I have adapted some of those traits of his. Non Commissioned officers are what the military call the “back-bone” of the military. You can be a fancy Academy graduate officer, but without a strong NCO corps, a unit will not correctly function. John proved this, like I said.

            So there was John who represented the 2T2 relationship. Then there are what you call loadmasters. These are enlisted flight crew. They are on the back of the plane at all times during flight. They manage the weight distribution of the cargo. They maintain the safety of troops in the back, and they safely run the operations of troop jumps (along with the jump-master of course). Loadmasters know that C-130 just as much as all the officer aircrew to include the pilot, co-pilot, and engineer. Loadmasters kind of play a dual role then. In the Air Force, it’s the officers who fly the planes and commit all the responsibilities of knowing that plane from the inside out, yet a loadmaster is on that same level. They consider themselves part of that prestigious group, which they should because they are just as much responsible for the safe flight of a combat aircraft.

            Then there are parachute guys like me. My job was to pack and rig different assortments of parachutes on different loads, depending on what the mission was, how much the item weighed, how low the plane would be when it drop the item, and who was receiving the item being dropped. We packed different sized cargo parachutes; everything from G-11, G-12’s, and SATB’s (basically a sandbag drop from the airplane strapped with a miniature parachute). The mission of our squadron is clearly real world, but you can’t get enough training to do that job the best that it can be done. Because of that, our pilots trained with dummy loads every single day. So we fooled around with different weights. We used different parachute configurations. The pilots would have their own objectives. To train for the real world drops, my pilots would get these loads into their planes, and fly six hours away to an Air Field known as Grafenwohr Army station. It was 6 hours away.

            My boy, I think I am going to leave it off right here for tonight. As I am writing this, I realize that there is a ton of things to write about that are involved here. The good thing is that I see now that I have much more writing material than I thought. The bad thing is that I have messed up my own structured way of wanting to write this. But that’s ok. I’m new at this writing thing, my boy. I was hoping that I could eventually move on to fiction, but I have been having fun with this memoir for you. When I continue, I will write more about the other people in our Airdrop element. If I write too much tonight, I will force too much out and not take care to introduce to you some other things. I love you boy.

 

Love Daddy.

 

 

Sources

1.      http://www.airforce.com/careers/detail/aircraft-loadmaster/

2.      http://usmilitary.about.com/u/ua/airforceenlistedjobs/2t2x1.htm

3.      http://usmilitary.about.com/od/airforceenlistedjobs/a/afjob2a7x4.htm

 

There Were Pigs on the Drop Zone

2/09/2015

Little-Son,

            My boy, there were indeed some wild animals over in the Deutschland. This paper is written to explain that to you, and move on from my simple first impression of the unit. Germany was great. The 37^th Airlift squadron was great. Going to see some new and exciting places was great. Let’s gear the gear ready, and move on little-soldier!

            So there I was! I was a young man in a foreign country in probably one of the best operating units in Europe. I went to many places and saw many things. I met interesting people. When I first got the place I remember there was a 2T2 (aircraft loader) by the name of Stacie. There was another parachute girl there by the name of Kim. Son, I wish I remembered everyone’s name. I know there was another 2T2 supervisor there. I think his name was Tim. He married a Pilipino girl from his younger days there. Of course there was John. He was a 2T2. He pretty much was the go to guy and responsible for a lot of the grunt work. Us new guys stuck by his side like glue.

            The building we worked in was a huge hanger. The inside of the hanger had rows and rows of roller type platforms where pallets could roll up and down. These pallets were roughly 8 foot by 8 foot in dimension. The roller shelving system made it so that two or three people could push a fully rigged platform down the aisle up to an awaiting forklift. The ceiling was high enough so that there was room for an overhead crane that was used to move the pallets around, once they had a rigged load on them. The inside of this hanger was big enough so that you could fit inside of it a C-130. That is not what it was used for, but I state that to give you an idea. There were side offices for the loadmasters. There was a side room for packing of the large cargo style parachutes. Along the side of that large room was a very tall parachute drying tower. This room had a crane which was used to hoist the parachutes up after they had been recovered from outside. They were then untangled and hung in the tower to dry. There was a set of stairs that went to the top so that someone could unhook the raised parachute, and attach it to a set of hooks near the ceiling.

            Now everyone had to share the responsibilities of everyone else’s job, besides the loadmasters. That was a flying position, and so they rarely did any of the little people work. But they would take time away from the plane to go to the drop zone with us. Mostly because that was a way they could see the side effects of their work, and the trip was always a good time of revelry and adventure. So I learned how to rig loads. Of course I learned how to pack every kind of parachute that is used to drop cargo. I learned how to recover dropped loads at the drop zones that we would get deployed to. I learned how to drive every type of vehicle that was used to load and offload the C-130. This included forklifts (big and small), Humvees, 25k and 40k loaders, long haul 18 wheelers with flatbed trailers. I had to learn how to tie equipment down so I could legally and safely drive across the country on Germany’s autobahn.

            I also learned how to party at a very young age. There was a work rotation. You spent about 3 weeks of the month at Ramstein rigging loads, packing parachutes, and loading the airplanes. That was my home station duty. The 4^th week of the month, I would travel to Grafenwohr Germany which was a little under 4 hours away by autobahn. The drop zone was on a US Army base near Nuremburg Germany. This was a beautiful part of Germany. There was so much history there. I could probably write another 20 papers on the history alone, but I’d like to leave this paper to my memories.

            This week of the month was of course the best time of the month. You got to travel. You got to see C-130 aircraft fly over you on the drop zone and drop things out of the rear end. All of this was happening with the aid of Air Force weather, Combat Controllers, and of course us. The work usually started around 2pm. Depending on the weather and the training requirements, we could have short days, or very long days that turned into cold bitter nights in the freezing weather, hoping you don’t get killed.

            The important hazards were the loads flying down from the air and the wild boar pigs. Both of them could kill you instantly. We rigged the loads back in Ramstein with what we called glow sticks. When the loads would leave the airplane at night, you could usually see them. Sometimes either the fog or the location of the drop, or the snowing would make it hard to see. The loads that were being dropped were most of the time training loads, as this was a training drop zone. The drop zone went for miles in all directions. The weather in Germany was always bad. I rarely saw a dropped load land exactly where it was intended.

            Usually there would be a team of about 6 of us. We needed a couple of guys to drive forklifts. We needed a guy on a 4 wheeler who was highly mobile and could scout out the terrain. Finally, the highest ranking guy drove a big 4 wheel drive 8 pack truck. The truck could get into about anything. That was needed because in this part of the country (Bavaria), the snow rarely stopped and the mud was never lacking. As you can image, this was an outdoors man paradise. There was no one who didn’t love going to Grafenwohr every month.

            Now let’s get to the pigs, soldier! These pigs were wild boars that lived all throughout the Bavarian countryside. They are usually not seen out in the open. Germany is full of thick forests and trees as well. What we would do on the drop zone was hunt for any opportunity to see them, and we did. We always knew what time the drops were. Sometimes there was a lot of hurrying up to wait. So we would all jump in the truck and drive around in some of the deepest woods you can imagine, looking for these guys. These pigs can grow up to be the size of a fully grown man’s waist. And they have razor sharp teeth that they will use to shred you to pieces. When you are hunting for them, it is one thing. When you come up on a group of them while chasing a load that is flying way off course due to high winds that is another story.

            These pigs are usually very aware of vehicles out there so they will avoid us. But almost like a bear, if you rush up on them by mistake and they have their kids with them, mamma pig will chase you. That was the danger! I remember one time while sitting in my forklift that had tires taller than the front door to any house, and watching a heard of the wild boars running across the open field. Now we couldn’t hunt them because Germany has their own rules and such, and the pigs were off limits. The fact that it was US federal property also made it more complicated, so no one hunted them. But my boy, were they fun to chase in a vehicle and fun to see. You just always had to be very careful going into a large batch of wooded areas, knowing that they could be in there.

            One of the other great things about these trips was the personal play time we got to do. By that I mean we would be able to go on shopping or ski trips in the local German, Czech economies. Poland was not too far away. There was Austria. You’re also talking about a group of young people who knew they would not experience this forever. My boy, I don’t know how many places we went to experience the night life. I don’t know how many drunken nights there were. I don’t know how many adventures we had. I just know that the trips were great, and the wives were always jealous. I learned to be gone all the time during this part of my life. I’m going to write about some more experiences, but I just want to say that during this time of my life, I was never more cultured and experienced besides the first few years of my adulthood. It was great. I only wish that I had pictures. I’m going to leave off for now. I love you boy. Stay away from the pigs!

Love Daddy

 

Daddy in Venice Italy

2/13/2015

Little-son,

            My boy, it’s been about three days since I have last written you. I’ve been working long hours at my airplane work, to get some of my friends ready for their deployment to Korea. I was asked a few months ago if I wanted to go. I told my superiors that I would not be volunteering to go at this time. I wanted to instead do what I normally do and that is spend time with you and writing. I figure the younger guys can go, and I’ll stay at home supporting the mission at home.

            It wasn’t always like that. From my last letter, you should gather that I was in a unit that was deployed on many occasions. Most of those occasions were to drop zones throughout Germany. For this paper, I’d like to tell you about the time I went to Aviano Air Base, Italy. Since this writing is a memoire, I have refused to look up online any research material. It is strictly from memory.

            I don’t remember exactly how long I was there. I just remember that I was there for a few months. Aviano Air Base is in the northern part of Italy. The base is at the foothills of the surrounding Balkan Mountains. It’s about an hour north of Venice, Italy. This would be my first time in Italy. The mission that we were on was in support of airdrop missions over in that part of the world. I believe at that time we were doing humanitarian airlift and airdrops for NATO. NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They are basically a world organization that polices war ravaged countries and supports humanitarian missions to that part of the world.

            I was there with a couple loadmasters, some parachute guys like me, and a few aircraft loaders. That was generally the ratio in our team as we went on these little fun mobilizations. We stayed on base in tents in a partitioned off part of the flight line called, “Tent City”. That’s what it was. It was a military compound made up of thousands of tents to house the multitude of military organizations that were there to support that region. There was a lot of bad stuff going in nearby. There was ethnic cleansing going on over in Bosnia and Serbia. Ethnic cleansing is when one country’s army comes into towns and massacres everyone, men woman and children. But it’s not as simple as just killing people. It’s a process of extreme horror and misery. While the men are killed and tortured, the women are always brutally raped, many times in front of their children and surviving family. The children witness the horrors of seeing their families brutalized and killed. The children are not spared. Many times the children are tortured in from of witnessing parents. Ethnic cleansing is never just straight up mission to kill people. It is pure hell on earth and your daddy was there to help stop that kind of thing by way of supporting the humanitarian mission over there.

            Aviano Air Base was mostly an F-16 fighter base over in Europe during the time I was in Europe, but the Air Force mission is highly flexible and able to support all the roles needed in any given region. Our C-130’s were there. My job was to load our aircraft with the pallets of food, clothing, medicine and whatever else was needed to be dropped to civilians who were cut off by ravaging armies. There is also a thing that governments do, and it’s all psychological warfare; sometimes planes drop leaflets or other messages to foreign armies to lower their will, or their will to fight. Propaganda is an all-out lie, but it is a way for the government to get inside the minds of their foes, and it works.

            There are a lot of things that were happening that I either did not know about because of my low military rank, and stuff I will never know. All I know is that the trip was not only honorable, but it was a fun trip. The Italian countryside is beautiful. We would do our job most of the day. At night there were beer tents. Usually every unit had its own beer tent, so at night or when things were slow, it was very possible to “tent-hop”. That is when you went from beer tent to beer tent, meeting people and exchanging war stories. The beer was shipped to the base on mass supply. There was never any shortage and it was cheap. If I remember correctly, a Heineken beer was 50 cents a bottle.

            There was a tent called Moral, Recreation and Welfare tent. This was where you could rent out bikes, pool tables, outdoor gear, all kinds of things. You could also get train passes. I would usually rent a bike. A few of the loadmasters and myself took some bikes and we rode them through trails along the Balkans. It was amazing. The weather was great when we did it and the riding was very challenging. I was never a bike enthusiast, but that experience was fun.

            What I really enjoyed was taking a train to Venice. From the base, all the guys and I would catch a bus to the train station. From there the train went straight to Venice. It seemed about a 40 minute ride. The ride was great in that you would see the way people live. The train literally went through the back yards of nice houses and some run down apartments. Italy had the same demographics that we here in the United States have. There are poor people and there are not so poor people. I can still remember passing through the woods behind apartment complexes were woman were out folding their sheets and hanging them on overhead lines that went off of their balconies.

            Venice was absolutely beautiful. We would get there and try out new places for lunch. I remember sitting on the balconies of fancy restaurants, eating pizza, drinking wine. I would be sitting next to open windows where the streets were not made of concrete, but of water. Venice was a city where there were no cars, but boats. All the streets were water alley-ways. Buildings looked as if by miracle that they were built in the water, with the basement floors below the water. The concrete for those buildings were stained by years and years of being submerged under water. The city was beautiful because of that old world feel. The feeling was so romantic. Son, if you ever decide to get married and go on a honeymoon, if you can afford it, take your wife here. She will love you for it. Venice is amazing.

            Son, I was about twenty when I went to Italy for the first time. Today I know that I may never get the chance to experience such a place again, yet here I was fully submerged in the culture and experience. I ate lots of the Italian food. I loved me many of the good drinks. I saw how different people acted. I saw that the woman in Italy are usually very pretty in their younger ages, while in their older ages their bodies show the full weight of child-bearing and a life of more servitude than what is typical in the United States. I will leave you with this small experience for now. I will come back to you in another Italian experience. It was just as good, if not better. I love you boy. Since I’m not in Korea, I’m going to get dressed and go pick you up for the weekend.

Love Daddy

 

Naples Italy and Stinky Cheese

2/14/2015

Little-Son

            My boy, first of all, I hope you do not mind the structure in which I write these letters to you. I call you Little-son, and I write in the same kind of format in nearly all my letters to you. I like to keep things as streamlined and efficient as possible, that way I am not thinking about style and structure, but concentrating on the memories themselves. Moving forward, I’d like to take you yet on another trip down to Italy. This time it is a trip to Naples, Italy. I unfortunately do not have pictures, but my stories should illustrate what you lack in photos. I had a great time. I hope you will also by reading this.

            So again I traveled to Italy with the 37^th Airlift squadron. Again I rode on the back of the C-130. Again we were on a humanitarian airlift mission. To be honest, I have absolutely no clue what we did down there as far as the mission. My memories are so filled with the fun of seeing the culture down there, that at this point I am not remembering anything else. I believe we were down there for a couple weeks—long enough to see so many things that I will now write about.

            First of all we did not stay on any military bases. We stayed in a nice high rise hotel in downtown Naples. I can’t even begin to tell you how beautiful this hotel was. First off, it was right on the beach. The beach was close enough that from my balcony, I could see and hear the tide come in at night. I could see couples holding hands as they had romantic walks along the ocean where the water met the land. The sun would set and the ocean went out as far as you can see and sometimes it was hard to tell where the ocean ended and the sky began, especially if the brightness of the sun was drowning in the ocean as it set.

            I was there with some of the funniest guys I ever met. They were a couple loadmasters from the deep south of Texas and Georgia. At nights we would sit on one of our balconies overlooking the hotel pool just below us and the beach that was within a stone’s throw away. Since I haven’t seen them for so long, I don’t remember the names. I just remember the awesome stories they had. There were stories of big game hunting down in Texas. They had stories of all the places they had flown to while attached to the 37^th Airlift Squadron. The loadmaster position in the Air Force is an enlisted position of nothing but flying. Their whole life was being an aircrew member and to me those stories never got old. It wasn’t so much the mission stories that grabbed my attention. It was the shenanigans that they got into in other countries that of course peaked my interest. I would soon realize that I would myself have my own stories.

            What else can I say about the hotel? In that hotel, we would take the elevator up past the 30^th floor to the fanciest restaurant ever. The hotel had a magnificent view of the ocean and the city which was brightly lit up at night. I was not an Italian socialite. I was there with a couple rednecks who rode in airplanes for work. I still ate among the fancy and enjoyed the hell out of that life. I would try different plates. I tried foods with noodles and different kinds of seafood and fish. The bread was amazing-which the table was never in the absence of. The people were dressed elegantly. To hear people talk in Italian was amazing too. It sounded like the language of love.

            So we would eat in the fancy restaurant, tell stories at night on our balconies and we would walk the beach at night. I remember walking the beaches at night with the wind howling, me with no shirt on, and feeling the cold wind breeze from the ocean and thinking I could spend my life on that beach. I would run along the water. It was the greatest. When we weren’t doing that, we would walk down the streets and check out the city within a few blocks of the hotel. I remember walking into a deli place that sold all kinds of meats, milks and cheeses. The smell from the cheese almost knocked me out. It hit me like a wall. That is how I came to know what “stinky” cheese is. And this was the good cheese! It smelled like the most rotten, dirty, smelly socks that you can imagine. It stunk so bad in fact, that it hit you as soon as you opened the door to the place. Apparently this is how you rate the cheese in this part of Italy. The stinkier the better.

            Now we didn’t stay around the hotel very much. Because of our mission, we had a government vehicle at our disposal. This meant that after we were done doing whatever it was that we did, we could check out the culture. The greatest memory from this trip was going to Pompeii, Italy. Pompeii is an old Roman city that was destroyed by a volcano that erupted from across the ocean. You can still see the mountain which erupted-Mt Vesuvius. You are in this old Roman city in which you can look across the water and see a huge mountain with the top of it blown off. It’s very eerie and amazing at the same time. The Italian government left the city in exactly the way it was before the people of that city perished. In fact there are bodies preserved in the position that they were in just moments before they died. You can see a man with his head in his hands. You can see a mother holding her young child close to her. There are relics of people in positions that given what they were doing, they had no idea what was going on. The ash from that volcano destroyed everyone. At the same time the ash actually preserved the city. There is an old roman stage where they must have had theatrical plays back then. The roads are made of brick with groves in them so that horses could move buggies along the streets with wheels attached. Even then you could see how technologically advanced the romans were even down to the way they had plumbing and the way the houses were built. It was an amazing experience.

            Finally I spent a lot of time in downtown Naples itself. Naples Italy is very mafia. Air Force intelligence officials briefed us on how not to fall prey to the many hazards of being in that kind of environment. There were scooters everywhere. The black market over there was astounding. You could buy anything that was probably illegal in most parts of our country. But you could also cross paths with the wrong people very easily. So we were told to keep to ourselves, and to watch out for street thugs, pick pockets, and otherwise low level hustlers. There are no street laws over there. Street lights and signals are more for just decoration. But you do not want to cross the Italian police, under no circumstance either. I learned that if you are driving down the road and see a police officer on the side of the road carrying a sign that looks like a big rainbow lollypop, you better pull over. If you didn’t, he was carrying an oozy machine gun and would riddle your car with bullets. I never felt any danger while I was down there. I just felt like it was huge chaos but that’s how they lived.

            My boy, even sitting here trying to think about this memory, I still can’t remember what our missions was. More importantly I don’t have any memories of the place other than the stuff we did while not on duty. I just remember falling in love with Italy. It was me, those couple loadmasters, a couple pilots and a flight engineer that traveled the countryside exploring history, wine, food, and the sites of beautiful woman. If I ever became wealthy, I would go back and buy a cheap boat and live on the beach. Or I would buy a house that was built of the beach. I would have a balcony overlooking the water as I looked at the moon. I would drink the best wine and I would create even more wonderful memories such as the one I am sharing with you now. They say that like Spanish, Italian is a romantic language. To me that means it is a language of love and passion. You don’t have to walk too far along the beaches of Naples to discover that that is true. To live on the ocean and to perish by the exploding ash from a mountain volcano-it doesn’t get any more passionate than that. I love you boy.

Love Daddy

 

 

           

 Daddy Reenlisted In a War Zone

2/15/2015

Little-son,

            My boy, here we are once again. In my last letter to you I spoke on an enjoyable trip to Naples Italy. If you can recall, I don’t remember much about the mission itself. The off duty time made much more of an impression on me. In this letter, I write to you about the time that I took an incentive ride from Ramstein, Germany to landing area just inside the border of Macedonia, on the other side of Kosovo. Two things were going on; there was massive ethnic cleansing going on literally miles from where we landed and I raised my hand to support and defend the constitution of the United States of America, as I reenlisted for the first time.

            In the Air Force, an incentive flight is when you can tag along inside an aircraft either for a mission or for just an experience to ride in the aircraft itself. Currently I’m in an F-16 unit and usually senators or state legislators can schedule an incentive ride in one of our F-16s. There have also been sports heroes, generals from other services, and other big names who ask for and get a ride in a two-seater F-16. But a lot of times, it is military members of the unit who get an incentive ride. In fact, I know a few colleagues of mine who have had one. They all tell me the same thing; they puked massively once 6-8 G-forces were reached on the jet. It’s not just like being in a roller coaster. The feeling is much more intense.     

            Now when I was in a C-130 unit, the incentive rides were less physically intense. Since I was one of the Aerial Delivery personnel, I had no problem asking for and getting permission to do an incentive flight on the C-130. In fact, it was not my first or my last time flying on the C-130. What made this trip special was that I asked the flight commander if he would reenlist me once we landed where we were going. I wanted to reenlist while performing a real world humanitarian airlift mission that our country took very seriously. And that’s what I did.

            Son, I don’t want to get too deep in the history of what was going on in the region, because it would take me months to explain all the complicated details. It can be summed up in a few sentences; one group of people hated another group of people mostly due to their religion, ethnicity, and background. The more superior of those groups systematically went from town to town where they imprisoned a whole city. They raped and tortured all the woman. They mutilated the children before killing them, and of course they tortured and killed the men. They even had mock trials in which they would bring false charges against the leaders of these towns, just to publicly humiliate and kill them while doing all the horrendous activities I just stated.

            There is a name for all this stuff and it is called Ethnic Cleansing. Genocide doesn’t even compare to Ethnic Cleansing because at least with genocide, it is just the mass killings of innocent people. The horrors that I just explained nothing less than the most evil activities and the most potent form of hell on earth that you can imagine. The countries involved in this war were Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia. At that time, NATO had an international humanitarian airlift mission to the region. They (along with the help of the United States to a large degree) provided medical supplies, food, clothing, and evacuation of personnel in and out of the region. My unit, the 37^th Airlift Squadron, was a major player in this conflict, known as the Kosovo War.

            My boy, I don’t remember too much about where we landed or what happened on that mission, which was probably a good thing. I just know that I had been paying attention to the news around that time. I knew exactly where the mass killings were going on. I knew they were in Kosovo. We landed in Macedonia, just on the other side of the mountains that were the boundary line into Kosovo. I know that on the other side of those mountains, innocent woman, men and children were being killed and whatever else. I know that the town was surrounded by the murderous Army and imprisoned for mass torture. Beyond that, I don’t know the details. Maybe we dropped some stuff off. Maybe we picked some people up. All I know is that I reenlisted.

            On board the aircraft were the pilot, copilot, flight engineer, and two-loadmasters. I of course was in the main cargo section with the loadmasters, both of whom were my friends since I knew and traveled with a majority of them. When we were waiting on the tarmac, I showed the pilot my reenlistment paperwork, and asked him if he would do the honors of reenlisting me. In the military, only an officer can register the oath of enlistment to a military member. Of course I wanted my first enlistment to be in this fashion. My two loadmaster friends were not only witnesses but one took off the American flag from his flight suit, and used it as the flag as I raised my hand and repeated this oath that the pilot read to me;

 

“I (State Your Name) do solemnly swear to (or affirm) that I will support and defend the constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, in accordance with regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God”

            And that was it. The pilot signed my reenlistment paperwork. We finished whatever business that we had over there and then we flew back to Germany. I have only told a handful of people about this story because to be honest, if it was somebody else, I don’t even think I would believe it. That is the problem with being in the military; you experience a lot of things, good and bad, that most other people will never even come close to experiencing. That’s why a lot of the guys come home and are a wreck. They can’t relate their experience with anyone else besides other military members and they have a hard time letting go of that past. The experience makes too much of an impression on their souls. I see old men all the time at the base commissary and Base Exchange who have retired, and drive on base to shop and mingle with other retired members. It is one of the saddest things to see; people who have not let go or done other things with their lives. They hold on to those experiences as if they are an accomplishment in themselves. I don’t ever want that. When I get out, I will not be wearing a “Veteran” patch. You will not catch me at the VFW sharing stories like these. Instead, I write about them for you, so that you know where you came from, and what your daddy was all about. I want you to go to college and make something of yourself. I want you to be happy. I love you boy,

Love Daddy

 

 

Hercules C-130s and Daddy in the Ukraine

2/16/2015

Little-son,

            My boy, there is something I need to speak to you about. It is for reasons of safety. If ever you find yourself on the flight line, remember that the speed limit for general vehicles while approaching oncoming aircraft is 5 miles an hour. At night, you must turn your lights off and turn on your flashers so the pilots can see where you are. When C-130 engines are running, you must stay away from the aircraft at no less than a distance of 25 feet to the front of the propellers and 200 feet to the rear of the propellers. If you are loading a C-130, there must be a loadmaster on the back of the aircraft, spotting your vehicle in and there must be someone on the side of the ramp with a chalk to stop your wheels so that your vehicle does not come into contact with the mighty Hercules. Finally, remember that whenever you are driving next to any parked aircraft that your driver’s side is always facing towards the aircraft. That way you can see any and all aircraft, moving or stationary, at all times. Now that the aircraft is loaded, let’s get ready for yet another story about your daddy while a part of the 37^th Airlift Squadron.

            Son, I was asked a few days ago which was my all-time favorite deployment. Without a doubt, my favorite deployment was to the Ukraine. My unit was deployed in a multinational humanitarian airdrop competition of sorts. It was a very high profile flexing of the muscles kind of thing. Among the nations involved were of course the Ukrainians, the Greeks, the Italians, the Macedonians, and I believe some other countries. I’m not 100% on all the details. It could have been a peeing contest for all I cared. I just wanted to go to the Ukraine. I even met the United States Secretary of Defense while I was there, the honorable William S Cohen. That’s how big of a deal this mission was. He came out and gave a speech.

            First things first—we were briefed that while in our hotels, we could count on spy activities against us from the locals, including people such as the maids, hotel guards, and anyone on the street who would have any vested interest in knowing what we were up to. I was young back then. We were told that our stuff in the hotels would probably be looked through. I don’t know if that stuff happened. I was pretty low ranking at that time, so I guarantee that I had nothing of use as far as information. The thing with information gathering is it’s about connecting the dots. We were also told to stay away from the woman. The country of the Ukraine was nothing but mafia and black market economics. It was a former Soviet Eastern bloc, and with the fall of communism, everything fell apart. From what I know about economics, is that’s it is much easier for a country to slide into communism once there is heavy government control. Once that control is broken, it can take generations for the market to settle into a more standard westernized economy of capitalism.

            That being said, women were supposed to be off limits because women were property of mafia men over there. It was dangerous to fall into the hands of those mafia men. I will tell you right now that in Kiev, not far from where we lodged, all the woman were beautiful. They now had their hands on American style and clothing, perfumes and the freedom to flaunt their sexuality. We were being set up for a catch-22 (an economic game theory in which each choice results in bad consequences, i.e. there are no winners).

            There is also something about the military that I’d like to share with you; Non Judicial Punishment, commonly known as an Article 15. Military members are guided by military rules or laws. When military members break certain rules, they are prosecuted under these federal guidelines which are much stricter than civilian rules. While engaged in any military deployment, outfit, or activity either stateside, or overseas, these rules do not become null or void. In fact, they become even applicable as a way for commanders to exercise discipline and punishments over their troops.

            So what’s the point of me telling you this boring legal stuff? There is a small clause in the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) called the Article 15. It is a way for commanders to issue NON Judicial punishments for infractions that can also be used in a court-martial. It’s basically a way for commanders to punish their troops while not leaving a permanent mark on their record in the way that a courts-martial will, even once they get out of the military. The punishments can range from loss of pay, loss of rank, forfeiture of future pay, confinement, extra duty. Any officer can recommend an article 15 in lieu of (instead of) court-martial for an enlisted member for common things as disobeying a direct order, dereliction of duty, drunk in public, sodomy (yes, it’s an ancient federal law system), and many others. The catch all one is disobeying a direct order.

            That is where all the power within the military ranks stems from. It’s the ability of an officer to hold substantial power over an enlisted members freedom and economic well-being. All officers must be educated to be commissioned. Not all enlisted members become educated. There must be a way for the upper echelons to control the lower echelons or hierarchy, and it’s very efficient because it’s very favored towards the un-marginalized sector of the military (the officers).

            Well my boy, every enlisted member on that trip was given a direct order not to engage with the woman in the economy, and to not engage in the activity of paying for prostitution services. Luckily I was with your sister’s mom at that time, and I did not feel the need to gain for myself the attention of a young attractive eastern-bloc lady. Yet many a man suffered greatly because of the legal order handed down by the mission commander.

            The problem was that we were confined into a hotel that was fenced in with gate guards at the front of the perimeter. We effectionantly called the guards “Guido” which is the Italian name for “pimps”. The reason is because like clock-work, they were bringing the prostitutes around the perimeter like a parade. I’m talking about 10-15 at a time. I’m sure the guards were making their cut. I’m sure this was the way in which intelligence gathering was happening as well. A man would pay for the company of a woman, and without realizing it, she can pick up on ten different things about you and report them to her pimps. It is the oldest trick in the book, and it was right in our face every night.

            Son, these ladies were freaking gorgeous. All of us had three or four things working against us. There was the order not to sleep with them. There is of course the fear that they could possess sexually transmitted diseases. Most of the men had girlfriends or wives. Son, I’m not going to be reading this letter to you anytime soon. But by the time you are a teenager or a young man, you will realize how powerful those hormones within you are. The place was a freaking party at night. There were girls everywhere. There were Jacuzzis. There was real Russian Vodka everywhere. I also never met so many interesting people. Now Kiev was 2 hours away from a place called Chornobyl.  It was the site of a huge nuclear accident that deformed and killed many of the local inhabitants. Son, I actually talked to military pilots who grew up down the road from this accident site. They looked normal, but they were crazy for sure. They loved their vodka, and they loved the ladies. Pour me another shot, son!

            The mission was sick, my boy. I got to ride in a Ukrainian helicopter to the drop zone. These guys were crazy and even drinking vodka while flying the helicopter. I don’t remember how many days it lasted, but we had the competitions at the drop zone. Each country would fly over in their own military aircraft, and drop their loads. The country who came closest to the “Bull’s eye” would win the competition for that day. My job was to be on the ground and chase our loads to recover the parachutes for the forklift driver to grab and take back to the landing strip to be uploaded back on to our C-130’s.

            There was one dilemma; the ground guys from the other countries were stealing the parachutes and equipment from the other countries. Some of our parachutes actually got stolen. We were in some heavily wooded areas, so it is impossible for me to know who it was. We did what we could do while having a blast all the while. No matter who won the games that day, I just looked forward to going back to the hotel to see the ladies, the shots of vodka, and the drunken Russian pilots tell us of their stories. Someone was getting thrown into the Jacuzzi, I guarantee you that.

            My boy, it was a great time. We did our normal custom of going downtown to visit the locals and check out the sites. Some of my loadmaster friends and I ate at another fancy restaurant. There was no ugly woman on the streets, my young boy. And if you heard a woman talk, she talked in that very deep Russian accent that is recognizable to me even to this day. We drank much Vodka. We listened to local Ukrainian music bands play in the streets. We loved each other’s company. For me the coolest thing about the trip was becoming friends with foreign military guys and learning about their machines (helicopters, trucks, C-130s, and others). I was in my young twenties my boy. I was living life like a rock star. I love you boy. Man, I love telling this story.

Love Daddy. 

PS……I have absolutely no clue who won the airdrop competitions.

 

I Married Into the German Culture

2/19/2015

Little-Son

            My boy, although I refer to you as my Little-son, you are actually my big heart. The other day someone asked me if I ever write letters to and of the ladies I may be dating. I said,

“Why the hell would I do that? Writing takes a lot of effort, time, and vulnerability to do. For me to write specifically for someone I barely know would be like giving Pearls to a pig”

I bring this up because you are the only one I’ll ever write my memoire to. I don’t mean to put pressure on you by that. I know that one day you’ll grow up, and start living your own life and being more independent. But through you God taught me what innocence, unconditional love, and true companionship is all about. You and I have been there for each other since the day I used to hold you on my chest when you were only days old. I’m not sure who has ever needed who more, my need for my son, or my son’s need for me. Therefore, you are the one I address my writing to.

            That being said, I’d like to go into the story about your sister. It is then important that I tell you how I met her mother and what I was doing in my life back then. It’s a huge reflection for me, because all this stuff happened to me at the tender age of 20 years old. That was over 18 years ago. Part of me remembers things like they happened yesterday yet if I see photos of myself from back then, I barely recognize the spirit, mind and soul of the person I see. I have long since moved on.

            So these last writings have been filled with high adventure of me in Germany doing some pretty cool stuff around pretty cool airplanes, going to some pretty cool places. I was experiencing things that most people will never see. I was going to places that I didn’t even know existed, and I was meeting people who did not even speak my language. Well my love life would follow suit. I met your sister’s mom in Germany. I dated her shortly and she got pregnant. As a man, it is the worst economic thing that can happen to you, individually, yet I also believe that some things happen for a reason. I thoroughly believe that sometimes God allows bad things to happen to you, so that you avoid even worse things. Let me take you back to where I was to explain what I mean.

            I was young, I was single, and I was utterly alone when I first got to Germany. I had come from a very bad upbringing. I didn’t write anybody back home because well to be honest, I didn’t have anyone back home that I wanted to hear from anyways. I was experiencing a life that I did not want to share with people who were full of animosity towards me in the first place. Well that isolation that I felt was not good because of the place I was living in, while stationed over in Germany. Life in the military barracks is all about this blind loyalty that you’re supposed to have with a bunch of guys who do nothing but get shitfaced every day after work. I never met a military girl over there that didn’t have a bad reputation. Yeah, I know we were all young, and I sound highly critical, but I needed family at that point in my life. I wanted stability. Dorm life is fun for about 3 weeks, but when the beer ran out, and I spent many days alone, I couldn’t handle not having a companion. My son, I didn’t find a woman to marry. I found Germany. The woman was just a tool to get me to be the man that I am today.

            So I met this German girl. We hit it off and right away I started staying off base with her. I began socializing with her and her circle of friends. Her accent was crazy ridiculous. Everything was different not only about her compared to American girls, but I was seeing a part of the European culture, that I soon realized I was missing out on while being in the dorms. I fell in love with it. I began leading a double life. I’d do my job during the day or night on the base. I’d do my regular deployments but when I was away from home, I wanted to get back to that other life of mine. I would get to the room, shower, grab some of my stuff and I was gone. I was going to towns that I would have never thought I’d go to, and on regular bases. I was around people who spoke little English, except to me so as not to be rude, and I had a German girlfriend who cooked for me all the time. She didn’t just cook for me, but she was always there for me. For the first time in my life, I experienced that kind of support.

            And then it happened; she got pregnant. I knew this was bad. I knew it was mine. I was with her all the time. I also knew that when I wasn’t with her, we were talking on the phone all the time. So at the time I didn’t question her loyalty to me. In fact, I knew she was nothing like American girls because I knew her family. When I wasn’t working, I was with them all the time. I was essentially adopted by a German family. They loved me, and I felt like a king around them. They were very good to me. I would go drinking with the father every weekend. His name was Alois. He was never once able to speak English to me, yet he and I were in the German bars, also called, “Gashouse” all the damn time. We’d go hiking some German trails in the mountains. We’d go to the lake. I loved him as my own father.

            German families and culture are very traditional. By that I mean that the men work, watch sports, and drink beer while the woman may work but they still also cook great meals and deal with the mess of the men while the men get out to do some more bar hoping. Marriages lasted because there is a strong catholic tradition over there. Many times the woman dealt with horrible men but still loved them through thick and thin, because the family was the most important unit, and you kept your dark family problems to yourself. I’m not saying that I agree with all that. I’m just saying that in general, it is a very conservative difference to what we experience over here. You have to remember, I came up without a father in my life during the years that I needed it the most, and I reeled from the anger in that for years.

            Today in our country, America is run by woman and overly brute feminists. They have kicked the man out of the family and somehow expected that the kids will do ok without the man in the kid’s life. It’s a bunch of bullshit, son. So for me, I didn’t give a damn about the opinion of the guys who lived in the dorms, once I became AWOL in all the lame partying and immoral sexcapades that most of them were into in the first place. Many of the guys in the dorms were getting busted all the time. Some would travel to Holland to pick up drugs, get caught and court-martialed. There were rapes and sexual assaults in the dorms. There were constant fights. People would party too much and someone would get dropped off of a third story balcony. I’m not exaggerating during any of this.

`           Imagine working in the military. Yes you get to go to cool places, if you’re lucky. But also imagine that they make all the rules, and you have none of the say so. Every time you walk out of your room you have to make sure your uniform is always sharp, your hat is never on crooked, and you better salute every officer that you see, or you’ll be standing before the man. Every damn thing you do is monitored and you are highly controlled. And if you are not liked, or get on the wrong side of the wrong person, they can systematically ruin your life, even just for the short term. The military is a very controlling and very “do as I say or else” environment. So let all the haters hate and the talkers talk. I found myself a family in which I experienced way cooler things. So I got a German woman pregnant? God dang son, I DO NOT ever recommend that. But looking back, I also know that she kept me out of trouble. She was my home away from home.

            So how did I handle a pregnant German girlfriend? Well I know that I dearly loved her family. I know I was young. I know I didn’t know what love was, at least the way it is supposed to be between a man and a woman. But I thought I had enough of it to marry her. I knew I’d have a loyal woman. I’ll just tell you that I do not at this point in my life think that I was made to be married. But back then, I needed to find out why. So I married her.

            Her parents paid for an awesome wedding in the town of Rodalben, Germany, where we were all living. By this time, I hadn’t seen my dorm room in months. I didn’t care about the single life anymore. I was very happy with my new family. God dang, did I feel the animosity, though. But it didn’t matter. We got married in a German Catholic church. The whole ceremony was in German, with the parts that I needed to understand in English. She wore a dress and I wore my military uniform. I didn’t have many medals or stripes back then, I was so young. I was barely 20.

            Looking back, I don’t think it is possible to love enough to get married at such a young age, but I will tell you that during the marriage, I did love her deeply. She knew me. I knew her. She was a very loyal woman. If it hadn’t of been for my age, I would have gotten fat real quick. She cooked the best German food almost every night. She took care of the bills as far as paying them (with my money of course, but that’s how it goes). She always made sure your sister was taken care of. And we were always around her family. Her and her mom would cook the best meals this side of the Rhine River, and usually every weekend while me and her dad, Alois, were out drinking all day. We’d come home drunk out of our minds yet able to eat the nest foods before we took a nap, and sometimes went out for round two. That’s just what men in that culture do, and I loved it.

            So my boy, as I close this out, let me write a little bit about what the typical road trip was like from my room in the dorms, to the city of Rodalben, Germany, where I would lead my double life;

So I would get off of work at whatever time. I’d usually rush to my dorm room, shower, and get whatever I needed for the next day. Then I’d set out for the half hour drive from the base to Rodalben. Leaving the base, you exit the gate and drive through a very heavily wooded area with trees so tall that you could not even see the base very well. About five minutes later, you would drive through an Army community known as Vogelweh, Germany. For me, that was the point that I’d begin my transition from a military American, to Der Deutsche (the German). Once I got passed the Army barracks in Vogelweh it was on. The drive would entail me driving through a winding road that climbed in altitude through the German countryside. There is one thing that Germans hate and that was slow drivers. If you were going the speed limit on these non-autobahn roads, which was 50 kilometers (about 35mph), you were getting passed all the time.

            Now imagine that all the signs are in Germany. All the town names are usually long winded 15 character words that were crammed into one word. The scenery was always cloudy because in Germany, the sun rarely shows itself. The trees and greenery is always wet, nothing is ever dry. There are crazy Germans passing you all the time as if you weren’t even driving at all. They were speed maniacs. I would drive along the countryside for about 20 minutes, going uphill at times, until it finally started descending. Just before you hit the town of Rodalben, you come upon a huge bridge in the sky. I say this because, the bridge is long enough that you actually drive over the city of Rodalben itself. Once you drove over the town on the bridge, the rest of the trip consisted of downhill switchbacks that would eventually lead you into the base of the town itself.

            By this time, I’m already cursing in German. I’m spitting every time I speak the language. I’m looking for the closest schnitzel joint. There is not an American in site, and I freaking love it. This far out from the base and I was a new man. I was Der Deutsche through and through. I’m passing fools on the road like they’re not even driving and I’m not loving the Polizei in their green cars, drinking their dark German coffee.

            Your sister’s mother lived nearly towards the end of town. I’d arrive about a half hour to forty five minutes after leaving the base. Her little apartment would smell of the best food. Don’t get me wrong, I had many good adventures with work, but when I was with her, I never wanted to think about any of that or anything American. I just wanted to be me, and I was me. I was very good at it.

            My boy, I have those same feelings when I am with you. I want nothing more than to be a father when I am with you. I don’t think about work. In fact I want it to evacuate my mind as fast as I can get it to. I don’t think about it. I don’t stress. I just have a good time hanging out with you as we go find stuff to do and things to talk about. It wasn’t America that taught me how important family was. It was Germany. For that I will always love her. I will always love you too.

Love, Der Deutsche, I mean your father.

 

Daddy and Julius Caesar Both Conquered Saarbrucken

2/20/2015

Little-Son,

            Now in my last paper I had disclosed to you that your daddy got married to a German woman. I was fully integrated into her family as if I had been eating Bratwurst and Schnitzel from the day I was born. I’m going to go more in that part of the family, but first I’d like to introduce you to a friend named Chuck. It is important, because as another American Service member, he was the only service member I kept around when I wasn’t working. Otherwise I was a full-fledged American living as a German, minus a good pair of Lederhosen.   

            Once I married my German wife, I really just lived with her for a while in the place she had in Rodalben. That was until your sister was born, and I’ll go into that later.  I loved it. It was like I had a new identity, and an identity in which I had found by mistake. An Identity that I never knew existed before. When you think of Germany, you think of all the negative things that you read about in the history books. In 1997-ish, none of that stuff was even present. What the history books don’t always tell you is that many of the people who joined Hitler’s armies had no choice. It was either they fight, or never see their families again. I tell you what; if the order came my way to fight, or I’d never see you or your sister again, all you have to do is tell me who to shoot, and I’m shooting. I’d rather kill somebody else’s darlings than to see my darlings perish. For a large part of Germany, that’s the way it was.

            The time that I lived in Germany, there are really no traces of war besides the American bases that are stationed there. There are a ton of Army bases there and of course the Air Force Base that I was assigned to. There is a hidden group of American’s who do very good jobs for the military, but choose to marry into the surrounding culture. I was one of them. My friend, Chuck, was another. I knew loadmasters with German wives. I knew officers with German wives. I met people who never went back to the United States after having been married to a German. Germany opened my eyes to the fact that there is a much larger world out there than USA.

            Remember what I told you about the military dorms? Remember the hellish feelings about that place that I spoke to you about? I now consider it a foreshadow of sorts. The dorms represented to me the melting pot of America. You had different people from all kinds of different walks of life from America. But at the same time it represented a prison of sort, in much the same way that America today is excellent at putting people in prison. The dorms represented this trap. Outside the base was a world of wonders. It was an immense world of history, culture, people to see, languages to speak, and new things to experience that you may never get to experience again. Yet in those dorms I saw the same faces getting drunk all the time. There were the same parties with the same drinking, sexual orgies, and people getting into trouble all the time. Every time you read the Stars and Stripes (this was the military’s edition of the newspaper) someone new was getting Court Martialed. There was nasty stuff going on too, which made it crazy. There were guys raping woman, guys raping guys, officers having fraternizing relationships, there was assaults, fights, and so on and so on.

            So to me, I struggled right away with living in that environment, and I didn’t like living like an animal in which some of the people eventually became the animals that they were condemned to be. When I met your sister’s mother, I never looked back and my transformation was swift. When I was done working, I became a ghost. I was off that base as soon as possible. I couldn’t stand being locked up like that.

            Chuck was very much cultured in the German society. In fact he was light years ahead of me by the time I met him, and because of that, I not only trusted him, but I liked him a great deal. When I met him, he was already out of the Army. He was a medic at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, in Landstuhl, Germany. The hospital is about 15-20 minutes from Ramstein, where I worked. It is the biggest Army hospital outside of the United States. Today, it is the major Medivac Center for troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hospital was important when I was there, and so it is still making history to this day.

            Chuck married a German woman by the name of Christine. Christine and my wife, were best friends. So it was fitting that I would meet Chuck. They had a daughter at the time by the name of Laura. I don’t remember exactly what Chuck did for a living, but he worked in the German economy. He spoke fluent German, although his wife made fun of him a lot and called his German “Ghetto German”, but at least he could communicate. Chuck was a very big guy, well over 6 foot tall and I would guess to be around 230-250lbs. He liked the German food just as much as I did, and his wife took care of his eating just as my wife always cooked. German woman are great cooks. Chuck was also an offensive coach for the American football team up in Saarbrucken, Germany. When I say football, I’m not talking about soccer here. Saarbrucken is the city for one of the European League’s football teams, namely the Saarland Hurricanes.

            Saarbrucken is located on the French border. There is a lot of history there. Julius Caesar made the city a huge Roman City after he conquered the country of Gaul, modern day France. So there are still a lot of traces of Roman History there from some of the old Roman military outposts, the major bridge that was constructed there, and some Roman Shrines. I used to go to Saarbrucken to hang out with Chuck when he was coaching in the home stadium. My most memorable moment had nothing to do with sports though. It had to do with Chuck taking me out on the town with a bunch of his German friends.

            Chuck told me his wedding gift to me was to take me to this amazing night club. It was just the boys. No ladies allowed. Now remember, I was married really young by this point, I had not experienced a lot of the club life by now. I would be blown away by this experience. The club was actually an old city catholic church. This is amazing because the city was very old. Well this church that it used to be was very old. It was on the side of a mountain. It was not a church anymore, of course, but blasphemy was written all over it in that not much was changed. It was huge inside, with the original pews still inside of it. I guess where the front of the church would be was this huge dance floor. There was no cross or elements of Jesus or the Virgin Mary anywhere, but the place still had stained glass windows everywhere.  There were bars and tables for people to sit at everywhere. But like I said, the church was built into the mountain. It was kind of creepy. Where the mountain was, the inside of the church went into the mountain via catacombs. A catacomb as best as I can explain it is a maze of tunnels. They were famous in France, and so that is probably how they were influenced as part of this old relic catholic church. Inside the catacombs were more tables and lights for the customers. The lights were just bright enough so that you could see, but not bright enough to see very well. The music was bumping like crazy through the speaker system that they had back there too. It was amazing.

            You see son, in our country, people are even to this day such Puritans. They are like, “ooooh, you can’t do this. You can’t wear that. You can’t talk about sex within 5 miles of a playground. You can’t even think of a body as a sexual thing, let alone inside a church”. Now I’m exaggerating, but only a little. In Germany, they love what is taboo. They are not so weird about sex even if it means mixing it with religion. They played techno music throughout the place. There were girls and guys wine-in and grind-in. it was one of the biggest churches I’ve ever seen with all the catacombs and a dance floor with pews still attached to it.

            Well, baby boy, I had too much fun that night. I ended up drinking way too many German beers, shots, and other sorts of beverages. I blacked out with Chuck having to rescue me from the inside of the woman’s bathroom. I was passed out next to one of the stalls after having puked my guts out. Chuck didn’t just take me home that night, no. I had to earn my rights as a newly married man. Chuck and his friends cleaned me up and we continued the trip by having breakfast the early next morning. The problem was that I was dry-heaving into a bag next to me at the table in a restaurant while some of the Germans would stop by and ask Chuck and his friends if they needed help holding my head steady as I sounded like a dying cow.

            That, my boy is one of the hugest differences in German culture compared to American. People don’t get all out of shape about stupid stuff. German people are actually some of the best people I have ever met. They have some of the tightest knit families that I have ever witnessed, and which is why I clung so hard to my own German family and forsook my American heritage, at least while I was off duty. I loved it. I never wanted to be without it at this point. I even wished I was born in it.

            Now Chuck and Christine eventually made their way to his home state of Pennsylvania. Harrisburg to be exact. They had three children. Chuck now works for the State’s maximum security prison. In fact he told me it is the worst of the worst as far as his state is concerned. Sadly, he and Christine did not stay married. Two things specifically shock me about this current paragraph. First of all, Chuck hated the dumb American Soldier image, just as much as I did while we were over there. He told me he was never going back to America. He loved being able to speak German, work in Germany, and be completely engulfed in the German way of life. I would have never guessed that he would go from that to working for the system itself which we sought to escape once we were off of work.

            Let me be clear again to you, my boy, the military is a prison system. You’re under the strictest of rules and while you may be defending your country and the rights of the rest of the nation, you yourself must give up many of your rights in the process. There is of course pay and benefits, but if you don’t improve yourself, then those pay and benefits will only act as a trap because in no way can you earn as much money with no education, on the outside world. Also, I was very surprised that Chuck and Christine divorced. She was beautiful. She took care of him. Yet as you may be realizing, I don’t think I or Chuck so much married the woman that we married, but more or less married the German culture. Once that buffer was taken away, the relationships usually soon fizzled. There are very few of the same culture norms in America as there are in Germany, or many European nations. America lost its family Identity a long time ago. And now we’re just a bunch of broken homes and lost boys. But you got me, son. And that’s why I write to you this memoire. I love you to pieces. Maybe I’ll take you to the German restaurant by our house soon. I love you

Love Daddy.

 

Germans Hang Their Blankets Out To Dry

2/21/2015

Little-Son

            I want to tell you about the German family life. First, let me tell you that at this time I was driving a red Geo Metro. It was not a very manly car, but I could put 8 dollars in the gas tank to fill it up for the week. The car has absolutely no power with its 3 cylinder engine, but that’s ok. The hills in this part of Germany don’t get too steep. I saved a lot of money by driving that car which is a good thing because I was driving to the German friends and family all the time. How about we save some money as I take you on a trip with me to the family’s house out at Rodalben, Germany on a typical weekend. Sit back, but don’t be expecting me to get in the passing lane of the Autobahn too often with this Geo Metro. There could be some Germans in Mercedes or BMWs screaming down the passing lane at an easy 100mph or even higher. And over here in Germany, that is perfectly legal.

            Driving to the family house in Rodalben was just kind of something I would get used to. Germans are really close with their families. So I’m going to introduce them to you. When we arrived in Rodalben, we’d drive a few kilometers inside the small town. The main road was adjacent to a passing waterway. We’d cross over the tiny bridge and take an immediate right onto an even smaller roadway with sharp corners. Many times the roads in German towns are so small, that you have to be careful when taking blind corners because if another car was coming your way, you would barely have enough room for the two of you. German roads were built with small economical cars in mind. That being said, once I drove around a couple of these tight turns, we’d arrive at the house.

            Germans are always friendly people. Your sister’s mom and I would barely be getting out of the car and the first people to meet us at the car or to be outside to greet us would be Oma and Opa. That is German for Grandma and Grandpa. I refer to them as such now because at this time, your sister was just an infant. Their first names were Henni and Alois. Henni was a short lady with bright hazel eyes behind thick round glasses. If she wasn’t folding a batch of laundry, she was probably cooking up some amazing food inside for later, doing yard work or giving Alois a hard time. Alois was the man of the house, but a very gracious man.

            Right away Henni would give me a big hug and kiss on the cheek and say something in German like, “Was ist los”, “Wie Ghetts”, “Hast du hunger? Ich hapt viel ghessen gemackt”, which meant, how are you doing, what’s going on, are you hungry because I have a lot of food cooked. Henni and Alois were in their mid-40s I’m guessing by this point. There were no Americans anywhere near their town and their lives never put them in a position to speak English. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t try any English, they simply didn’t know any. So I learned very quickly how to get around and speak some German. I loved the language along with the culture.

            Alois would also greet us. When we would arrive at the house, he would quickly tell Henni to grab us some beers. I remember at first feeling very uneasy about ordering the woman around at first like that, but I would come to realize that that was normal, and Henni did not ever in my presence show any complaints. But when Alois told her to bring him and I some beers and some Brotchen (that is some good German bread), she brought them with a huge smile behind those thick glasses.

            Then there were the boys. There was Tobias and Jenz (pronounced Yents). Tobias was the 19 year old who still lived in his parent’s basement as he was figuring out what to do with his life. I believe he worked the typical manufacturing job down the road. He was a funny guy. He liked to fish and catch rabbits and other kinds of hunting. He also liked his girlfriend a great deal. When I think of Tobias, I think of guy who liked his life with as minimal complications as possible. He was nice; he would drink a beer with us too. Sometime later he would eventually move to France to live with a girl there and live his days in that country. For now he lived in the basement.

            Jents was a little guy. He was about 9 or 10 years old and that guy complained more than any girl I had ever seen. He was a moody little guy too. His father Alois would always be yelling at him for his girly ways. Alois would be on the couch, rolling his German cigarettes, drinking his beer while the boy was going off about something. Alois would essentially tell him to stop being a girl. Alois would blow it all off and then look to me and say, “Noch mol Bier, Joe” to which I responded that I would gladly take another beer. Now I understand kids cry and complain about meaningless stuff all the time, but even then I began telling his sister, my wife, “Yo, I would not be surprised if your brother turns out to be gay later in life”. Not to sound mean or homophobic, I just had that sense that his behavior and the way he identified himself led me to those beliefs. 10 years later and I would be correct as I would see him kissing another man. Yeah, I’ll definitely take another beer, Alois!

            Now that you have met the family, let me tell you about a German norm that the women of house do. It blew my mind when I first noticed it. I thought it was just my wife. When they wash the blankets, they don’t dry them in the dryer. German blankets are not the same as American blankets either. They are much fluffier, and are incased in what I can only describe as a huge pillow case. They are amazing to sleep under. But what the woman does is open a window inside the house, usually the bedroom window, and hang the blanket without the case to it, from the window. If you are walking by outside, you see this blanket hanging from the window with the window wide open. They do this when it is cold or warm outside. It was not uncommon for you to drive down the middle of town and see blankets hanging out of windows to air dry.

            Now as those blankets were drying, the food was being cooked, the gay little man was crying about someone looking at him the wrong way, me and Alois were out to the Gashouse getting some beers with the other local men. I didn’t speak too much, but I would listen intently as Alois would chat with his buddies. The more we would get drunk, the more I understood when it was time to laugh, even if I did not fully understand what was being talked about. There were a couple places that served the best German beers. I’m talking HefeWeissen, Park Pills, CrystalWeissen, and many others. Those beers were stout, son! You can’t drink German beer like you can American beer and just think everything is going to be ok. They have higher alcohol content and the beer taste nothing like American beers.

            Man, Alois and I would do that almost every time I came up to town. We would go drink with the boys, come home for some awesome food, and possibly drink a few more beers. We’d watch German television and I hear some of Alois’s buddies come over and they would be talking politics or something crazy that the wives were doing. The women were very close too. That’s how it was in that particular family. But I would guess it was that way for a lot of the German families because that sort of lifestyle seemed like the social norm; drink beer, eat the food that the woman cooked, drink more beer, and talk politics or sports. It was great.

            As I close this letter off, my boy, I’d like to tell you that these reflections seem so distant and yet so relative. I have been divorced for around 15 years. I’ve been single for roughly 4 years since your mom and I have been raising you separately. Do I miss the family years? Of course I do, but I also feel like I thrust myself into those years much too soon in life. Yet at the same time it filled the whole that I had in my soul, at least for a little while. It also taught me the proper family roles in German society and it reinforced upon me that my own background was flawed and that it was not my fault. Having Alois in my life at that point was great. The marriage to his daughter didn’t last but the lessons that I learned from that experience taught me how important men are in their kid’s lives and plus how the men keep the house together, as well as the woman. You see, in our society today, it’s common to hear a woman say that she doesn’t need a man. She can be both the father and the mother. I’m afraid that is not true. Most of the women who say this sort of thing and deprive their sons of their fathers come from the most economic downtrodden areas of the country.

            It is all a deep mystery, son. How do a man and a woman love each other for the long term? How do families stay together when passion are long gone? A lot of times people stay together for the kids. I don’t know, my boy. Just as the German woman hang those blankets out the window to air dry, many times I just write my thoughts out to see how those thoughts look on paper. From that I can look at it from a different perspective and make different judgments about things. Writing is a beautiful thing my boy. Because of that, I address these writings to you and I share my soul with other people. I love you boy. Until next time

Love Daddy 

 

I Saved a German’s Life

2/22/2015

Little-Son,

            Sometimes I have to think about whom am I writing this for. I have to apologize if I seem a little harsh in some of my letters. I know you will not be reading these today or anytime soon. I also know that I’m not always a very friendly person in some of my opinions, but you will always know where I stand. When I am sharing my life with you, I am remembering things that I haven’t thought about in many years. So to be honest with you, I write some of these letters while spilling much soulful blood on my keyboard. Please forgive me and know that I love you dearly. I’m just speaking from my heart.

            I want to speak about my own ex father-in law in this letter to you. If you remember right, his name is Alois. The man never spoke any English, or even attempted to, yet to this day I remember the connection I had with that man. During the last part of my 4 year tour over in Germany, I used to drive up to visit Alois at work by myself. He was a hard working blue collar man. He had very little education beyond the traditional German education. In Germany, only the really gifted students go to what you considered straight high school. From what I understand from your sister’s mother, the kids either continue on through a well-rounded education that prepares them for college, or they go on to a trade school. Of course there is testing that goes along with that and I’m sure the standards are different depending on which part of Germany you grow up in.

            Alois was responsible for putting the city’s trash in this huge globe like machine that eventually turned refuse into material that was then made into boxes. He worked with a lot of chemicals and around a lot of stinky trash. His area of work was on the back of a loading bay where many trash trucks pulled in, empties their trash trucks. Alois would then separate the trash, put the trash to be recycled in this huge globe in the ground. Imagine a huge ball, bigger than the trash trucks themselves. It was under the ground with a manhole cover on the top, which was easily accessible from the floor. Alois controlled certain chemicals that went into to it, and turned the machine on so that it spun in many directions as it chopped up the trash as it also softened it up. I once looked down inside of it and it looked like there were giant mulching blades inside of it that crisscrossed like giant gear teeth.

            I thought that was the neatest job. I think that job was a great deal of frustration for Alois. Doing that job is probably fun for a day or so. Alois did that job his whole adult life. From what I gather, his boss worked him long hours many times. Alois was not any different than most men who want to take care of their family. He had to deal with a hard boss who undervalued and overworked him. Alois was the man of the house, as Henni was the stay at home mom who took care of the house. It is the very traditional way of life and in Germany, that framework of living is still strong.

            So I’d visit Alois at work. Sometimes he would show me how he did the separating of the trash, and how he did the different tasks that would take the ordinary trash and make it into box material. I would even help him sweep the place up. My German was very basic. I knew how to ask questions that were not very complicated and I could usually tell what he was asking or saying to me. I knew he liked the company. Sometimes when we were done we’d go have a couple beers.

            There were some frustrations in my own life at this point. I knew I was about to get orders to another base; most likely in America again. This is not what I wanted. I wanted to stay in Germany forever. For me, America represented me not having that close family tie again. I had not written my mother, or my siblings pretty much the whole time I was in Germany. I did not want to hear from no one over the holidays. My family was Germany. My family was Alois, Henni, Jents, Tobias, and of course my wife and your sister. Yet I began to realize that I had married a woman that wanted to become American just as much as I wanted to be German. I began to increasingly feel like a fool for having married so young. I also knew that I was now seeing what so many people wanted to warn me about; getting taken advantage of by a German woman to be brought back to the United States. The end of my German dream and family life was coming to an end, and I saw it coming down the pipe.

            My boy, life is hard on a man sometimes. Alois was no exception to that rule. He was the sole bread winner with a beautiful house and people to take care of. There were some things going on with his work and Alois was in fear of losing his job. It caused a great deal of stress for him and his marriage. He was in his 40s with no other sort of job skill who wanted nothing less than to just take care of the people he loved and to enjoy a beer after doing it. He was not very picky.

            One day he called us at the place we were living in at the time (Vogelweh Army Housing) and said he had had enough. He couldn’t live with all the crap that was going on. He feared losing his job. He had been drinking heavily that day. I was in the room with his daughter when they were speaking on the phone and the next thing I know is she told me to hurry up, he was about to commit suicide. I didn’t ask any questions. I just got us in the car and I drove as fast as I could to their house in Rodalben. From our house to theirs, it was about a half hour drive normally. That was one of the longest drives I can remember, and I don’t think I once did the speed limit.

            Alois and Henni had a garage that was separate from the house. I told my wife to go check the house, I’ll check the garage. Of course, my wife was frantic and ran to the house, which was locked. Henni was not at the house when Alois called, so she had no idea that something was going on. When I got to the garage, the side door was locked. On the door was a window. Through the window I could see the silhouette of a body hanging from the rafter. I grabbed a chair that was outside and used it to break through the window so I could unlock the door. Alois was hanging from a rope that he had fastened around his neck. There was nothing in the garage from which I could hold his body and cut the rope at the same time. So I cut the rope while strained on my tippy toes, and Alois’s body fell to the ground. He was passed out before I even got into the garage. His head hit the cement floor and of course he was bleeding, but I got him down.

            My wife was crying because around this time she came out to the garage to see me cut him down. She ran to call the police and ambulance. They came and took him to the hospital. It was a very sad event. I was upset because I cared a great deal about not only Alois, but the whole family. I spent years around all of them. I went fishing with Tobias. I would laugh at Jentz for acting like a girl all the time, but even though I did, it was because I cared for him. I spent my Christmases and holidays with this family. Alois was my German buddy. I never really thought of him as a father-in-law. He always had the attitude of we men have to be men, because the woman are always up to something. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but in a jokingly way that all men know that we are nothing like the woman in our lives, please just give us a beer.

            Well Alois lived through that. In fact, there was no brain damage at all. He had a slight scar from the rope burn and a mild concussion from hitting the floor when I cut him down, but that was about it. As I write this, Alois and Henni still live in the same house. I think Alois retired, but he continued to have that job. All the kids grew up and moved out. Jentz of course has an amazing boyfriend with whom he lives with. Tobias has a longtime girlfriend in France, with whom he has been living with for years. That’s really all I have to say about that, son.

            I sincerely hope this story is not inappropriate to share with you. Maybe it needs to be said because there are some lessons here. Sometimes in life, our problems seem much bigger than they actually are. Alcohol is also not the answer when life does begin to feel stressful. In fact I have this rule for myself; if I’m feeling down or stressed, I will not drink alcohol. Alcohol only magnifies the stress and it does nothing positive to help you figure out how to deal with those problems. Instead I’d rather work out, go for a run, write, or listen to music. Even if life does kick you while you’re down sometimes, suicide is much more painful to those left behind. So I hope I can take something negative here and make it a positive. I love you, my boy.

Love Daddy

 

Mamma Said…Metallica Would Be in Mannheim, Germany

2/28/2015

Little-Son,

            First of all, I’d like to apologies for not writing this week. I received two injuries while doing Jiu Jitsu.; one to my lower back and one to my left foot. The pain from those two injuries had me coming home from work so exhausted, that all I wanted to do was rest and take my mind of the hurt. I am feeling better now, and can sit up in a chair. I have been doing some sort of combative sport for the last 8 years or so. Injuries are just part of the game. I just finally realized that injuries can effect also my writing time as well.

            The part of the story that I am going to write about to you now entails an injury to my heart. It involves me being in Germany still. It traces my sadness to my brother Tony, Sister Lisa, and my mother Susan. I affectionately call this writing, Mamma Said. It is a song written by a band named Metallica. The singer wrote this song as an older man with a new perspective on his mother, having lived through the trials, the good, the bad and discovering forgiveness and love for the woman who brought him into this world. Before I write to you where my heart was with my mother, let me first tell you of the epic concert I went to when Metallica came to Mannheim, Germany. I love you boy. Turn on your lighter. Get ready to join the mosh pit with the other crazy guys looking for loud music, fire and a good time.

“Mamma she has taught me well. Told me when I was young, Son, your life’s an open book. Don’t close it before it’s done. The brightest flame burns the quickest, is what I heard they say. A son’s heart owned to mother But I must find my way” ---Metallica. Mamma Said.

            From an economic standpoint, Mannheim Germany is one of the richest manufacturing cities in the southwestern part of Germany. It was about an hour’s drive east of the military base that I was at. Home to many famous European sports starts and manufacturing complexes in the country, Mannheim was the place for good music as well. It was I believe the late winter of 1997 when I traveled to Mannheim, Germany to see my favorite band from growing up. They had released their Load, CD in the year of 1996. Load began to show the much softer and refined sider side of Metallica that fans were not used to. Previous to this, there were albums such as Kill ‘Em All, Master of Puppets, and Ride the Lightning. Load was a dramatic departure from the rough anthems that supported emotions of war, being locked up in a sanitarium, killings, murder, and any other violence that you can think of. It greatly appealed to the masses of young men in the world at any given time, and that was the secret to Metallica’s success; it was anger driven.

            There is one small problem, my boy…there comes an age when a man begins to start seeing life in the full picture and not with blinders on. He starts to understand the benefits in his hardships. He starts to realize the positives through the negative. He stops being angry because it may just be as simple as this; he is just tired of being angry. I would say it happens in a man’s life when he hits his mid to late 30s. Some men are not ever really angry and some men go to their grave angry because of the choices they make, but I would say that averagely, a developing man losses that raw edge. It is a blessing.

            This happened clearly with the making of this CD, Load. I travelled to Mannheim with a few of my work friends. There were 4 of us. I don’t remember the name of the coliseum. I do remember that they were touring with Corrosion of Conformity, and there were about 3-4 other opening bands with the same type of angry names. I was ready to smash some skulls. This was not a typical seating style of concert. Imagine walking into a huge school gymnasium with a huge stage in the middle. That was it. There was a fence walkway to separate the entering band members from the crowd when they would enter. But it was literally that simple. If you were brave and wild enough, you could get to the front stage. The lighting was pretty amazing. For all the bands, there was actually two stages, or circles of stages that were connected to make on large stage. The drum kits were the center of the stage diameters. Only Metallica used both stages, and I will write about how in just a moment. Otherwise only one drum centered stage was used by the other bands.

            So the place is wild like you would expect any other thrash-metal concert to be. I had never really listened to Corrosion of Conformity or any of the other bands all that much, but to see music live is always better because you now are witnessing the faces and personalities of the bands. I was loving it all. There German beer stands in the back wall of the coliseum kept the lines efficient and moving. The bathrooms were fairly efficient in processing all that beer that was flowing. The mosh pits that sprouted up throughout the whole places were fun. The Germans are very kind people. I actually felt very safe during the mosh pits. In Germany, or at least for that concert, I remember that if you got knocked down, you would have about ten hands reaching down to you from strangers to pick you up so you wouldn’t get seriously hurt. It was like we were getting our rage out while the music was playing, yet the people watched out for each other. I was very amused and surprised by this. That is just another display of cultural differences between Europeans and Americans.

            Now I have to tell you son, Metallica could not have come on the stage a moment too quick. After a few hours of drinking and moshing to the music of the opening bands, they truly hyped up the place for the entrance of the band members of Metallica. For the other bands, the place was pretty well lit up, even during the music. When Metallica was about to show up, the whole place went dark, besides remote white lights here and there and the sound of German being spoken from an announcer. The crowd would go wild. The lighters were always going. People were high-fiving and bro-fisting like crazy. There was one negative cultural difference, son; I went to take a quick bathroom break before the band was to come out and there was pee and feces everywhere on the stalls. I don’t know if the Germans lose all bathroom etiquette when they drink, or if it was just the excitement of having one of America’s loudest thrash bands in the world, be in their hometown. Let’s just say, that I was so glad that I didn’t have to poop, but only pee in the urinal that was left pretty much untainted by feces. The place was going nuts.

            Then it finally happened; Singer/guitarist James Hetfield, Drummer Lars Ulrich, Lead Guitarist Kirk Hammet, and Bassist Jason Newsted were called out one by one. From then on, the place was pure craziness. The lights were going crazy. The band was playing music from their new album and of course their old stuff that many people had loved from day one. Metallica did some stage tricks, that none of the other bands did. First of all, there was a moment in time when drummer Lars Ulrich was playing the drums as usual when during the song there was a drum/guitar solo and continuation while singer James Hetfield was talking to the crowd, in English of course. The lights inside the place were completely out, so it was pitch black. This only went on for about 30-45 seconds. I’m sure in a place that loud and with all the crowd, any sort of pitch black darkness for a longer period of time could have been dangerous. But anyways, the lights came back on and drummer Lars Ulrich was now sitting at the other drum kit, playing like the mad man he was. It was this huge magic trick because when the lights were off, the drums and the guitars did not stop and the music was a fast song, specifically I think it was Ride the Lightning. The stage was a cat walk of sorts. To this day I don’t know if somehow they looped the song with added music while Lars ran to the other drum kit, using a tunnel underneath the stage, or if Lar’s drum kit was switched with the other drum kit while it was dark, and while he didn’t stop playing even though it was completely dark. It was an awesome visual effect for sure.

            If you remember from earlier, I mentioned that there was essentially no seating at this concert. If you wanted to be in the front row, you just had to push your way through or find a weak spot. I don’t remember it being that difficult, but that is exactly what I did; I pushed my way up to the front so I could see the whites in the singer, James Hetfield’s eyes, as he was singing and playing metal riffs. I remained there for the majority of the Metallica set.

            During the song, One, there is a part of the song where the drums and the guitars make this war sounding anthem. The song is about a soldier who comes home as an amputee with no way to exist outside of a breathing tube inside his mouth and the painful memories of a war that was done with him. It is both musically and lyrically emotional. Well during that anthem part, two huge flames shot up from the stage so that singer James Hetfield was in the middle of those two flames and there was a flame within feet of him on both sides. Well son, me being that close to the stage, I thought that my eyebrows were going to burn off. I could feel the heat from those flames as if I was standing behind the engine of an airplane as it turned up its rpm. I could not believe how hot those flames were and how close to the stage I was.

            The last greatest thing that happened to me while in the front row was when James Hetfield started throwing out guitar picks. I don’t know if all guitarists do this, but it makes sense; James had about 10 picks tapped to the side of his guitar. I guess when you are on stage, in the dark, with flames shooting out of the ground around you, you may lose the grip on your guitar pick every once in a while. To combat this, it seems realistic to have plenty of picks ready to grab so that your chords do not miss a beat. Well James started throwing these out, just around the time they were playing their last few songs. I remember seeing him throw some out and the mosh pits would develop around the drop zones of said picks. It looked like catching a pick would instantly make you the target of a rough mosh pit with people fighting for control of that pick. He must have thrown about 4 or 5 when I said, to hell with it; I raised my left hand up tall. I could not see around me too well because it was dark. It was loud and the energy was crazy. Yet in the slowing of time, I felt something hit my palm. I instantly knew what it was. From there I quickly closed my hand and jabbed my whole fist in my pocket. I then released whatever it was that I felt and went back to moshing in my area as if nothing happened. It worked. No one bothered me or chased after that pick.

            I later went to the bathroom to check if I had indeed landed me a pick from the hand of one of America’s best thrash metal guitarist/singers of all time. To my everlasting glory, I did. It was a neon-green Metallica pick. On one side it had the Metallica emblem. On the other side it had the emblem for the new Cd, Load. That night I felt like I had had the most wonderful concert and German cultural experience of my whole life. It was not just enough to see Metallica. To me it was about seeing the band that I had loved while growing up. I had been in Germany for going on 4 years by this point. I had been living my life in a whole different culture. Yet now I was standing there with a piece of my home. I felt like Metallica had come to see me and to tell me they missed me.

            My boy, I was going to write about how this ties into an episode with my mother. I did not realize that writing about this event would not only be so epic, but would take this much space. I think I will close out this section by telling you that it still does tie up with what I will write about next, so consider this a foreshadow. I began contacting my family back home. I spoke with my mother and found out that my brother had been in a very bad accident. That accident would leave him blind in one eye and I would immediately be traveling to San Diego to check on them. It was a trip that I both needed to make and regretted all at the same time. The turning point would be a night that my own mother would say something that would change the way I viewed my own relationship with her. Until then, my boy, I love you dearly. Now let’s go find something to do as you are watching cartoons so very patiently as I write this out.

Love Daddy

 

 

My Brother Antonio…the Shot Heard Around the World

3/1/2015

Little-Son,

            My dear boy, I hope that you have recovered from that awesome Metallica concert that I wrote about in my last essay to you. I think I am fully recovered and would like to proceed to the next chapter in this memoire that I am writing for you. I do have to confess, my lower back is still in a lot of pain, but I can’t allow these papers to go unwritten. The next chapter of this saga that I call my life goes back to Colorado. I’m still stationed in Germany at this point. I’m barely into my twenties and I have experienced so much up to this point in my life. All those experiences I have already written about. It is about this time that my thoughts go back to where I came from and the people who were still there. I wondered if life had changed, and had the people changed as well. I knew that I was nowhere near the same, so it only seemed natural to want to look back in reflection.

            Some of my most early memories of my brother Tony were when we were growing up in Lakewood, Colorado. The time that I am thinking about was when I was about 16 or 17 and my brother was about 9 or 10. I feel like he always looked up to me while we were growing up in that place. Of course he had his friends that were his age, but Tony and I played a lot of football, basketball, Frisbee and we ran around with our black Labrador, Cassie, everywhere we went. Cassie was one of the kids. Cassie was such a bad girl too, but we all loved her. My mother was either too poor, too lazy, or too ghetto to get her fixed like normal people did with their animals. So instead, we had to put up with her getting pregnant once a year or every other year. It was fun watching her go through the change, but it was also messy; the added dog poop, and the mess of her having labor in my room under my bed, was not always pleasant to deal with. But we still loved her.

            So I was the oldest of the house. Then there was my sister Lisa and then my younger brother Tony. Cassie was around from the time I was 14 until long after I left for the military when I turned 18. Cassie slept at my feet every night. She ran outside with us. She got pregnant on the regular. We called her our little hussy. When she would go into heat, she would leave the house (we had no fenced in yard for our condo) and not come back for days. A few times she got captured by the pound and we would call around town until we found her and we’d go pick her up. She fit right in with this dysfunctional family.

            Tony and I, like I said, were always playing some sort of sports. It was mostly catch and basketball. We also had a baseball glove and ball. We would take turns practicing our pitch. We did normal boyhood stuff. We would do this for hours in fact. I remember one time while playing catch, the person who caught the ball would then have to outrun the guy who threw the ball or get tackled. One time I threw the ball to Tony, he caught the ball and I was on him for the tackle. This time I hyper extended his elbow so that it went the wrong way. It bent backwards and the bone pooped out of place. My brother jumps to his feet and is freaking out, and I’m grossed out too because his elbow is out of place. He is screaming. I didn’t know what to do. At that point I ran up to him, grabbed his arm and set the bone back into place myself. I did it mostly out of fear. I knew that I was going to be in some serious trouble and I did not want him to be running around with his arm all busted because I tackled him.

            Well the arm was fine. It swelled up pretty bad and to this day, Tony’s arm that went out of place is about half an inch shorter than the other arm. It seems that when it popped out of place, he damaged some of the bone where there was a lot of growing that didn’t happen for a while afterwards. I got into some serious trouble with my mom of course, but the point of this part of the story is that Tony and I were amazingly close while growing up. We were the typical brothers who played pranks on our sister, played sports together all the time, talked about how we wanted to be Michael Jordan, and complained about the ways in which our mother raised us as a single mom.

            So when I was over in Germany for the better part of 4 years, he was one of the people I missed the most. I did not miss my mother, or at least I did not miss the bad times with her, but I did miss my brother something fierce. So I think it was during the last year that I was over in Germany that I began to find out how everyone was doing. A lot of it was not good. My mother had decided that it was time for her to move from the condo in Lakewood to San Diego, California. She took Lisa, Tony and my dear dog Cassie. It seems that my mother lived a much unfulfilled life and felt like it was the time to move elsewhere, even though San Diego is not a good place to raise kids unless you are of the upper echelon of society. Otherwise San Diego is a shithole for those in poverty.

            I remember right away being saddened by this. Not only had those I left behind moved on, but even if I was to go back, there would be nothing for me to go back to. Going back was the least of any ideas that I would have, but I really hated seeing my mother drag my siblings through the mud of her life. I knew San Diego was going to be trouble, and it was, almost right away.

            First of all, my mother took the kids in a car that could barely make it for a long haul, let alone through the treacherous Rocky Mountains. To this day, I wish my mother would have lost custody of all her kids long before this trip was ever made. They made it to San Diego safely even though the car was at the point of overheating. Then they were living in some bad hotel. It was on the rough side of San Diego. They took my dog, Cassie, to the dog beach and she got desperately ill. She drank from the ocean water and her lymph-nodes swelled up to the point where she was having a hard time breathing. My mother had her put down. Of course, I cried later as I heard about it in Germany. That would not be the last thing that would break my heart.

            The shot heard around the world came on a sunny California day while my brother was outside in the street playing with some other kids his age. Now I’ve never thought it was a cool idea to throw rocks at your friends, but that is what they were doing. They were literally skipping rocks at each other from one end of the street to the other. My brother Tony didn’t see the rock as it was thrown and made a direct hit to his eye, popping it like an egg pops from falling to the ground. He was immediately taken to the hospital where they did emergency surgery to restore the cornea and the fluid that was lost. His eye would never fully recover. He would have to go in for surgery after surgery to restitch the cornea into place. He would lose most of his site in the one eye, his left eye, I believe.

            Of course I hear about all this. I remember at the time not just mourning for what my brother was going through as far as the accident goes, but mourning for my siblings because of the dysfunctional and instable life that my mom was raising them through. All it did was usher me right into the memories of my own upbringing during the years when we had no one to look up to. That is the most painful thing for a boy to endure, and here I was seeing it all again, halfway around the world while all I wanted to do was live life and do well. My brother’s life was going to be forever changed because of the accident, and I knew it. As I write this to you, my brother is still a victim of this circumstance. I could blame my mother, I could blame Tony, I could blame myself for not being there for him. I have looked at this one point in time and have always hated the outcome. I loved my brother dearly. I wanted good for him.

            So while he was in the hospital and recovering from this, I made plans to fly out from Germany and visit him. This was very bad. It was very unsettling for me to see the downward spiral that my mother was taking her kids on. I hated San Diego. I felt like it was too fast paced of life to raise kids in. I missed my own family at the time; your sister, her mom, and her parents who had grown to be my own family. When I got to San Diego, I was horrified to see my brother in that condition. He was in good spirits as far as I could tell. My sister Lisa was not around much as she would run away to Mexico, shortly, to be with the father of her soon to be baby. And finally I learned that my mother was not a crack addict anymore, but a full-fledged prescription pill junkie. I witnessed it right away, too. I had made an effort to tell her how I felt and how discussed I was, but she threw it in my face that had I been there, maybe Tony would not have gotten hurt, and that I had no business judging her life. She said a lot of other hateful things to me that night. She never once asked me how my family was, but only made me feel guilty for moving on and trying to have a life of my own. She treated me as if I abandoned her.

            I remember that being the single most painful night of my life. Here I had come to visit the brother that I loved because of our bonds growing up, and this woman had thrown every kind of poison in my face that you can imagine. I could have left that night. I could have gotten a taxi and went back to the airport to go back to Germany. I don’t know if it was stupidity on my part, but I stayed for the original week that I had planned. I wanted to be with Tony. But I will go on to say that every night I spent in that house was pure torture. I don’t know how I survived it. I remember needing my wife more than anything at that point. I just wanted to see my daughter. I wanted to be around good people who wore uniforms, not around this woman who showed absolutely no care or concern for the life that I was living.

            I eventually went back home. I wanted nothing more but to see my family. I wanted nothing less than to forget about going home. I think I felt depression, misery, guilt and shame for a few weeks. It took me so long to shake that off.

            So I’ve decided to make this memoire a book for you. To be honest, as of this point, I don’t know if I want to expose you to any of this. The only reason I could see it benefiting you is for you to know why I love you so much, and why I love your sister. You kids are the only family that I have. The rest of the people who share my genes have treated me in this same contemptuous manner. For that reason, it is so difficult for me to trust anyone besides myself. That is not a good thing. Yet I am working on it. I know one thing for certain; you have had me in your life as your father in these short years of yours, more than I experienced in my whole childhood. I think being your father has helped me heal from all the traumatic experiences. One more thing has as well; writing about it. I love you with all my heart.

Love Daddy.

           

Auf Wiedersehen, Bis Morgen, Alles Klar, Schuss Meine Schones Deutches Menschen

3/2/2015

Little-Son,

            My boy, the title of this essay can be translated from German to say literally, Until I See You Again, Until Tomorrow, Everything’s Good, and now Goodbye My Dearest German People.  My time in Germany was coming to an end. I had spent nearly four years in the beautiful country, experiencing many different kinds of things. That means everything from cultural awareness to personal tragedy to laughter to a deep sense of American pride and German pride as well. Life had happened so quickly, I don’t know if I will ever fully remember everything I experienced. Now as I transfer to the next chapter of my life and military career, I’d like to write a farewell essay, describing one of the many trips that I took to the drop zone in Grafenwohr, Germany. Get your cold weather gear because it only stays warm in the countryside of Bavaria for about 2 months during the year. Otherwise it is freezing. I love you boy…the vehicles are loaded up with the gear and it is time to move out!

            Recently I looked over my military records and I discovered that I have nearly 40 deployments. A deployment is when you go away from your home base to work somewhere else for an important military mission. I have some for Iraq, Saudi Arabia, The Ukraine, and Italy, but for the most part I was deployed 4 hours away to an Army Range known as Grafenwohr. The military took the name from the nearest town name. The name is literally translated to mean Island of the Count. Germany used this 90 square kilometer area to train its soldiers. After the Versailles Treaty was signed by the Germans, the Grafenwohr training ground was one of the only training grounds that Germany was allowed to train its troops. When the Germans surrendered to the Americans during WW2, the American Army used this site as their own training base, and it is still used as such to this very day.

            Sunday is the day of the week when the team deploying to Grafenwohr would show up for work at Ramstein Air Base. We would get a heavy duty 10 pax truck ready and fueled. Someone who was signed off to drive the 18 wheeler and flatbed trailer would get that ready and fueled. Sometimes we might have to bring a heavy duty, off road forklift up with us. We did have a compound up in Grafenwohr, but many times when our vehicles needed maintenance, we’d have to load it on the flatbed and transport it or any other vehicles back and forth. In the business of recovering equipment being dropped out of a C-130 Hercules aircraft, we used that forklift for everything. In fact, if you parked your car in someone else’s parking spot at Ramstein, we might be the one who moves your car as a practical joke. I’m just joking; we would never abuse government resources like that, but imagine if that happened!

            Once all the vehicles were loaded up, we would then start the 4 hour drive to Grafenwohr. We drove in our own mini convoy. Sometimes someone would take their personal vehicle if we had planned in advance to take a special trip during off duty hours. I mean we were going to be in the most beautiful part of Germany, not far from other countries, and plenty of fun to be had. These deployments were vacations in which we had to bust our butts for a few hours before and after it got dark. We would take the Autobahn the whole way. I’d like to say that we were in the passing lane most of the time, but we were only as fast as our slowest vehicle which was the 18 wheeler. That meant we were going roughly 80 kilometers or 60 miles an hour; nothing too impressive because of the governor on the engine.

            Grafenwohr, the Army Base was your typical military base I suppose. You had your shopping area, your living area, and then of course your training area. The training area was massive. The Army had tank and infantry units out there, and I think some scout units. I could do the research, but I’d like to keep this memoire as personal as possible with only my memories. Some of the German history or artifacts had been left as they were. In fact, I have many times passed the tower that Adolf Hitler used to sit in and watch his troops march.

            When we would arrive during the late afternoon hours of Sunday, we would go to the military billeting to see if there were any rooms available. Most of the time there was not enough space available, so we would get a non-availability letter so that we could then spend the government’s money on a hotel off base. It was much better that way because no one in the military really likes to stay on a military base when they are not working. We wanted to experience the culture, like we always did. We’d get a bed and breakfast style room for each of us. We would unload our personal items in the rooms and then go back to the base to get our equipment ready for the drop times the following day. The drop times are the times that the C-130s were scheduled to fly over the training area drop zone and drop out their training loads. They were our airplanes and the gear was packed with parachutes that we rigged back at home. We were involved in the beginning of the process, as well as the end process, and then we would take the training loads back home, strapped to the flatbed of the trailer to be taken back to Ramstein, where the process would start all over.

            Getting the equipment ready meant starting up the ATVs, the forklifts with tires taller that a room, all sorts of straps and anything else we may need given the circumstance. Once we were done doing all that, the rest of the night would be ours. Sometimes we’d grab a bite at the local Burger King on base. Some guys would go use the gym. The Army even has a movie theatre on base. There was only one problem; you had to be in uniform, and you better stand up during the national anthem, or you would have an Army Sergeant Major with his boot so far up your ass, it would take a week to dig it out. I remember we did go to the movie theatre once. We were the only Air Force guys in the place. I remember an Army Sergeant came in the theatre and he needed someone’s attention. He yelled out, “Hey Retard!” That’s when I realized that with Army guys, you cannot be literal, because every guy in the theatre looked at him and acknowledge him as if to say, “Yes Sergeant”.

            Most of the time we would go off base. When I say go off base that usually meant getting some good German food at a German restaurant, and then partying it up at our favorite German bars or nightclubs. Now it all depended on who you went with, on what you were doing during off duty hours. The younger guys like me and some of the other ones wanted to get our drink on. The older guys wanted to get their drink on too because they had a government issued kitchen pass. Pretty much everyone wanted to get their drink on. Of course this is the time when you really got to know people’s personalities. Some of the quiet guys were the craziest drinkers. Some of the married men were not so reserved, and went wild knowing momma wasn’t around to keep them on a leash.

            The good thing about our job was that drop times were not usually until 4-5ish and we were usually packed up with everything back at the compound no later than 10pm. This gave us from Sunday until Thursday to get cultured and rowdy at night. We would leave Grafenwohr that Friday morning. Usually you knew who was driving and as long as you were sober for the drive, you had a full week of drinking and revelry. Some people weren’t into the whole drinking thing. They usually became the designated driver. Sometimes we’d travel to Czechoslovakia to buy crystal kitchen wear, or we’d take a ski trip to the mountains of Bavaria and sometimes as far as Austria, depending on if the drops got canceled during one of the days there. There were castles to check out. It was a government paid vacation, every time we went. 

            When it was time to get to the drop zone, we put our business faces on. We put all our cold weather gear on. We’d drive onto the base and drive for miles to the compound. From the compound we would take the forklift, 18 wheeler, and truck through some winding pathways until all the trees cleared out and you entered an open way of nothing but sky and ground. Let’s say the drops were at 4pm local time. We would be there and ready about an hour before. We might be fooling around on the ATVs or the large forklift. We might be using the truck to see if we could find some wild boars, which we found a lot.

            While we were doing all this, at ground zero, or the very center of the drop zone (think of it as a dart board with the bull’s-eye in the center) there would be a Humvee. The Humvee belonged to the Air Force’s Combat Controllers. Combat Controllers are the Air Force’s Special Forces unit. They’re job is essentially to come into an area and either set up an immediate landing zone, call in air strikes, and other Air Force related missions that required ground guys to relay information to Air Force pilots. They were heavily trained in combat operations, weather, paramedic procedures, as well as providing the support needed for C-130 humanitarian Airlift. So they were with us at the drop zone every time we were there. Their job was to take wind measurements, and to be the final authority if the pilots were cleared to drop their loads. These guys were studs. They also could drink like the rest of the boys.

            Since the Combat Controllers gave the final go ahead, we often had our fingers in their pockets, patiently awaiting the drop times. Before the C-130s were in site, we knew what was going on already. Now imagine that the wind is within range for the drops, the weather is nothing too drastic (the weather was more for the planes, not us on the ground. Many times we couldn’t even see the planes with a blizzard happening below their planes). You see about 5-7 C-130s coming over the horizon. The Combat Controllers will tell you where the aircraft should be positioned before they drop their loads for us to recover. The Combat Controllers give us all the pertinent information.

            The C-130’s usually came in a flying V formation, much like the formation that birds fly in. each plane drops loads out of its back end.  We would have a load manifest so that we even knew which planes were dropping what and how much. The goal of the C-130’s was to get their loads to parachute in to as close to the bull’s-eye or on it as possible. Now let me just mention that we were on the bull’s-eye. That being said, it was a very dangerous situation sometimes. Usually if you stayed in one place, it was very unlikely that these loads would land on you. Usually they were a few thousand pounds. But you had to be prepared to either run, get inside a vehicle and get it out of the way from a falling load, or do whatever you had to do to save your life. If all else fails, forget the government resources, and get yourself to a safe location. So you had to be paying attention all the time.

            Now I have seen damage done by a falling load. I’ve been to a drop zone on a farmer’s land (drop zone time paid for by the US Government) in which one of his cows was killed by a falling engine can with nothing more than a parachute to slow it down. I’ve seen a load fall directly on the back of the 18 wheeler and on the flat bed. This made the job very easy later on. Finally I have seen guys have to book it on the ATVs or else they and the load would have had to decide who was going to inhabit that space at the same time. I myself have been focused on tying up the parachute and getting a load ready to be picked up by the forklift, when all of a sudden another load fell within 20 feet of me as it crashed down to the ground.

            The added mix to all this excitement and danger was that the planes almost always did more than one pass. They pilots had to keep their numbers up, and pilots never wanted to return to base with un dropped cargo. Add in to this that the sun usually came down once the drops started and in the winter, the drops were starting once it got dark. In Bavaria, it snows all the time. Sometimes you would be out in the middle of the dark, with the howling wind and the snow would literally be coming in sideways. Not only did we have that danger, but there were wild pigs out there. We had to make sure we were not running each other over out there. It was always bitterly cold, but it was always fun and exciting. I wish I could go back.

            Once we got word that all the passes were made for that day, we began the tedious task of chaining all the dropped loads onto the back of the flatbed trailer, driven by the 18 wheeler. I remember many freezing nights standing out in the cold as we all helped the forklift guy get the loads loaded, and the rest of us foot soldiers were chaining the loads to the platform. Then we had to make sure we had every cargo parachute rolled up and on the back of the truck. There were also many mechanical devices that came down with the loads, which we had to account for.

            I think we eventually got used to the cold. I remember those of us driving the ATVs would be soaking wet with mud and water or freezing snow, with a smile from ear to ear as we drove our recovered loads to the compound. It was fun work. Not only was it fun, but we always knew that the rest of the night was going to be eating, drinking beers, and chasing the German ladies of the town. They loved Americans by the way. All Europeans ladies did. We were like rock stars over there, son, chasing the wind, evading the danger, seeing things that we may never see again the rest of our lives. I was just 19 years old when I began this epic life. Sometimes I think that the only way to live up to that sort of excitement would be to jump out of a burning plane or something. I love you, boy. The next adventure will continue.

Love Daddy.

 

My Edwards Air Force Base Assignment

3/4/2015

Little-Son,

            My boy, earlier I was writing to you and I had mentioned that I got hurt. Well I really pulled my back muscles. I thought I did it while training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. That is not the case. I think it happened when I was lifting weights and decided to do leg squats. I would have thought that I would have taken such a painful injury through a much more dangerous sport, then weightlifting. Well as you can tell now from my writing, life is far from perfect and many times it leaves no explanation. I’m currently on some medication for the pain, so excuse me if my writing is evident of that. I want to faithfully get this writing done for the both of us; me as the writer, and for you so I have a piece of mind knowing it is done.

            So at this point in my life, I have reached the conclusion of my overseas assignment over in Germany. I spent nearly four years there and had gotten an assignment to Edwards Air Force Base in California. As soon as I got the official orders, I thought I would be living near the beach with half naked people walking everywhere and bubbling wine always within reach. That was far from the truth. Edwards Air Force Base was nothing like the overseas experience that I had over in Germany, also. Stateside Air Force active duty is much different than an overseas assignment. I hope through the next set of essays, that I can show that clearly to you.

            Edwards Air Force Base is located in the Mojave Desert of California. The Mojave Desert is huge. When you think of California, you may think of the Mountain with the Hollywood sign on it. Well that is the range of mountains that surrounds Los Angeles. Just to the other side of those mountains or to the North East of those mountains, behind the Hollywood sign, lays the Mojave Desert. It is a vast desert. When you travel north through Los Angeles, you take the Antelope Valley freeway (Highway 14) out of Los Angeles and it takes you up in a winding fashion through some of those pretty mountains. The trip from Los Angeles to Edwards Air Force Base takes about an hour and a half. Los Angeles County is so huge, that even traveling this long distance and you escape Los Angeles County and enter Kern County, only 15-20 minutes from the base. Los Angeles County is huge.

            As you travel along highway 14, there are some small cities that you will pass, but the ones of note are the ones that you come across as you leave the mountainous region and you hit nothing but flat desert land, full with sand on the shoulder of the highway as far as the eye can see. All along the highway at this point is not only sand, but dried and sunburnt tumble weed, some areas so thick with the stuff that you can imagine coyotes, rattle snakes, rare desert turtles and other kinds of wildlife roam free in these parts of sunny California. The first town that you will come across is named Palmdale. There are some notable people from Palmdale. The ones that I know of is R Lee Ermy. He was the drill instructor for the movie Full Metal Jacket. There is a hip hop artist named Afroman. He made a whole song about getting high off of marijuana. The song is about him making all kinds of bad choices “because I got high”. There are a bunch of other actors, politicians, sport stars and NASCAR racers that call Palmdale home. Palmdale is part of the Los Angeles County, even though it is a full hour outside of the city of Los Angeles. That may give you some idea as to how big the State is.

            From Palmdale, you travel through a city known as Lancaster, California. John Wayne, Judy Garland, and Frank Zappa, once called Lancaster their home. These are either actors or musicians well before my time, but in their day they were among the biggest names in Hollywood. Lancaster is home to one of the county’s major prison. You won’t miss that clue while driving along the major freeway, because there are signs all over for it warning you not to pick up hitchhikers in the area. It’s kind of creepy at this point. Again, as you drive along this section of the Antelope Valley Freeway, you get a dreadful sense of this massive desert all around you. Driving through Palmdale and Lancaster not only give you the wishful thinking of them being oasis towns, but you begin to question what would happen to you if your car broke down at any point.

            The heat does make this rugged area a dangerous prospect as far as your car breaking down or overheating. The annual rainfall for this area of the country is about 5-8 inches of rain a year. That is nothing. You will see the sun shining all 12 months of the year through these areas. This is a far difference from what I was used to in Germany, where the winter’s first snowfall can still be seen come the end of winter. I remember driving through some parts of these desserts and if you look off to the side during the mid-day heat, it looks like you are seeing a lake off to the far distance. You realize that it is only an illusions created from the heat radiation off the ground and what you are really seeing is the heat waves moving from the ground that give off that illusion. It is crazy.

            From Lancaster, California, as you are still traveling on highway 14, you come across a highway sign that reads Rosamond/Edwards A.F.B. next right. As you take the exit, you realize that nearly the whole town of Rosamond is built along the cross road to the highway. It’s a very small desert town, nearly 15 minutes outside of the base. It is a nasty looking small town. Now if you were to stay on the highway, without exiting, you would see off to the distance a great amount of solar windmills on the mountains that lead up to Tehachapi, California. Beyond that are more desert towns, more specifically Mojave (yes that is the town name) and California City, California. These are all desert towns that for the most part have nothing major going for them economically. There is a lot of poverty in these towns. From my own recollection, the more upper class of citizens live in the Palmdale area. Lots of families began moving from the Los Angeles area to the desert towns. In the process, they brought a lot of their big city problems to these towns. This includes dangerous gangs, low work skills, and the major problem with Methamphetamine when the popularity of the drug first came about. When I lived in this part of California, it was always on the news about major meth lab busts, major drug wars in the desert, and major crime from the violence associated with these types of drugs and gang problems.

            Then you have Edwards Air Force base, strategically located within 15 miles from the Rosamond Exit. Rosamond ends at the Edwards Air Force Base sign, about 4 miles into town. From there you have about a 12 mile drive straight through the dry lake bed that makes the base the alternate landing field for NASAs space shuttles. I have seen the shuttle land at the base a total of 3 times. I will write about that later. For now just know that Edwards Air Force base was out in the middle of nowhere. People from all around the local population held on to government conspiracy stories all the time. They believed that the government had aliens captive there. They thought that below the dry lake bed that lead out to the base, was a fully developed underground city. It would be hard not to believe such stories because there are signs around certain places that surround the base warning you not to trespass and that you will be shot by military police and asked questions later.

            Now son, because I am feeling woozy from my medication, I believe I will end it on a short night for this writing. I want you to be left with the feeling that I had left the world of European cultures, weather, different languages and experiences, to a place with more sand than there are stars in the sky. This was going to be a huge adjustment for me. In my next writings, I am going to tell you about my job in a maintenance unit. I will write to you about some of my desert experiences. I will share with you some of my deployment experiences as well. I will tell you exactly what I was doing on that dismal day known in our history as 9/11. That day would in so many ways change the way the military operated, how top commanders thought as far as wars are fought, and who our enemies are. I will also tell you about a time that I was part of a mission that helped bring closure to pilot’s family who died in a training mission crash. I don’t want to ruin or miss any of those writing opportunities. I love you, boy.

Love Daddy

 

           

I Heard a Boom and Then another Boom

3/5/2015

Little-Son,

            My boy, imagine the fastest running creature on the planet. When I think of this, I imagine a jaguar or a leopard running at nearly 70 miles an hour. Now for the sake of discussion, imagine that same leopard running in a straight line at 70 miles an hour and doesn’t stop for an hour. I know that is crazy, but this is part of a thought experiment. Now imagine you are on a space shuttle, out in space. You are thousands of miles into space. This leopard is on your radar so you know where he is. At the same time you can see the whole earth underneath the leopard. In fact, you can see space totally encircling the earth. The earth is so large, yet you are far enough away to see all the continents and the large bodies of water that are on the earth facing you. Yet you are still able to see that leopard on your computer screen which is illuminated by a mark on a map.

            Now as you think about all that you are envisioning, I have just one command for you; sit for an hour and watch that leopard on your computer screen and see if you can tell he is even moving. I predict that you will not even notice the leopard on your screen move at all. In fact I predict that you will actually see the whole earth move along its orbit instead. I predict that you will even be able to tell a difference in movement from the earth’s relative position to the stars in the galaxy that are in your range of view. You will see two movements; the earth’s orbit on its own axis, and the earth’s movement along an imaginary line through the galaxy. I predict that you will in fact notice quite a distinct movement. Through all of this, you will not even notice any movement from the leopard who is running at 70 miles per hour.

            Now let’s change perspective; imagine that you are on the earth. Imagine that you are on a hill and you see the leopard run from your far right, to your far left. You see him from about a mile away. You will indeed see him running as if he is the fastest moving thing on the planet. When the leopard passes in front of you, he will be traveling very fast, and relative to anything else you see in the sky, or anything else near you ( considering that you are not on some NASCAR speedway), there is nothing else moving that fast. I’m not positive if I explained it correctly. I’m sure some physicist could argue with me, but I think that is the idea behind Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Without getting too bogged down into the science, it’s the idea that we are all in different spaces and the information of light and speed reach us differently dependent on where we are and how far away we are relative to the speed that light travels. The theory when generalized basically states that the light that you see from the sun at this very moment was actually emitted from the sun thousands of light years ago. That is just how long it takes for the light from the sun to travel to the earth. His theory proves time and time again that not only is the galaxy huge, but the galaxy is expanding at not only an increasing rate, but that rate at which it expands is also increasing.

            My boy, now it’s time to land your space shuttle. We have a problem, Houston. It seems that the landing pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida just went on lockdown because of a tornado warning. You can’t land there. You must now land this shuttle at the alternate landing runway located on Edwards Air Force Base, California. I’ll make sure the leopard does not run across the landing strip, and I’ll meet you after you land, but first I will be on the parachute tower roof, watching you make your entry into the orbit. Until then, Godspeed, my boy……..

            When I arrived to my new duty location at Edwards Air Force Base, I was not quite ready for the change. It was always hot and nearing 100 degrees in the dry summer days. There is a strong smell that you get used to. It is the smell of burnt cactus, tumble weed, and sand that surrounds the whole region of this area. The rain hardly ever shows up, but by some miracle that it does, the smell is only made stronger as if the rain set free the aroma like a prisoner being set free from its sandy dungeon.

            I was a part of the 412 Equipment Maintenance Squadron. This was not an operational mission. There would be very few deployments. Edwards Air Force Base was and is still the primary base for the Air Force to test all of its ideas from advanced fighter weaponry to lasers that can go through cinder block walls, without leaving a hole on either side (no wonder the civilian population thinks that the base is holding aliens). Before the Air Force puts anything into circulation, it first uses tons of experiment time and trial and error. This requires the thought process of many smart people in the field of science and engineering. What that means is that the base is roughly 50% military and 50% civilians. There are and were things that happened on that base that you needed the highest level of security clearance to even gain access. Even then, you were required to have a need to know bases, or the proper clearances from commanders of certain missions.

            When I was there, the F-22 was the biggest and baddest new thing in the Air Force inventory. Even though I was trained to work on the parachute systems that are packed on that aircraft, I could not even so much as look at that plane without a mile long background check and further clearance. There were a lot of things on the base that run that way. The base was huge. There were parts of the base that no ordinary person could drive on, military or civilian. It was so strict that on some parts you might see a sign that says trespassing would be dealt with even to the point of death. Business was very serious.

            Now my job was not so secret. I packed parachutes that went in the back of jet airplane ejection seats. I can pack the ones for f-16s, f-15s, and the Back Automatic parachutes that go on every cargo or passenger airplane in the Air Force. I also can inspect, pack and rig the escape life rafts, life vests, life preservers, and escape slides. All of these equipment items are used in the event of an emergency for either the pilot of a fighter jet aircraft or the passengers of a passenger airplane. I also am qualified to pack cargo parachutes in the event that the Air Force drops equipment out of the rear of the aircraft. I spoke about that a great deal with regards to my missions in Germany.

            Here’s the thing about your daddy; if the Air Force made a piece of equipment designed to save your life, your daddy probably knows how to use it and make sure it is properly maintained for others to use it. While at Edwards Air Force Base, I also packed the parachutes that were used daily by an on base Jump School. That school had the primary mission of testing different parachute configurations. I can pack the regular back style parachutes as well as the reserve parachutes if God forbid, you have to use it.

            The area that I worked in was actually a part of the hanger that you see in the movie, Armageddon with Bruce Willis. The area has two floors. Upstairs was the area used for packing the back style parachutes. There were rows and rows of tables used for the packing of these parachutes. The room was equipped to have temperature and humidity control. The upper floor also had a conference room, where we all gathered for our morning meetings. There were also offices down the hall for which the supervisors performed their computer and managerial duties.

            Downstairs was big enough that you could have a full hockey rink and probably still have room left over. This is where there was a section strictly for the maintenance of floatation equipment. In the other part, there was a long table, about the size of half the hockey rink, to pack cargo style parachutes.

            At the very end of the downstairs section was what we called the parachute hanging tower. That is exactly what it was. Some of these cargo style parachutes were hundreds of feet long. That meant that we needed a drying tower tall enough to hang the parachutes up. The tower had a grid of hooks that were operated by a remote on the bottom floor. Now you could also get to the top of the tower by taking an elevator up. Once you were on the top of the tower, you were walking on a cheese grater like floor. It was very high up and you could see everything below you. There was also a 10 foot square hole in the floor which had a raised arm rest all the way around to keep you from falling over. If you were scared of heights, this was the place to get over that fear.

            Now that I have given you the layout of the place, I’m going to take the elevator up one final floor. The elevator won’t go that high up unless I have a key, and I do. The reason is because this is how I get to the slanted roof where there is a door that I can open and sit myself on the roof to watch the shuttle land. During my entire time at Edwards Air Force Base, I saw the shuttle land on the runway, which passed right in front of our building, a total of 3 times. Now when you sit on the roof you usually know from the control tower when it is coming. We usually got a call ahead of time. Before you see the shuttle you hear a loud Boom followed by another Boom. The second Boom echoes the first Boom by a split second. What you are really hearing is the sound of the shuttle breaking through the atmosphere, and I believe the second sound is actually the sound as it takes to finally catch up to you. It’s all sciency stuff and I love it, but forgive me if I am not completely correct.

            That is my introduction of Edwards Air Force Base to you. I hope you enjoyed your ride into the atmosphere. I was told that your shuttle makes a glide landing. That means that you are coming in with no engine power. You have to get it correct on the first try. That is ok, because I also know that the reason Edwards Air Force Base is NASA’s alternate runway is because you can see the runways from space, and not just the leopard running at 70 miles per hour like I was telling you about in the beginning of this story….

That is all for now. I love you, boy.

Love Daddy.

 

09/11/2001 The Day No One Worked

03/07/2015

Little-Son,

            So my boy, by this time of my life I am clearly working out in the middle of the desert. There were no more deployments to rich and fancy cities throughout Europe or former Soviet blocks. When you are part of an operations unit like I was in Germany, you essentially own the mission of the base. When you are part of a maintenance unit like I was at Edwards, you are essentially a glorified maintenance garage for America’s most expensive military weapons. It is good, but when you get down to the day to day work stuff, there is not that many exiting days. I would venture to say that for a writer, an operations unit is a writer’s dream come true, while a maintenance unit will require that same writer to dig deep inside to write anything.

            At Edwards Air Force Base, I worked with some people from some pretty humble backgrounds like myself. I was part of the survival equipment shop. As stated in my previous writings, we dealt exclusively with all types of equipment that was intended to save the lives of pilots, aircrew, passengers, and even dignitary civilians alike. Edwards Air Force Base was a Test Wing. That meant that the job of the base was to test every single piece of equipment and configuration before the Air Force officially accepted it into its normal inventory. This mission style required not only military but many civilians with high knowledge and education: everything from master’s degrees or doctors in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering and aviation. That need for civilians also opened the door for many prior military.

            That being said, my shop was equally divided with military and civilians. This created a huge problem for morale in the shop. Many of the civilians in my shop were ex-military who did the same job while they were military. Interestingly enough, some of them did not exit the Air Force on good terms, yet somehow they found a way to get back into the same line of work even though their work history or reason for discharge was known. The point here is that if you have a dirt bag military member working for you, I guarantee you that once all that discipline is gone, he/she will be an even worse dirt bag as a civilian. The problem though is that we are talking about the government. That means that logic is left outside the gate many times. The American military may not be run like the governments of other nations, but there is still corruption or at least those who know how to play the system. That is why the morale was so bad.

            Imagine being a full time military member. Or better yet, imagine someone like myself who is a supervisor for military members who see the civilians slide on behavior that would ruin the career of a military member, if he/she did the same behavior. That is exactly how it went down. Civilians would either be drunk all the time, be lazy or commit thievery all the time, be disrespectful of the military members, or just plainly don’t give a damn. They knew all they had to do was just enough work not to get fired. They had a strong union on base so even if you did want to fire them, you had to have miles of paperwork documenting their bad behavior. The problem was that the shop was run by a civilian. He was in charge of both the military members and the civilians. Even though he was ex-military himself, he was either gullible (which I highly doubt) or just a plain bleeding heart, and never took the time to discipline his civilians. When he did want to fire someone, it was too late and he risked getting into trouble with their union.

            So as you can imagine, this is not the stuff of any writer’s dream to write about. The atmosphere was very petty. The anger was very deep between members of the military and the civilians. Sometimes there were even fights. The military members would not get along with each other either because of the monotony of the work and dealing with drama. This created a severe atmosphere for disciplinary problems. It wasn’t just problems within my shop either, although in my shop alone I saw a guy get court-martialed for drugs. One was sent to prison for a sex crime. It was in fact a reprehensible crime that I don’t even want to talk about. I was the supervisor of a guy that I always had to write up for every infraction you can think of from being late, not paying his bills, laziness at work, and lying among other things.

            I’m not saying that I was perfect, which I wasn’t. I just want to point out that there was this huge double standard between us military guys and the civilians. If you were military, you couldn’t even look stupid without getting written up. And right there, son, I want to point out the phenomenal difference between military authority compared to the civilians who work in the exact same place; you have the military who are part of the Federal government and whose total mission is to defend and protect. Yada yada yada, we’ve all drunk this Kool-Aid, but that is what is drilled into our heads from day one. You have people who come from usually very poor and bad backgrounds. I’m no different. Yet because it’s the highest form of government, you give a lot of people who were nobodies before, a lot of power. In laymen terms, you are giving poor, uneducated people a ton of power. I call it the Adolph Hitler effect. People who fit the model that I just explained, go absolutely crazy with that power.

            Now I’m not saying that an education makes you a better or wiser person. What I am saying is that you will not usually see this kind of abuse from officers, or at least not in the same way. They kind of run the command and let the lower life forms (I say this only to make a contrast) eat each other up. In fact the officers do not want to deal with the petty stuff. I would venture to say that officers in the military also understand that power is never forever, but always temporary. Yes you may work your way up and gain more authority, but no one is ever free from authority. The man who is totally free from authority is actually the most dangerous and his reckoning will one day come crashing in on him. That’s called justice. Military members are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but many times they are even more subject to arbitrary rules set up and confirmed by members of the enlisted force who not only were nothing before they came into the military, but will be nothing again when they leave the military.

            Let me explain some Economics of the Military kind of stuff to you or anyone who wants to know. I write this because I know from first-hand experience. If you join the military, hopefully you not only do some cool stuff, go to cool places, but hopefully you do it to make something of yourself as well. The problem is that the military pays much higher than the market rate (or the average rate) that is paid in the civilian world. It’s very easy to provide for not only yourself but also a family while in the military, hence the reason some woman are severely attracted to men in uniform. The danger is getting comfortable, which as I write this I see time and time again and I was fooled by it too at one point. You have all this good money coming in, why go to school when I can just buy a car, house, clothes, and all kinds of other material things that don’t mean anything. In fact, those who do have a non-myopic view of the world (not living for just today, but investing in the future) and do go to school, often see their accomplishments either discounted or they see themselves with animosity by other military members.

            Son, I got out of the military after this assignment. I couldn’t deal with the drama and politics anymore. But I wasn’t smart enough to further myself educationally. When I got out of the military, I saw what the civilian world was like, and it was a very cold world. I was lucky to find maybe a 12 dollar an hour job. I had to take extremely hard work. I was later able to turn it all around and go to college later and get an economics degree, which to be honest; I felt later on that I was the best student because I saw the miseries of economics first hand. I was able to recover and now I see other military members who do the same as I did and not take Uncle Sam to the bank by using the benefits that are offered to the military so that one can make something of himself/herself. The civilian world does not give a damn how many troops you abused under your authority. They don’t care where you have been. They don’t care how many medals or years of experience you have. If you leave the military with just a high school diploma, you will be treated like anyone else who just has a high school diploma. Many military members don’t see that until it is too late and they wonder why they left a job that could pay 70,000-80,000 in the military, but now they are working at jiffy lube changing tires. That’s pure 100% economics right there, my boy.

            Now a few years before I got out of the military, I remember the day of 9/11/2001. All of us civilians and military members were in our break room waiting for the morning meeting to start. The channel on the TV was usually on sports center or C.N.N. I remember we saw when the first airplane crashed into the first of the twin towers. I remember thinking that I could hardly believe I was actually seeing this. I remember thinking it was just some movie or something. Yet the news broadcast made it real. Then I remember thinking what if that was my family in there. I remember then seeing the second plane crash into the next tower. 

            No one worked on that day. We stayed in the break room all morning and afternoon. Once we realized that we were attacked terrorists, it was over from that point. Things were not going to be the same, and the whole military from the top all the way down to our humble little shop was going to be effected. At this point I had a few more years on my enlistment. I was sick of the civilian bullshit and I wanted to do something great again. I had left Germany after doing so many important things on such a high level. Now that I was seeing this sickening shit on the television, I wanted to do my part. I will say this…to hell with those civilians who came to work for the government just so they could collect a paycheck. That was the difference between us and them. They had a union to protect them while we military members had a code we were to believe in. we may have come from nothing and been a rag-tag bunch of people, but we swore an oath to defend something. I believed it was time for heads to roll.

            Well I got what I wanted, my son. It didn’t happen that day and it didn’t happen right away, but it happened. I wanted to contribute, and I got my chance in many ways and on many occasions. If you keep up with this story, you will see how that happens. I love you dearly. Please forgive me if this is nothing short of a patriotic rant, but before I can move forward, I have to lay the foundation to what happens next. I love you boy. I’ve always just wanted to contribute and do something to be proud of.

Love Daddy

 

            Daddy and His Saudi Arabian Nights

3/9/2015

Little-Son

            I think the most favorite thing for me to do is for me to take you to school. I get to see you interact with all the kids. I get to see your face light up when your friends call your name. The thing I like the most is when you give me that huge hug and tell me you love me. It’s a no wonder why the first person I can think of writing for is my son. I will write your sister later.

            My boy, 9/11 changed everything. It changed who our enemies were. It changed international relations between the United States and her neighbors. It changed privacy issues for American citizens as we become more and more technology driven. It even changed the way we process prisoners who are accused of terrorist acts against the United States. For me, it changed what was happening for me while I was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

            I used to wonder if the work I was doing there had any effect on the world besides the immediate world that surrounded me at this test base. I knew that ultimately my efforts supported the test mission. But when you don’t see the second hand effects, you sometimes question the meaning of it all. Seeing people get hurt as a result of a foreign attack made me see all the more that what I did was not in vain.

            It was not long after that that my unit got a tasking from higher headquarters, asking for volunteers to go over to Saudi Arabia. I remember it happening at the morning meeting. I immediately volunteered. I didn’t care what I would be doing, I just wanted to go. So I’m going to tell you about it in this essay for you. It was not combat related, but it was definitely in regards to protecting the security of our country. By that I mean the mission was called TCN duty, or Third Country National duty.

            In Saudi Arabia, the whole economy is driven off of oil. This means that there is what’s called a “Natural Resource Curse”. The political incentive for any country with high amounts of natural resources, is to make the economy less capitalistic (free market run with minimal government interference) and more of an aristocracy (either King driven or dictator driven in other countries). This is because of greed. With such high profits from something that is rich in the region, the government in effect creates a monopoly of the item and eliminates all freedoms of the press (which essentially keeps an eye on government misbehavior) and provides as many barrier to entries within the market to keep the money in the hands of the rulers and not the private citizens. Boy, you mix that with religion, and you have the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

            The citizens do not typically do manual labor. They hire third country nationals to do that kind of work. You’ll see people from Pakistan, the Philippines, parts of Asia Minor, and other poor countries where the people leave their poverty to serve the kingdom. The incentive for these people is that they work for a year or two in the kingdom, and they can afford to feed their families back home. They also have an incentive to give away secrets to terrorists. I was volunteering to prevent that kind of activity.

            All that meant was that I had to watch people who did menial jobs like construction, port-o-potty clean up, flight line repair, mess hall duty, and other stuff like that. It doesn’t sound glorious, and it really isn’t. But it was important enough that the government had us out there doing that. Imagine terrorists funded third country nationals taking pictures of the flight line, or the barracks where Americans forces lived, or where high ranking officers worked as they were the minds behind the war on terror. Even one shred of information of this type would be detrimental and there were workers all over the place. They were installing buildings, cooking our food, fixing our vehicles. You had to keep a close eye on not only yourself, but also everything in your surroundings.

            One thing that I realized very quickly is that these TCNs were very friendly. They would ask you questions about American Culture, about your home, how long you have been in country, and about mission specific stuff, but in a very round-a-bout way. You have to understand that in the Middle Eastern culture, it is very normal for people to be curious about each other. Their culture is huge on hospitality, even as far back as the bible times. When a man comes into your door, it is rude not to offer him something to drink and some water to wash his feet with. Americans have this preconceived notion that Muslims are evil because they make their woman wear head coverings all the time and that they are very barbaric towards their woman. I’ve read some of the literature about their culture and it is very much a society that wants to protect the woman from the evil of the world around them, and that is the man’s job. They also hold to the fact that in their culture, evil is vindicated as swiftly as possible and with much terror to warn others from trying the same kinds of bad behavior. That’s why many crimes like rape, drug dealing, robberies, and other crimes are death penalty crimes.

            The way men relate to men is much different too. When I would see men in the culture, it was very common to see two men holding hands, whispering in each other’s ears, and being very affectionate. The whole time I was out there, I rarely saw any woman. Women were not allowed to drive, walk among men, and not even look a man in the eyes.

            When I was in Saudi Arabia, I was assigned to a base called, Prince Sultan Air Base. The base is southeast of the major city of Riyadh. It was a scary place at that time. I remember the base being this one huge square with a perimeter fence that was barb-wired. Along that fence at specific intervals were huge watch towers. When you entered the base, there was a maze of barbed wire barricades. Once you got through those, you finally were greeted by American guards. The walls at the gate had openings for 50 millimeter rifles. That big of a bullet is so powerful that even the trajectory from a bullet close enough will rip your limbs off your body. It will rip your body in half. That’s where I lived for the few months that I was deployed to this location.

            The work was alright. It was hot all the time. There were sandstorms. There were extreme amounts of boredom, but there were moments of fear also. One of those fears was the dreaded camel spider. I remember the first time I saw one. I was walking along the sidewalk as the sun was nearing the horizon. I saw something move from my right side to about ten feet in front of me as fast as it takes to flick a light switch on. It was dark and had long legs. I knew what it was right away because you hear the stories about them all the time. I will tell you that they are as gross and creepy as you hear about them. I remember going to my destination by another route. I remember always paying attention to my surroundings after that. Camel-spiders are so gross. They have ten legs where as other spiders have 8. They have mandibles like ants, except that theirs are powerful enough to rip skin off of you. They can run upwards of 10 miles an hour. Most of the time when they run, they are running towards you because they are trying to get into your shadow to escape the heat.

            The scariest time I had in Saudi Arabia was when we had to take a vehicle near Riyadh. There were four of us military guys in a truck. We were given a phone that dialed directly to the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigation, in case we got into any kind of trouble. Around that time, there were cases of American soldiers getting kidnapped in Saudi Arabia, tortured and killed. Back then you would not hear about it on the news. So that phone was there to hopefully protect us from such an incident.

            While we were in the truck, there was a point when we were at a stop signal. I remember a group of angry Saudi Arabian men circling around the vehicle and then yelling at us. I was very nervous about this. We were all wearing bullet proof vests. We had this emergency phone and now the reality of our danger was right in our face. Nothing happened because the driver immediately started driving again. I just remember that I never wanted to be in that situation again. As I write this out, I sometimes understand why I have been emotionally unbalanced at times. That was the most intense fear that I have experienced.

            My boy, this is not one of my favorite essays to write. I only say that because this time over in Saudi was filled with times of extreme boredom, followed by times of extreme fear. Well that’s exactly what it feels like to be in a dangerous war zone. Even though that was not a declared war zone, it was still a place of fear. I’m also realizing a lot of things about myself through all this. I experienced a lot of scary and terrorizing things that most people don’t experience. People talk about PTSD; well I say there are different degrees of it from minor to extreme. I just want to one day put my military days behind me and move on to happy times in the civilian work force. All I have ever tried to do by joining the military was try to escape poverty. I’m still working on that, son. I love you.

Love Daddy.

           

Daddy Recovers an F-16 Pilot Who Lost His Life in Death Valley

3/10/2015

“Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; say to those with fearful hearts, ‘Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.’

Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then the lame will leap like the deer and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert” ---Isaiah 35; 3-6.

Little-Son,

            I figured before I got into something heavy, I could start the writing off with a little inspiration. The above bible scripture was written by a Jewish prophet before the days of the Jewish people’s captivity and exile to Babylon. Isaiah spoke to the people and told them about all the horrible things that were going to happen to them in the days to come because they worshiped idols, forsook the LORD, and took advantage of the poor. Isaiah also foreshadowed what was going to happen after the suffering of God’s people. He spoke of a time when there would be a suffering servant, sent from God not only to save the Jewish race, but the entire human race. This suffering servant would one day be hailed as Wonderful Councilor, Prince of Peace, Mighty King, and Almighty Redeemer. Isaiah spoke of a time when the whole world would see this once suffering servant, and that the whole world would mourn because of him, and even those who pierced him would see him.

            We live in a fallen and broken world, son. We live in a time when everything evil is considered good, while everything good is considered evil. Good men are persecuted while those who pervert justice, hurt the fatherless and widows, and those who hate not only God, but everything having to do with authority. When I read the above passage, I think of a time when God says, enough is enough. He will slaughter everything that causes evil in this world and will take with him those whom he loves to be with him to what the bible describes as the New Jerusalem where he will “wipe away every teardrop”.

            Until then, we are going to experience a lot of pain, heartache and disappointment. But God says to not worry; he will walk with us all the days of our lives. Son, I’m here to tell you about a time that I experienced death firsthand. It was sometime after I had gotten home from Saudi Arabia. In fact, I know the exact date of the incident. It was the 17^th of July, 2001. I can put names down, because I think that would be highly disrespectful to the family. I will just state that it was an Air Force Major and a civilian photographer. They were in an F-16B Falcon. The airplane and pilot were stationed at Edwards Air Force Base.

            Their F-16 crashed at echo range, which is close to China Lake Naval Station. The crash site was specifically in the desert known as Death Valley. They were on what is called a “photo/chase sortie”. The pilot was chasing drone targets while the photographer was in the backseat of this 2-seater. Only the Air Force, God, and that crew know exactly what happened, and I would be highly inappropriate to speculate. What I can say is that I was part of the group of Airmen that went to the crash site to recover the remains of the pilot and the photographer.

            This was another job that I volunteered for. The tasking came down from higher headquarters to units throughout the base. As soon as I heard about it, I asked for permission to help. I was sent to get two weeks of supplies and got my briefing about what happened. The next day after the crash, I was out at China Lakes Naval Station where about twenty of us were given rooms inside a navy barracks where sailors lived. That following morning we were bused to the crash site.

            Death Valley in the middle of July reached temperatures as high as 120 degrees during the afternoon. Before we could go to the crash site, we had to get clearance from a special unit that monitored the area to make sure no hydrazine had escaped from the jet. This is emergency jet fuel that a pilot uses in only emergency instances where he runs out of normal jet fuel. The stuff is so dangerous, that to even smell it means that you are about to die. It causes rapid cancer in tiny doses and in major doses, will kill you instantly.

            We got cleared and part of my job was to go near the wreckage and collect and remains of the deceased. I’m not going to go into detail besides the fact that there were remains. I helped recover them so they could be properly identified, and returned to the next of kin for burial. I believe that we were out there as a group for 2 weeks. It was hot all the time. People got very moody after a while. The scene upset some people. We were all required to go through psychological counseling after it was all done. We recovered many personal effects of the aircrew so that the family could have that back.

            I’m not going to get any deeper than this. Just know that at the end of the day, when were all formed up in formation, the base chaplain would always say some prayers for the deceased. Any remains that we collected that day were properly stored and had an American Flag draped over them. The national anthem was played and everyone saluted this pilot and photographer, whom we now considered American heroes.

            I was given an Air Force medal for this later on. I will confess that I felt very ashamed that I would even accept this. I felt that this medal would not bring the pilot and photographer back, and that the family would still go on without their loved one. I do know this; there is a widow out there or perhaps her children, who have a picture of their father with his kids because of me. I would not even say it was me, I would say that the power that is much higher than me gave me the opportunity to help provide closure to a grieving woman and her children. I was also fortunate enough to find the man’s wedding ring so that it could be returned to his wife who I’m sure was beautiful back when he married her, and I imagine she will always have a place for him in her heart.

I will always have a place for you in my heart; for both you and your sister. I love you boy.

Love daddy.

 

Daddy Went To Iraq in 2007 and 2009

3/11/2015

Little-Son,

            I want to fast forward from Edwards Air Force Base now. I spent a total of about 3 years there. Besides what I have already written about, there was not much more to talk about. The base was an isolated base out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I’d like to move on to my deployments to Iraq. I’d like to combine them and finish out this memoir by sharing something with you that I think you should know. Of course I want you to know how special you are to me, but I will share with you the moment I first knew that would be important to me.

            After I got out of active duty I spent the next two years realizing that I couldn’t find decent work anywhere that paid anything decent. It was a miserable realization. I ended up doing furniture repair work, over the road truck driver, oil drilling, tanker truck driver (driving gas to gas stations), and local truck driving work delivering anything you can image, including hazardous cargo. I spent many days feeling unfulfilled at what I was doing and constantly thought that there was more to life.

            During all of these times of void that I felt inside, I had joined the Colorado Air National Guard. It’s basically the Air Force, only at the National Guard level. We still wear the same uniform and have the same rank structure. I started out doing the same job that I did while on active duty, only I did it one weekend a month and 2 weeks a year. I thought maybe I could catch a break somehow. I had zero skills in the real world besides the skills to do back breaking work for barely enough money to survive. While doing my National Guard duty, I was bouncing around Colorado, doing some of the hard jobs that I have told you about. I just felt like I was going nowhere in life. I seriously wanted a change.

            Well I was asked by leadership at the base if I want3ed to volunteer for the unit’s required overseas tour. The trip was to Balad Air Base, Iraq. I volunteered. It must have been pretty bad for me if my next best choice was to go overseas to a combat zone. Well first of all, I did not have it nearly as bad as some of this country’s young men who went over there. Secondly, that was when things started to change. I told myself that when I came back home, I was not only going to go back to school, but I was going to finish it even if it meant I was living under a bridge to get it done. I had come to the point where I hated the way things were so much, that I was going to make changes.

            Balad Air Base was in the same way in a lot of aspects as the time I was in Saudi Arabia. The place was surrounded by concrete barriers and barbed wire. There were camel spiders everywhere. It was very hot. The first time that I was in Iraq, it was usually up to 110 degrees a day. I worked on the flight line because my unit is an F-16 fighter unit. I took care of the pilot’s gear. I remember days of walking in sandstorms. I remember days of boredom so boring, that you thought you were going crazy. All there was to do was work, go to the gym, take a shower, eat, go read or play video games or basketball, go to sleep, wake up and do it all over again.

            Since we were stuck on the base, the danger was rather minimal, but it wasn’t non-existent.  The base had belonged to Saddaam Hussein before we bombed him with airstrikes and took it over. The base was complete with a Muslim mosque, MIG fighters and hangers, a completely efficient flight line with runways and taxiways. Once we took over, the base was constantly attacked with mortars from off base. Mortars are basically rockets that are dropped in a small barrel and shot into the air with a trajectory like a football. These things are dangerous and killed people all the time.

            I feel like I’m holding back in my latest writings. Maybe I am. Maybe I realize that I have come to the end of these writings for you. Son, I made it through 2 trips of this stuff over in Iraq. The first time I went out there was in 2007. I left with Colorado. I stayed out there to help New Mexico with their F-16 unit. When I came home I immediately started going to college. I went for about a year or so and volunteered again for the 2009 trip. I left with Colorado. I came home with Wisconsin because they asked for my help. Both times I stayed in Iraq longer than I had originally planned. I came back from that second trip and went right back into college and started plugging away.

            When I came home from the second trip, I remember I was not doing to good. I was first sleeping in my closet at night because noises outside freaked me out. I had a crappy apartment downtown. I’m not sure how long I was home, but I met you mom at some point. Once I met her, I never left her side the whole time we were together. There was this crazy feeling inside of me where I knew that I wanted a son. I felt like your mother was in my life for a reason. I loved your mother too, even though we were only together for a short period of time. I felt a very strong bond with her.

            Then one day she told me she was pregnant. I remember how I felt about it. I remember thinking that if I really wanted to; I could run away and never think twice about the responsibility of being your father. I also remember the early signs that things probably weren’t going to work out between me and your mom. I remember thinking about it long and hard one night after I had trained Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at a place off of Holy and County Line Road, here in Colorado. It is south of Denver. I was at a King Soopers. I thought about my future. I thought about the prospect of having a child with a woman with whom things might not work out with. I remember thinking at that exact moment that I didn’t care. I was going to finish college. I was going to do my best to make things work with your mother. Most importantly I was going to be your father at all costs. I even saw a future in which you were with me and we would have a strong bond even in the distant future. I knew we would be together even before you were born. I loved you even then. Here is the crazy thing; I felt as if God’s voice inside of me told me that you would love me, and that God loved us both. We would be there for each other.

            I want that moment to be the moment in which I end this memoir for you. I am not saying that I will never write for you again. I am only saying that I am closing at least this chapter. More than anything I just want you to know that I love you very much. I have written to you about a lot of crazy experiences I’ve had and about some crazy people along the way. All that stuff really doesn’t matter. What matters to me is when I see you, when I pick you up and when I make sure that you know that you are highly loved. I love you very much, boy.

Love Daddy