Air Force Brat

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  Air Force Brat

  Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  Copyright 2012 by San Marco Press. All rights reserved.

  Published by San Marco Press at Smashwords

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  To my son, John Patrick,

  for whom this book is written.

  And to Kevin, Terry and Tom,

  my three intrepid brothers,

  to whom it is dedicated.

  I need to thank my older brother, Thomas Kiernan, for most of the facts pertaining to the military history surrounding the places and times we were overseas. He is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the aircraft and historical significance of Chambley-Bussieres Air Force Base. (It's a good thing since the Internet and Wikipedia have little information on our overseas installations during the time we were there.) A salute, also, to my husband, Del Kiernan-Lewis, who edited the manuscript. As usual, any errors remaining are my own and the result of my reluctance to accept perfectly logical editing advice. Finally, I'd like to thank my beautiful mother, Rosella Kiernan, for accompanying me on this amazing journey into the past and for all the support, freedom and encouragement she has always given me.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my dad, John Patrick Kiernan, without whom…

  Introduction

  I was not ten years old when my older brother first placed a live bomb in my hands.

  It was the early sixties and he would offer up many more unexploded WW II explosives unearthed from the countryside of France before he finally got too old and jaded to care about finding them. By then we’d both moved on to other things, having miraculously survived our childhood as well as our curiosity about “living history.”

  This particular bomb was about twenty inches, oblong and metallic gray. It had little fins at the end to help it fly and weighed about fifteen pounds. When my brother first handed it to me—an extraordinary feat in itself considering how unpleasant his typical behavior was toward me and our two younger brothers—I instantly hefted it over my head and threw it.

  My brother made whistling noises to simulate the bomb’s descent. It landed with a thud at the base of an ancient Mirabelle bush.

  “Where did you find it?” I asked.

  He gave me a disdainful look. It was possible that conversation wasn’t a part of the so-far-not-unfriendly sibling exchange. Finally, he squinted and nodded toward a distant knoll.

  “There’s more, too,” he said.

  There would have to be if he was allowing me to put my hands all over this one.

  “You want it?” he asked.

  My younger brothers, Terry and Kevin, aged seven and eight, suddenly emerged from a long, winding path that led up from the village on a steep, staircased hill of several poorly tended rows of grapes.

  “Want what?” one of them asked. The idea that Tommy—Tommy the Wicked, Tommy the Tormentor—might be actually giving something away wasn’t instantly believable to any of us.

  “The bomb?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “You found a bomb?” Kevin, the older of the two little boys, stepped up to the bomb. He nudged it with his foot. “What kind is it?”

  Tommy shrugged. “German, it looks like,” he said.

  We never doubted Tommy’s knowledge when it came to bombs or guns or airplanes. If he said it was German, it was German.

  I picked up the bomb and handed it to Kevin. “It’s ours now,” I said.

  Instantly, he ran with the bomb, holding it chest high and making the appropriate airplane noises. Our youngest brother, Terry, ran after him. I watched Kevin heave the bomb onto some bushes. The branches splayed apart awkwardly.

  “My turn! My turn!” Terry called, grabbing for the bomb.

  I looked at Tommy.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  He made a face as if the effort of generosity was physically painful.

  “If you come near my mort,” he said grimly, “you’ll be sorry.”

  I looked in the direction of the knoll.

  “Maybe you should tell me where it is,” I said. “So I don’t accidentally stumble onto it.”

  He gave an ugly laugh.

  “Like that would happen,” he said, and turned and left.

  There were four of us children living abroad in rural France in 1962. At twelve, Tommy was the oldest. I was next, the only girl, then Kevin, and Terry was the youngest at only eight. Living overseas, away from our usual support systems, our typical American schedules and conveniences and television shows, had been as easy adaptation for us kids. As dependents in a military family, we knew intrinsically the feeling of belonging, first to a close-knit nuclear family, and secondly to the United States Air Force.

  As for many dependents, the memory of belonging, which is so prevalent in the military, is a warm and restorative one. You always had the feeling that you mattered, that there was a spot for you. As a result, you could take on new challenges, new billets in strange new countries, leave your best friend behind, over and over again, be the new kid in school, two, three times a year, because you belonged to the coolest, biggest club of all.

  Being a military brat was like having a life-membership to a club, but unlike the cozy membership of being a Baptist or a Catholic or a Dodgers fan, this club had special schools just for you. It had separate clinics, it had nifty handshakes (salutes), a billion rules (most of which only your Dad was subject to), and even its own newspapers and television stations. It was a club that was solely responsible for keeping your country’s beloved flag flying, a club that made other countries back off and be respectful. In fact, it was less of a club, really, than a whole world. And growing up in that world—as opposed to joining it when you are an adult—meant a cosseted kind of security and even love civilian kids couldn’t access. (Every time you stood up for the National Anthem a part of you believed it was yourself and all military personnel that shared in the homage.)

  A few days after Tommy gave us the bomb, my father finally noticed our new door stop and had the Chambley Air Force Base Military Police come out to the village where we lived to dispose of the lethal weapon. Kevin and Terry and I were witless enough to complain about losing the bomb. (I remember Tommy rolling his eyes. He’d never let an adult find his armory if he could help it.) In any event, we were all impressed when the report came back that the bomb was not a dud. I remember writing in my diary around that time: “And the MP report said that if the bomb had fallen or been thrown precisely on its nose, it would’ve taken out the whole village!” It wasn’t until later years that I even thought to doubt the intelligence level or bomb-disposing capabilities (let alone analysis) of our backwater MPs, most of whom were barely out of their teens.

  After that, my mother was sure to read out loud all the stories frequently reported in the Air Force Stars & Stripes about dependents getting fingers and hands blown off by hand grenades and bombs found from the (still) recent war.

  I remember watching Tommy as she read him one of the stories, tapping a pencil against his bottom lip and muttering: “It’s true. Germany’s the place to find live grenades. France is hopeless for that sort of thing.”

  Six months earlier in September of 1962, my father, a Major in the Air Force Reserves, had been transferred along with us, his family of five, to a small tactical fighter base in western France. War-da
maged and remote, the airbase that would become Chambley A.F.B.—and eventually our home—had originally been used by the Luftwaffe during German occupation in the 1940’s. It was situated twenty miles southeast of Nancy, very close to the German border, in Alsace-Lorraine. After the war, Chambley (named for the village it is nearest to) was abandoned. Its runway was considered too short and its location nonstrategic now that France and Germany were friends again (sort of). It was, however, ideal for the Americans and so, the United States Air Force set up housekeeping under NATO and began to fly its F-86 jet fighters from Chambley as our contribution to the Cold War.

  When my family arrived at Orly Airport in Paris in September 1962, I knew I was looking at the beginning of an incredible adventure.

  Chapter One

  New Billet, New Worlds to Conquer

  One morning several years ago, when my son was six, I sat at the breakfast table watching him eat his Fruit Loops and mindlessly mentioned to him that when I was a girl I used to eat Fruit Loops, too. He put down his spoon and looked at me with surprise. “Were they in color back then?” he asked.

  I suppose, as boomer parents, my husband and I had made much about the fact that when we were kids there were only three flavors of ice cream and three television channels and we didn’t wear seat belts or bike helmets. Our son firmly believed that our childhood idea of a good time involved watching the moon change its orbit or guessing how much grass had grown over the summer in the back yard. But the truth is, many of my memories seem to be in a softer shade of black and white. For all that, they were, it seems to me, exciting and colorful in themselves.

  When our plane landed at Orly Airport in Paris that September afternoon, I had seen enough film clips of Jackie Kennedy poised at the top of the non-motorized gangway to take a moment and strike a similar poise when I “saw Paris for the first time.” This was, of course, before the days of the equipment scooting right up to the gate. In 1962, you still had to climb down to the tarmac and walk across the runway to get to customs. It would be a little harder for a romantic child today to weave her way through the Pizza Huts and magazine stands and moving sidewalks inside Charles DeGaulle airport, past customs and baggage claim to where the Metro opens up to take her into the heart of Paris before she ever got to say “I am now on French soil!” There’s a reason the Pope doesn’t fly Coach—he’d never find an empty spot to kiss the ground upon debarking.

  Paris in the sixties was, to a starry-eyed nine-year old, the perfected picture of Paris in my dreams. It even smelled different from America, or at least New York City, from where we’d just flown. I’d been practicing my French vocabulary for months, but it was pretty clear, right from the beginning, that learning and speaking a foreign language was not going to be as easy as I thought.

  As I understand it, my mother had preferred that my Dad come back to the States to collect us all when it was time to join him in France. This may have had something to do with the fact that my brother, Tommy, although only eleven years old, could be very strong willed and my mother didn’t relish attempting to bend his will during what promised to be a challenging journey. Or maybe with four children, and having never been overseas herself, she just wanted the extra support. On top of that, this would be her first flight ever. Whatever the reason, my father did fly back to escort us over, only to be thwarted at the last minute—as we were all boarding the plane. He’d flown over “space available” on the TWA flight into the New York International Airport (three years later it would be renamed JFK International Airport) but wasn’t able to get a seat out on our flight.

  For us kids, it was also our first airplane flight and we probably never enjoyed one more. Once Dad knew he wasn’t going to make it on our flight, he paged the family of a buddy—also on their way to France—so that we might all travel together. The Scibettas would be living in our same village. Their Dad—Captain Scibetta3—was a flight surgeon at Chambley who had become good friends with Dad during the time the two were in France waiting for their families to join them.

  The Scibettas were a family of four boys and one girl which nearly perfectly matched our own family of three boys and one girl. Susan Scibetta became my best friend for the whole of the time that I was overseas. We were both dark-haired, bright, and short. We were both scheduled to be registered at the convent school in the French village so we would not only be neighbors but the sole American schoolmates in a French school.

  As soon as we landed on French soil, it was clear that we had all taken a huge step back in time. Gone were the neon signs of Rome, New York, from where we’d moved. Gone were the super highways, the outdoor movie theatres, the McDonald’s hamburger stands and early morning television cartoons. Gone also were the bright colors that had earmarked the beginning of the new decade. France was tired and gray and, more often than not, black.

  Paris was Paris, however. When I saw the Eiffel Tower for the first time, I gasped as if seeing my favorite fantasy character come to life. My memory of the first time I saw Paris always has a cheesy, scratchy-record Edith Piaff song playing in the background. Absolutely magic.

  Captain Scibetta, a bald, stern-looking man who, I am told, was really extremely witty and fun, met us at the airport with a large station wagon which, amazingly, the three adults and nine children were able to fit in. We drove to a restaurant outside Paris where we all had a wonderful lunch, and then the Captain drove us all the three hours from Paris to our new home. (Richard Scibetta gained some fame years later when he went to the USSR to bring back Gary Powers after Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down and he was captured by the Soviets.)

  Our view of the French countryside was a very different one from the countryside we’d left back home in upstate New York. Although we traveled on the equivalent of an interstate highway in France, it was, in some stretches, little more than a dirt road. The villages looked uninhabited, with dark, largely windowless stone buildings, linked together in long, uninterrupted expanses of filthy, quarried stone.

  “At least they have telephones,” Terry pointed out helpfully to my mother at one point in the trip. The straggling telephone wires dipped and swayed from pole to pole across some of the village streets. I’m sure, from the looks of the primitive villages we were passing, she wasn’t feeling very confident about our new billet.

  “Yeah,” Tommy said. “Now if they just have electricity.”

  I gave him a sour look. “Don’t upset Mom,” I hissed.

  When we first drove into Ars, Captain Scibetta pointed out the train station at the entrance to the village.

  “Not unlike most village train stations,” he told my mother, “it has the best dining in town.” I remember looking at him to see if he was being funny. But, as usual with adults, I couldn’t tell. Later, my father was to confirm to me that what he said was true and we would eat at the train station on and off throughout our time in the village.

  My new best friend’s dad stopped at the apartment building that he and his family were renting and unloaded everyone before tucking us five back into the car for the drive across town to our own house. As we drove, I suppose my mother became more apprehensive while we four children became much more excited. The village looked less like a place where normal people lived and more like a movie set from the eighteen hundreds. It reminded me of the field trip my class had taken the month before to Jamestown where we saw how the pioneers made butter and forged their own buttons and stuff.

  The clothes the villagers wore, from their ubiquitous berets to their old men’s baggy pants, were mostly ancient ebony wools. The village facades were dark with a thick patina of coal dust. The roads were unpaved, the villagers' expressions untrusting and worn. It appeared that urinating in the street—in full view of the world—was de rigueur. Any restaurant or shop could have been easily transplanted back to the 1920s without any loss of believability in the dress, setting or food.

  The fact was, from the moment I stepped foot in Ars-sur-Moselle, the remote and hilly village in
Alsace-Lorraine that would be my family’s home for the coming year, it was immediately obvious that it was a fantasy world beyond my child’s dreams and expectations.

  The house my father had rented for us was beautiful. I could almost hear the sigh of relief from my mother as we drove up to the crest of a long hilly street. The house was fairly large, with a bright orange Mediterranean tile roof. A wrap-around balcony gave access to each of the three bedrooms from the outside. There was a large side garden, a double garage and a full basement.

  We were home.

  Chapter Two

  Boomer Children and A World War

  While it was true that France in the early 1960’s was a fantasy-come-true for us kids, the experience was a rather different kind for our parents. Considered the “arm pit” of France (and often even more colorfully referenced), the airbase where most dependents lived was unlovingly referred to by dependent wives as “Shambles A.F.B.” (Such a kinder, gentler time!) Chambley was too far from Paris, too small, and too much in the middle of nowhere. Plus, the French people in the area surrounding the base were not often terribly gracious with their American visitors. And although I have no doubt our hosts were usually justified in their pique, it definitely didn’t help make for Chambley being considered anything but a demotion or reprimand by the Americans who had been sent there.

  There was no obvious standard of behavior for American-children-in-a-foreign-land and no visible enforcement even if we’d known what the rules were. Like the other recently shipped-in American wives and dependents, my mother was stressed out enough just trying to understand the toilets in post-war France without monitoring the movements of her four very active children. And so it happened, never to be repeated in any other time or venue, that my three brothers and I were given an unprecedented freedom. My parents’ desire to believe that no real trouble could come from such a pastoral setting combined with the anxiety of living abroad as part of a military installation—and make no mistake, there were plenty of rules for the grown-ups—allowed us children something I would never be able to offer my own child: the opportunity to roam freely and safely, and to discover the world on its own terms and in its own unique wrapping.