Chapter 6: Home to Stay

Since we loved England so much, I tried to get a follow-on tour or extend my tour another year or two, but the Air Force in its ultimate wisdom needed people in my career field at Bergstrom AFB, Austin, Texas. So we got orders for there. We bought a new VW bug about a month before we got orders, and I could ship it home since we shipped a vehicle over. However, by the time we got to my parent's home, and they pushed off a bunch of stuff we had left there that we couldn't take over with us; we had to get a bigger car. We bought a 1970 Ford Pinto Wagon. Ha Ha, we made it to Nebraska and then had to get a trailer to put behind the Pinto to come to Texas. More stuff we had to have to move.

We could get base housing this time as I was a Master Sergeant now and able to live on base. I had missed Bob in Thailand as he went to Nakhon Phonom where I had gone to Udorn. However, we met up again at Alconbury and then about a month after I got the orders for Bergstrom so did Bob.

We were together again. Not much happened in Texas other than working on aircraft until I didn't pass one of my yearly hearing tests. I finally was taken off the flight line and put into the shop, but the shop was too noisy as well. I transferred again, this time into Quality Control and then into Maintenance Analysis. Hell I couldn't even spell analysis let alone do the job, I thought.

Well, was I surprised; I took to the job like a fish to water. After nearly eight years, the analysis school had an opening, and I could go to school for the very thing I had been doing for the last eight years. The school was at Chanute AFB, outside Rantoul, Illinois. Rantoul is about seven miles north of Champaign. I flew up there at the end of October and the class normally lasted 12 weeks so that would put me missing, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years with my family. Once we got to the first class, I found out the class was the self-pace kind. Once we took a pre-test to see if we knew the material, we could test out of that phase. I was over half way finished by Thanksgiving, so while some people went home for the holiday, I stayed in the barracks and studied. When we came back to school on Monday, I was ready to test out on four more phases of the class. I swore I would be home before Christmas. I was too; I finished the class in five weeks and two days and passed with an overall score of 95 of 100. There were several phases that I aced. I heard that my record was broken three weeks later when a woman who had been working in the field twelve years did it in five weeks and one day. Her overall score was a 95 too.

I didn't go TDY anymore while I was Bergstrom, so we were now homebodies. In 1978, Kathy had found a job with the state comptroller and was making good money. John was getting ready to start middle school, so we felt that we were stable enough to buy a house.

We now became homeowners, along with the bank. Things went well for a while. Then in December of 1980, I got orders for an eighteen-month PCS (Permanent Change of Station) to Osan Air base south of Seoul in South Korea. That was not the worst part. Once I finished the eighteen months, unaccompanied, I had a follow-on PCS to Keflavik, Iceland for two to three years. Keflavik was a Naval Air Station by then, but they needed my career field there so that was where I would go. At least, Keflavik was an accompanied tour.

At the time, there was a lot of mixing of the senior NCOs within the different services. If there was an excess in a particular specialty, and another service needed that specialty, then you would be temporarily assigned to that service, however, you would still be in your branch of the service. So I would be an Air Force member working on a US Navy base and working with Navy personnel. In some cases, I would be their supervisor. I had worked with a Navy Chief Officer (CPO) and a Marine Staff Sergeant (SSgt) while in England, and we worked out fine. The CPO was the higher rank.

Needless to say I could put my papers in order to retire as I would have my twenty in, come September of 1981. Kathy and I discussed it; I was even promised another stripe to Senior Master Sergeant with a possible second stripe after Iceland to top me off at Chief Master. We thought it over for a week, and I put my papers in. I was done.

While I was still in the service, my mother came to visit us in Texas. We had gone home to New York several times, but it was a long two-day drive or a shorter three-day drive, where as Lincoln was a thirteen-hour drive either one day or two, didn't make any difference. Lincoln was about eight-hundred miles due north and a little east. Lakewood is a twenty-four-hour drive and fifteen hundred miles no matter how you figure it. Needless to say we didn't go home to New York quite as much as we did to Nebraska.

My grandmother Emma flew down to see me graduate from college in 1976, and my mother flew here two years later to see us before she died. She knew she was pretty sick and wanted to apologize to Kathy and me for her interference over the years. I guess she felt she had to atone for the talk when we came home to celebrate our wedding.

About six months after that trip, I received a call from my dad that mom was really bad. So we packed up and headed home. On the second day, as we were getting ready to leave the motel, the car wouldn't start, and somehow I just knew that my mother had died that morning. Sure enough I was right; she died about ten minutes before I tried to start the car. I called home and found out that what we thought was true. We continued our drive to New York for her funeral. It was funny because as we were shopping at Sears for a suit for John, we were waited on by my father's girlfriend and future wife. Since my mother was so sick, she allowed my father to have a mistress while she was still alive.

That part sickened me. My father was nothing but a horny old goat and showed no respect for my mother. However, I guess they had a different moral compass than I had.

Before the funeral, I was tasked with picking up my father's mother at the airport in Buffalo. I was going to take John with me as Grandma Maude had not seen John in several years. My father said he was going to take a shower and asked my wife if she wanted to wash his back. Kathy thought he was kidding and laughed about it. I knew my father better than she did, and I knew it was a not so veiled proposition to have sex with her.

As I was driving to Buffalo, I asked Kathy if she wanted to stay with my father and have sex with him. She looked at me as if I was crazy, but I told her he was serious when he asked her to wash his back. He figured he could seduce her and show me once and for all that Kathy was not a good woman for me. That was just one more dig at me from my father.

After the funeral, we drove home, and I didn't talk to my father until eight years later when he was diagnosed with skin cancers. I finally did begrudgingly accept that he was my father and that his attitude towards me was just his way. Years later my sister and I have become much closer, and she told me that we turned out like we did in spite of our parents. I think she was quite correct. I feel that got my moral compass from my Grandma Emma and Grandpa Merle. I certainly didn't get it from my parents. And except for the five years, we lived above my Grandma Maude and Uncle Bill, I never saw much of her or my uncle before or after that five-year period.