Childhood nostalgia

 You have yours, I have mine.  

The FEN audios are before my time, but close enough.  I do remember the High Flight video at the end of this post and, you know what?  So does my dad from when he was a kid.  Considering that's an F-104, it's probably from the late 1950s.  If you are an airplane buff, you'll enjoy it.  Yeah, I know it's U.S. Scare Farce, but I forgive that. Heh.  Originally, it was played when TV stations ended their broadcast day.  They'd play the Star-Spangled Banner and then this.  I don't know why.  But it's kind of nice.  

The author of the poem that's read was an American volunteer pilot in the RAF.  He was killed during the Battle of Britain in 1940.  Thinking about him, I'm reminded of Flight Lieutenant Arthur Gerald "Art" Donahue, DFC, another American who joined the RAF back then.  He wrote two books that I found in our home library and read; one was Tally-Ho!: A Yankee in a Spitfire, about his service  during the Battle of Britain, a very intimate, personal account of what it was like to be in a fighter plane engaging with a very skilled and capable enemy.  It reminded me of Bert Stiles' classic memoir of his days as a B-17 co-pilot, circa 1943, the really bad year, Serenade to the Big Bird, which was also in our home library.  Donahue also wrote a vivid memoir of his time fighting the Japanese invasion of British Malaya in 1941, Last Flight from Singapore. It was for his actions during the Japanese assaut that he won the DFC.  While the Japanese conquest of Singapore is the greatest defeat and humiliation in the history of the British Empire, Donahue did his best to prevent that, unlike a lot of the Brits, who ran like rabbits.  

Since I was living in Japan at the time, and daily saw fighter planes screaming across the sky, Donahue's Singapore story resonated with me far more than did his English story. Donahue was killed on a rodeo (RAF term for a fighter sweep) over France not long after his return to England from the Far East.  Bert Stiles was also killed in action.  

Why are these part of my childhood nostalgia?  Well, I read them as a child and I knew my dad was a fighter pilot and had been to war twice by the time I was old enough to read these -- Viet Nam and the first Iraq War -- so I kind of identified him with these men and got the notion that inevitably he, too, would be killed by our merciless enemies.  My brothers read these books as well, and vowed that they would become fighter pilots when they grew up and fight the dirty Japs and lousy  Krauts and the godless commies and the...the... well, those other bad guys, whoever they were, ugly tyrants and dictators with frizzy beards, and I worried that they would get killed, too.  I suppose it was an odd thing, but as a kid I assumed that boys grew up to be men who would fight to protect us from a world of vicious and cruel enemies, dying to save us, and so we should always respect and defer to them, try to make their lives as happy and comfortable as possible because they would not be with us long, and without them we would suffer unspeakable horrors at the hands of ruthless savages.  What a dope, huh?  Or, maybe not.  Time will tell.  

As a Navy brat you can bet that whenever the National Anthem played I stood up and placed my hand over my heart.  Well, not when I was in the car, duh.  I really enjoyed my life as a brat in an FDNF family.  I grew up in Atsugi, Sasebo and Yokosuka, Japan,  Guam, Naples and Sigonella, Italy and Rota, Spain.  But I loved Japan and Guam best.

By the way, nobody knows where the term "brat' for military children came from, but there is a reference to it in a song from a 1707 British play called The Recruiting Officer.  It was, apparently, a contraction of the phrase "barracks rat," which makes sense to me, since kids are even now often called rug rats until they can walk, at which time they metamorph  into house apes and yard apes.  But when I was a brat myself I was told it stood for, variously, born, raised and transferred, born rough and tough, brave, resilient, adaptable, tolerant (I liked that one!), or -- I know, dream on -- beautiful, rich and talented.

Service brats who don't join up themselves as adults permanently lose a part of their childhood, as they can never revisit the base housing and base schools of their youth.  But the sons and daughters of career service members do often join up themselves, as I did.  For me, it actually was a relief to don the uniform and be back aboard Navy bases and this time ships, too!  (I knew an old chief who had  "Death Before Shore Duty!" tattooed across his chest, lol.)  It was, in many ways, literally coming home.  Good old Atsugi, especially.  I was so happy there as a kid and as an adult.  We crawled around in forbidden tunnels dating from World War Two looking for the treasure the Nips had looted from all of Asia, but finding nothing much beyond some empty sake and beer bottles.  We went over to Kamiseya to fly kites and just run around whooping and hollering.

If you take a look at the videos below, be sure to read the comments.  They help you understand why Atsugi was so much a part of the happiest days of our lives, child or adult.  I've lived and worked on other bases. I've mentioned Guam, of course, but there it was Guam that I enjoyed as much as Navy life, and as an adult I lived off base.  But at Atsugi I lived in base housing, a roomy and comfortable two-story town house  with my family as a brat and again as a serving adult.  Living aboard Atsugi was like living in Small Town USA in the 1950s, or so I imagined.  Safe, peaceful, pleasant, with neat, clean streets, stores and work facilities.  Think of a place where 75 percent of the general population is not allowed to even visit because they are too dumb, too maladjusted, too fat, too dysfunctional in general.  Just the A and B high school students who participated in extra-curricular activities and college grads with practical degrees. (Plus FDNF were the cream of those.) That's how it was.  I've read that things are changing throughout the armed forces, what with CRT being pushed and sensible individuals either getting out or declining to enlist, thus lowering recruitment standards -- which will only result in a lot of administrative separations by and by.  But it wasn't that way before.

Speaking of changes, CVW-5 has moved down to Iwakuni and Atsugi's going back to the Japanese navy, it seems. Well, they built it originally, so I guess it's fair.  The last kamikaze sorties and Imperial Japanese navy fighter intercepts were flown from Atsugi -- after the surrender; in fact, the last American killed in the war, a crew member of a Consolidated B-32 attacked by N1K-J Shidens on August 18, 1945, three days after the official cease fire, was the victim of fighters based at Atsugi.  The B-32 was flying a recon mission to make sure the Japs were abiding by the cease fire and keeping their warplanes on the ground.  It found out the hard way that they weren't.  Who was that last man to die?  Twenty-year-old Sgt. Anthony Marchione, photographer's assistant.  Well, you can't trust a sneaky Jap. Don't take my word for it, ask a Korean or Chinese.

Funny, though, all the Japanese I knew in Japan -- well, practically all -- were nice people, friendly, kind and helpful. Also very smart, reliable, trustworthy...basically, everything good that a person could be, they were, as far as I could ever see.  I guess war turns even the most decent of people into monsters.  So why do we keep having wars?  Don't ask me.  The will of the gods, I guess.

Anyways..., I suppose I am going through one of those phase changes that we all experience as we make our way through this life and I am now in the stage where I am realizing that a part of my life -- a big, important one -- is over.  Forever.  At first, I was relieved to have successfully negotiated my Navy career and was excited about my new life and dove into it, everything new and different and so interesting. But now....  The routine is established, and, to be honest, it's not much and kind of boring. I have obligations and concerns and all that, but it's nothing like what my life in the Navy demanded of me, and what I got used to.  As a commenter to one of the Atsugi videos wrote, "There are so many memories there, I wish I could go back and live in a time loop. Life forward deployed is so fast paced you can never stop and smell the roses."  If I'm not careful, I'm liable to unpack my old dress blues, put them on, stand in front of a mirror and start crying. Lordy.  So why don't I re-enlist?  Well, you know...let's not get crazy here.

Oh, well.  This, too, shall pass.  As everything does.  It's just a temporary funk. But, man, I would rather smell JP-5 than horse manure!