3.9

I ran across an amazing artifact from a big day in my life, on Facebook of all places.

Gary was the supervisor of flying at Langley AFB on 9 March 1991. I'm not sure there's an analogous position in the civilian world. The SOF is an experienced pilot, usually field grade and at least an instructor pilot, who sits in the tower with the air traffic controllers and is on standby to deal with in-flight emergencies and weather issues. I pulled SOF duty a few times toward the end of my career, sitting in the big barber chair in the tower at Tyndall, sipping bad coffee and warily watching the fog roll in from the beach, smothering the BX on its way toward the runway.

On this particular day, 9 March, the 27th Tactical Fighter Squadron returned home from Desert Storm. As always, our SOF had a handwritten spreadsheet of the callsigns, pilots, and weather categories for every jet coming back that Saturday. The other day Gary found those old spreadsheets and posted them on Facebook.

There on page two, flying under the callsign "Banjo 83", is 26-year-old me. Apparently my jet, 3031, was broken that day, so I was flying 2011, with my wingman Sammy Slade flying "Maloney's Pony", 82023. The card shows us landing at 1903Z, or a little after two in the afternoon. I remember we had a high overcast. I remember the thrill of seeing verdant hills passing under us, after all those months of desert brown. We crossed over the James River, passing the rusting hulks of the old Liberty Ships waiting there to be turned to scrap, just as these Eagles would be one day, and flew up initial and pitched into a downwind and a pretty good landing. You didn't want to go around today--your families and the world were all watching.

My family wasn't, of course. Peg asked me last night why my parents or my sister didn't show up. It was 1991, and I remember we didn't know until two days before that we were headed home, and of course there was no internet. Maybe they just didn't know.

The scene as we opened canopies was chaotic, like when an underdog wins a huge rivalry game in college football. Wives and kids ran to the base of the ladder to see someone who'd been in harm's way for seven months on the other side of the planet. Sammy got to meet his new son, born right around the time the war started.

As for me, I wasn't entirely left out. A sergeant also deployed to Dhahran anticipated the letdown of arriving to no one, and arranged for his wife and kids to meet me when I landed. As she hugged my neck and said "welcome home", and the kids (they were maybe elementary school age, as I recall) gathered around me, a television camera crew hustled over to catch the magic homecoming moment. "Hold on, guys," I raised my hands as if to push them away. "This isn't my wife, and these aren't my kids. This was just someone doing something very kind for me today."

Or something like that. Was I that articulate? Probably not. I recall being pretty choked up. Standing on your native soil after months preparing for and fighting a war is a pretty heavy thing, if you've not done it before.

Then I lugged my A3 bag to the Jeep, and rhythmically thumped my way back to the house because the tires had grown flat on one side from sitting in one place for months. At least they weren't flat.

I pulled into the driveway of a house I'd dreamed of seeing again but worried maybe I wouldn't, opened the front door, and stepped back so Jeep the dog could come onto the porch, wagging her entire posterior, and unceremoniously leave a puddle of welcome pee for me. Hellion the cat walked out looking bored, rubbed on my leg, then went back into the house. I followed, and spent the next week sitting in a bathrobe drinking Bug Light and smoking Marlboros while I watched MTV with some fascination. "Right Here Right Now" was a big hit that week, an apt tune for the moment.

Right here, right now. Watching the world wake up from history.

And REM released "Losing My Religion" at the same time. It was an inescapable music video during those days sitting around trying to make sense of it all.

But that was just a dream

Try, cry, fly, try

That was just a dream

Just a dream

Just a dream, dream

Time to take a break from this blog for a while.

This all started as a way to advertise the farm, to create a narrative for what we figured would develop into some sort of roadside attraction with the clueless lawyer and the beautiful CRNA bringing eighty acres back to life in the midst of the pandemic. That may happen yet. In the meantime, this blog has turned inward, I guess I've turned inward, and it's not nearly as much fun as it used to be. I was reminded this weekend that every post is about feeling tired and old and discouraged. Who the hell needs to read that whenever I get around to writing?

Point well taken. This may yet come back to life, perhaps transformed into something different. For now I'll let it abide, and get away from oversharing.