On Veterans Day 2014, I want to do something a little different. This time, I want to celebrate the veterans and heroes behind the veterans and heroes, the men and women behind the men and women in uniform whose sacrifices are just as great and in many ways even greater, but who are very seldom recognized. I want to recognize people such as Mom.
During my father's 28 years in the U.S. Air Force, he was (and is) my hero, but she was the quietly heroic one. In military jargon, we were all Dad's "dependents," and we three kids were certainly that. But all of us, Dad included, were dependent on Mom. We lived in Kansas City, Massachusetts, two bases in Japan, Mississippi, Oregon, Massachusetts again, two places in Pennsylvania, Italy, Germany and Omaha. As a military spouse, if you're not dismantling a home in one place, you're putting it back together in another. It's a lot of taking kids out of the old school and placing them in a new school, a lot of friends left behind and a lot of starting all over again knowing nobody. It's a lot of dislocation, physical, social and otherwise. And when Dad was away on TDY (temporary duty), sometimes for months at a time, Mom somehow handled it all on her own, with us three kids as her support and her burden.
At one point, we were stationed for more than two years at a very isolated radar site on the highest mountain in Oregon's Coastal Range, intended to provide early warning of a Soviet air invasion. Dad worked at the site at the summit of Mount Hebo, and we lived in a 27-unit housing area a little lower on the mountain, surrounded by nothing but mile after mile of national forest. Snowfalls of two or three feet weren't unusual, and the roofs of the cheap military housing often had to be shoveled clear of snow to prevent collapse. And if it wasn't snowing, it was raining. In hindsight it was a hard life, but it really didn't seem so at the time, thanks to Mom. (From her point of view, I imagine it was a lot more difficult than we knew or were allowed to know.)
With the men on duty protecting the country at the radar site, the women back at the housing area were charged with protecting home and family. The photo below was taken by the local weekly newspaper, covering the then-inconceivable sight of an all-female firefighting crew drilling in case one of the housing units caught fire. That's Mom with the big grin, at the business end of the hose.
With today's all-volunteer military, the pay is better and I'm told that the various services are more protective of family life than they had been back in the '60s and '70s, requiring fewer transfers and offering more support systems. On the other hand, a lot of our service personnel have been serving multiple combat rotations overseas, leaving families behind to cope with the separation and then to try to re-sync the returned warriors into the very different rhythms of domestic life. It cannot be easy, and again, the sacrifice and quiet heroism of those who stick by their military partners through all that is too seldom recognized. They are largely invisible but their contribution is enormous.
As a bit of a coda, my younger brother and I went back to Mount Hebo more than 20 years later just to check it out. By then the Air Force had closed the radar site and dismantled it; satellites had rendered the facility antiquated. When Alan and I drove up the winding mountain road to the housing area, we were shocked to find that on the very day of our visit, they were dismantling the house where we had lived, cutting it in two and putting it on flatbeds to be hauled away.
We sat on the hillside and watched the crew work, marveling at the cosmic magic of actually being there together that day to witness it. And we both pointed and smiled at the sight of yellow daffodils blooming all around the footprint of the house, descendants of the bulbs that Mom had planted everywhere we had lived in her determination to turn yet another house into a home.
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