My Father Was a Military Man
Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2019
My dad was a military man. I grew up answering the phone, “This is Captain/Major/Lt. Colonel Leavitt’s quarters. How can I help you?” Often it was an airman far away from home hoping to score an invite to dinner from my gourmet cook mother. She always obliged. We seldom ate a meal without every chair at the table full of uniforms across the gamut of rank and duty. One of my neighbors was the pilot of the command module on Apollo 7. Another died in an accident on the base runway coming home from a tour in Viet Nam. For me, they were all family.
To this day the national anthem invokes memories of the entire base coming to a standstill—vehicles stopped, airmen at attention–saluting, and family members with their hands over their hearts as the Star-Spangled Banner played over loudspeakers for the raising and lowering of the flag each morning and evening.
There were perks to being an officer’s child. The air base theater featured five different movies every week—tickets were a quarter. My siblings and I saw a lot of films. Occasionally, when my parents would come with us and the airmen down front got a little rowdy (usually during Ann Margaret or Grace Kelly films), my dad’s voice would boom out of the dark. “This is Lt. Colonel Leavitt speaking—you men are interfering with my entertainment,” and dead silence would reign for the rest of the show.
On the flip side, we moved. A lot. I counted once. I went to nine public schools, including four different high schools. That’s assuming I went to kindergarten. I don’t really remember for sure. Dad was transferred to Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque for the second time when I was a senior in high school. My two brothers were at the height of adolescent angst. When your dad is a military officer, airmen aren’t the only people who get ordered around. The day the moving van was unloading a truck full of boxes, my dad had kept us busy for hours. Late in the afternoon I walked into what would become our dining room and found my 14-year-old brother crouched behind couple of cases of my mother’s treasured china. “What are you doing down there?” I hissed.
“Shut up! I’m hiding from Dad.”
I barely had time to roll my eyes, when my dad’s voice thundered through the house. “Wayne, get out here! I need to some help.”
My brother looked up at me in disgust and asked, “Why does he always remember my name?”
And heaven help the military kid who got in trouble at school. If the Base Commander got wind of it, he called in your dad/mom and ordered it fixed. Now. Most of us didn’t dare sluff, ignore homework, or get lousy grades. Our dad’s/mom’s promotion might depend on it. I have, though, always wondered about what kind of trouble the Major in the quarters behind us got into when his son blew the cabinets off the kitchen walls while he was concocting rock fuel for a science fair project? There was a lot of neighborhood speculation about that one.
One year my dad was stationed in Thule, Greenland—an isolated tour. The ice cap is apparently no place for families, thank goodness. My mom moved back to Las Vegas to be near the support of extended family, and dad spent the year along with 5,000 other airmen battling blizzards, isolation, routine, and bad jokes. By then he was an OSI agent, but there’s very little crime when the temperature is 20 degrees below zero, so he taught himself to play the harmonica—not the little kind you get in your Christmas stocking–the 12” long fancy one with sharps and flats. He often doubled as the accompanist for hymns at his tiny LDS branch.
When you dad goes to work every day in a crisp, pressed uniform with silver maple leaves on each shoulder, ribbons on his shirt, a hat at regulation tilt, and highly polished shoes, you learn to be a patriot without even realizing it. You listen as your neighbors sit around a barbeque and talk about war and loss and courage. And they are telling their own stories, not something printed in a history book. You learn that your country is worth fighting for. After all, the people you love do it every day.
So, here’s to you, Dad. Thanks for belonging to the ranks of good men and women who, for almost 250 years, have held the door of democracy open–for all of us.