Thirty-one years ago today, I turned in the flight cap
for which we clever enlisted people had a cunningly obscene alternate name, slid the blue
belt out of the khaki-keepers on the slacks for the last time and returned
myself to the ranks of civilian after eight years of active (for the most) duty
in the United States Air Force.
I like to remember it as a moment of altruism and
self-sacrifice. As I said at the time and meant as close to sincerely as I ever
get, I wasn’t greedy; it was someone else’s turn to serve his country.
I had
traveled half way around the world from the armadillos (and a few peccadilloes)
of Texas at San Antonio through the summer of The Big Race and Nothing Else in
India No Place to the white wastelands of Greenland and unceasing speculation waiting
for the seventeen days of summer as to why in hell anyone would want to be here
in the first place all the way to the Federal Republic of Germany and the woman
I was to meet and marry.
Unlike the armadillo and penguin, I so glibly promised a
solemn younger sibling who suspected more than knew just how large a goober his
oldest brother was, the wife was real, as were the children who followed the
union. As a unit, they presented a pretty eloquent argument to choose door
number two instead of taking a right at the light and going straight through
the night though I do recall the following day and struggling to answer the
getting-dressed question of “what goes with dark blue? Oh yeah, more dark blue.”
I’ve always thought of it as ‘two decades or so since I
left the Air Force’ until I sat down to write this and realized it’s been a
skosh way more than that, so much more that in truth, I’ve been out longer than I
had been on Earth when I chose to get out.
No matter how you slice it, that’s a
long time ago and I’m still waiting for the
final cut mindful, as always that the second show is often
completely different from the first.
-bill kenny
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