Confession of a Re-enlistment Irritant

In the summer of 1975, well into civilian life, I was in pretty close touch with several of the guys I'd served with a few years earlier. We were Air Force recruits, all on four-year enlistments, several of us putting on a blue uniform just as we were about to get drafted into army green for two years, one of which would have been spent in Viet Nam.

After basic training, I was sent to learn the Hungarian language so that I could spy on the Hungarian military. A wooden barracks at the army language school in Monterey, California, became home for the next 10 months. It was "open-bay"--no privacy--and so I spent my time living in pretty close proximity to 60 other guys, all learning various languages.

Some of the bonds established then and there turned out to be permanent. Same with the outfit I joined after I finished language school. Of the Monterey crowd, two of us got orders to go to Frankfurt, Germany, others to stations in Turkey and Bavaria. 

On the opposite side of the runway at the Rhein-Main airport in Frankfurt was an American airbase that hosted a unit assigned to fly in big cargo planes specially outfitted to intercept radio communications between pilots and ground controllers of targeted air forces. Russian and Polish transmissions would be loud and clear from back-and-forth missions over the Baltic Sea. and this was supposed to give our government valuable information about the air defense forces of the Soviet Union. We could also fly over the Adriatic and listen to Yugoslavians, Hungarians, and Albanians, over the Aegean for Bulgarians and Rumanians, and over the Mediterranean for Egyptians, Jordanians, Israelis, Libyans. Tunisians and Algerians. Our mission was a huge waste of resources and left some of us wondering what sort of war we were fighting in Asia that wasted soldiers on intelligence collection and beer-drinking in Europe.  

Once a year since 1975, the Monterey guys and the Frankfurt crowd, along with some of our classmates  who'd been assigned elsewhere after language school, would get together, as many as we could gather, and it was a restorative assembly every time. Forty-nine Labor Days--long weekends for all of us--we'd gather somewhere nearby the home of one of us, drink beer, catch up, gripe, drink beer, and our kids would play with each other, while our wives sipped wine. Some years there were 20 of us, some others, just two or three. We were an informal honor guard for a couple of guys who died. Now we're all well past 75--with unlimited long weekends--and we've had some serious attrition, so we got only four of us this year, our 50th, for an August weekend outside Rochester, where a nonambulatory comrade of ours lives.

As it turned out, we had a big turnout. Our kids, most of whom have kids of their own, organized themselves and brought their kids. We used to wonder, when we'd gathered for these reunions and our kids played together, whether our reunions might continue after we'd all departed. This year we had the kids and grandkids of a comrade who died a couple of years ago and another kid and grandkids of a guy who was not well enough to travel. I counted two dozen of us altogether. The kids and grandkids came to visit each other, and there's a good chance they'll still be doing that twenty years from now, when the erstwhile airmen are long gone.

I found the assembly uplifting, and it came at a time when I was in need of upliftage. Something that brought us together six decades ago stayed with us for a lifetime, a kind of male bonding that wasn't just permanent but got passed down somehow to our kids and grandkids, who seem to have bonded for life.

Compulsory military service creates bonds among the conscripts, and it could be why so many people consider it a character-building exercise. There's something that unites people facing adverse conditions together. You're thrown in with a bunch of strangers from places you've never visited, sometimes with accents so thick you can't understand what they say, and you're ordered around by cruel autocrats, and you find things to like in each and every one of your comrades in obedience, even the ones whose company you wouldn't choose. If you had a choice, which you don't. And so we kept in contact, some of us, and we've been part of something bigger than us, again.

I asked my friends and their issue what the thing was that made this gathering an important event, some of them for as long as they can remember. Most of us were pretty sure it's the same force that bound the airmen together fifty-some years ago. Every one of us took on the troubles and accomplishments and families of each and every other of us, and we passed on to our kids and theirs that quality, whatever it is, that makes people want to do that.  What force was at work here, and should I celebrate it? I think it's love, and I think I will.