Saving Bonds

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 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 us wondering what sort of war we were fighting in Asia  that wasted soldiers on intelligence collection 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.

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 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 bonded for life. What force was at work here, and should I celebrate it? I think it's love, and I think I will.