Air Force Brat

Air Force Brat

Susan
Kiernan-Lewis

Copyright 2012 by San Marco Press. All rights
reserved.

Published by San Marco Press at
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of this author.

To my son, John
Patrick,

for whom this book is
written.

And to Kevin, Terry and
Tom,

my three intrepid
brothers,

to whom it is
dedicated.

I need to thank my older brother, Thomas
Kiernan, for most of the facts pertaining to the military history
surrounding the places and times we were overseas. He is a walking
encyclopedia when it comes to the aircraft and historical
significance of Chambley-Bussieres Air Force Base. (It's a good
thing since the Internet and Wikipedia have little information on
our overseas installations during the time we were there.) A
salute, also, to my husband, Del Kiernan-Lewis, who edited the
manuscript.  As usual, any errors remaining are my own and the
result of my reluctance to accept perfectly logical editing advice.
Finally, I'd like to thank my beautiful mother, Rosella Kiernan,
for accompanying me on this amazing journey into the past and for
all the support, freedom and encouragement she has always given
me.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my
dad, John Patrick Kiernan, without whom…

Introduction

I was not ten years old when my older
brother first placed a live bomb in my hands.

It was the early sixties and he would offer
up many more unexploded WW II explosives unearthed from the
countryside of France before he finally got too old and jaded to
care about finding them. By then we’d both moved on to other
things, having miraculously survived our childhood as well as our
curiosity about “living history.”

This particular bomb was about twenty
inches, oblong and metallic gray. It had little fins at the end to
help it fly and weighed about fifteen pounds. When my brother first
handed it to me—an extraordinary feat in itself considering how
unpleasant his typical behavior was toward me and our two younger
brothers—I instantly hefted it over my head and threw it.

My brother made whistling noises to simulate
the bomb’s descent. It landed with a thud at the base of an ancient
Mirabelle bush.

“
Where did you find it?” I
asked.

He gave me a disdainful look. It was
possible that conversation wasn’t a part of the
so-far-not-unfriendly sibling exchange. Finally, he squinted and
nodded toward a distant knoll.

“
There’s more, too,” he
said.

There would have to be if he was allowing me
to put my hands all over this one.

“
You want it?” he
asked.

My younger brothers, Terry and Kevin, aged
seven and eight, suddenly emerged from a long, winding path that
led up from the village on a steep, staircased hill of several
poorly tended rows of grapes.

“
Want what?” one of them
asked. The idea that Tommy—Tommy the Wicked, Tommy the
Tormentor—might be actually giving something away wasn’t instantly
believable to any of us.

“
The bomb?” I asked,
dumbfounded.

“
You found a bomb?” Kevin,
the older of the two little boys, stepped up to the bomb. He nudged
it with his foot. “What kind is it?”

Tommy shrugged. “German, it looks like,” he
said.

We never doubted Tommy’s knowledge when it
came to bombs or guns or airplanes. If he said it was German, it
was German.

I picked up the bomb and handed it to Kevin.
“It’s ours now,” I said.

Instantly, he ran with the bomb, holding it
chest high and making the appropriate airplane noises. Our youngest
brother, Terry, ran after him. I watched Kevin heave the bomb onto
some bushes. The branches splayed apart awkwardly.

“
My turn! My turn!” Terry
called, grabbing for the bomb.

I looked at Tommy.

“
Thanks a lot,” I
said.

He made a face as if the effort of
generosity was physically painful.

“
If you come near my
mort,” he said grimly, “you’ll be sorry.”

I looked in the direction of the knoll.

“
Maybe you should tell me
where it is,” I said. “So I don’t accidentally stumble onto
it.”

He gave an ugly laugh.

“
Like that would happen,”
he said, and turned and left.

There were four of us children living abroad
in rural France in 1962. At twelve, Tommy was the oldest. I was
next, the only girl, then Kevin, and Terry was the youngest at only
eight. Living overseas, away from our usual support systems, our
typical American schedules and conveniences and television shows,
had been as easy adaptation for us kids. As dependents in a
military family, we knew intrinsically the feeling of belonging,
first to a close-knit nuclear family, and secondly to the United
States Air Force.

As for many dependents, the memory of
belonging, which is so prevalent in the military, is a warm and
restorative one. You always had the feeling that you mattered, that
there was a spot for you. As a result, you could take on new
challenges, new billets in strange new countries, leave your best
friend behind, over and over again, be the new kid in school, two,
three times a year, because you belonged to the coolest, biggest
club of all.

Being a military brat was like having a
life-membership to a club, but unlike the cozy membership of being
a Baptist or a Catholic or a Dodgers fan, this club had special
schools just for you. It had separate clinics, it had nifty
handshakes (salutes), a billion rules (most of which only your Dad
was subject to), and even its own newspapers and television
stations. It was a club that was solely responsible for keeping
your country’s beloved flag flying, a club that made other
countries back off and be respectful. In fact, it was less of a
club, really, than a whole world. And growing up in that world—as
opposed to joining it when you are an adult—meant a cosseted kind
of security and even love civilian kids couldn’t access. (Every
time you stood up for the National Anthem a part of you believed it
was yourself and all military personnel that shared in the
homage.)

A few days after Tommy gave us the bomb, my
father finally noticed our new door stop and had the Chambley Air
Force Base Military Police come out to the village where we lived
to dispose of the lethal weapon. Kevin and Terry and I were witless
enough to complain about losing the bomb. (I remember Tommy rolling
his eyes. He’d never let an adult find his armory if he could help
it.) In any event, we were all impressed when the report came back
that the bomb was not a dud. I remember writing in my diary around
that time: “And the MP report said that if the bomb had fallen or
been thrown precisely on its nose, it would’ve taken out the whole
village!” It wasn’t until later years that I even thought to doubt
the intelligence level or bomb-disposing capabilities (let alone
analysis) of our backwater MPs, most of whom were barely out of
their teens.

After that, my mother was sure to read out
loud all the stories frequently reported in the Air Force Stars
& Stripes about dependents getting fingers and hands blown off
by hand grenades and bombs found from the (still) recent war.

I remember watching Tommy as she read him
one of the stories, tapping a pencil against his bottom lip and
muttering: “It’s true. Germany’s the place to find live grenades.
France is hopeless for that sort of thing.”

Six months earlier in September of 1962, my
father, a Major in the Air Force Reserves, had been transferred
along with us, his family of five, to a small tactical fighter base
in western France. War-damaged and remote, the airbase that would
become Chambley A.F.B.—and eventually our home—had originally been
used by the Luftwaffe during German occupation in the 1940’s. It
was situated twenty miles southeast of Nancy, very close to the
German border, in Alsace-Lorraine. After the war, Chambley (named
for the village it is nearest to) was abandoned. Its runway was
considered too short and its location nonstrategic now that France
and Germany were friends again (sort of). It was, however, ideal
for the Americans and so, the United States Air Force set up
housekeeping under NATO and began to fly its F-86 jet fighters from
Chambley as our contribution to the Cold War.

When my family arrived at Orly Airport in
Paris in September 1962, I knew I was looking at the beginning of
an incredible adventure.

Chapter One

New Billet, New Worlds to Conquer

One morning several years ago, when my son
was six, I sat at the breakfast table watching him eat his Fruit
Loops and mindlessly mentioned to him that when I was a girl I used
to eat Fruit Loops, too. He put down his spoon and looked at me
with surprise. “Were they in color back then?” he asked.

I suppose, as boomer
parents, my husband and I had made much about the fact that
when
we
were kids
there were only three flavors of ice cream and three television
channels and we didn’t wear seat belts or bike helmets. Our son
firmly believed that our childhood idea of a good time involved
watching the moon change its orbit or guessing how much grass had
grown over the summer in the back yard. But the truth is, many of
my memories seem to be in a softer shade of black and white. For
all that, they were, it seems to me, exciting and colorful in
themselves.

When our plane landed at Orly Airport in
Paris that September afternoon, I had seen enough film clips of
Jackie Kennedy poised at the top of the non-motorized gangway to
take a moment and strike a similar poise when I “saw Paris for the
first time.” This was, of course, before the days of the equipment
scooting right up to the gate. In 1962, you still had to climb down
to the tarmac and walk across the runway to get to customs. It
would be a little harder for a romantic child today to weave her
way through the Pizza Huts and magazine stands and moving sidewalks
inside Charles DeGaulle airport, past customs and baggage claim to
where the Metro opens up to take her into the heart of Paris before
she ever got to say “I am now on French soil!” There’s a reason the
Pope doesn’t fly Coach—he’d never find an empty spot to kiss the
ground upon debarking.

Paris in the sixties was, to a starry-eyed
nine-year old, the perfected picture of Paris in my dreams. It even
smelled different from America, or at least New York City, from
where we’d just flown. I’d been practicing my French vocabulary for
months, but it was pretty clear, right from the beginning, that
learning and speaking a foreign language was not going to be as
easy as I thought.

As I understand it, my mother had preferred
that my Dad come back to the States to collect us all when it was
time to join him in France. This may have had something to do with
the fact that my brother, Tommy, although only eleven years old,
could be very strong willed and my mother didn’t relish attempting
to bend his will during what promised to be a challenging journey.
Or maybe with four children, and having never been overseas
herself, she just wanted the extra support. On top of that, this
would be her first flight ever. Whatever the reason, my father did
fly back to escort us over, only to be thwarted at the last
minute—as we were all boarding the plane. He’d flown over “space
available” on the TWA flight into the New York International
Airport (three years later it would be renamed JFK International
Airport) but wasn’t able to get a seat out on our flight.

For us kids, it was also
our first airplane flight and we probably never enjoyed one more.
Once Dad knew he wasn’t going to make it on our flight, he paged
the family of a buddy—also on their way to France—so that we might
all travel together. The Scibettas would be living in our same
village. Their Dad—Captain Scibetta
³
—was a flight surgeon at
Chambley who had become good friends with Dad during the time the
two were in France waiting for their families to join
them.