Throughout the years as an Air Force enlisted, officer, government civil servant, and several other roles not mentionable, there have been a few defining imprints on my memory.
- Basic training and ROTC graduation ceremonies where friends and family came to see me take my oaths. Grandma Crall drove from Michigan to Texas to see me march and graduate at Lackland AFB. Major Don Bogue drove from Alabama to Wichita overnight to give me my commission oath.
- A C-130 finally (did I emphasize finally!) arrive in the uncharted parts of Honduras to lift my team out of a dirt runway where we’d spent hours wishing for Godfather’s Pizza from San Antonio, and got it…with ice cold cokes!
- Directing an F-15 Flyby of the Luxembourg American Cemetery for memorial Day observances and the guys from Bitburg AB executed THE PERFECT Missing Man formation.
- Retiring to our small island and then seeing the Stars and Stripes sail into harbor below our humble home the day before our troubled nation’s 2019 July 4th observance.
Maybe “Defining imprints” should be redefined as “things-you-never-thought-could-make-you-feel-better-and-then-you-learn-you-were-wrong.”
I’ve known some great “Coasties” in my time, top among them might be Admiral Salerno, Admiral Watson, Nick Pardi and Captain Fish, but to a guy sitting at breakfast on a small island in the Atlantic away from family and remembering many Independence Days in the far corners of the world, no one looked better today than those cadets bringing in the USCGC Eagle. None of them will ever know what I felt; and God willing, none of them will ever know where and how I’ve felt on many July Fourths, but they are absolutely the top of the United States military today. Some will be great leaders, some will lose interest, some will and leave their uniforms behind, but today, they are my greatest American Heroes.
Thank you, U.S. Coast Guard. And as Lee Greenwood sang to us in a hangar in Korea at the end a week-long combat exercise…”God Bless The U.S.A.”