Crewcut Days

WHEN YOU'RE A kid, and your dad's in the Air Force, you're obligated to be friends with the other Air Force kids in town. It was never stated to me as such, but was always a given. This is something I didn't realize until I was nine or 10 years old.

Unlike most military brats, I have no recollection of moving around a lot. We did plenty of moving from base to base—Nebraska, North Dakota, Upper Michigan—but all of it occurred before I was four years old. It was around that time (1969) that my dad switched from in-flight refueling to recruiting, and we moved to Green Bay. That's where we settled down, and instead of flying around in the belly of a KC-135, my dad worked in a little office in a recruiting station downtown.

It was in Green Bay that I first came to recognize that I was under certain obligations to become friends with the children of the other recruiters. Not the Army, Navy, Marine or Coast Guard brats, whose fathers worked in the same small building as my dad—those kids were off-limits. In fact, the question of even meeting them never came up. It simply didn't happen. No, I just had to be friends with the Air Force brats.

If you grow up on the bases, you're surrounded by other military brats. That's your whole world. Those are the people you deal with all the time anyway, in school, on the street, at the commissary, so it didn't really matter. This business in Green Bay, though, was just kind of weird. I ended up having my "regular" friends and my "Air Force" friends.

It's probably no surprise that children with parents in the military tended to be misfits—likely as a direct result of all that moving around, all those different towns and different schools. Military bases by nature make for strange environments in which to grow up. Checkpoints, guns, barbed-wire coils, B-52s flying low overhead every five minutes. Factor in that at least one parent tends to be far away for extended periods of time and, well, it all adds up.

Thing is, military kids aren't misfits in the traditional, charming, scruffy sort of way. There's often something strange and unpleasant about them (they didn't call us all "brats" for nothing).

The first obligatory Air Force Brat Friend I remember after we settled in Wisconsin was Randy. I recall little about him except that he was a wiry, nervous kid with white hair. More than Randy himself, I remember his mother, who might help explain why he was so nervous. Randy's mom was an awful angry drunk who showed up in our kitchen ranting and raving on more than one occasion. She even threw a chair once before my dad tossed her out. And the day Randy's dad—the recruiter—was diagnosed with the cancer that would later kill him, she showed up again and blamed my dad. That took place when I was five. It was an ugly evening.

Two years later, after Randy's dad died and another recruiter was brought in to take his place, there was Greg.

Greg was another skinny nervous kid who seemed a little off from the beginning. I believe his family had just been brought up from Texas (as most of them were). He was an excitable type, and not the brightest of bulbs. I always had a very difficult time explaining things to him—the rules of games, the plots of movies and the like. It became exhausting and frustrating.

Plus, if we were in the backyard and he saw a dog pass by (which was pretty common in our neighborhood), he would run screaming for the backdoor. It didn't matter how big the dog was, or whether or not it was leashed. If it was a dog, he ran screaming, then cowered just inside the screen door until it was gone. Only later did I notice the thin, pink semicircular scar around his left eye.

Greg and I went to different schools, so at least I didn't have to deal with him there. Once we hit our pre-teens, we lost contact completely.

(Though I did hear that while in high school, he decided that his life's calling was to become a professional Russian boot dancer. That didn't surprise me at all. "Yeah," my dad said when he heard this, "there always was something a little off about that kid.")

Mark showed up when I was 12. I didn't have much to do with him, though we talked about horror movies a lot when our families got together. He was two years older than I was, had much more in common with my sister than with me and was a hellion. He'd hang around with me at picnics, but always made it clear it was a chore. We were at the same school for a year, but he never talked to me in the halls. He was too cool for that. Maybe that's why he was the only one I liked. When he hit 15, from what I was told, he imploded into a mess of booze, drugs and violence. He began threatening his parents, and before I knew it, was sent away somewhere.

While Mark was still around, Tommy showed up. Tommy's family was trailer trash. I don't like to use terms like that, but it's succinct and it gets my point across. Besides, I have nothing against trailer trash.

When they moved to Green Bay from (again) Texas, they arrived without a place to live. As a result, my folks being good-hearted types, they stayed with us until they found one.

Along with his mom and dad, Tommy had three sisters, all younger than he was. And in the three weeks they lived with us (only finding a house after my mom got in the car and found them a house), they made a shambles of our place. Toys were left anywhere. Books and pictures were tossed to the ground. Food was spilled and left there. Every day I'd come home from school and head straight downstairs (where the mess was usually the worst) to start sorting through the day's carnage, cleaning up what I could. One of them killed all the fish in my aquarium. Tommy's dad threw firecrackers at me. His mom was a coal-eating layabout. And despite anything he may have been led to believe, Tommy's "Fozzie Bear" impression really stank.

Still, he was my friend until we hit high school and his dad was rotated to another station. By that time, I was no longer obligated to be friends with anyone.

Here's the weird thing. I was raised in a strict military household. We raised the flag every morning and folded it properly at night. I had a crewcut until I was nine. Early on, I was taught the "Star-Spangled Banner" and was expected to sing it whenever called upon to do so (i.e., at Packer games).

All these other kids, with the exception of the Russian boot dancer, were freaks. They had long hair, they smoked, they sassed their parents, they raised hell at school. But by the time we hit 18 or 19, all of them, with the exception of me and the Russian Boot dancer, had joined the military.

That always struck me as kind of funny. o