Air Force Brat (4 page)

Bernard shook his head but
he was grinning. (It always amazed me how someone so
bad
could always be
so
jolly
.)

“
He didn’t get his kiss,
did he?” he said.

I snorted and hoisted myself up the pipe to
the balcony and into the warm and quiet house. Within minutes, I
was in my bed.

Chapter Four

The Major

“
The Potato Eaters and
ancestors of the Hillbillies.” This is how Wikipedia describes the
Irish. It is the first sentence of its description of them. My
father wouldn’t have disagreed with that description, but then, he
was fully Irish by blood, himself. A more perverse, obstinate and
contrary group of people you’d be hard pressed to find.

On the other hand, the
most charming, and delightful people of my acquaintance have also
been Irish or of Irish descent. In my mind, the Irish have some
incredibly good things about them, and like most Irish-Americans,
I’ll always have a special spot in my heart for Ireland and things
Irish. This doesn’t change the fact that they tend to be a
difficult people, given to sly misrepresentation if not downright
mendacity. So Erin go braugh
that
.

My father was the fourth child in an Irish
family of seven children. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in
August, 1920, four years after the Easter Rising in Ireland. He was
the fourth child of Tom Kiernan and Mary Ann Mears, who met on the
S.S. Lusitania ten years before the ocean liner was sunk by a
German U boat in WWI. His older sister, Mary, and two brothers, Tom
and Jim were born in America and were naturalized in 1920, along
with their parents. My father, born that summer, was the first
“true” American born of the family—something which, I believe,
contributed to a life-long patriotism on his part.

He was christened “John Joseph” and was
called “Joe” by family and friends. It’s an interesting, and
utterly believable part of my father’s history that no one seemed
to know—even his brothers and sisters—what his real name was. As
long as I knew him, he was “John Patrick.” It wasn’t until nearly
ten years after his death that I unearthed his original name. I’d
always thought his first name was “Joseph” since that was what his
siblings called him. I’d heard the stories why he’d changed it: He
thought “Joe” was common, the equivalent of “Bud” or “Mac.” I had
heard my paternal uncle, Bill, jokingly lament at having his middle
name, Patrick, stolen by Dad. I had not known that Dad hadn’t made
up the “John” part of his name. He was the kind of boy who might’ve
easily done such a thing.

My grandmother and grandfather settled in
Indianapolis shortly after arriving in this country in 1907. Mary
Ann came from County Sligho to join her sister, Agnes and her
husband Mike in Indianapolis. My grandmother spoke only Gaelic when
she arrived at the age of twenty-five. But by the time she died,
sixty years later, she could not remember a single word of her
native tongue.

My grandfather Tom Kiernan was, technically,
an Englishman, his parents having emigrated to Whitechapel,
England, twenty-five years earlier from County Mayo. Seventy years
later, I had an argument with my Aunt Kate where I tried to
convince her that Grandad Kiernan wasn’t really Irish but an
Englishman. (I was on an anti-Irish kick at the time.) I’ll never
forget her response: “Well, his mother was Irish and his father was
Irish, so I’d say that was a neat trick him turning out
English!”

Because he had no real prospects in New York
and because he believed he had just met the woman he wanted to
marry, Tom followed Mary Ann within a few months to Indianapolis,
where he became a fireman—an occupation that effectively buffered
his soon-to-be-large Irish family—from the poverty and want of the
coming Depression. They lived in a large house on the west side of
Indianapolis, where their four boys and three girls attended
parochial school.

Intellectually gifted, my
father had a vision of who he was and where his place was in the
world. From the beginning, he knew that wasn’t Indiana. At
fourteen, he ran away to New York City where he found work as a
photographer’s apprentice and modeled for
Boys’ Life
.

A year later, he returned to Indianapolis to
finish school. My grandfather told him he wouldn’t waste any more
private school tuition money on him. My father enrolled at
Washington High School, a public school, skipped his junior year,
and became class president, head of the school newspaper, and
debating society president. He graduated at the top of his
class.

After he graduated, he
enlisted in order to join his two older brothers in World War II.
Both of them were pilots; Tom was with the 55th Fighter Group,
338th Squadron, and Jim with the 398th Bomb Group,
603
^rd
Squadron. Except for the fact that my Dad was, briefly, a
part of the 8th Air Force, there is no file, and no record of his
unit.

On the basis of a standard IQ test, my
father was sent to Officer’s Training in Florida, given the rank of
Lieutenant 2nd Class. He was sent to London to work with British
Intelligence. From this point until he was honorably discharged
from the Army in 1945 there is no detailed information as to what
my father did in the war. When my older brother Tom used the
Freedom of Information Act in 1996 to get what were supposed to be
the military records of my father’s work with British Intelligence
during the war, almost all of the pages were blacked out. We
believe, from piecing together certain known events of his history,
that my father migrated to the OSS, or the CIA after the war. But
he never admitted to it, himself.

Often, when he’d had a few
drinks too many, my father, who was a brilliant raconteur, would
tell stories about experiences behind enemy lines, always out of
uniform or, worse,
wearing an enemy
uniform
. He was fluent in French but used
to joke that his German wasn’t good enough to prevent him from
being executed. He was certainly a spy during the war. He hinted at
many escapades, but none fully explained.

He was a brilliant puzzle-solver, and when
he wasn’t dodging bombs, dating English actresses, or doing
intelligent reconnaissance on every pub in London, he worked at
Bletchley Park. The work done at Bletchley Park (with British
cryptanalyst, Alan Turing,) was primarily code cracking. The
decryption done at Bletchley is generally accepted as being the
reason the Allies defeated the Germans in the Battle of the
Atlantic, a turning point in the war.

There is a photograph
taken during the war that each of us kids has displayed in our
homes. It was taken at Station 159, Wormingford, England in East
Anglia where nearly all of the US operational bases were located
and where my father’s older brother Tom was stationed with the
55
^th
Fighter Group. The photo shows Tom and our father standing in
front of Tom’s P-51 with the name of a third brother written on the
side of it. (The photo was taken several months after Jim had been
killed during a bombing mission on the Ainsworth, Nebraska Bombing
Range when his engine failed. He was the pilot of the B-17F and
went down with a crew of six.)

My father had come down from London with a
photographer from the Stars and Stripes that wanted to do a story
about the two brothers. After the photographer got his shots and
was packing up his gear, Tom’s squadron, which provided escort to
the big B-17 bombers, returned from their mission and overflew the
field before breaking off into tight, sequential landing
patterns.

This was always a dramatic and emotional
moment. As the two brothers looked up to count the number of planes
returning, the photographer knew that this was “the photo.” He
grabbed his camera, steadied it without a tripod, and took the
picture that would be forever etched in our hearts, and in our
living rooms from Jacksonville to San Francisco: two brothers, and
the memory of a third, in wartime.

A couple of months later, Tom loaned the
“Prince James” to another pilot whose plane was in maintenance. He
got shot down but made it out okay, but the “Prince James” rests at
the bottom of the English Channel.

After the war, my father sat in on the
Nuremberg Trials and then left the Army and moved to Paris for a
few years. From there, he moved with a childhood friend to Alaska
where he made and lost a fortune in some enterprise or another,
before the two of them decided to take advantage of the GI bill and
go to college. They enrolled at the University of Arizona.

In 1949, Tom died of spinal meningitis. My
father returned to Indianapolis for the funeral, and met my mother
through a mutual friend. They married soon after, and my older
brother Tommy was born on the one-year anniversary of the day his
Uncle Tom died. My father was thirty years old.

My father did not return to Arizona with his
new bride but buckled down to making a life in Indianapolis. He got
a job working at a menswear store by day and went to school at
night, majoring in pre-law at Butler University.

Paris must have felt very far away to
him.

I’m afraid married life came as a big shock
to my father. He had been a free-and-easy older college student
with no worries but the next class and the next bar tab. Now he was
selling jackets and shirts. Every dime went for formula or clothes
for a beautiful but nonworking wife. He no longer had enough time
or energy for the life of the mind he craved.

In late 1950, my father was approached by
the US government to “come back,” this time to the reserves. At the
beginning of the Cold War, the US was taking precautions,
reactivating bases overseas and preparing for its part in keeping
Russia in check. There were reasons to fatten up the ranks.

The Air Force promised to bring him back at
the rank of Major. They promised him a steady paycheck. They
promised him his first base assignment would be in sunny
Florida.

It was always a surprise
to anyone who knew my father that he would accept the government’s
offer. He was known as an independent man who scorned authority,
idiotic rules and conformity. But I think he went back in because
he was tired of the struggle, of being constantly poor. My father
had expensive tastes (he lived at the
Dorchester
in
London
,
and was
known to keep his taxi waiting, meter running, while he dined in
restaurants). Champagne,
foie
gras
, jewelry, travel, and leather-bound
books were very real seductions to a wallet that could not afford
the daily, unrelenting needs of a family.

Finally, I think he went
back in because he was fiercely patriotic. I think he really
believed his country needed him. Coming from a family of
immigrants—both parents possessing strong Irish and English accents
that socially set them apart—he was always aware of his singular
position as the first-born
real
American.

Besides, by the time he was approached by
the United States Air Force, his little family was getting even
bigger; by then he would’ve known that I was on the way.

In 1951, my father moved my mother and my
brother, Tommy, to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where I was born a year
later and my younger brother, Kevin, a year after that, at Patrick
Air Force Base.

Patrick was originally built for the US Navy
as an anti-submarine patrol base and was named Banana River Naval
Air Station. The air base is two miles south of Cocoa Beach and
separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the highway, AIA, but the
Officer’s and NCO clubs were both built on the beach. Later, when
we returned to this area after our overseas tour, and moved to a
house on a beach further south, I’d be well aware of the dramatic
differences in a beach that had been painstakingly cleared of coral
and one that hadn’t. (The enlisted men had dug up all coral
extending nearly a quarter of a mile into the ocean on the beach in
front of the Officer’s club.) It was like wading out onto
wall-to-wall carpet.

From Patrick, he moved us and my mother, now
pregnant with Terry, back to Indianapolis where she would have the
comfort of her sister and parents—and his own huge, rollicking
family—to help her with four children, two toddlers and two
infants, while he went to an atoll in the Pacific called Einowetok,
there to watch one mushroom cloud after another in a series of
nuclear bomb testing. A year of only male company, no vegetation,
no town, khaki shorts, island snakes and booze. When he finally
returned to collect us all, we landed in upstate New York at
Griffiss Air Force Base for the next six years.

Griffiss Air Force Base was located in Rome,
New York, about fifteen miles northwest of the town of Utica. (It
was named in honor of Lt. Colonel Townsend Griffiss, who was shot
down by friendly fire during the war.) It was a former WWII staging
base for bombers and fighters, and then became a fighter
interceptor base to defend us against high-flying Soviet bombers
that might invade the US. When we were there, it was also a
Strategic Air Command (SAC) base. Because of the experience with
material procurement, processing and disposal, they established an
Air Force material Research and Development testing lab there,
called the Rome Air Development Center (RADC) of which was my
father was in charge.

This was a fairly wonderful period of time
for all of us. We were there for nearly seven years and Tommy and I
have strong memories of Rome and upstate New York, in general.
Money must have been less tight (amazingly) for the family photo
albums are full of my parents laughing and happy at New Year’s Eve
parties, vacations, costume parties, and cocktail parties. I don’t
know if it was any kind of a shock for my parents to get the news
that we were being transferred overseas but I know they had made
lifelong friends in Rome and were sad to leave.