mcb
The Living Force
RflctnOfU said:...My mom's dad was 'Air Force' back in the time of WW2, although he did let it be known to her later in his life that he was a CIA asset, and his airforce career was cover.
Kris
I have to wonder now how common this is. My father escaped an abusive home situation by becoming a fighter pilot (hmm, no control issues there); he would have been 18 in 1942. After the war he left the service and my parents married (my mother was a WAVE doing I-do-not-know-what but at least sometimes serving as a courier).
After going to college (which is when I entered the picture, in 1950) and receiving a math degree, he returned to service as a reserve officer on active duty. There was no explanation for this, and it remained an issue until he retired in about 1970. He claimed that he was discriminated against with respect to promotion because he was a reservist.
I have no idea what the 5 years were about between when my parents were married and when I was born. They apparently lived on a closed military base in Arizona, and they had a cat. That's what I know. The book talks about people leaving the service after WWII and going to work for the agency, and then being called back to active duty in their reserve grades. Apart from working for the agency, that is exactly what he did. The fact that he spent much of his career after that doing classified surveillance work could be pure coincidence.
He was assigned to Chanute Field in Illinois for a couple of years, where I have no idea what he did other than fly and work in the base weather station. Then we moved to Washington state for a year at McChord AFB, a base that would appear to have intelligence connections. I know nothing explicitly about what he was doing there, but perhaps he was training in some way for the next assignment, which was surveillance of the sort mentioned in passing in the book (I learned this 25 years later). The last three months of that preparation were in Palm Beach, Florida, where he trained on the aircraft he would be using. We lived in a motel on Singer Island for three months, and that is all I know.
After that assignment the Air Force sent him back to school for a master's degree in meteorology (he was always in "weather"), and then he went on to doing 4 years of classified "meteorological research." Again, I have no idea what he did other than "flying and weather" and by the end of that I was in high school.
He was a stauch anti-communist, which is another clue. It was extreme, almost comical. Now I wonder if it was a role he was playing. Something happened, however, in his later years -- he came to see what was actually going on in Viet Nam, or so he said. Whatever it was, it shook him to his foundations. He died some years later, at 58.
Reading the book hasn't really clarified things for me. Instead, it has offered me "alternative" readings of what was going on when I was growing up. My father was an "absent father," both emotionally and physically. He didn't talk about his earlier life, he preferred the officer's club to being home, and he spent long periods away from home on "temporary duty" (which we knew as "TDY"), something else mentioned in the book as a way of staffing CIA projects. We didn't know what he was doing, and I guess we don't really know where he actually was.
I had assumed that this all had to do with his home life, which was dreadful from what others have told me. Now I have even more possible interpretations for what may have happened, and no way to tell if any of them are true.
Does any of this ring a bell for anyone else?