Lonely Pilot Bob

“There are no ceremonies to mark the end of our career as military brats either.  We simply walk out into our destinies, into the dead center of our lives, and try to make the most of it.  After my own career as a military child ended in 1967, I received not a single medal of good conduct, no silver chevrons or leaves, no letter of commendation or retirement parade.  I simply walked out of one life and into another.  My father cut up my ID card in front of me and told me he would kill me if he ever caught me trying to buy liquor on base.  I had the rest of my life to think about coming of age as a military child.“

My father took my ID card also – when he dropped me off at the steps of the Frankfort Airport, in July 1964.   It left me ’empty…’

“When my mother left my father, she found, to her great distress, that she was leaving the protective embrace of the Corps that she’d served for more than thirty years.  She was shaken and disbelieving when a divorce court granted her $500 a month in child support, but informed her she was not entitled to a dime of his retirement pay.  The court affirmed that it was the Colonel who had served his country so valiantly, not she.  But she had been an exemplary wife of a Marine officer and it was a career she had carried with rare grace and distinction.  Peg Conroy made the whole Marine Corps a better place to be, but her career had a value of nothing when judged in a court of law.  My mother died thinking that the Marine Corps had not done right by her.  She had always considered herself and her children to be part of the grand design of the military, part of the mission.“

Congress eventually recognized this and has passed legislation to rectify it – somewhat.

“I had already begun the first chapters of The Great Santini.  I wrote about a seventeen-year-old boy, a military brat who’d spent his whole life smiling and pretending that he was the happiest part of a perfect, indivisible American family.  I had no experience in writing down the graffiti left along the margins of a boy’s ruined heart.  Because I was born a male, I never wept for the boy who’d once withstood the slaps and blows of one of the Corps strongest aviators.  I’d never wept for my brothers or sisters or my beautiful and loyal mother, yet I’d witnessed those brutal seasons of their fear and hurt and sadness.  Because I was born to be a novelist, I remembered every scene, every beating, every drop of blood shed by my sweet and innocent family for America.

As I wrote, the child of the military in me began to fall apart.  I came apart at the seams.  For one thing a military brat is not allowed to do is commit an act of treason.  I learned the hard way that truth is a capital offense and so did my family.  I created a boy named Ben Meecham and I gave him my story.  His loneliness, his unbearable solitude almost killed me as I wrote about him.  Everything about the boy hurt me, but I kept writing the book because I didn’t know how to stop.  My marriage would fall apart and I’d spend several years trying to figure out how not to be crazy because the deep sadness of Ben Meecham and his family touched me with a pity I could not bear.  His father could love him only with his fists and I found myself inconsolable as I wrote this.   I would stare at pictures of myself taken in high school and could not imagine why a father would want to hit that boy’s face.  I wrote The Great Santini through tears, hating everything my father stood for and sickened by his behavior toward his family.

But in the acknowledgement of this hatred, I also found myself composing a love song to my father and to the military way of life.  Once when I read Look Homeward, Angel in high school, I’d lamented the fact that my father didn’t have an interesting, artistic profession like Thomas Wolfe’s stonecutter father.  But in writing Santini, I realized that Thomas Wolfe’s father never landed jets on aircraft carriers at night, wiped out a whole battalion of North Korean regulars crossing the Naktong River, or flew to Cuba with his squadron with the mission to clear the Cuban skies of MiGs if the flag went up.

In writing The Great Santini I had to consider the fact of my father’s heroism.  His job was extraordinarily dangerous and I never knew it.  He never once complained about the perils of his vocation.  He was one of those men who make the men of other nations pause before attacking America.  I learned that I would not want to be an enemy soldier or tank when Don Conroy passed overhead.  My father made orphans out of many boys and girls in Asia during the years I prayed for God to make an orphan out of me.  His job was to kill people when his nation asked him to, pure and simple.  And the loving of his kids was never written into his job description.“

There were nights when I was determined not to cry when I was being beat – just to piss off Dear Ole Dad – my way of “resisting.”  But when your ass is “on fire,” sometimes there is no choice.  Then I discovered when the crying began, the beatings stopped.  So, I began “experimenting.”

I soon discovered a sense of timing.  If I cried too soon, it infuriated him because I was a coward; if I held out too long, it infuriated him because I was defying him.  So I found that ‘small window” where I could satisfy both of us… shit, that’s sick, but it worked.

I talked with Mom a short time before her death, about the beatings we all took.  “Oh,” she remarked, ” they weren’t that bad…”

“You gotta be shitting me, Mom,” I replied, “what planet did you depart for?”  And we kinda left it at that… Like Conroy, I have a memory like a steel trap.  They were bad…

(I know this ‘thread’ is getting a bit ‘lengthy’ here, but I didn’t write the Introduction!  LOL).

“In 1972, my book The Water is Wide came out when I was living in the Beaufort, South Carolina.  It was not the most popular book in South Carolina during that season, but it was extremely popular at the Beaufort Air Station where the Marines and their wives looked to me as a living affirmation of the military way of life.  I accepted an invitation to speak to the Marine Corps officer’s wives’ club with the deep sense that some circle was being closed.  Seven years earlier my mother had been an officer in the same club and she produced the first racially integrated program in the club’s history.  Neither of us knew that my speech would mark a turning point in both our lives.

Instead of talking about my new book, and my experiences teaching on Daufuskie Island, I spoke of some things I wanted to say about the Marine Corps family.  I was the son of a fighter pilot, as were a lot of their kids, and I had some things to tell them.  I was the first military brat who’d ever spoken to the club – I was a native son.  I could hear the inheld breath of these women as I approached the taboo subject of the kind of husbands and fathers I thought Marines made.  For the first time in my life, I was hanging the laundry of my childhood out to dry.  I told those women of the Corps that I’d had met many good soldiers in my life, but precious few good fathers.  I also told them of my unbridled admiration for my mother and other military wives I’d met during my career as a brat.  But I told those women directly that they shouldn’t let their Marines beat them or their children.

I thought I was giving a speech, but something astonishing was unleashed in that room that day.  Some of the women present that day hated me, but some likes me very much.  The response was electric, passionate, immediate.  Some of the women approached me in tears, others in rage.  But that talk to the officers’ wives was the catalyst that first made me sit down and start writing the outline of The Great Santini.

A year later, the day after my father’s retirement parade, my mother left my father after thirty-three years of marriage.  Their divorce was ferocious and bitter, but it contained, miraculously, the seeds of my father’s redemption.  Alone and without the Corps, he realized that his children were his enemies, and that all seven of us thought he hated our guts.  The American soldier is not taught to love his enemy or anyone else.  Love did not come easily to my father, but he started trying to learn the steps after my mother left him.  It was way too late for her, but his kids were ready for it.  We’d been waiting all our lives for our Dad to love us.“

“We’d been waiting all our lives for our Dad to love us.”  …so had I…