War child

I am a war child.

This is an unusual statement considering the times in which I came of age. I began to understand there was a world outside my immediate family and friends in the late 1960s, considered the peace generation. I then formed in what would be formally called the Me Generation of the next decade when everyone seemed to want to catch and express their feelings to anyone. If you weren't "sensitive," you weren't alive.

I've been insulted by that last accusation repeatedly in later years. I've tried to consider sensitive a compliment, but when it's spit in derision and accompanied by a shaking of the head, it's a bit more difficult. Eventually, as a Texas male of advancing years, I just shoved the sensitivity as deep inside as I could to join society.

Yet beneath those layers, I still considered calm and peace my preference. Until a recent random event made me realize how much hawk is in my history and system. But maybe not my soul.

The event was a quick business trip to San Antonio in which I skirted the air base there. While rushing down the highway, I caught a flash of a silver dart in the blue sky. It was some pilot practicing his skills and testing his talents. But his silent slip through the morning churned up a childhood memory I hadn't recognized in decades.

From the time I was about 8 until I approached teenagehood, I lived in a little suburb that was adjacent to an airbase and an aerospace research and production facility in Fort Worth. Almost everyone in the ill-named town of White Settlement worked at one of those sites or in some support business.

It wasn't a drab air base and barracks type of town though. In those 1960s underdevelopment times in Texas, there were still big open fields around my elementary school, a creek cutting through the western portion of the town ending in a decent sized canyon. But there was no doubt it was a defense town in function.

If nothing else screamed that fact, it was a certain kind of nonchalance in children of my age.

You see, in the beginning the air base was what was referred to as a SAC base, or Strategic Air Command. Rumor was there were atomic weapons on the base. That was spurred by the fact there were definitely B-52 airplanes on the base, the delivery system for atomic bombs in those days. Every day, those behemoth planes practiced taking off, circling around to the runways, almost landing and taking off again. They were called touch and gos. And they would magnificently roar over large portions of White Settlement at low altitudes keeping our nation ready for unbelievable destruction.

I lived there long enough for the ways of war to change and the nation to believe might wasn't in just whales of planes, but sharks of the sky, fighter planes that could deliver mass destruction with amazing speed. Next to the airbase they were developing and then building the F-14, one of the nation's first true fighter jets. Which meant they had to be tested. Their contribution to our lives were often huge screams of engines blasting what seemed like only fuselages with the swept back wings into hundreds of miles an hour. Even if they got high enough to give us some distance, the day was often shattered with a sonic boom as somewhere above they broke the sound barrier.

Living next to war might isn't what I think made me a war child. It is how institutionalized I and those around me became to it. Visitors would often physically flinch at passing planes. Some would fall to the ground at a sonic boom. They would cover their ears. But I can still see in my mind's eye my friends and I playing in a yard, never altering a step or squeal to what was going on above us. Oblivious. I remember simply going forward with my class work as the entire room shook with a passing plane. Unaware. I recall teachers simply pausing when a lecture was drowned out by flight and picking up right where they left off when the cacophony moved past. Undeterred.

Last week when I let the distant pilot catch my eye, I was surprised. My natural reaction seemed to have changed. Or maybe just sublimated like my sensitivity. I wonder if being a war child is a learned behavior and natural reaction is never really lost.