Twas the Night Before Basic--The Plane Ride Was Rough
Forty-eight years ago this week, I was saying goodbye to my family and friends before flying to Basic Training on January 31, 1972. The photo above is the drunk 18 year old who flew to Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, to get a serious haircut and begin training. On February 1, I was shorn and dressed in green fatigues and getting my first instructions in marching.
Spring 1977 in a German woods on top of my tank
In 1975 I left the Air Force and re-enlisted in the Army. In February of 1979, I made the first of three trips from Rhein-Main Airbase in West Germany to Dover Air Base, Delaware. I was getting out of the Army in November of 1979 and had to sign up for college at Penn State University. The round-trip to America on military flights was $20, plus $2 each way for the box lunch. On these trips I flew three times on a C5A Galaxy, a plane so big it could carry a platoon of tanks inside. It was so smooth that on one trip the Loadmaster woke me up after we landed. I slept through it.
C5A Galaxy transport plane
After active duty, I traveled only in North America until the late 90s. In 1998 I got a job in communications that took me overseas every month until 2001 all over the world. In February 1999, I made my first Round-the-World trip from America to France to Singapore, then Perth, Australia, Hong Kong, and back to America by way of Los Angeles.
The night before deployment to Iraq
January 31, 2009, I had dinner in Harrisburg with my battalion before an early morning flight to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and two months of training before deployment to Camp Adder, Iraq. February 1 was the first flight on that long journey.
Team Africa Rising
And now in the third decade of this century February is the month I will begin a five-week trip that will take me to more than a dozen countries on four continents and each hemisphere: northern, southern, eastern, and western. I will be a few hundred miles south of the equator in Kigali, Rwanda. There I will visit the memorial of the 1994 genocide and the professional cycling team that has been part of bringing the country back together.
Most of the trip will be in Asia and Europe. I will meet my friend Cliff in Darmstadt then spend a week with him in Jerusalem. After that I will visit Georgia, Azerbijan and Armenia, followed by Athens and several Balkan states followed by Rwanda and then Germany again to visit Dachau and Flossenburg. The whole trip begins and ends with a 200-mile train ride from Lancaster to JFK airport and back, so I actually do travel in North America too.
