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Hamilton Air Force Base

Helen found a twenty-four minute walking tour of Hamilton Field in Novato, California, on the internet. Hamilton used to be the Air Force base I lived on when I was twelve years old. There are no more Air Police guarding the main gate and you can drive onto what's now called Hamilton Field. What used to be Capehart Housing, like the duplex we lived in, has been renovated and put up for sale. The local historian of Novato who narrates the walking tour points out the Officers' Club where my father was NCOIC. She goes by the swimming pool where my brother and I took lessons. Every summer, "third lieutenants," cadets from the Air Force Academy would spend  some time TDY at Hamilton marching on the parade grounds. But what I remember the most clearly wasn't in the video--the chapel where I was an altar boy, the bookstore annex to the Base Exchange where I bought comics and paperbacks, the hamburger stand where Kev and I ate burgers and fries. The base theater was still
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The 19 Bus

The 19 bus ran from Tempelhof Central Airport to the Ku'damm, the economic heart of Berlin during the Occupation, while the Berlin Wall separated East from West Berlin. At one end of the Ku'damm was the Europa Center, a shopping center next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which had been left in its destroyed condition. A new modern church had been built on the site. In the late seventies there were often groups of protestors with signs and tables full of petitions. ATOMKRAFT? NEIN, DANKE was the most common slogan. Inside the Europa Center was an ice skating rink. It was fun to sit with a beer and people-watch.
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The Cuban Missile Crisis and I Rescue My Brother

When my father was transferred from an Air Force base in Waco, Texas, to Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida, the four of us moved temporarily into a trailer just on the beach on the Gulf of Mexico. I didn't know how to swim yet,  but I loved living there. School hadn't started yet and one afternoon I heard my mom yell. I could see Kevin's head out on the water. He was walking away from the shore. My mom was yelling for Kevin to come back in. He was calm and not worried, so we both just walked back to the shore. I loved living on the Panhandle the three years my father was stationed there. Due to the hurricanes in that part of the country over the last few years, not only is there not much Tyndal Air Force Base left, there's hardly any Panama City. I was reminded of living there when I saw the movie Matinee .The film is about a teenage boy with a younger brother who live on a Navy base in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis . I was barely aw
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My Cold War Begins

My birth coincided with the birth of the Cold War. I was born at an Air Force base hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1953. My parents were both serving in the military when they met and got married, but by the time I was born, my mom was a civilian again. When the Cold War finally ended, like many baby boomers who grew up in the sixties my life had been affected in many ways by the mid-century power struggle between the United States and the USSR. By 1991, when the hammer and sickle flag was taken down from the Kremlin for the last time, I had been in the Air Force myself, assigned to Tempelhof Central Airport—which had been the main American airport during the 1948 Berlin Airlift. I used to walk by the Memorial to airmen who died supplying Berlin whenever I walked to the bus stop to go to the Ku'damm. One thing that has surprised me in the years since I lived in Berlin is how many people, places, and things in America were connected to the Cold War, in ways
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