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Back on the Base
One Disenchanted Evening (September 1993) When I first moved America I was expecting to live in a large modern city, and was somewhat dismayed when I found that my new home town was a rural backwater. I'd been expecting skyscrapers and malls and bright city lights, and I ended up with barns and tractors and a complete lack of the trappings of civilization that I'd been expecting. To be frank, at first I wondered what on Earth could have possessed my Mother to move there. However, understanding soon followed. When it came to picking a place to live, my Mother had apparently done her homework very well. Back on the Base Although the Midwest was unfamiliar territory to me, the town had a very familiar feel to it. The scenery might have been different, and people were driving pickups and station wagons rather than jeeps but other than that it felt almost exactly like being back in the family compound of the base where I had lived as a child. Seriously, the feeling was overwhelming. The way people spoke, the way that they acted, and most certainly the way that they saw the world, it was almost identical. The reason for this being, as I would soon find out, that about 70 percent of the families in town had strong ties to the service. Both current and historic. About 20 percent of families had at least one active service member in them. A husband, a son, a brother and even a couple of mothers, daughters, and sisters for good measure. More than this though, the town also had veterans a plenty. WWII, Korea, Vietnam, The war in the Persian Gulf (only recently over), and a million squabbles, skirmishes and brawls, All of them. If you could name it, and if America fought in it, the town had two dozen veterans who had fought in it. Even the people families who weren't actually tied to the military often acted like they were. They played up long dead ties, such as brothers, uncles and grandparent who had been conscripted but who hadn't survived various wars, and they made them sound like recently deceased military heroes (particularly when it came to Vietnam), and they made out as if they would join up in a flash, if only there was somebody else to mind the store or to tend the farm. No Surprises When I found out exactly how tied up in the forces the town was I was quite taken aback, but I wasn't exactly surprised. This is to say that I was surprised to learn that the town had such pronounced ties to the services, but I wasn't surprised that my Mother had chosen such a town in which to live. Indeed, I now strongly believe that this was why we moved there. Having known known the life of a services family for so long, and coming as she did from a long line of service men, it was perfectly logical for her to move there. She was among friends and like minded people, even if they were friends and like minded people who lived in the middle of nowhere. I also strongly suspect that the town's connection to the services was one of the reasons why my Mother had been able to move us in so neatly, and how she had managed to get such a good job without ever having set foot on the premises of the company where she worked. The chances were that she had thrown my American grandfather's name into the ring, and had used it as leverage. Both with the local population, with whom she had to deal in order to get the house and the other accoutrement of life set up before we arrived, and with the half dozen employees of said company (about 9 other residents of the town worked in the same company as my Mother) whom live in town and whom also shared service backgrounds with her. |
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