Air Force Brat (2 page)

The Scibettas were a family of four boys and
one girl which nearly perfectly matched our own family of three
boys and one girl. Susan Scibetta became my best friend for the
whole of the time that I was overseas. We were both dark-haired,
bright, and short. We were both scheduled to be registered at the
convent school in the French village so we would not only be
neighbors but the sole American schoolmates in a French school.

As soon as we landed on French soil, it was
clear that we had all taken a huge step back in time. Gone were the
neon signs of Rome, New York, from where we’d moved. Gone were the
super highways, the outdoor movie theatres, the McDonald’s
hamburger stands and early morning television cartoons. Gone also
were the bright colors that had earmarked the beginning of the new
decade. France was tired and gray and, more often than not,
black.

Paris was Paris, however. When I saw the
Eiffel Tower for the first time, I gasped as if seeing my favorite
fantasy character come to life. My memory of the first time I saw
Paris always has a cheesy, scratchy-record Edith Piaff song playing
in the background. Absolutely magic.

Captain Scibetta, a bald, stern-looking man
who, I am told, was really extremely witty and fun, met us at the
airport with a large station wagon which, amazingly, the three
adults and nine children were able to fit in. We drove to a
restaurant outside Paris where we all had a wonderful lunch, and
then the Captain drove us all the three hours from Paris to our new
home. (Richard Scibetta gained some fame years later when he went
to the USSR to bring back Gary Powers after Powers’ U-2 spy plane
was shot down and he was captured by the Soviets.)

Our view of the French countryside was a
very different one from the countryside we’d left back home in
upstate New York. Although we traveled on the equivalent of an
interstate highway in France, it was, in some stretches, little
more than a dirt road. The villages looked uninhabited, with dark,
largely windowless stone buildings, linked together in long,
uninterrupted expanses of filthy, quarried stone.

“
At least they have
telephones,” Terry pointed out helpfully to my mother at one point
in the trip. The straggling telephone wires dipped and swayed from
pole to pole across some of the village streets. I’m sure, from the
looks of the primitive villages we were passing, she wasn’t feeling
very confident about our new billet.

“
Yeah,” Tommy said. “Now
if they just have electricity.”

I gave him a sour look. “Don’t upset Mom,” I
hissed.

When we first drove into Ars, Captain
Scibetta pointed out the train station at the entrance to the
village.

“
Not unlike most village
train stations,” he told my mother, “it has the best dining in
town.” I remember looking at him to see if he was being funny. But,
as usual with adults, I couldn’t tell. Later, my father was to
confirm to me that what he said was true and we would eat at the
train station on and off throughout our time in the
village.

My new best friend’s dad stopped at the
apartment building that he and his family were renting and unloaded
everyone before tucking us five back into the car for the drive
across town to our own house. As we drove, I suppose my mother
became more apprehensive while we four children became much more
excited. The village looked less like a place where normal people
lived and more like a movie set from the eighteen hundreds. It
reminded me of the field trip my class had taken the month before
to Jamestown where we saw how the pioneers made butter and forged
their own buttons and stuff.

The clothes the villagers
wore, from their ubiquitous berets to their old men’s baggy pants,
were mostly ancient ebony wools. The village facades were dark with
a thick patina of coal dust. The roads were unpaved, the villagers'
expressions untrusting and worn. It appeared that urinating in the
street—in full view of the world—was
de
rigueur
. Any restaurant or shop could have
been easily transplanted back to the 1920s without any loss of
believability in the dress, setting or food.

The fact was, from the
moment I stepped foot in
Ars-sur-Moselle
, the remote and
hilly village in Alsace-Lorraine that would be my family’s home for
the coming year, it was immediately obvious that it was a fantasy
world beyond my child’s dreams and expectations.

The house my father had rented for us was
beautiful. I could almost hear the sigh of relief from my mother as
we drove up to the crest of a long hilly street. The house was
fairly large, with a bright orange Mediterranean tile roof. A
wrap-around balcony gave access to each of the three bedrooms from
the outside. There was a large side garden, a double garage and a
full basement.

We were home.

Chapter Two

Boomer Children and A World War

While it was true that France in the early
1960’s was a fantasy-come-true for us kids, the experience was a
rather different kind for our parents. Considered the “arm pit” of
France (and often even more colorfully referenced), the airbase
where most dependents lived was unlovingly referred to by dependent
wives as “Shambles A.F.B.” (Such a kinder, gentler time!) Chambley
was too far from Paris, too small, and too much in the middle of
nowhere. Plus, the French people in the area surrounding the base
were not often terribly gracious with their American visitors. And
although I have no doubt our hosts were usually justified in their
pique, it definitely didn’t help make for Chambley being considered
anything but a demotion or reprimand by the Americans who had been
sent there.

There was no obvious standard of behavior
for American-children-in-a-foreign-land and no visible enforcement
even if we’d known what the rules were. Like the other recently
shipped-in American wives and dependents, my mother was stressed
out enough just trying to understand the toilets in post-war France
without monitoring the movements of her four very active children.
And so it happened, never to be repeated in any other time or
venue, that my three brothers and I were given an unprecedented
freedom. My parents’ desire to believe that no real trouble could
come from such a pastoral setting combined with the anxiety of
living abroad as part of a military installation—and make no
mistake, there were plenty of rules for the grown-ups—allowed us
children something I would never be able to offer my own child: the
opportunity to roam freely and safely, and to discover the world on
its own terms and in its own unique wrapping.

There is an argument to be made that this
was simply a manifestation of the time we lived in. My husband, who
spent his entire childhood living in one American city in the
fifties and sixties, experienced much the same freedom of being
able to ride his bike miles from home, or certainly over to a pal’s
house, unencumbered by the need for cell phones, pagers, or having
to check in with various minders. But even so, it is totally
mind-blowing for me today to think that I, a dreamy-eyed nine-year
old girl, frequently roamed alone for hours over a foreign
landscape. Or that two little boys, aged seven and eight, with only
each other as logistic or moral compasses, often did the same. (On
the other hand, it’s less shocking to think of Tommy going off on
his own since he was always so formidable. Tommy, like my father,
had a bigger-than-life quality about him that tended to mitigate
the necessity of worrying about his safety.)

I used to roam with my two
younger brothers in tow for hours around Paris or Nuremburg or
Berlin. Often at night since that was the time my parents were most
ready for adult relaxation and socialization in the various
restaurants and pubs. We spent many wonderful hours looking in shop
windows, discovering alleyways and cobblestone mews, riding the
buses, watching the
bateau mouche
go up and down the Seine. We spent most of our
money at
patisseries
, once went to the cinema to watch largely incomprehensible
(and more than somewhat rude) gibberish, lay on the grass in the
beautiful city parks, and fed the thousands and thousands of
pigeons the ubiquitous crumbs from the remnant
pain chocolat
that we were rarely
without.

I remember sitting with
the two of them at the back of
Notre Dame
Cathedral
when it was cool and quiet
inside and too hot and summery outside. I remember bargaining one
snowy November with the sellers at the
Christkindlmarkets
in Nuremburg, the
golden fairy lights dancing above my head on magical, invisible
strings that seemed to hold the whole toy market together, and huge
snow flakes falling in slow motion all around.

In our new home in Ars, we
children made friends quickly with the other French children and
sucked up the language from the first day. (One of my mother’s
favorite early anecdotes involves my youngest brother, Terry,
playing tag on the day of our arrival in the village and walking up
to a French kid, tapping him on the shoulder and saying:
“
Vous
it.”)

For my older brother, an
intense and brilliant (if decidedly quirky) boy of eleven, this
meant a serious and determined raid on the French countryside for
any and all war artifacts, or what he ominously called his
“souvenirs.” Tom’s hallmark at the time was his obsessiveness. This
may have been what is today diagnosed as ADD but, in those days,
simply appeared to be chronically, single-mindedly bad behavior.
His obsessions ruled him. Mostly, these involved aviation, guns,
bombs, World War II history, and (scarily) a few imaginary friends.
He was highly uncommunicative with his siblings and lived, happily,
(for him
and
us)
in a world of his own. During our time in France, Tommy quickly
developed a reputation for his exploits and weapons plundering.
Later in the year, when my father became Acting Commanding Officer
of the airbase, Tommy’s tenacity and inability to give up his
munitions raids would prove to be one of the more difficult and
frustrating footnotes of my father’s rule.

Besides the lack of
structure, the other important discovery we made about our new
country was the fact that aside from a few inadequate attempts at
farming, the main thing that had been done to the countryside in
recent history was that it had been frequently and consistently
bombed. This translated into a treasure hunt for adventurous
American children who had been taught the value of curiosity and
adventure—unlike our
petites
French counterparts—and to whom the fairly recent
events of World War II—in all their glamour—was adventure at its
zenith.

There were unexploded bombs all over the
place.

Our village, Ars, was very
close to the city of Metz and, historically, was an important Roman
city with plenty of evidence of its Roman roots. There was a
humongous great aqueduct built in the fourth century which looms
over a hundred feet on the outskirts of Ars. The stone was dragged
from Gravelotte, nearly twenty
miles
away. This aqueduct was used
for centuries and is in remarkable shape for a ruin. Its
construction must have been a gargantuan task performed by the
Roman army and led by hydraulic engineers of the time.

Another example of the Roman occupation is
seen in the great wide boulevards leading to and from the major
towns of the region: Nancy, Toul, Lyons, Verdun, Reims. They’re not
only wide and flat but shaded by wonderful sycamores to cool the
marching Roman armies. I always thought of the soldiers, first
planting the trees and then trudging beneath them, every time we
sailed under their leafy branches on the way to the base.

It seemed that Metz was constantly being
fought over. It was defeated in 59 BC by Julius Caesar and was one
of the last Roman cities, in 451, to surrender to Attila the Hun,
after which it became German. During the War of Metz in 1324,
cannons were first used in Western Europe. Throughout its history
it ping-ponged back and forth between France and Germany. One of
the reasons for this is that Metz is in Lorraine, the only French
region to share borders with three other countries: Belgium,
Luxembourg, and Germany. (Belgium and Luxembourg always behaved
themselves, it seems.) Since its location made it a strategic asset
as a crossroads of four countries, it was always switching hands.
Plus, it has no less than four major rivers running though it: the
Rhine, the Moselle, the Meurthe and the Meuse.

With more than 1,350,000 killed in this area
in World War I and another 700,000 in World War II, there
definitely should have been plenty of ghosts visiting our
playgrounds at night.

Anyway, Metz was taken
over by the Germans during the last world war and was important
enough to serve as a Nazi stronghold full of Nazi party members,
and officials. When things started to get hairy towards the end of
the war, Hitler actually gave orders to hold Metz and “fight to the
last man.” In order to fulfill this wish of
der Fuehrer
, the
17
^th
SS panzer Grenadier Division joined the 1215th Regiment to
defend the town against the obstreperous and very determined
Allies. This was in November 1945. We’d taken Normandy seventeen
months earlier and were painstakingly moving our way from the
coast, through Paris, and on toward Berlin.

Metz sits exactly between Paris and
Berlin.