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very real seductions to a wallet that could not afford
the daily, unrelenting needs of a family.
    Finally, I think he went
back in because he was fiercely patriotic. I think he really
believed his country needed him. Coming from a family of
immigrants—both parents possessing strong Irish and English accents
that socially set them apart—he was always aware of his singular
position as the first-born real American.
    Besides, by the time he was approached by
the United States Air Force, his little family was getting even
bigger; by then he would’ve known that I was on the way.
    In 1951, my father moved my mother and my
brother, Tommy, to Cocoa Beach, Florida, where I was born a year
later and my younger brother, Kevin, a year after that, at Patrick
Air Force Base.
    Patrick was originally built for the US Navy
as an anti-submarine patrol base and was named Banana River Naval
Air Station. The air base is two miles south of Cocoa Beach and
separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the highway, AIA, but the
Officer’s and NCO clubs were both built on the beach. Later, when
we returned to this area after our overseas tour, and moved to a
house on a beach further south, I’d be well aware of the dramatic
differences in a beach that had been painstakingly cleared of coral
and one that hadn’t. (The enlisted men had dug up all coral
extending nearly a quarter of a mile into the ocean on the beach in
front of the Officer’s club.) It was like wading out onto
wall-to-wall carpet.
    From Patrick, he moved us and my mother, now
pregnant with Terry, back to Indianapolis where she would have the
comfort of her sister and parents—and his own huge, rollicking
family—to help her with four children, two toddlers and two
infants, while he went to an atoll in the Pacific called Einowetok,
there to watch one mushroom cloud after another in a series of
nuclear bomb testing. A year of only male company, no vegetation,
no town, khaki shorts, island snakes and booze. When he finally
returned to collect us all, we landed in upstate New York at
Griffiss Air Force Base for the next six years.
    Griffiss Air Force Base was located in Rome,
New York, about fifteen miles northwest of the town of Utica. (It
was named in honor of Lt. Colonel Townsend Griffiss, who was shot
down by friendly fire during the war.) It was a former WWII staging
base for bombers and fighters, and then became a fighter
interceptor base to defend us against high-flying Soviet bombers
that might invade the US. When we were there, it was also a
Strategic Air Command (SAC) base. Because of the experience with
material procurement, processing and disposal, they established an
Air Force material Research and Development testing lab there,
called the Rome Air Development Center (RADC) of which was my
father was in charge.
    This was a fairly wonderful period of time
for all of us. We were there for nearly seven years and Tommy and I
have strong memories of Rome and upstate New York, in general.
Money must have been less tight (amazingly) for the family photo
albums are full of my parents laughing and happy at New Year’s Eve
parties, vacations, costume parties, and cocktail parties. I don’t
know if it was any kind of a shock for my parents to get the news
that we were being transferred overseas but I know they had made
lifelong friends in Rome and were sad to leave.
     
     

Chapter Five
    French Village Life in 1964
    The house my father moved us into “on the
economy” was comfortable but very French. It had a bright orange
Mediterranean tile roof and a wrap-around balcony that my mother
would have filled with flowers if it hadn’t been for the fact that
we were heading into winter. It had mercurial plumbing, a very,
very small kitchen, and dangerously steep stone steps leading to
the large, very dark, very creepy basement carved out of solid rock
and separated into several, doorless rooms.
    Along the side of our house was a large
ravine, covered with hanging vines and trees that