zimatravels

Born in 1943, war has always stayed on my mind.  I just took a tour of Camp Pendleton Marine Base in southern California and was reminded of how many military bases and soldiers have been in my life.

In the beginning, I was conceived, born, and spent the first 2 years of my life on an army base in Tampa, Florida.  My mother had gone there to marry my father after he was drafted into World War II.  Of course, I have no personal memories of those first two years, but I have the photos of me being publicly bathed in a big washtub outside base housing.  And my mother told me how often she had hidden in the closet with me when I cried at night so the soldiers could get some sleep.

I attribute a lifelong love of Nature to the Air Force base we lived next to during my active elementary school years.  Unlike today’s children, we kids were free to fearlessly explore our environment as long as we came home at dark.

The Air Force base that bordered our small attached housing units was off limits to non-military.  But, being kids, we used a convenient hole made under the fence to climb through and explore.  I don’t remember ever getting close to the actual working part of the base, but my playground was the land left wild on the fringes of the base.

I attempted ice skating in the swampy areas that turned to ice in winter.  I remember once having a leg fall into the wet swamp and I had to pull out that whole leg covered in mud and muck.  A hill which no doubt would look like a pimple to me today was where I skied down in the snow, and courageously rolled down the rest of the year.  Best of all was the wildness and the solitude it offered me in my most formative years.

It surprised me when my grandmother would come to visit and complained about the noise of the planes flying so close to us.  They never bothered me at that age.

When we were a young married couple, my husband and I drove around Europe for 12 weeks.  I don’t remember at all the couple we went to visit on an army base in Germany, but I can remember the base they lived on.  I was used to preceding every question with, “Do you speak English?”  I quickly found out how silly that question was on an American army base.

Not only did everyone speak English, but the base was a little duplicate of America in every way.  To those Americans living on the base, few were aware, or cared about, the German culture that lived around them.  Years later, when I lived in South Korea, I was told the same thing about the American soldiers based there.

When in Israel, it’s impossible to miss the soldiers coming and going in the streets.  It was disconcerting in the beginning to see the rifles they always carried with them.  These soldiers were not on patrol; just going about daily life.  With a mandatory 3 year stint in the army for young men and women, and the men being called up in the reserves until the age of 52, soldiers were everywhere.

I most remember them as always sleepy.  They’d get on a public bus, for that is how most of them traveled, prop their gun up next to them with one hand, and fall immediately to sleep.  But they would always magically awaken just before the stop where they needed to get off.

Although we think of soldiers as dressed in impressive uniforms with everything just so,  Israeli soldiers were often unkempt.  The older ones were sometimes out of shape, with pot bellies bulging their uniforms.  It was difficult indeed to put them together with an army known throughout the world for its commitment and masterful skills as an effective army.

Once, I spent a few days at an army base in Israel.  I was then the housemother for Ethiopian teenage boys in an Israeli boarding school.  Regular pre-army training on a base was mandatory.

The impressions that remain with me from those days  were how very fast they gulped down their food at the mess hall, and how little sleep the women soldiers I bunked with got.  An experience I never expected to have was firing a rifle at an army firing range.  I’d never shot even a rifle at a carnival shooting gallery.  But, that, my first and last time ever shooting a rifle, resulted in hitting the target.  I even saved the paper target all these years.  It’s sitting in a box alongside a piece of wood I broke with a karate chop in a women’s self-defense course.

There are two other guns in Israel I specifically remember.  One was the gun casually laid under my dining room table when one of my young Ethiopian friends who was then a soldier came to visit me.  Perhaps the most poignant mental picture I’ve carried with me for years was a rifle laying next to a violin at a concert on a kibbutz where I was volunteering.

When I was buying my home in the retirement community of Leisure World in southern California, there was an ominous sentence in something they gave me to read explaining that the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro about 3 miles away would soon be closed and that it may possibly be developed into an international airport.  The first volunteer job I signed up for after moving in was fighting against having an international airport there which could only mean unbearable noise, pollution,  and traffic congestion for us.

The fight spanned years, and became very intense at times.  On the one hand, big money was at stake.  On the other hand, our quality of life was at stake.  It was basically a big mountain behind the base that saved us.   Although fighter planes can take off and climb quickly, commercial planes can’t.  That, plus the many planes already flying to and from neighboring airports in that same air space, made an international airport unsafe.  I treasure an ugly piece of the old runway that was torn up to remind me of the battle we had won.

At Camp Pendleton, one initial impression during my visit was how different a place it was even though it was only 45 minutes from my retirement community.  Instead of old and over-the-hill people, these were young and in the prime of their lives.  Instead of mainly females, these were by far mostly male.  Instead of plump to obese, these were trim and fit young men.  From my senior vantage point, they looked like children.  But, they were young soldiers living in dangerous times of possible deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.  I wondered how many really wanted to be there compared to those who, like our guide, were trying to find a possible way to finance going to college.  Or, were just trying to find a paying job with benefits in today’s skimpy job market.

We saw an exhibition of training for hand to hand combat.  It struck me as ironic to be training for nuclear weapons as well as a somewhat more sophisticated form of the old cowboy fist fighting.  Having only had dogs who barely mastered commands to “sit,” and “come,” I was amazed at the highly trained K-9 Corps.  Fortunately, the trainers are abandoning the previous harsh training with choke collars in favor of inducement training with toys, which the trainer I talked to said was proving to be a much more effective method.  I had already seen the toy training technique with rescue dogs.  Man’s best friend is often the soldier’s best friend too.

I left the spacious rolling hills of Camp Pendleton with a deep sigh for those soldiers, and a vague wondering of when and where there might be another military base and soldiers in my life.