Army about the Navy,” Dad said.
Dad sounded matter-of-fact about this, but I could tell bythe pinched look around his blue eyes and the way he crumpled up the envelope and tossed it into the fireplace that he wasn’t happy about this new tour of duty. Nonetheless, he explained that the Navy was asking him to teach Army officers what the Navy could do for them during wartime at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth. “Given the events in Vietnam, Army officers have to be prepared to fight in wide-ranging circumstances,” he told us, “from counterinsurgency attacks to full scale nuclear war. My job is to help teach them how.”
So, in a peculiar sort of military Noah’s ark, Dad was chosen as one of just three Navy officers assigned to Fort Leavenworth in 1967, along with three Marines and three Air Force officers. He had already served in the Korean War and visited ports and cities in more than thirty countries around the world. Now Dad sold our house in Virginia Beach and drove us to Kansas.
It was a miserable trip. By the time we left, it was July and so hot that our legs burned on the car seats even through the towels Mom gave us to sit on. Our white Ford Galaxy had no air-conditioning, so we were forced to ride with the windows down. We couldn’t hear much or even keep our eyes open because of the wind and exhaust on the highway. Our parents chain-smoked throughout the drive, which meant that the smoke streamed steadily into the backseat.
At twelve years old, I suffered from such severe motion sickness that I was fed a steady diet of Dramamine. The drug turned me into a drooling narcoleptic. I woke up each time Donald pinched my leg, punched my arm, or ripped the bookout of my hands, only to nod off again, my chin bouncing against my chest, until the blows accumulated and made me cry.
Once Mom turned around to snap at me in the car. “What in the world are you crying about?” she asked. “I can’t understand why you’re always so emotional, Holly. There’s no need for this fuss. You know what it’s like to move. Crying only makes things worse for all of us.” She turned back around and said something I couldn’t hear to my father.
It was true that I could remember what it was like to move. I had clear memories of all the places we’d lived, starting with our terraced gardens in Mexico City, where Dad was the naval attaché at the American embassy and did something mysterious with maps and Mom was a smash hit at parties in sparkling cocktail gowns that made her look like a mermaid. After that, there’d been a little red-shingled house and another, more solid brick house and several places in between. It didn’t matter where I was, because I was at home with my family.
But I was older now, and it wasn’t the house that I’d miss but the people and animals that had been woven into the fabric of my life in Virginia Beach. Marcy had become a second sister to me, and I was leaving her behind. My grandparents were staying in their apartment in Newport News. I didn’t have my guinea pig, George, for comfort because my parents hadn’t let me bring him; George was now living in a cage next to Marcy’s rabbit. My parents had sold Tip and left Yankee, our newly adopted collie/shepherd, with our grandparents. The gerbils were all sold to pet stores or given away to schools, even Kinky, before Dad hosed out the garage and wateredhis little trees one last time. My whole world had been pulled out from beneath me like a scatter rug.
“Baby baby baby,” Donald sang in my ear, pinching me as hard as he could, leaving red welts on my bare legs as the Summer of Love brought three hundred thousand protestors against the Vietnam War to New York.
Our family was in no mood for love-ins. Mom turned off the car radio and shook her head over the news of antiwar demonstrations not just in New York, where you’d expect that sort of thing, but all over the country, too. “Those dirty hippies,”
Dad sounded matter-of-fact about this, but I could tell bythe pinched look around his blue eyes and the way he crumpled up the envelope and tossed it into the fireplace that he wasn’t happy about this new tour of duty. Nonetheless, he explained that the Navy was asking him to teach Army officers what the Navy could do for them during wartime at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth. “Given the events in Vietnam, Army officers have to be prepared to fight in wide-ranging circumstances,” he told us, “from counterinsurgency attacks to full scale nuclear war. My job is to help teach them how.”
So, in a peculiar sort of military Noah’s ark, Dad was chosen as one of just three Navy officers assigned to Fort Leavenworth in 1967, along with three Marines and three Air Force officers. He had already served in the Korean War and visited ports and cities in more than thirty countries around the world. Now Dad sold our house in Virginia Beach and drove us to Kansas.
It was a miserable trip. By the time we left, it was July and so hot that our legs burned on the car seats even through the towels Mom gave us to sit on. Our white Ford Galaxy had no air-conditioning, so we were forced to ride with the windows down. We couldn’t hear much or even keep our eyes open because of the wind and exhaust on the highway. Our parents chain-smoked throughout the drive, which meant that the smoke streamed steadily into the backseat.
At twelve years old, I suffered from such severe motion sickness that I was fed a steady diet of Dramamine. The drug turned me into a drooling narcoleptic. I woke up each time Donald pinched my leg, punched my arm, or ripped the bookout of my hands, only to nod off again, my chin bouncing against my chest, until the blows accumulated and made me cry.
Once Mom turned around to snap at me in the car. “What in the world are you crying about?” she asked. “I can’t understand why you’re always so emotional, Holly. There’s no need for this fuss. You know what it’s like to move. Crying only makes things worse for all of us.” She turned back around and said something I couldn’t hear to my father.
It was true that I could remember what it was like to move. I had clear memories of all the places we’d lived, starting with our terraced gardens in Mexico City, where Dad was the naval attaché at the American embassy and did something mysterious with maps and Mom was a smash hit at parties in sparkling cocktail gowns that made her look like a mermaid. After that, there’d been a little red-shingled house and another, more solid brick house and several places in between. It didn’t matter where I was, because I was at home with my family.
But I was older now, and it wasn’t the house that I’d miss but the people and animals that had been woven into the fabric of my life in Virginia Beach. Marcy had become a second sister to me, and I was leaving her behind. My grandparents were staying in their apartment in Newport News. I didn’t have my guinea pig, George, for comfort because my parents hadn’t let me bring him; George was now living in a cage next to Marcy’s rabbit. My parents had sold Tip and left Yankee, our newly adopted collie/shepherd, with our grandparents. The gerbils were all sold to pet stores or given away to schools, even Kinky, before Dad hosed out the garage and wateredhis little trees one last time. My whole world had been pulled out from beneath me like a scatter rug.
“Baby baby baby,” Donald sang in my ear, pinching me as hard as he could, leaving red welts on my bare legs as the Summer of Love brought three hundred thousand protestors against the Vietnam War to New York.
Our family was in no mood for love-ins. Mom turned off the car radio and shook her head over the news of antiwar demonstrations not just in New York, where you’d expect that sort of thing, but all over the country, too. “Those dirty hippies,”
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