Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [21]
Finally he was back from Yokosuka and Washington and was again with us in Iwakuni. Commander Mayer and my father were each awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the highest medal a pilot can earn outside of wartime. Then life was quiet again, or at least quiet in our way, for things had returned to our version of normal. Dad was coming home for dinner, and then sometimes not coming home.
I never had any doubt that my father had saved himself and the thirteen others aboard that plane, and apparently I was not alone. When my father was seventy-five years old—about five years after he had a massive stroke that doctors said might have killed another man and crippled him—he got a letter from one of the Mercator crew, writing from California, where he and his family and grandchildren lived. He wrote that he had a full life, and he just wanted to thank Dad for it. What the man said in his letter was a great gift to my father.
All these years later, I still feel connected to the military, especially when incidents like the one involving my father occur. In 2001, after a collision with a pursuing Chinese fighter, a reconnaissance plane from that same squadron, VQ-1, was forced down in Hainan, China. The Chinese accused the plane of flying in their airspace and refused to give up the crew or the plane, which, like my father’s planes, had an electronic surveillance system aboard it. The crew came back in April 2001, and the plane came back a few months later. During the ordeal, I felt as if the men and women on board were my military family. I had to remind myself how young they were, that they were not my father’s age, that they were not even my age. Yet I felt the connection. When Shane Osborne, the pilot of that EP-3 plane, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, I felt a satisfaction and pride that a family member might feel. I was fifty-one with no present connection to the Navy; it made no sense except that the bonds built in the military community are strong enough to last a lifetime.
Now, some who have grown up in military families will tell you a story of scars left by a largely absent father and an oppressive warrior mentality. For some that is undoubtedly true. There were fathers I won’t name who drank too much; there were mothers who were lonely and depressed, even suicidal in this nomadic life. I know that it did happen. It just didn’t happen to me.
The common image of a military pilot is the father in Pat Conroy’s brilliant and heartbreaking The Great Santini, but my own father was as far from Bull Meecham as any military man could be. Oh, sometimes he would wake us up with a bugle—because he thought it was funny. Sometimes he would “inspect” our rooms—but I never remember anything awful happening, and believe me, the condition of my side of the room I always shared with my very neat sister would have justified memorable punishment. Dad clearly expected more from his son than from his daughters, just as his Italian father had from him. My brother was never allowed to have his hands in his pockets. Of course, he put his hands in his pockets anyway—there are dozens of family photos that attest to that—but when my father spotted it, the bellowing would begin. I thought about it later and realized that John Kennedy’s natural easy pose with his hands in his pockets was never, absolutely never, repeated by anyone in uniform.
At the same time that he was hard on Jay, Dad would give him every spare minute. That my brother loved baseball is an understatement, for as far as Jay was concerned, the hidden meaning of life was found on a baseball diamond. So the year before my brother was eligible, my father signed up as the head of the Iwakuni Little League, and he decided that, to round out the teams, the age limit would be dropped a year—just this once. The whole family joined in—my sister and I, and other sisters on Jay’s team, dressed up in plaid—what were we thinking, plaid?—cheerleading uniforms, chanting cheers like “Iki masho, let’s go!” which