In 1973 I was nineteen years old.
The Vietnam War was still running and my number came up in the Last draft.
Not the way you want your number to come up.
But I was one of the lucky ones.
Instead of Southeast Asia I got orders for Germany.
Three years in Europe while the war wound down without me.
I have never once taken that for granted.
Germany was a world I had no framework for.
A kid from hopping housing and desert tracking stations and Cold War missile silos suddenly standing in a country that still carried the weight of what it had been thirty years before.
You could feel it in the stones. In the way the older people moved through their days.
History wasn’t something in a textbook over there. It was in the walls.
I was twenty-two when I came home.
The years after the service were the years of figuring out what a man does when nobody is telling him where to go next.
Different jobs. Different towns. The same restlessness I’d been born into.
Then December 1977.
I landed a job at California Portland Cement Company.
The GI Bill put me there.
It was hard work. The kind of work that tells you exactly who you are by the end of a shift.
I was good at it.
1978 I got married.
Had three boys.
If you want to know what grounds a man, it’s watching three sons come into the world and knowing they are looking to you to show them how it’s done.
I don’t know that I always got that right.
But I showed up. Every day I showed up.
The cement plant years were the steadiest years of my life up to that point.
A paycheck. A family. A place I went every morning and knew what was expected.
After a childhood of never belonging anywhere, that steadiness meant something I couldn’t have put into words at the time.
Then 2003.
I was fired.
I’m not going to say it didn’t knock the wind out of me. It did.
But I knew what they did wasn’t right.
So I did what a man does when something isn’t right.
I fought it.
Eight years in a lawsuit.
Eight years of lawyers and depositions and waiting and grinding and not knowing how it was going to land.
It landed right.
I won.
1997 the first marriage ended.
That’s another story for another day.
Some things take longer to find the right words for.
1999 I remarried.
After the lawsuit settled we made the last move.
Lexington, Kentucky. 2006.
I retired.
And I made myself a promise I have kept every day since.
We are not moving again.
After a lifetime of Vandenberg and Pensacola and Edwards and Plattsburgh and Goldstone and Goddard and Germany and every place in between
Lexington is where I put my feet down.
This is home.
Not because the military sent me here. Not because a job pulled me here.
Because I chose it.
For the first time in my life, I chose where I belong.
And I’m not leaving.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
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