And I don't even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don't know just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below

(Smashing Pumpkins, 1979)

Ft. Hood, Texas, 1978

I don't remember much about that summer, except it was the summer following one of the biggest disappointments of my young life. Mohammed Ali had lost his heavyweight title to Leon Spinks (he would regain it later in the year). The Dallas Cowboys, with Roger Staubach at the helm, were the defending Superbowl champion, and I would launch my Evil Knievel stunt bike down the road of our little cul de sac.

We were soldiers, then, and young. In the woods behind our house, we would erect "forts" out of anything we could scavenge. This was a military base, and many families would dump items back there when moving out, so console TV's would be gutted to make "secret" entryways, box springs would form walls, and plywood would form the roof. Every once in awhile, we would "raid" the forts of some of the other groups, and stash our haul someplace until they were finished looking for it. We didn't have anything planned for these items, but the conquest was always worth the effort.

Past the woods was an open field that had long ago been used for training purposes. My father feared the possibility of unexploded ordinances in the field, and so he forbid us from going out there. As with so many things at that age, being forbidden made it that much more attractive. Where it might have otherwise been nothing more than open space, it was now the promised land, and we would spend our days marching into the field. A large tree was out towards its center. I can't say how far out, but at that age it seemed as if it was a mile. Not entirely dismissive of our fathers' advice, we called it the minefield, and we ventured out the first time just like we had seen on old war movies, with one of us pressing forward digging an old pocketknife into the ground and marking off the "safe route" through the minefield, with nothing but the eyes of old Texas Longhorns to mark our steady forward progress.

When we reached the tree, we were rewarded with the ultimate capture: military barbed wire. We decided then and there that we were going to take our prize home and fortify our fort like no other fort had been fortified before. But first, we had to explore our newly conquered territory.

One of the boys came back and announced the discovery of gold. He had in his hand a rock to prove it. It wasn't "fool's gold"; no, we were much too smart to be tricked by mere iron pyrite. It was rather a similarly colored (and similarly worthless) rock. We headed out to the goldfield and began digging into its side, an excavation that would take all summer and yield nothing except for a bunch of displaced dirt. It's a wonder local plumbers didn't discover our mad digging skills and set us to work saving them time and money.

Having dutifully marked the gold mine on our map (and making plans to protect it from capture by the enemy), we made our way back to the tree and began making plans on how to haul our cache of barbed wire back to the fort. In extricating the barbed wire from its location, my brother found out unfortunately just how sharp military barbed wire can be. The resultant trip to the ER ruined our plans for extra fortification, but not our plans for the "gold" field, the tree, or any of our other weapons of mass destruction.

That was the summer we spied the "UFO". To this date I'm not sure what it was, but I am sure of one thing: it most definitely, most decidedly, was NOT an alien spacecraft. But these were the days of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and of scifi comic books, and our eyes would not be convinced of anything else. It may have been a weather baloon, it may have been the moon making a daytime showing, but when you want to be convinced of something, you are, and when you're 8 years old, bicycles become Harley Davidsons, big wheels become dragsters, and pieces of wood become semi automatic rifles.

That was the summer I got lost. It was some kind of show at the base with all kinds of military equipment on display. I think it was the Fourth of July, although I am sure some base historian with too much time and bandwidth will come across this article and correct me, so I won't set it in stone as such. I was running around exploring everything, and in the process, got separated from my family. Undaunted, I wasn't concerned, even though I didn't see familiar reassuring faces around me. Late in the day as I was going through my adventures, I sat in the seat of a tank out on display and saw my father off in the distance. I climbed out of the tank and went to where he had been, but by then he was gone. And in a world that's so much bigger to an 8 year old than it is to an adult, I wasn't finding him.

At long last I found an MP, who, of course, had been notified of my disappearance. I was returned home, where my father was waiting.

Many lifetimes in the perspective of that 8 year old have faded, but the memories have not. I'm sure my mind has fudged a few details along the way, but that's just "artistic license" at work.