l to r: Dad, Aunt Mary (visiting), Mom, me, and my sister. Honolulu, Hawaii, 1968

Usually drunk, or trying hard to be, Saturday nights we’d pile into somebody’s car and drive over to the MATS terminal on the military base where many of my friends and I lived.  The flight line wasn’t our reason for driving there; as I recall the snack bar had really good fries.

It was 1966, in Hawaii, and the Military Air Transport terminal on Hickam Air Force Base was a stop on the hop from California for soldiers going to Vietnam.  Like us, most of them were teenagers.

Most of my friends were kids of military families like mine.  Ever since Pearl Harbor the military presence on Oahu’s been pretty beefy so being a military kid –  Air Force, Army, Marines, and especially Navy – wasn’t unusual.  My life was about protocol and acting appropriately…