It’s funny how memories often pop up in the course of a simple conversation. I’m sure you’ve experienced situations similar to mine, which usually happen when I meet someone for the first time. That’s when we exchange innocuous bits and pieces of information in an effort or a desire to find common ground.

For me, there is sometimes but not always an impediment to the free flow of info. It’s in my nature, I guess, to joke when I shouldn’t. That’s what I’ve been told. I don’t intend it. To paraphrase Nero in the movie Quo Vadis, “I didn’t wish me a joker.”

This is what I’m talking about. One day I was standing around looking like I knew what I was doing when a woman asked me for directions to a local class on motorcycles safety. Impulsively, I said, “Do I look like a biker?”

“Actually, you do,” she responded.              

That surprised me. I’m no biker, but the first memory in my mind when she responded to my silly question was of a childhood friend who took a curve too fast on a motorcycle and lost most of his skin. He lived but with a lot of scars.

This was a satisfying memory because the guy was the same one who used to beat the crap out of me when we were little kids.

But one of the most common questions most people ask me is, “Are you a veteran?”

“Yes,” I say seriously, “I was in the Air Force.”

“Were you a pilot?”

“Nope. Just a general all around flunky.”

“Oh.” Pause. “When were you in?”

This is where I usually lose it. “I was in the Air Force before the airplane was invented.”

This isn’t too far removed from reality. There was a time when I almost believed it myself, and on a few occasions I wondered if I had enlisted in the wrong branch of service.

The reason for my confusion was simple. In my four years of service, I never rode in an airplane. The Air Force transported me from one place to another by many means, but an airplane was never one of them. Here are a few that I can remember. They are roughly in the order in which they occurred, with a couple of exceptions that I’ve noted.

Trailways Bus; Troop Train (three times, from Little Rock to San Antonio, from San Antonio to Moses Lake, WA, from Yokohama to Tachikawa Air Base); Greyhound Bus; Ferry Boat; Troopship (three times from Fort Mason in San Francisco to Yokohama, Japan, and return); Flat Bed Trailer; Weapons Carrier; Air Force Bus

Those memories popped up almost before the question was asked and that generated my silly answer. Moreover, when I thought about my Air Force travels, it dawned on me that each of these trips is a memory in itself. One of these days, I’ll write them out in greater detail and each will probably generate more memories.

In the meantime, I’ll generalize a little in my mind about my Air Force years and recall my early exposure to accepting responsibility, working with a team, sweating my buns off, getting the job done, and in general learning a few social skills like silverware placement.

We may have been by some definitions fighting men and women, but we were expected to move easily between our Spartan existence and the society around us. We pissed and moaned, but in retrospect, we did okay. And I came away with some good memories.