Reflections

There is no doubt in my mind that military pilots have egos stretching to the stratosphere. I found out early in my military career that fighter pilots, as a group, are a bunch of assholes. I learned to tolerate most of them, but none…

I shared my big news with friends while visiting them out of town over Mother’s Day weekend. I planned to begin in vitro fertilization with a donor to freeze embryos later that year.The couple, a fellow Navy veteran and their spouse, had…

“This place needs a fresh coat of paint,” Mike said to me as we stood in the flag-bedecked United Nations Square in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.Mike, my executive officer, was the king of dry wit. Besides his sense of humor, Mike was a superb…

So, why EMS?That question came up often in the first few months on the ambulance, and it was an understandable one. I worked part-time for the county’s 911 emergency response system while I completed a master’s degree in creative writing in…

On an October day in 1966, the sun rose in the west, a man was seen biting a dog, Hades reported ice storms—and the U.S. Marines asked the U.S. Army for help.Okay, the first three things didn’t happen. Normally, the Marine Corps is the most…

The sun clung to the horizon at four p.m. that November day in Alaska. From my office, I quickly did the calculations—if I left now, I would have just enough time to scoop up my children from daycare and fit in 20 minutes of sledding before…

I grew up in Richland, Washington, and enrolled at Washington State University in the fall of 1959. By my junior year, I really wasn’t too happy there and didn’t think I was going to finish. Meanwhile, guys I knew were getting drafted left…

June 9, 2022, started like any other day—I was up at five a.m. to get ready for work at Marine Aircraft Group 36 in Okinawa, Japan. At the end of my drive, I checked my phone and found a message from my good friend Teedha, my first flight…

I still remember the blinding glare of police lights in my rearview mirror. My heart began to race as the white officer approached my vehicle. I knew I did nothing wrong, but still I clenched the wheel tightly to signal I was not a threat.…

“You know what’s crazy?” I said. “I’m turning the same age you were when you went to war.”“Oh wow,” my mom said, nodding thoughtfully from the couch. Then, “Wait, you’ll be 35?”I laughed from where I reclined on the floor, stretching my…