We had moved from Alaska to Delaware and Dad had taken us to see the arrival and Christening, complete with a champagne bottle, of a military airplane called a Gooney Bird. It was incredibly large and ugly by standards then. Must have been at least two stories or more high. It sported a very large black radar Dome for a nose. It had four engines with monster propellers. That was good, because nobody back then really trusted flying in a plane that didn’t have propellers. Now today, people won’t fly on a plane with a propeller, because they don’t trust them. Really. What a switch.
Three years or so later, we moved temporarily to Charleston SC, where we tried to patiently wait for our time to catch a plane and join our Father in Libya, North Africa. The Russians then were our enemy. Commies, we were taught to call them. They had picked a fight with us in Cuba, and somehow we lost. Americans never lost wars, so we kind of ignored that. But we had learned earlier to hide under our desks at school in a crouching position and wait for the all clear signal after an atomic blast had blown away civilization.
The Libyans didn’t have Kaddafi then. He was just a kid. They had a king. No kidding. And they liked us Americans. So they gave us an airbase, called Wheelus, on the shores next to Tripoli, where we had won a war earlier against the pirates there. Several dozen Americans were killed, fighting for our freedom then too. They wrote a song about them and sing it every time the US Marine band strikes up. Dad had to wait three months for us to come there. So, we were treated to a technological miracle.
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