Our Story – 3,371 words

1969

We met on a blind date facilitated by our mothers. Teri was still living at home; working at a bank and taking classes at Pierce College. I was on 30 days leave after finishing Army helicopter flight school before returning to Vietnam. We hit it off pretty well but I was afraid to solicit or make any promises. I had seen too many similar relationships end with a “dear John” letter during my first tour. So when I left for my next tour, we agreed to stay in touch and make no promises. We wrote often. It is very much like blogging; you send out newsy letters, trying to keep her interested but knowing you won’t be getting a response for over two weeks. Turns out we were both aiming at the same goal, keeping the other one interested and picking up where we left off when I got back.

Taking the Army up on an offer to get out about three years early, I extended my tour for an additional six months. This included an extra 30 days leave; which I spent back at my parents using my GI bill to get a fixed wing rating at a civilian flight school. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t very good company during this period. Whatever the reason, things cooled off considerably between us.

I wasn’t good company because things had gotten pretty weird in Vietnam; not to say it hadn’t been weird before. We invaded Cambodia; friends died and I drank, a lot. I am convinced alcoholism has a very strong genetic component. I flew long days and drank beer and/or whiskey into a stupor every night. This for the last nine months (at least) of the second tour. Why I didn’t become an alcoholic is beyond me. It was OK to get drunk but marijuana was verboten. Only the long hair, hippie, commie, bed wetting peace freaks did that stuff. So, when we would smoke dope, we’d be sure to chug straight Seagrams 7 so our bizarre behavior would be interpreted as the the result of the alcohol and therefore, tolerated. But back to Teri and I.

When I returned to the States in December 1970, I was out processed. They said that any warrant officer with 12 months in Vietnam was being given two choices. Accept a direct commission or an honorable discharge. I left feeling thoroughly used. This was when I decided that if I kept flying I’d probably be dead soon. My attitude was not conducive to safe and competent flying.

I went to live with my brother in Yuma AZ. He was still in the Marines; instructing in the A4 and building an airplane in the living room of the house he was renting. The landlord was cool with it. He pulled up the carpet and we did all the messy stuff outside in the carport. I took a job driving the gas truck for the FBO on the civilian side of the airport. Life was simple; work, build airplane and hit happy hour at a local restaurant with the Marines from the base. Our diet was Beer or Tab, cantaloupe (20 for a dollar) and hamburger. Our social life was pretty much non existent.

Teri and I finally met again at a family friend’s wedding. We danced and the rest is history. I applied to the Ventura County fire department and got hired in the spring of 1972. We ended up getting married, buying a house in Thousand Oaks and starting with the fire department within the first four months of 1972.

I worked as a carpenter on my days off with my brother (who by then had hangar space at Camarillo [the old AFB} and was contracting and building on spec) and Teri’s father, Vince. Teri quit work and stayed home raising our two kids, Amy and Ryan. By the end of our eighth year there I had made Engineer and gotten my California contractors license; Ryan was three and Amy was six.

We visited Roger and Claire at their new home in Evergreen, Colorado and fell in love with the place. We had been considering finding a better place to raise our kids and this seemed like a perfect fit. It was 1980; in the 70’s real estate boom in California, all you had to do was build any sized single family home and it appreciated by at least 10% before you could finish it. Figuring this would go on forever, I quit the fire department ( I was nearing burnout anyway ), sold our house, packed everything we owned into a UHaul van pulling a UHaul covered trailer and moved to Evergreen. I drove the van towing the trailer with Amy and Teri drove the GMC (my work truck) with Ryan in the car seat; the 1971 Volvo wagon followed behind via the tow bar I’d welded to the frame. We were off to make our fortune building spec homes in Colorado.

We lived in Evergreen for 10 years. At 7000+ feet elevation, located just south of Hwy 70 West of Denver, Evergreen was fantastic. In the foothills of the Rockies, it is covered with Ponderosa and Lodge Pole Pines with plenty of open meadows and wild life. There is a lake with a public golf course where the Colorado Philharmonic gave a free 4th of July concert ending with the 1812 Overture complete with 105 Howitzer accompaniment and followed by fireworks over the lake. Teri took an active roll at the kids school and worked part time taking care of people’s pets and plants while they were on vacation. I worked for one of Roger & Claire’s neighbors as a carpenter while Roger and I looked for a good spec project. But the economy didn’t cooperate and I soon realized that I wasn’t the business man I thought I was.

We had formed a partnership with Roger and another pilot friend of his from Continental Airlines. The theory was they would get the loans and I’d provide the building expertise. We built a total of six duplexes and sold only one. We moved our family into one of them and rented the rest. With a renter in place, each unit had a negative $200/month cash flow. Meanwhile, Continental Airlines was taken over by Mr. Lorenzo and driven into bankruptcy. The pilots went on strike and it was ugly. Roger stood by the union and walked the picket lines while our third partner elected to cross the lines and scab for the company. It got worse.

We had FHA and VA assumable loans on the units we sold (by now it was three) and one of the buyers turned out to be a skimmer. That is where you put in a renter, keep the rent and don’t pay the mortgage. Turns out, you can string things out for almost a year before they take over the unit and kick out the renter. It also turns out that the bank comes after the original borrower as well as the assumer of the loan. The result for us was personal bankruptcy. We did not list my suppliers as creditors on the bankruptcy so I was able to keep working as a contractor.

It was about this time that one of my clients ( I had been doing a lot of remodeling ) suggested that I consider Air Traffic Control; seems like the FAA was hiring like crazy after Reagan fired everyone. Plus they made about four times what I was making. The FAA was one of the main reasons that I had quit flying. They took all of the fun out of it. By this time I could see that the FAA offered me the only clear path to a retirement, this rational enabled me to go to work for the dark side.

It took two years to get through the process but finally, in February 1990, I got hired. I had four days notice to get to Oklahoma City to begin four months of training. I turned over the jobs in progress to my best carpenter and left Teri to pack up our lives for the move to Alaska. Why Alaska was the result of two years of trying to get a straight answer out of the FAA, and that is another story. She managed to pack up everything, get it all into a storage facility only with lots of help from our Colorado friends. Among them, Les and Cathy Hatch were invaluable and they  remain an important part of her support network. In June she drove the kids and dog to her folk’s in Woodland hills CA, sold the car and flew (with Mel, the Golden Retriever ) to Oklahoma City to pick me up for the drive to Alaska. After I finished with my training  we drove back to Evergreen and loaded up a U-Haul for the trip up the Alcan. Mel rode on the console between the seats in the U-Haul. After we arrived Teri’s folks put the kids (Ryan was 12 and Amy was 15) on a flight to Anchorage (changing planes in Seattle of course). We stayed with the Teagues until we found a temporary apartment as I had to work at Anchorage Flight Service for three months before the FAA would pay for our move to McGrath.

We spent the next three years in McGrath Alaska. We were dead broke but had no debt. The FAA provided us with housing at a subsidized rate with utilities included. We were quite literally in the middle of nowhere; find the halfway point on a line from Anchorage to Nome, that’s pretty close to McGrath. Population a little more than 500 with over 300 attending the K-12 school, McGrath was the perfect place for us to recover financially. Life was not hard for us, just interestingly different. The most exciting thing to happen was when Teri suffered a bowel blockage after returning home from surgery in Anchorage and had to be air evacuated back into Anchorage. The FAA picked up the whole air ambulance tab ( $10K+ ), as was their policy for all their bush employees. After three years in McGrath we were able to move back into the road system with enough in savings to buy and furnish a house in Soldotna. We were in that same house until I retired and we moved to Redmond, OR.

Amy had finished high school in McGrath and was attending university in Fairbanks, and Ryan was finishing his sophomore year in high school when we made the move back to civilization. We spent over 19 years in the same house; adding a garage, arctic entry/greenhouse and remodeling nearly every room. After I retired we decided we could live wherever we wanted so we started looking around the lower 48 states. The only requirements were, the weather had to be better (not too terribly hard to find) and near at least one set of grandkids.

We bought a truck in Tuscaloosa, AL and a fifth wheel trailer in Tallahassee FL and started crisscrossing the states between grand kid support units in Tallahassee and Portland OR. After three trips across the country, we settled on a house in Redmond and sold the Soldotna house, and soon thereafter, the fifth wheel and truck.

It was during the events of the last paragraph that our train derailed. After several months living in the 350 square feet of the fifth wheel I was on the edge of completely losing it. I had totally lost control and my identity. If we hadn’t walked into the Bend Vet center seeking couples counseling when we did, I would be dead or incarcerated. Couples counseling lasted about 15 minutes. Teri was very hostile. She said I was the one with the problem (true enough) and I was the one who needed fixing. The counselor offered to continue working with me if we wanted. So she left and I stayed.

My sense of time during this period is quite fuzzy. I worked with the Vet Center counselor for almost two years and I’m sure Teri blames him for putting the wrong ideas in my head. I believe the opposite to be the case. He pushed me to do all I could to save the marriage. Meanwhile, I worked to understand what had sent me into the depths of depression and PTSD.

Ever since returning from my last tour I had been struggling to keep my military service from defining me. The public image of Vietnam vets was not one I wanted to embrace. I was not one of these screwed up psychos. My mantra was, “If you came back from Nam screwed up, you probably were a little off before you went there and the experience tipped you over the edge”. I silently told myself that I was a rock, since I was obviously not messed up. I wanted recognition for the shit I had been through but to ask for that meant I was less than the self image I was trying to maintain. When I took a honest look at my failures in the past, I realized that I needed to scale down that image and set new goals that were attainable.

Inside I felt like I was the real deal. I may not have jumped on a grenade but I exchanged fire with the enemy and he missed. I literally fired thousands of rounds into the jungle; hitting the mark no more than half a dozen times. I spent many hours absolutely terrified, knowing I wouldn’t survive the day. But to talk about it was to join the ranks of hero wannabes that never left a secure firebase. I expected accolades and parades; what I saw was quite different. No one spit on me or called me a baby killer but for sure, no one understood. The first time anyone asked me if I had ever killed anyone wasn’t till a few years before retirement. It was over 30 years after I had returned but I remember it immediately triggered me and I couldn’t answer as my mind went tripping off through long forgotten memories. I had thought that all my PTSD symptoms were long ago laid to rest. The best tactic was to pretend you were fine and get on with life. I developed extraordinary avoidance and defection skills. If I can make you laugh about it, mission accomplished with discussion avoided or deflected, at least scaled down. 

I mention all this because when Teri and I hit the RV trail I felt like I had completely lost my identity. I realized that everything I did or said was done only after I mentally ran it through the filter that was Teri. Obviously, when you are connected as we were, everything you do affects your spouse so you should consider that before you act or speak. It was more than that.

By utilizing my avoidance and deflection skills, I had forced her into a position of total control that she accepted in order to facilitate the marriage. In fact, she embraced the roll and developed exceptional control skills. That was fine with me until a few years before my retirement. I don’t know what epiphany moment I experienced but one day I realized that both of us were embracing the wrong ideals.

Any time we would talk about our friends and their trials and tribulations, it would be to pass judgement on the bad decisions they had made that were now causing all their problems. I suddenly realized that were I presented with the decisions they had to make, I probably wouldn’t have handled it any better. We had become quite smug over how well our kids had turned out; I started feeling that we were just lucky that they turned out so well. It was more of a testament to their character, for which we were taking a little too much credit.

The other thing I had a problem with was our obsession with material things. After observing others embrace the minimalist lifestyle, I began to reassess what we really needed to thrive. We got a 39’ fifth wheel and proceeded to fill it with so much “stuff” we’d have made George Carlin proud. Back home our crawl space had over 30 large Rubbermaid totes of Christmas decorations. That’s a lot for a family that is 50% atheist. But that didn’t include the various totes of “stuff” for all the other seasons. I’ll admit that it was nice to have a house that changed through the seasons, and Teri did all the work. I just needed things to get simpler.

We agreed I needed to establish my own space, so I began to try and make that happen. After a few months I realized that it wasn’t working. No matter what I did, Teri had veto power. She would ask a question and if she didn’t like the answer, she would rephrase and ask it again. This would continue until she got the answer she wanted. When I realized this, I started to give her the answer she wanted the first time. Not conducive to good communications. When I finally realized that, I had to leave; I managed to screw that up too.

We had resumed couples counseling with another counselor at the Vet Center but that wasn’t going well for me. At the sessions I felt like a child being scolded for just trying to be me. In session I had told Teri that I couldn’t travel with her any more. It was just too stressful. I got her to agree to let me go to Alaska for fishing and then drive alone to Denver and Montana for more fishing and time away with no requirement to check in daily. In return I promised we could plan a trip together to our daughters family in Denver for Thanksgiving.

As the time for our departure approached, our relationship deteriorated further. I felt more and more controlled and less and less autonomy. I realized that I couldn’t get on a plane with Teri. I also realized that I couldn’t move out with her there; she would have to be in charge of the move. I have never been able to keep a secret from her. Maybe a Christmas gift but that only because she didn’t really want to spoil the surprise. I decided that if I backed out of the trip at the last minute, she would go without me and give me the chance to leave before she got back. It called for unprecedented courage on my part to tell her that I was still too screwed up to get on a plane with her and she should go without me. It made for a super hostile day the day before departure, but I managed to get her on the plane. Then I franticly started to arrange for a UHaul van, storage for my stuff and started shopping for a furnished apartment. I didn’t plan to be there when she got back.

The wheels came off when she saw an email conformation from UHaul for the truck. I was busted. We exchanged a few texts and one brief phone call then nothing. My daughter, Amy, called and said that she was on her way back. Teri’s plan was to show up unannounced and catch me sneaking off with all my tools. My son, Ryan, put his life on hold, drove over from Portland and picked her up at the Redmond airport. He then proceeded to prevent WW3 by facilitating a civilized meeting between us. Bottom line: I agreed to wait until Dec 1, 2014 to move (as that was the earliest I could get housing) and to leave my tools behind, she agreed to watch.

The next two weeks were hell. It was leaving with supervision. I leased an unfurnished condo for six months and furnished it from Goodwill. I didn’t achieve autonomy until I packed it all into a storage unit and left for Alaska in July. I’ll be on the road until we reach a financial agreement. There has been some progress on that front as I finally got her talking with a financial mediator. This brings us up to November 25, 2015, the day before Thanksgiving.

The story continues in my posts over on the left side of the website. At least there are pictures.