My Mind Was a Military Sky

The dream goes like this:I'm standing on my childhood street, barefoot on the black asphalt and staring up at a cloudless afternoon sky. The same excitement that sent me racing out my front door without shoes leaves me shifting my weight from one foot to the other in a quick dancing rhythm. I turn circles every few moments, sweeping my sightlines—the tops of the eucalyptus trees at the park down the street, the terra-cotta roofs of my neighbors’ homes—before holding my breath and listening for the telltale sounds. I'm eight years old in these dreams, sometimes nine, my anticipation uncomplicated and joyous.Then I hear it, the high shriek and the low rumble. I turn more circles until I see them: four F-18 Hornets racing over the eucalyptus trees in my direction, the jets astonishingly low in a tight diamond formation. The high gloss blue and yellow paint, the glass of the canopies: they catch the sunlight and send it winking back at me, conspiratorial somehow—as if they know something I don't but should.I run toward the planes, shouting and whooping as I wave at the pilots in their cockpits. My exhilaration, however, suddenly turns to panic. The right-most jet drifts out of formation, clips its mate's wing and yaws over with a terrifying quickness. In the time it takes for my breath to catch in my throat, the fuselage slams against my street and erupts into a ball of flame. I try to run, but my feet, turned to iron, anchor me to the ground as the wreckage rushes across the asphalt toward my body.That's when I startle awake—heart racing, gasping for breath—unsure in these first moments of wakefulness if I am alive or dead.Thirteen years old, the first time I have this dream. I'll have it again in another month, then a month after that, and dozens more times over the next twenty years. Every time I wake, I feel some pillar of stability within me wobble on its base and threaten to topple.I spent most of my youth under military skies. In the ’80s and ’90s of my childhood, my hometown, Irvine, California, was flanked on two sides by Marine airbases. A few miles to the north, Marine Corps Air Station Tustin was home to transport helicopters whose whirling rotors produced subfrequencies deep enough to rattle our windows as they flew overhead. A couple miles to the east, Marine Corps Air Station El Toro was home to F-18 Hornets and a frequent waystation for C-130 Hercules and C-5 Galaxys. All of them were loud enough, visible enough, frequent enough to colonize even the most resilient of minds and inhabit their dreams. But it was the F-18s, their daily training missions and the way their jet engines sounded like cataclysm—seeming to tear the sky in two as they cut through the atmosphere overhead—that left the deepest mark on my psyche. I woke to that cataclysm. I went to bed to it. I sat in class learning my reading and my writing and my arithmetic to it.Though we lived a stone's throw from two military bases, mine was not a military family, except insofar as every Republican family in the 1980s was a military family. My dad served a brief stint in the Air Force long before I was born, and both of my parents were William F. Buckley Jr.-loving, Reagan-adoring conservatives who believed in American exceptionalism and the importance of a vast military complex. Like many families in Orange County—that bastion of conservatism in otherwise liberal California—we celebrated this love of all things military each spring by attending the El Toro Airshow.It was a massive affair that took place over three days and brought in, on average, half a million people. After waiting in hour-long car lines to get on base, the eager hordes wandered the black tarmac, marveling over the aircraft on display and enjoying the intermittent air performances throughout the day. The main event, of course, the experience everyone came for, was the Blue Angels. Final act of the day, they took flight just as the afternoon sun reach its hottest and most oppressive position, just as the crowd found themselves sufficiently sunburned, beer-sotted, and hotdog-stuffed to stop roaming the tarmac and gaze up at the aerobatics cutting across the sky.When I was very young, my parents, my brother, and I attended the airshow together. Like everyone else, we roamed the tarmac, oohed and ahhed over the many parked aircraft, ate overpriced churros, and at the appointed time, we sat together on brown grass to watch the Blue Angels in flight. Throughout all this, my brother and I were suitably pleased to be there. If my father was aloof, always walking a little ahead of us—his bald spot burned radioactive red by midday and, beacon-like, leading us forward through the crowds—if my mother was on edge, quick to snap at us or him on little provocation, this was no different from anything we experienced at home. Every day, my family lived in the kind of extended, cold-war tension that arises when the parents hate each other but stay together for the kids. Admittedly, they tried to play nice, which in my home meant strained silences that were punctuated all too often by verbal fire.Parental bickering aside, my brother and I were grateful for the airshow, grateful for the opportunity it afforded us to do anything together as a family. Our father, a workaholic and a high-functioning drunk, didn't participate much. He didn't go to our sporting or school events, our piano recitals or Boy Scout meetings. He didn't celebrate with us at our birthday parties. He didn't play catch or watch movies with us. He went to bed every night at seven o'clock to read The National Review in solitude, less a family member than a tenant who reluctantly shared his home with strangers. Our mother, a jilted housewife raising two kids on her own while her husband worked and drank himself into oblivion, saw to our upbringing with a fierce and often terrifying intensity. Fall outside the narrow path of her expectations and her response could be both swift and savage. The El Toro Airshow, along with the occasional Angels baseball game, were the only activities we shared as a family, the only times we approached the normalcy of so many other families we knew. My brother and I took what we could get.By the time I turned seven or eight, my mom stopped going to the airshow with us. For several years after that, my father took us, clearly under compulsion from our mother, who not surprisingly resented his abstention from our family life and who, like any lonely, broken-hearted wife, found ways to shame the man into half-hearted fatherly action. And what awkward affairs these trips to the airshow were. Witness my father as he strides briskly ahead of us, his long legs outpacing ours as we try to keep up. Watch how, every few moments, he turns his head over one shoulder to say “This way” or “Over here” or “Not now,” before looking ahead once again and barreling forward through the crowds. Notice the way, even when we stop to look at one airplane or another on the tarmac, he hovers just outside a six-foot ring that apparently circles our bodies at all times. Listen to the curses he mutters under his breath while he waits for us: fucking asshole, goddamn turkey. Now, imagine being seven years old and assuming his curses are about you, about the obvious barrier you prove to his happiness.By the time I turned twelve, my brother had his driver's license, and we went to the airshow on our own. To say being there without our parents was a vast improvement is to put it mildly. I loved my brother, Kurt, who for a long as I could remember had been nothing but kind and supportive. Older brother, yes, but he never made fun of me, never beat me up, never made me feel small, never tormented me in any of the ways older brothers so infamously do to their younger kin. Less sensitive than me and less prone to impulsive action—which put me in my mother's crosshairs far more often than him—he seemed to understand how hard our family dynamic was on me. I also think that, as the oldest, he had come to believe it was his job to hold the family together, whereas I had early on concluded I was the reason our family had fallen apart. (It didn't help that, one morning just days before my twelfth birthday, I had to overhear my mother berate my father for his failures as a husband and a dad, a brutal tongue lashing she concluded with: “And for god's sake, I haven't had sex for twelve years!” The math was simple enough. I was the last time they'd had sex. I was the un-planned-for mistake, the curse upon their marriage and our family.)It's not surprising, then, that Kurt was the closest thing I had to a real friend in life. But the truth is, by twelve years old, I had already learned to hide myself, to present the thinnest shell of myself to the world. Though my brother and I had fun at the airshow that year, it was the good time of relative strangers sharing in the pleasures of casual companionship. We had, in fact, learned no deeper intimacy in our family.This was May 1, 1993, and despite everything, it was as good as any day I'd had for years. That is, until the moment I watched James A. Gregory die.He was a former naval aviator turned stunt pilot. He performed that day at the El Toro Airshow in his vintage F-86 Sabrejet. Just one airshow among many for James—he flew his restored Korean War-era fighter plane alongside a friend and sparring partner in mock dogfights at airshows across the country—but on this spring day in 1993, something was different. That morning, his partner became ill and James decided to fly anyway and put on an improvised aerobatic display.Just past noon, he strapped into his F-86 and took off solo into a sky that had only recently burned off the last remnants of morning haze. Shortly into his routine, he raced into a vertical climb, and arched backward in a smooth curve until his nose pointed down, he and his plane accelerating toward the black tarmac. The Vertical Loop: a routine trick by any measure for someone as experienced as James, one he had likely done hundreds of times, but that day, something went wrong. When his F-86 should have been leveling out and preparing for his next maneuver, it was still plummeting, nose-down, at an incredible speed. By the time he did finally begin to level, it was already too late. The plane's belly slammed against the tarmac and erupted into flame as the wreckage slid along the runway.Roughly a quarter mile away in the VIP seats my brother had secured for us sat my twelve-year-old self, watching as Marine fire engines hurried to the wreckage. My mind raced for an explanation. It was a stunt. It was part of the show. Hollywood special effects, mirrors, sleight of hand. It had to be anything other than what it so obviously was: a terrible accident and a man's death. It took several minutes before I could fully accept this truth.My brother asked me if I was okay, and I told him I was. Which is strange because I was not anywhere near okay, and as much as I wanted to say so, I did not know how. I did not know how to ask others for help. In fact, it would take me another fifteen years, when my adult life began to buckle under the weight of panic attacks and depression, that I would first learn how to seek help from others.The show went on, as it always does. My brother and I stayed in our VIP seats, and we watched as a team of red biplanes and then the Blue Angels flew in tight formations and crisscrossed through the air within feet of each other. I was miserable, holding back tears and flinching each time planes came remotely near each other or the ground. I did not want to watch anyone else die, sure, but it was more than that. That plane crash struck a psychic chord within me that left me fearful for my own life, as if my fate depended on those pilots in their cockpits, their preternatural reflexes, their better-than-perfect vision. I was at their mercy, and if they failed in their maneuvers, I, somehow, would crash and burn with them.The dream goes like this:I'm standing on my childhood street. Dusk on a fall day. A chill in the air. The sky at the horizon line a pale yellow turning to white as it reaches toward the meridian. Clear and untroubled one moment, the sky suddenly turns apocalyptic, crowded from horizon to horizon with military jets and bombers and transport planes out of which thousands of armed soldiers parachute their way to the ground. War has come. Intuitively, I understand my vulnerability, my helplessness, a child with no way to protect or care for myself. Paralyzed with terror, I watch armed bodies rain down from the military sky, afraid for my life in a way that is immediately familiar.The first time I remember fearing for my life—the kind of fear that leaves my limbs buzzing with adrenaline, my face drained of blood, my body frozen—takes place when I'm four years old.My mom has just picked me up from preschool and we're off to the mall. I've done something worthy of reward. I don't remember what. Something involving reading or writing or general good behavior. We have charts in my house, charts with stickers and numbers that quantify how good I am: twelve stickers good at reading, fifteen stickers good at writing, and so on. One of these charts has enough stickers to earn me a toy.In the store, I deliberate between two choices. They're both Transformers, one a blue sports car and the other a neon green construction vehicle. They transform into robots, of course, but the blue sports car is bigger and heavier while the neon green construction vehicle is small but can join other construction vehicles to form to a mega-Transformer. I hold both in my hands, my eyes wandering from one to the other. My stomach twists. My throat tightens. Decisions at this age, even the exciting ones, never feel without danger. My mom hovers, waiting for me to make up my mind. “It's time,” she says. I choose the blue sports car and she pays for it at the counter.It's as we pull out of our parking spot and begin driving through the lot that I realize I've chosen the lesser toy. I feel sad. I feel duped and angry at myself, and I tell my mom I want to go back. I tell her I want the other toy.A frustrating occurrence for her? Certainly. Annoying? Absolutely. A grown man now and a father of two young boys, I know just how maddening the fickle natures of children can be. But she does not govern her irritation the way I try (and sometimes fail) to do with my boys. She does not measure her words and calmly say, “I see you're feeling disappointed. And if you really want to get the other toy instead, you can. But we don't have time today.”Rather, she hits the brakes and slams her fist down on the dashboard, again and again, savagely. “Goddamn it!” she screams. “Goddamn it! Goddamn it!”I freeze. To say I feel like I might die is no exaggeration. That's how scared I am. She does not hit me (this time). But I know. On some level, I understand that dashboard is a substitute for me.After pulling us into another parking space and yanking me out of the car, she drags me through the mall, back to the toy store and up to the counter. Her fingers dig into the flesh of my arm and it hurts. Her anger at this point has changed to disgust, a silent revulsion that wafts from her body. I'm crying, but she makes me do the talking at the counter. My voice shaking, I tell the lady that I don't want the blue sports car, that I want the neon green construction vehicle. I am certain this lady sees in me what my mother sees, and I feel ashamed.There are many, many other times over the years that I fear for my life. The time my mother grabs a cookie sheet she has at hand—it's the week before Christmas; she's making cookies—and beats it against the edge of the kitchen counter until the thing bends in half. The reason? I spent my entire allowance on one trip to the baseball card shop. Or the time she shoves me against a wall, pinning me there with the weight of her body while she squeezes my jaw with her hand so tightly it feels like my molars will pop out. “How can you be so stupid?” she says. Why? I got a D on a progress report.As unreasonable as it might be, I feel like I will die each time my mom pours her rage over me. That farther back than I can remember her abuses were against my body rather than dashboards and cookie sheets has been confirmed by my older brother. “She used closed fists on both of us,” he once told me. It is little surprise, then, that as I pass through childhood and my teens, all it takes is a hint of my mother's rage, the remotest possibility that I might again have to weather it, to inspire terror in me.As I entered junior high and high school, I did whatever I could to protect myself. I wore only the stealthiest emotional camouflage, engaged in covert missions typified by lies and schemes and more lies when I had done wrong (or whatever it was she considered wrong). When these strategies inevitably failed, when my lies and transgressions came to light and enraged my mother, I would fear for my life. I would experience her rage and my worthlessness all over again and worse, such that the next lies and the next schemes, the next destructive comforts and the next protective walls behind which I could hide myself had to be bigger, better, airtight.Eventually, I built a bunker deep within myself. A fallout shelter. There was little oxygen within those walls, the structure buried so deep beneath the dirt, the concrete walls fortified with lead. There was zero human warmth. But in that bunker, sustained by endless rations—drugs and alcohol and porn and a thousand petty indulgences—I tried to live.The dream goes like this:I'm standing in the living room of my childhood home, staring out the front window. I can see the full length of my street, the houses on each side running parallel until they reach the little park where I spend hundreds of hours playing over the years. Beyond the park: rows of eucalyptus trees, the bleached sky. Cheerful and lovely, as my street so often can be. Then I see flashes of light, several of them, followed by mushroom clouds reaching upward and expanding into a sky now turned black. The moment I see them, I know I am doomed. I watch as a wall of nuclear fire races toward my street, my home, me.Like Russian nesting dolls, contexts find themselves contained by other and larger contexts. Each containing context inevitably stamps its imprint upon all that it contains. The context of my mind received the imprint of my familial context. My familial context and the community context beyond the walls of my home bore the imprint of the larger military context within which we lived, which in turn bore the imprint of our nation's fearmongering as it prepared perpetually for war. Content mingles and overlaps; events and patterns within the smaller contexts take on the thematics, the organizing principles of the larger.In other words, I lived under a military sky that day in and day out sounded like cataclysm. A sky that became military because we lived in a town and in a country that told us war could break out at any moment, that we always had to prepare because evil legions the world round hated our way of life and wanted us dead. I went to an airshow that celebrated this perverted worldview and watched a man die as his fighter jet crashed into the black tarmac. For the next twenty years, shellshocked by the unbearable tensions and conflicts in my childhood home, I watched my own psychic death unfold, again and again, in military dreams.My dad never wanted me or my brother; he wished he had never married our mother. Nothing could have been clearer in our home than these foundational truths. They were the ground we walked upon every day, the black sun that rose in the sky each morning and cast an appalling light over every aspect of our lives. My mom treated me like a curse when I did not conform to her vision of what I should be, of how I should make her life easier. Nothing could have been clearer in the ways she shouted me down to microscopic size, in the ways she grabbed my body and shook me, as if to set right some faulty wiring in my brain. And it felt like doom to me, like death. It felt like standing alone on my childhood street while burning metal raced to engulf my body, knowing that—no matter how deeply I buried myself, how deep the trench I dug, how fortified the walls I erected—there was no escape because, ultimately, I carried the street and burning wreckage with me wherever I went.But now I know the terms of my dread, the nesting doll contexts: my dad the black tarmac, the black street, the black sky that gives no light. My mom the burning wreck of a person who could not control her own ongoing psychic death enough to steer it away from my helpless body. And knowing (as that military cartoon of my youth routinely proclaimed) is half the battle.