Captains Drove Cadillacs
Submitted by Ron Krebs
Misawa 63-66
[DutchNote ~ Although not specifically a Misawa story, this story was deemed sufficiently
appropriate to be included in this collection. As you read it, I think you'll agree.]
A few years ago I read this article in the Air Force Times.
It was written by Rodney Carlisle, a one time Air Force brat.
Yesterday I was going through some boxes and found a copy.
I found it amusing when I first read it and equally amusing yesterday.
It comes under the "you had to have been there" category.
At the time Mr. Carlisle wrote the article he was a marketing consultant and drove a Plymouth Acclaim.
"Captains Drove Cadillacs"
Rodney Carlisle
Air Force kids live portable lives. Many schools are attended, many rental houses slept in.
But it was our car, and the endless spool of highway that linked our old home on Friday with the new one on Monday.
Over time, my brother and I noticed similarities between the cars men drove and the rank they held in the Air Force.
Comparing notes we came up with a system that had real meaning.
The base organization chart was, we realized, bogus. Stature was real and captains had it.
Captains drove Cadillacs.
We'd watch captains taxi their Cadillacs up to the officers club and race the engine.
Then while the car idled lazily, and we stopped breathing, came the crucial power window ritual.
We'd see the driver turn his head and look directly at the open window as he pressed the
shiny buttons on the driver's door. As if by telekinesis, the empty frames would fill with glass.
A Japanese tea ceremony was a Jackie Gleason routine compared to a captain stepping from his Cadillac.
Dad was stationed at Randolph AFB, near San Antonio, when he made captain.
A few days later, he wheeled up in a gleaming, black Coupe DeVille.
We knew of other men and other ranks. We'd see the starched, spotless Air Police wave second
lieutenants through the main gate. At the rock bottom of the system, as careworn and wretched
as their beaten, dark cars, they drove with both hands on the wheel. Second lieutenants were born to walk.
On the next rung were colonels and sergeants. They owned station wagons. We went to school,
games, and on scout trips in station wagons. Leaving the driving to their wives, these old warriors
would stand in the carport and watch us pull out.
But, while we rode in station wagons, we were carried in Cadillacs. Carried past majors and their
eerie obsession for cars that were new, small, uncomfortable and weird. Majors drove Ramblers and Volkswagens.
The only Gogomobile I ever saw was being shown by a proud major to an astonished knot of people
who were gathered around it at the base post office. Intense, strange men were majors.
With the Air Force transferring us every year or so, we did a lot of cross-country traveling in our Cadillac.
We'd leave San Antonio, following the sunset to New Mexico and Arizona with their "Last Gas" and
"Burma Shave" signs. At night, the dark piled up in a wake just outside the cone of our headlights
then swirled back in behind us as we passed.
I pressed my face against the cold glass to watch and wonder at the cities, towns, truck stops,
and finally just the neon eyes of distant windows. Did other chidren sleep out there?
What could they know of first lieutenants and their unique role?
To be transfered to England and return with an MG was apparently the singular purpose
Congress had in mind when the rank of first lieutenant was created. Other duties were only ceremonial.
They wore regulation pilots smoked sun glasses, and spent mornings at the exchange's magazine
rack thumbing through Motor Trend.
A first lieutenant, head high, driving by on an April day, his MG's top and windshield down,
was a splendid sight.
Near the top we put airmen. Clearly the most imaginative. No patriotic airman ever left a car
in its original condition. The magnitude of the planned transition meant nothing. Nor did
completion matter. It was enough, on warm August nights, to stand in line at the base theater
and listen to the airmen sculpt their dreams.
A puzzle, generals were always driven in a staff car. A blunt, Air Force blue four door staff car,
stars on the license plate, the checkered flight line flag snapping importantly from the fender.
Our Cadillac stayed with us all during our tour in Texas, then carried us north, as we moved on again.
Out on the Oklahoma badlands, we watched through the back window one hot, still, summer afternoon,
while Dad hunched over the steering wheel, putting distance between us and the tornadoes that groped
down from a blackened sky. The following winter that Cadillac broke trail for lesser cars that tucked
behind us through a blanketing blizzard outside Goldfield, Nev.
Spring found us in a motel across from the gray, windowless caverns of the Boeing factory at
Wichita, Kansas, while a few months later it was on to Lockbourn Air Force Base in Ohio for fall colors.
The following year the Cadillac carried us south again to the SAC base in Arkansas.
That's where we lost her.
My brother and I were standing in the somber twilight of our garage looking at an impossibility:
a Renault Dauphin. I couldn't fathom the twisted genious it took to produce a car so smugly insecure.
A new friend let his bike fall to the floor.
"Why'd your dad ever trade your Cadillac for that thing?" he asked.
Joe and I knew the cruel progress that brought us here, but this beefy, freckled boy,
having experienced only the town he was born in, could never understand.
Inside our house, Dad sat reading the evening paper.
He had turned on a table lamp.
From his collar glowed the bright gold leaf of a new major.
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