My Dad Sarge
His friends call him “Norm”. His grandkids call him “PaPaw”. His children call him “Dad” and when he is a bit tough, driving us hard or we feel sentimental, we call him “Sarge” — short for Technical Sergeant Norman O. Tumlinson, United States Air Force.
You see, my dad (like every vet I have ever met) is heavily defined by his military service. They are soldiers. It is not something they did. It is not a job they held. It is who they Are. It is a unique and obviously powerfully transforming experience that in every case has changed them and their lives forever.
And you can see it in them. Vets are different than other people. Frontline or support, they carry themselves differently than the rest of us. It is as if they entered the service as one person and came out another, and that is the person who they are the rest of their lives.
My dad of course was not always Sarge. The pictures of him as he entered the Air Force in 1951 are of a handsome young guy (with all his hair) who has a bit of a dash and swagger to him. He signed up in San Angelo and was sent like most recruits to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio to basic training, where they take the swagger and cockiness of kids just rolling out of their teens and turn it into something solid, a maturing process like the annealing of steel from raw metal.
Aiming at becoming an aircraft mechanic in the Tactical Air Command he was selected for electrical training, which was to be his field for the rest of his time in the service. He soon found himself in England at Woodbridge /Bentwaters AFB working on F-84 fighter bombers. It was in this period he met my mother at a dance and like so many American GIs brought home a new soon to be US citizen.
This was the height of the Cold War and he was sent to work in the Strategic Air Command at Offutt AFB in Nebraska, home of the famous command center and flying command posts. I recall that time, during alerts, as he would grab his gear and be gone, or we would find ourselves doing duck and cover exercises as sirens wailed. A scary period to be sure, but somehow, being a military kid in a military family, I never felt any fear…that’s just how it is in that world. Yes Sir, Can Do. That’s not just the attitude of the soldiers, it’s the whole family, for if your father or mother is in the military, in a way, so are you.
Often he had to go away on Tours of Duty (TDY) for months or more. I recall in that period he was chosen as part of an elite group to be sent by President Kennedy to help train the Air Force of Emperor Haile Selasie. The pictures he sent back were amazing, and it was only later in life that I realized just how incredible it must have been. (He and his team trained over a hundred flight line electricians they were only supposed to train a couple dozen.) When they finished the Emperor gave them each a gold medallion, which is a family treasure to this day. (This story also makes me an instant celebrity with every Rastafarian I meet…)
By this time the war in Vietnam was heating up. He came back and we shipped to Bergstrom AFB in Austin, where he became expert on the venerable B-52s. Next it was off to March AFB in California and he went off to Guam in the Pacific, supporting missions from there over North Vietnam. Back in California then and he became the quality control inspector for the base’s flightline. He then turned around and went to Thailand for an extended tour, in support of F-4 Phantoms flying recon and combat in the war.
In that theater he came into as close contact as most support personnel do with the realities of combat, dealing with damaged aircraft and crews as they returned, fixing them back up and turning them around sometimes in mere hours. Again, he never talked about it, but it must have been an intense time, as became clear only a few years ago at Christmas when my brothers and I gave him a large die cast replica of one of a Phantom for his book cae. He opened the box carefully and held the beautiful model in his hands as tears came to his eyes and he began to speak of the heroes he knew who had flown those missions, some of whom never came back.
It was during our time in California that I finally “got” something very important about the military. You see, like most kids I was enamoured of the frontline soldiers and pilots, and jealous of my friend son base whose dads were jet pilots and aces. I felt at times a little sad my dad wasn’t one of them, that somehow we were second class, that he was just a supporting player and all the glory went to others. Until something happened that changed my understanding, and shifted my view of the entire military.
It was the summer of 1968 or so and dad and my little brother were out camping as part of the YMCA Indian Guides sponsored by the base. While up in the mountains my brother was bitten by a rattle snake. As they raced back to the base my dad sucked out the venom and used his hands as a tourniquet and probably save his life, as it was serious bite and he was just a little kid.
Unfortunately, the base hospital didn’t have the right anti-venom available, meaning he might lose his hand. What I didn’t know and didn’t understand until much later was that to save him a fighter jet in Alaska was scrambled to carry a vial of the precious liquid to California. Within hours the medicine arrived and his hand was saved.
He told me back then that the military takes care of its own. But I didn’t know what that really meant. I certainly didn’t get the bigger meaning of what had happened, until one day a couple of years later when I was talking to the base Commander in England, a well known jet pilot and my best friend’s father about the incident. I said I couldn’t believe they had done that just for a Sergeant’s kid.
The commander smiled and said: “Son, the Air Force isn’t just us pilots. Those guys who flew that medicine to save your brother did it because they know who puts them in the air and keeps them there — and that is your dad. We’re a team. Without him and his crew out there on the flightline we don’t fly. We may get the glory, but he is our hero.”
I never felt bad about his job again after that. You see the US military is a team. The finest, most highly trained and cohesive fighting force in the history of the world. It is a finely tuned machine with a million moving parts, and each is critical. Whether on the front lines, driving a computer or driving a tank, wielding a gun or a wrench, they are a team. No one moves, no one wins without everyone doing their job. The aces and combat soldiers may be the “tip of the Spear” but there is no spear without the hundreds and thousands of other soldiers who make it fly and strike home.
After dad came back from the war we went to England, where he continued to work on F-4s at Alconbury AFB. He went on other tours of duty, for example to Athens, Greece, in support of aircraft shadowing the Soviet Fleet. Little did we know, when he retired in 1974 that we would end up in Athens, Texas.
Here he worked at my uncle’s Phantom Boat company, the Salesmanship Club and eventually became County Commissioner for a term. He is known around town, works at the Food Pantry my mother helped start and is a very serious member of Kiwanis. He is a nice guy, someone you might say hello to at WalMart or run into at the auto parts store, and he looks just like any senior citizen wearing a baseball cap and a smile.
But to us he is still “Sarge”. It is a name we used as kids, sometimes out of frustration when he pushed us to excel, to work hard and be honourable, but now it is used out of respect, and said with a smile.
Yet to my family and I he is a hero. He is an American soldier. He is a Vet.
He’s Dad. And yes, he is and always will be Sarge.
Note — I published this back in 2011 on Memorial Day for his small home town paper “The Athens Review”…. The writing is a little rough, but I thought I’d post it for fun. At 87 he’s still Dad (and Sarge).
