As we endure yet another Spring blizzard, I recall my arrival in this part of the world many years ago. I remember the day well. It was May 17, 1968. I flew into Minot North Dakota wearing shorts and a short sleeve shirt to discover it was snowing. I wondered what planet I had landed on, and what I had gotten myself into. I was nineteen years old, in the Air Force, young, naïve, and lost. I even wrote Senator Javits in New York to get me out of this place. My letter did not work.
I came to be in Minot because the Air Force had promised to show me the world. They did not. I was first sent to San Antonio, Texas, Lackland Air Force Base for basic training. I was barely 18, Jewish and in Texas. Basic training was a kind of reparenting. I was the youngest in my unit and frightened. We were told again and again, “There’s a right way, a wrong way and our way. And our way is the right way.” No questions were allowed. It took me quite awhile to adjust. They shaved our heads, gave us a uniform, and began shouting orders. I was young and scared. What was I doing here? Then I remembered. I had joined the Air force to run away from home and I had succeeded. But where had I landed?
I was transferred next to Biloxi Mississippi, another hub of Jewish activity, for radar training. From there I was sent to a remote isolated radar base in Iceland. After spending a year there, my final assignment for the next two and a half years was Minot.
Stationed at a radar base south of Minot, I did my job as a radar operator but was in truth a New York Jew in North Dakota, a fish out of water with few other fish and not much water around. And I say again, I was young and lost, trying to figure out who I was and what to do with my life.
For all the craziness of the Air Force years, I tip my hat to them. They forced me to grow up. They taught me to make a bed, to shave, to drive a car, most important to be disciplined and to not always think I was right. This was also a time when I acquired many questions about life, faith, war and God.
It’s been quite a trip for this Jewish boy from the Bronx. I ran away from my home, my religion and my community only to return years later and know the place and tradition for the first time. T. S. Eliot was right, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
By the way, while I did not settle down in Minot, I came to love this part of the world, the open skies and beautiful plains, and of course the four uncertain inconsistent indistinct seasons that make up our lovely weather.
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