Tribute to a Dad

Clifford James Moore Jr. 1921-2003

Fifteen years ago today, February 17, 2003, our home in Alexandria, Virginia, was surrounded by 16 inches of snow, a record for that date. The temperature was in the low 20s, and the wind was out of the Northeast, gusting to 26 mph. Our north-facing living room windows shook with each freezing blast, and the cold seeped in wherever it could find a crack. My wife and I and our two dogs were waiting out the storm, humans and beasts sharing a nervous discomfort that did not yet have a name, but which was about to make itself known in stark mortal terms.

Sixty miles away, on a small 25-acre plot of land, in a house overlooking a modest lake, my father was dying. He had been ill for many years, the victim of diabetes and glaucoma and other ailments which had evaporated his mobility and drained his once-impeccable mind. For the previous several years, I, and a team of care givers, had been his constant companions, tending to those needs that frighten all of us who are still upright and in touch with our minds.   

But when pop was upright and in touch with his mind, he was a wonder.

           He was a pilot.  He was a Group Commander or a Base Commander or a Wing Commander or a Division Commander.  He was a pilot who did these other jobs as they came along;  Orders from the Secretary, approved by a General, passed on to a Colonel, handed over to a Captain, written up by a clerk somewhere down a corridor, within a bay,  off a ring around the Pentagon.  

         My mother was religious about keeping pictures – wicker baskets full of dog-eared Kodak booklets, their bright yellow, plastic spiral-bound covers, stained with countless fingerings,  ball-point pen marks and occasional jelly or drool smears.  Faded, hazy Kodachrome slides -- their dyes deteriorating,  their images yielding to time.  Box-camera prints -- some with corrugated edges, others, less sturdy,  brittle and cracking -- spill out of the baskets, distributing themselves -- and the years --  haphazardly across the carpet.

          The pictures, slices of time, like lifelines to the past, take the place of memory and are my mother's best effort to maintain some semblance of family history as we slid from one continent to the next, pack-ratting our way across the Atlantic.  Pressed into the bottom of the baskets are manila envelopes containing official documents in silver halide.  Glossy eight-by-tens of the aviator in his various ranks; it is with these that I have attempted to extrapolate his life.  

         There is the West Point cadet in parade dress...handsome, eager, fire in the eyes.  A gunman on the skeet range, a champion.  There is the student pilot...rolling inverted in an open cockpit, engine roaring, flying wires singing in the bitter, thrilling wind.  The student becomes a professional...but not yet a killer.  Pictures of P-38's in echelon over California's San Joaquin Valley in 1944,  their twin-boom empennages reflected one after the other,  guns and cannon in the nose, earnest faces, hidden by masks and Lockheed sunglasses, peer through the perspex.  Father or fantasy?   Eight by tens of a fighter base in England, snaps of his planes, Uninvited I and Uninvited II, and a young (choose one:  lieutenant;  captain; major) posed (choose another one:  smiling in the cockpit; seriously in the cockpit; casually, by a propeller; formally with ground crew in front of the plane).  Shards of time. 

       In one basket I found a snow scene.  There were fir trees laden with heavy white cloaks in the middle of a driving storm, the suggestion of a balcony in the foreground, and a curious, latticed construction half-buried in mid-drift. I asked him once about the picture; I'd found it in his den, but he didn't recall the place...or the time.  Perhaps an officers' club.  He was an existential artist with a Rolleiflex camera and a Weston light meter.  Wicker baskets.  Pictures of a man moving through the world of rank and privilege.  Glossies of the clear-eyed, goggles-on-top-of-the-head Major.  Glossies of the just-come-home Major.  Glossies of the new Lieutenant Colonel.  Glossies of the new Colonel.  

         The pictures don't show it, but he smoked.  Back from a mission, once again a survivor, he stayed in the cockpit.  I think it was the one where flak ripped into the cooling system -- a dicey ride home not knowing if the fan would seize then and there.  Maybe it was from his first one-on-one combat -- a quick burst of the cannon as machines careened through four dimensions, passing one another in both a moment and an eternity -- one machine disassembling, the other escaping. I can't remember all the stories, but he stayed in the cockpit because his legs were shaking.  A crew chief stuck a Camel in Pop's mouth and his legs worked again.  By the time he was 24, he'd become the old man.  I suppose it was the last time he was young.

         He wrote letters home.  Poetry in V-Mail.  The letters were collected and bound in gilt-edged leather.  Letters to Liz.  Letters to Jim.  He is a charmer with his narrative.  I lived his first mission and his last. I read words of endearment I will never hear him repeat. His daughter is born.  He kills a man. Then several more. A certain number of heartbeats and he will be home. Mom and Pop seemed closer then, five thousand miles apart, than I remember ever seeing them when they were together.  It is not a subject to dwell on.

        He was a military public relations man's dream. In the wicker baskets I once found pictures of the wedding reception at Chasen’s – a fancy restaurant near Hollywood. There were lots of cigarettes, slightly boozy, dull-eyed stars, screenwriters, producers and assorted hangers-on assembled for the pleasure of the bride and groom. Pop looked very much out of place.

         I’ve already opened the door on my father’s contributions to my life – you met him when I was five, in my story Major Sevenths–  but there is more to know about him than what you have seen so far. He was 81 when he died, alone without his wife, nearly blind, unable to care for himself.

          A rotating staff of nurses tended to his needs – bathing him, changing him, medicating him, cooking for and feeding him. His days were spent in his den, either watching television – which he mostly heard since his vision was almost gone – or listening to the music of his younger days – big bands, Gene Krupa, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, Peggy Lee, Ray Conniff, Benny Goodman, and patriotic marches. He had a special affection for movie musicals, and I have known him to watch My Fair Lady from sunrise to sunset, crying at the sad parts, laughing at the humor, and mouthing the words to all the lyrics.

        He was easy prey for telemarketers and television hucksters; he once spent $7,000 on a gutter replacement scam we knew nothing about until after the workmen left. He ordered “commemorative” coins or kitchen gadgets for which the staff or his family had no practical use. We found out about them when the FEDEX or UPS couriers dropped them off.  He could do those things up to the last half-year of his life because he fancied that he had a sound mind and knew perfectly well what he wanted – he just didn’t give a damn about he cost or the practicality of his actions.

         His care alone set his rapidly diminishing estate back about $200,000 per year – but he didn’t give a rat’s ass and he angered quickly when it was pointed out that the money he was spending was not actually his, but rather the remnants of a trust that belonged to his wife, intended to be handed down, and not necessarily discharged like Niagara into the waiting coffers of the nursing agency.

I often pointed out that his pension – his legitimate work product – would be sufficient to support him in any one of a number of excellent nursing facilities, including one tailor-made for Air Force retirees.

        I used to tell him, “Pop, this is a place where everybody is Air Force and the care is as good as you’re getting right here.”

“Just get me a gun.”

“What?”

“Just get me a gun, because if you think I’m ready for a home, I’d rather shoot myself.”

“Pop, all I’m saying is you’re rapidly running out of money – you’ve got to plan for what’s going to happen when it’s all gone.”

“How much do I have?”

“About $800,000, more or less.”

“I heard it was more than a million.”

“It was once, Pop. When it was more. Now, it’s $800,000, which is less.”

“Fine, then I’ve got enough for a while.”

“A while, at your current rate, Pop, is four years.”

“The doctor says I’ve got at least ten years in me.”

“That’s great, Dad…I don’t doubt it. But do you see the problem?”

“Which is?”

“Which is six years of no money.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that when the money is gone, in four years, it will be a bit too late to decide where to go. I’ve told you we will modify our house and build a room for you, and that’s the best I can come up with.”

“I’m not leaving here until I’m dead.”

“I’m not sure that’s an option, Pop.”

“Get me a gun.”

         We would go through that exercise regularly, and I sometimes think he got more mileage out of my frustration than he deserved.  I was comforted by the fact that all the handguns in the house were trapped inside a big brown box, wrapped many times in tape, and stored on a top shelf far beyond his reach should his wheel chair ever be so inclined to roll that way.

         We were all baffled when my father retired after 30 years in the military, and made a very clear decision not to work another day in his life. He was relatively young – 52 – and there were a number of aerospace and consulting firms that were wooing him to accept an executive position in what was fast-becoming the foundation of the high-tech future.  This was back in a time when the term “Silicone Valley” referred to the cleavage between the boobs of Playboy Bunnies, starlets, and strippers.

         For years we – family, friends, West Point classmates, and former colleagues – speculated on the real cause of my dad’s intransigence to even remotely consider stepping into a private sector vice-presidency. As a colonel, his salary was adequate within the military world. However, it was but a pittance when placed on a scale of potential corporate earnings, especially in the space-applications market, the electronic engineering fields and the emergent computing technology firms. One of my father’s oldest friends, a former Air Force colleague, who, like my dad, retired as a colonel, took a leadership post at TRW, the huge California-based aerospace company. He walked out of the Air Force with a respectable five-figure salary, and into TRW and a serious six-figure introductory income. Within five years, what with stock options and advances in position, my father’s friend was a millionaire twice over and was calling my dad begging him to come to the coast to partake of the excitement and rewards. The answer was always ‘no,’ and if pressed to explain it, he’d just say he was happy being a “gentleman farmer,” and that was that. The truth was not even close.

         He was a West Pointer who became a fighter pilot, a spy, a bomber pilot, and a retiree all in 30 years. Once he left the service, he never looked back – but he also never looked forward. A bullheaded stoic, he would refuse treatment for any injury short of a torn-off limb, and he had a maddening habit of half-smiling through adversity. “I love you” was not in his daily lexicon – not that he didn’t say it, he just didn’t say it much and, more often than not, he preferred to respond to an incoming “I love you” with, “Me too.”  I rarely got a rise out of him despite my many unplanned attempts, including one that involved his favorite typewriter and a can of extra-hold hair spray. What he would do was to become quiet. Very quiet. Don’t-even-go-there quiet. And then he would utter those five words that would just slay me every time: “I’m very disappointed in you.” 

        It took me years to shovel out the manure under which the truth was buried – but then, the crap the covered the truth had been accreting for at least 30 years. He was the son of a World War I Cavalry officer, born on an Army post in the south, mostly raised there except for a stint in the Philippines as a young boy. He was educated at a mix of schools and was never really an outstanding scholar, but he never fell below the middle of the academic list either. He managed to get into West Point after failing his first set of entrance exams.

       He was a loner as a kid, preferring to spend time building model planes, fiddling with the aerodynamics of wings, seeing what would and wouldn’t work. He could spend hours whittling away on a slab of balsa or gopher wood until just the right airfoil emerged from the once-featureless block.

          His persistence for perfection contributed to his pursuit of an engineering degree; his first school of choice was Georgia Tech, but the university’s aviation program couldn’t match West Point’s. The regimented world of the “Trade School,” as my father reverently referred to the Military Academy, suited my dad to a T. “Yes Sir,” No Sir,” “No excuse, Sir,” were mantras that kept my father’s life on a steady keel, and allowed him no margin for experimentation with anything outside the bounds of perfection as defined in the West Point handbook. Failure was never an option, and success was always taken for granted. That same pursuit of perfection worked like an acid on the lives of his children.

         Like so many Norman Rockwell kids of the 1930s, my dad had a devoted dog, Buddy. Buddy was a German shepherd and Buddy was a legend. On three occasions, Buddy either saved my father’s life, or certainly kept my dad from serious harm’s way. The first time, Buddy got between my father and a cottonmouth snake; the second time, he ran interference when Pop wandered into a bull’s pasture; and the third time, Buddy launched himself at my dad and knocked him out of the way of an oncoming car.  Buddy took the hit from the car and suffered massive injuries. My father had most of his right ear torn off as Buddy slammed into him, but the ear was stitched back; Buddy was not so easily repaired. When the veterinarian suggested Buddy be put down, my father’s father said “No. This dog saved my son’s life – now you save his life.”  Buddy pulled through and lived another five years. There would be another Buddy in my father’s life…and the outcome of that relationship would haunt my father forever.

         There aren’t too many other childhood stories about my dad; it’s not that there weren’t any; kids are kids and they do kid things despite circumstances. But my dad, in all the years I knew him, seemed to have relegated his youth to a packing box, heavily taped, and stored in a musty repository far from his willing consciousness. If he had boyhood friends, their names are lost to him. Did he have a youthful crush on some freckle-faced little girl? He couldn’t recall. Could he have possibly engaged in some risky but harmless prank of youth? I think so, but I’d have to make one up, because he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, go there. On the other hand, his reluctance to dowse for memories is completely consistent with his embrace of military regimen, which rewards the transient life with virtually no opportunities for concrete experiences to set; they remain permanently impermanent. You can lift the plastic sheeting that protects them years later and find they are still wet to the touch – easily capable of taking a new impression, or of being smoothed over again and again.

         Pop frequently listened to big band music whenever I’d drop in for a visit. One day, a Sousa march, the Thunderer, was pouring out of the speakers in all its patriotic glory.  I turned around and watched him as the music swelled – the proud warrior no longer on the reviewing stand, no longer returning the salutes of hundreds of airmen in their parade dress as they passed beneath his gaze.  No more would the formations of B-47s or B-52s grace the air above a base under his command.

          I have a picture of him in his West Point parade uniform. No cadet ever looked sharper; no cadet’s eyes ever shone as brightly with the light of patriotism.  The man I saw in the recliner was that same man, the sharpness of physical stature had been dulled by disease, but the clarity of vision…the light was still there. 

         Many years would go by before I learned most of the truth about my father’s career. He didn’t advance beyond colonel, not, as he rationalized it, because he wouldn’t play the Air Force’s political games – real as they were – but because he couldn’t. He didn’t have the guile for politics or the vision to see beyond the obvious. He also had no feel for what he could have contributed. His performance ratings throughout his career were top-notch, and by the 1960s, the Air Force was clearly grooming him for his first star. In July, 1960, a month before he turned 39, Pop’s rating officer wrote, “…I consider him an excellent potential for a Wing Commander in SAC. Colonel Moore is also ideally suited for air attaché work.” One year later, his evaluation included this: “All of this combined to move his new unit from last in 2^nd Air Force and SAC, to second in 2^nd Air Force and third in SAC in the space of one quarter…Definite wing commander potential.” The accolades continued into 1962: “Colonel Moore is an affable and immaculate officer…He is an excellent emissary of the Air Force.” In 1963, he was on his way to bigger things, reflected in his rating officer’s entry for that year: “His ability here has led to his selection to command Barksdale Air Force Base, the home of Headquarters Second Air Force.” 

         Once we got to Barksdale, Pop did a bang-up job there as well, getting kudos from high command within 6 months of his arrival: “Barksdale is noted as one of the finest appearing and cleanest bases in the Strategic Air Command. Colonel Moore’s organization of the elements of the base command has achieved this result…This officer has great potential for command and should be considered for a wing commander position…I consider him general officer potential at this time.” By 1965, Pop had, indeed, been moved upstream, leaving base administration behind, and taking on the responsibilities of a vice-wing commander in SAC, at Barksdale, where B-52s and KC-135s reigned supreme just as the air war in Vietnam was heating up. Although half the wing flew over to Southeast Asia, Pop’s half remained at Barksdale, gearing up for deployment. He’d done his job well enough to merit a second vice-wing command, returning us to Lincoln in late 1965. Just before he departed, my father received his last evaluation at Barksdale. In that evaluation, Pop’s immediate boss wrote, “Colonel Moore is intelligent, adaptable to new situations, and exhibits an unusual ability to foresee and anticipate requirements. He has been selected to assume command of a SAC wing at another station. It has been my pleasure to have been associated with this outstanding and dedicated officer.”  

           It was with great interest that this file entry referred to my father getting the full wing command job, when, in fact, the job was a repeat of his vice-wing command at a base of lesser stature than Barksdale, and a base that was going to be eliminated from the SAC inventory within six months of my father’s arrival. And yet…he did what he always seemed to do, as reflected in these January, 1966 comments from SAC headquarters: “Colonel Moore impresses me as that rare breed – the officer who does everything well. His personal standards of conduct and performance are high, and he has the happy ability to motivate his subordinates to match his standards. His brand of leadership produces a tightly knit, family-type organization in which outstanding results are the nor, the atmosphere is cheerful, and panic is unknown. The past three months presented a challenge which few commanders are better qualified to accept than Col. Moore: the accelerated phase-out of a B-47 wing and associated support activities. His planning was accurate, his execution precise. During this difficult period, Col. Moore’s personal imprint appeared on every facet of the project…I believe that his promotion to the grade of Brigadier General would be in the best interests of the Air Force.”  Not just SAC, mind you… but the Air Force…the big show. This particular recommendation was shared by a three-star general who had known my father for years. Short of Curtis LeMay signing off on the order, my father was as close to a shoo-in for his first star as any 45-year-old colonel could get.

By the fall of 1967, having not been officially recommended for an operational command, Pop focused his attention on finishing out his last five years before retirement in Washington, and not a word more of flying or field command was ever mentioned in any of his subsequent evaluations.

I think he was, at heart, an honest country boy, the Tennessee roots were deep. 

Now, on February 17, 2003, my father was dying. We knew—my wife and I—that it was important for us to see him, to get out to the country house and be with him, to tell him we loved him, to escort him through those last moments in the company of family. But the weather was cruel and unyielding. We’d gotten a call from his nurse earlier in the day letting us know that his end was in sight, and it was our mission to be there, to move whatever drifts were between us and him and hug him, talk to him, comfort him.

As the blizzard drove relentlessly on, we got in my big Expedition, me, my wife, and our dogs, and dove into the storm, angling to the Northwest, driving into the teeth of a weather system that had no mercy. We were not able to drive more than 20 miles—less than half the distance to the country house—before it was clear we would either be lost in some off-the-road trench, or stranded on a snow-swept highway. We had to turn around and go home. I think even the dogs were crying.

By the time we pulled into the driveway, our hearts were darker than the descending night. I called the country house to explain we could not get there…tears streaming down my face, frustration vibrating in every bone and muscle. The nurse, herself stranded in the house with a fellow caregiver and my father’s dog, let us know that my father was comfortable and in his favorite chair in his den. The hour was late, the storm raging unabated. We hung up and waited.

The phone rang late in the night…I cannot recall the hour. It was his nurse, and pop had only minutes left. She held the phone to his ear and we said our goodbyes and I-love-yous, and then he was gone.

The snow continued. It was February 17, 2003. Good night Pop.