In 2000, when I was 51, Rob Branting, a young man from Lincoln, Nebraska, had just turned 15. The flip of the numbers of our ages 20 years ago is more than just an idle curiosity...it signifies the spread of years between us and a place we both love--one of us loving it for having lived in that place when it represented one of the front lines of the Cold War, and one of us discovering that place--uncovering that place, really--out of the mists of a bygone era and making it live again, if only on paper and in the hearts of the remaining few of us who lived in that halcyon time.
The place I loved, the place Rob resurrected for my memory and for the memories of so many other men and women who are now, ourselves, fading in the grass, was Lincoln Air Force Base, a living, breathing, beautiful bastion of Cold War power placed deep in the heart of our country. The remains of the base which sparked Rob's imagination and caused him to embark on a 20-year journey to capture every historical and human interest detail about the base, were not remains to me when I was 15...it was alive then, it was a part of me and I of it.
It is no secret to my family and lifelong friends that I have had an ongoing love affair with the Lincoln AFB I knew as a teenager, the air base that was washed blue-white under the vast Nebraska skies, the base where grasshoppers the size of your hand would cling to the window screens on hot summer days, the base where towering lines of thunderstorms a hundred miles to the west could be seen marching toward the state capitol with its golden dome and sower statue visible from the back yard of my house.
But it was also a base where B-47 flight crews waited on around-the-clock alert for the first signs of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a base that supported the men who waited deep underground at the missile sites scattered across the Nebraska plains...knowing that when the order came to insert their keys and launch their Atlas missiles, there would be no base to come home to, nor any family left to mourn them.
It was a base where everyday family life tried hard to be normal, but which we all knew was still a base capable of visiting great destruction on our counterpart families half-way around the world. Conversely, we also knew that once the klaxons blared a true warning, and the planes took off, and the missiles departed their hiding holes, no duck-and-cover drill would save us from the pure white flashes sure to come in about 20 minutes.
So many memories; so many images; so much love for a place that has been transformed and moved on.
Yesterday, I received two copies of Rob's wonderful book, "A Mighty Force for Peace: A History of the Former Lincoln Air Force Base."
In one of the books, Rob wrote, "Jim, It has been an honor to help preserve the history that your father contributed so much to. Thank you." No, Rob...Thank you.
I cannot praise Rob enough for this thorough, insightful book. He honors thousands of men and women whom he never knew--was not alive to know at the peak of our journey--and as Veterans Day approaches, I can't think of a better volume of military history to read than this one. Rob dedicates the book to his late father, a Vietnam veteran who encouraged Rob to take this trip into Lincoln's history.
On the cover of the book is a photograph of a B-47 Stratojet lifting off from Lincoln's 12,000' runway, on its last flight in the service of peace. There is a man in uniform saluting that B-47. He is my dad, Colonel Clifford James Moore, Jr, at the time the commander of the 98th Strategic Aerospace Wing, an arm of the Strategic Air Command (SAC).
SAC had sent Pop to Lincoln once before, in 1961, when he became the base commander. We left for a tour of duty at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, and then returned to Lincoln in 1965 when my dad took command of the 98th SAW, with the orders to close the base by 1966. It was a bittersweet tour, that one.
As we celebrate Veterans Day tomorrow, let us give thanks once again to the men and women who preserved our freedoms in the heat of combat, or in the loneliness of a missile silo, or beneath the waves in submarines. I will be giving special thanks to the Cold War warriors who stood the lonely night watch around the country at bases like Lincoln and on US bases around the world so that the rest of us could sleep in peace.
I will give Rob Branting the final word, from his book:
"The veterans of Lincoln Air Force Base around me were not as historically celebrated in books and magazines as the veterans of World War II. It seemed funny considering that their work during the Cold War, in my mind, deserved a great deal of respect and understanding than what seemed to exist at the time. Such movies as The Battle of the Bulge, Saving Private Ryan, The Longest Day, among the others that celebrated the heroism of World War II. Any movie pertaining to World War III, like the Terminator series, On the Beach, and The Day After, portrays a nuclear exchange in nightmarish terms, and rightfully so. To many veterans of the Cold War, the whole point was to avoid a new world war, and some credit should be given to them."
Rob Branting has done just that, and A Mighty Force for Peace is a gift to all of us who will never forget the service, sacrifice, and honor of those who have worn the nation's uniform.
As we celebrate Veterans Day tomorrow, let us give thanks once again to the men and women who preserved our freedoms in the heat of combat, or in the loneliness of a missile silo, or beneath the waves in submarines. I will be giving special thanks to the Cold War warriors who stood the lonely night watch around the country at bases like Lincoln and on US bases around the world so that the rest of us could sleep in peace.
I will give Rob Branting the final word, from his book:
"The veterans of Lincoln Air Force Base around me were not as historically celebrated in books and magazines as the veterans of World War II. It seemed funny considering that their work during the Cold War, in my mind, deserved a great deal of respect and understanding than what seemed to exist at the time. Such movies as The Battle of the Bulge, Saving Private Ryan, The Longest Day, among the others that celebrated the heroism of World War II. Any movie pertaining to World War III, like the Terminator series, On the Beach, and The Day After, portrays a nuclear exchange in nightmarish terms, and rightfully so. To many veterans of the Cold War, the whole point was to avoid a new world war, and some credit should be given to them."
Rob Branting has done just that, and A Mighty Force for Peace is a gift to all of us who will never forget the service, sacrifice, and honor of those who have worn the nation's uniform.
