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Part I: True until Death.

I grew up with O.D. Green. That's the unique color -- Olive Drab -- of U.S. Army uniforms. Fort Campbell, Kentucky, one of the largest Army bases in the nation, sits on the Tennessee/Kentucky border, and I lived in the city outside its gates, Clarksville, Tennessee.

In 1941, when they started construction on what was then known as Camp Campbell, the residents of the rural Clarksville community helped build the base, and, in turn, the Army helped build a city where only an agrarian community had been. Since then, Clarksville’s economy has always relied heavily on the military, but, more importantly, the Army has affected the lives of the civilian locals perhaps even more than the lives of the enlisted personnel. Soldiers complete their enlistments and go back to their hometowns, but the locals live out their lives in the shadow of the U.S. military, and generations have been influenced by it. It has certainly had its affect on me and my family.

The base is enormous, 125,000 acres or so. Huge, dense, perfectly uniform groves of tall pine trees, planted by the Army to obscure the base from public view, grow behind a 20-mile length of chain-link and barbed wire. Most of the back areas of the base are still wilderness and used for training, including massive gunnery ranges and landing areas for the illustrious Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division. Somewhere deep in it all is a mock town that was originally German, but has since been Nicaraguan, Kuwaiti and now, almost certainly, Iraqi, where young soldiers are trained to storm buildings, secure structures and kill from upstairs windows.

In the summer of 1942, the camp received its first personnel: one officer and nineteen enlisted men. By the end of that year, two thousand U.S. sailors were dead on a far-away island; many entombed forever in the mangled wrecks that had been their ships. The nation went to war, and the initial cadre of enlisted men at Ft. Campbell grew into a half dozen armored and infantry divisions, a battalion headquarters, an air-wing, the required commissary and, of course, a Spartan, but sprawling, hospital complex. The town of Clarksville also grew as increasing numbers of civilian support-personnel were required to operate the base so that every available soldier could go "over there."

My grandfather was one of the first civilian employees on the base. My mother was ten years old. The Army provided housing to its civilian workers, but the base had no schools at that time, so my mother spent the school week in town with an aunt, and stayed on the base with her parents on the weekends. My grandfather was a fireman at the airfield, and, as many firemen do, he often stayed at the fire station overnight, leaving my grandmother alone on those school nights when my mother stayed in town.

That all changed when the military police came knocking at my grandmother's door in the middle of the night. Expecting to be given bad news about an injury or accident, she was, instead, asked if she had a gun. When she replied that she did not, the MP’s gave her one. They told her that German prisoners had escaped and were somewhere on the base. They advised her to shoot on sight. She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with the gun on her lap until the sun came up. She never saw the prisoners, nor heard any more about them, but she was ready to move back into town.

Moving would increase living expenses -- so my grandfather applied for a higher-paying job at a secretive new area on the base known only as the "Bird Cage." The Cage itself was a small heavily-guarded compound set inside a larger well-guarded area a dozen square miles or so in size. After receiving a top-secret clearance, he was assigned as a fireman to the high-security area, and for more than forty years afterwards, his family never heard another word about his work.

Because my grandfather was required to stay overnight at his job, it was necessary to take him to work so the family would have transportation. Driving up to the guard shack at the gate offered a glimpse inside the mysterious Bird Cage, but provided no answers. The strange sights, as limited as they were, only raised more questions. The most prominent feature that could be seen through the checkpoint was a large dome-shaped building, covered in a thick metallic paint, which we later learned to be lead.

My grandfather worked at this secretive job as his daughter grew up, and as his grandchildren were born. Eventually, he became Fire Chief. His security clearance provided him with freedom of movement through the base, and no one seemed to mind that he would often drive through the restricted areas with his young grandson in the truck. He never explained anything about the strange things I saw during those rides, but the years have a way of making things known to us, and the secrets, as the Cage itself, weren’t always kept as well as time went by.

By the 60’s, my earliest recollection, the lead-domed building looked decrepit and a little insidious. The restricted areas surrounding the Cage were wild and overgrown, a stark contrast to the military-issued, immaculately-manicured grounds on the rest of the base. In several places, lush Tennessee flora tried to retake the steep slopes where enormous steel doors, each at least two stories high, had been set into the hillsides. Outside the monstrous doors stood two cement structures. Both were big enough to hold only one man at a time, and each had open slots on all sides, at about eye-level, sized right to aim and fire a weapon. Tall grass had long since invaded and become the occupying force.

While we never learned the exact nature of my grandfather’s work, we now know that atomic weapons were researched and built in the Bird Cage during World War II and for many years afterwards. The most dangerous work was done inside the lead dome. The interiors of our Tennessee hills provided secure storage, and the earnest workers from the local community offered to the base an even more important layer of protection. They were honest in their work, and loyal to their neighbors, even the enormous governmental one.

My grandfather eventually retired, but he was always called Chief and was true to his oath of secrecy until death. I learned a lot about honor and loyalty from that sweet old guy, and that has been much more valuable than any possible secrets still hidden in the Cage.

Part II: The Moon Always Shining.

As a kid in grade school in the 60’s, I knew there was another war going on, but the concept was, and should be, lost on a child. The Army was nothing more than a job that employed the fathers of many of my friends and classmates. I knew that soldiers went away for long periods of time, but they seemed to do that during peace time too. I listened, uninterested, as Walter Cronkite gave the day’s casualty tally and showed black & white images of things I didn’t really understand. My parents always looked sad and worried when the news was on.

When we rode our bikes though the neighborhood, or played in the hay fields, or followed the paths we'd blazed through the woods to the creek, the cave, or to whichever place might be the destination of boys' adventures, we barely noticed the distant rumble of artillery shells or the constant overhead presence of military aircraft. Many of my friends' fathers were in the Army. Military families lived all around us. The sons of soldiers and the lawns of soldiers shared the same severe flat-top cut, maintained mostly by the wives of soldiers, who took on the primary responsibility of raising the family while their spouses went to war.

The locals helped whenever they could. Children of military families became part of our families as kids befriended each other. They slept over often. They came along on family outings. The local parents felt a sense of responsibility to these military children, and to their parents. In another town, these people, many with odd-sounding accents, would have been considered outsiders. That was not the case in my community. I didn’t fully understand why at the time, but I was growing up in a place where the adults showed genuine love and concern for each other, regardless of their physical or social differences.

Our third-grade class had quite a few military kids. Some military went to the schools that had eventually been built on the base, but just as many attended public schools in the area. Military kids were sometimes difficult for the teachers because they’d been toughened by frequent moves from school to school. They didn’t have the expected level of fear for the elderly ladies that taught us in Clarksville, Tennessee. The kids were often willful and ornery; cut-ups and clowns, and I found myself drawn to them like a magnet. That is, until the arrival of Mark Charneski. He ruined everything.

Mark was an extremely bright and well-behaved kid from a military family. He was a handsome lad as well, and the teachers adored him. That was one of the many reasons we disliked him so. Not only did he always know the answer to the teacher’s questions, but he always seemed completely enthralled with the subject matter, and asked insightful and inquisitive questions that obviously pleased the teacher, but caused us to give him the stink-eye. One day he raised his hand and asked Mrs. Franklin, “Since we know the moon is not made of glass or metallic materials, how does it reflect light?”

I looked at him with disgust, then immediately turned to the teacher, secretly anxious to hear her response.

She cocked her head to the side just a bit, and smiled the type of adoring smile that neither I nor my friends had ever seen from her before. We thought he was the devil.

She went to her desk and pulled out a flashlight and tennis ball.

She flipped off the overhead lights, and lowered the Venetian blinds. She took her place in front of the class and shined the light on the ball.

It glowed. She explained the nature of light waves to us and taught us about celestial orbits. She had planned this lesson for a little later in the year, she said, but couldn’t resist showing us once Mark had asked. It was typical.

When the holidays rolled around, we were given a short list of four or five books and told to pick one to read during the break. We thought it was the most horrible torture to read a book over Christmas break, but Mark Charneski read them all. I was convinced he wasn’t human. I swore that he would be my eternal enemy.

One day I was shooting a BB gun with a friend from up the street, I took aim at a mailbox and fired off a shot, denting it with a “ping,” and chipping off some paint to boot. The elderly man of the house saw it through his kitchen window and came out yelling. He demanded to know my name and where I lived so he could contact my parents. I told him my name was Mark Charneski, and gave him the name of the street where Mark lived. I never knew if the man contacted the Charneski family, but I was proud of myself and felt that I was somehow vindicated after the thing with the tennis ball.

Our matronly principal, Mrs. Powers, had been a teacher for generations before becoming an administrator. She was tall and sturdy, with blue eyes and horn-rimmed spectacles. She wore clunky orthopedic shoes, and had posted on the bulletin board in the teacher’s lounge a new version of a popular poem that began, “I think that I shall never see a thing as ugly as a knee.” Despite her prudence, she loved her children. She never seemed very menacing as a principal, which emboldened the more mischievous among us, and she always seemed entertained by us, even when we were sent to her office.

Not that Mark Charneski would ever know.

One day in class, I noticed her looking through the small window in the classroom door. There was something about it – about her, the look on her face – that wasn’t right. She looked sick, and she stood outside looking in for several moments before opening the door.

She came in and whispered something to our teacher. She then asked Mark Charneski to come with her. We watched him walk out of the classroom, and our teacher told us that his father had been killed in Vietnam.

As Mark Charneski followed that poor woman through the door, the innocence of his classmates went with him. In exchange, our eyes were suddenly opened. We had a new awareness of the world, an insight into the realities of war. The weight of what had been happening around us suddenly sunk in. It was an important step toward adulthood, and that sad gift from a fatherless boy is still as important to me today as knowing the reasons why the moon shines in the sky.

We never saw Mark again after that day, but I did see Mrs. Powers’ face at the window twice more. Those times, those children, were just as sad and tragic, but the day that Mark left taught me something beyond the tragedy of war. From him I learned how wrong it is to let our own insecurities turn into hatred for others.

He’d done nothing to any of us. He was just different, but we never gave him a chance. In a moment that day, I went from disliking him, to feeling compassion, and sympathy…and shame for myself.

I’ve often thought of him over the years.

I’ve wondered about his life after he shut the classroom door behind him and walked away forever. I’ve tried to imagine how he reacted when they told him, and how Mrs. Powers contained her own heartbreak. I’ve wondered about the rest of his fatherless life, and what kind of person he turned out to be. I wish I could tell him how sorry I am for his dad, and the BB gun and everything else. I wish I could explain how that moment in our childhood opened my eyes and my heart, and even helped me understand the kind of devotion that kept the secrets from crossing my grandfather’s lips as long as his breath still did. I will never know how the loss of his dad affected Mark, but I do know how it affected me.

I am a better man today because of that unfortunate boy’s tragedy. It’s sad that he will never know this, but thanks to him I now understand that even when the night-sky overhead is black, the moon still shines its light down brightly somewhere, on someone.

Now, after all these years, I find myself at the front of the classroom, teaching enlisted men and women at Ft. Campbell. They take college courses at night. The degree helps them advance in rank. Most of them are new parents, and they work amazingly hard to build better lives for their families. I am taken by how young they are; just kids, really. They come from rural communities, economically-depressed areas and blighted inner-cities.

Yes, they are patriots, but many of them join the military, especially in times of peace, for the opportunity to have a career, an avocation, that will help them provide for their families. I’ve only lost one of my students so far in the war, and I suppose I should consider that somehow lucky.

I can’t help but think about the third-graders though. Which kid will be summoned tomorrow out of the classroom and into a whirlwind of grief and loss? It’s true that I gained something important from a child’s tragedy, but I would gladly give back that lesson, and hope to learn it another day, if I could only freeze the moment just before that sad face looks through the schoolroom door.