Thirty-eight years, three more hours, and the people worth the drive
A couple of weeks ago, my CS-32 squadron mate Joe from the Air Force Academy reached out to me on LinkedIn with news that a few of the Roadrunners were getting together for a mini reunion near Dulles. I was already committed to emceeing a prayer breakfast that Friday morning, so I knew I would miss the first part, but I wasn't going to miss all of it. Six of us had said yes, and I had not seen most of these people since graduation.
Saturday I drove two hours to Joe's house in Herndon, pulled into the driveway, and found nobody home. I checked the first text thread, and sure enough, I was sitting at his home address. Then I checked the second thread and found a Maryland address. Surprise! They had all gone to his other house. Our squadron motto is Catch Us If You Can, and the Roadrunners were living up to it!
I thought, well, this is the Northeast; how far can Maryland be from Virginia? I had driven through Maryland to get here. I pulled up the map and it said three hours, and I thought, that cannot be right. I sat in that driveway and argued with myself. I was already two hours from home, with three more in front of me, and I hadn't seen these people in thirty-eight years. I put the car in reverse, and then the phone rang. They had seen me on the Ring camera, and before I could say a word, Joe said, "See you in three hours!" So the map was right. I said, "Yes, you will!"
Last month I wrote about the Dragon Lady, the maintenance officer whose entire mantra was follow up, follow up, follow up, and I closed that post by telling you to listen when the small voice says to check one more time. The Maryland address had been sitting in that second thread the whole time. So when I finally walked in the door after five hours of driving, I looked at the gang and said, "Gee, if only we had gone to a school that taught attention to detail and situational awareness!" The Dragon Lady would have had a field day with me.
Before I got there, the guys had driven out to the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville and stood together under the Tower of Voices, forty wind chimes for the forty passengers and crew, whose last words to the people they loved came over the phone lines that morning.
We went out to eat, five of us around a long wooden table, because one of the six had already had to leave, and it was the best time. Everybody looked great. Everybody was doing great. The updates kept coming, and I could not get over how much life had happened to these people. Back at the house, we hung out and called classmates to catch up, let them know we were thinking about them, and tell them the fortieth is coming and we looked forward to seeing them again. Nothing beats five people crowding around one phone to drop in on somebody who had no idea the call was coming.
We also watched Air Force play Army at West Point, and we were stoked when the Falcons took back the Commander-in-Chief's Trophy for the first time since 2022. Sitting in that room, it felt like nothing had ever left.
One more call that night went to Major George Fiedler, our Air Officer Commanding, the active-duty officer who ran Cadet Squadron 32 in our day. We got his voicemail and left him a message from his cadets. That call mattered to me for a reason I wrote about in Natural Born Follower. At graduation, he handed me a plaque with our squadron logo on the front and a handwritten note laminated to the back. He wrote that he was still sorry I had not put my name in for Squadron Commander for spring of '88, that I would have done a great job, and that he wished me the best in my Air Force career. He dated it 30 May 88. That note opens Chapter Nine of the book, and it has been on the back of that plaque for thirty-eight years. On my way out the door, the man who would have selected me was telling me the door had been open the whole time.
Chapter Eleven of that book is called The Fellowship of Followership, and I felt it most distinctly in the military. Fellowship does not happen because somebody assigns it. It happens when people self-select in, when they decide they belong to one another and then act like it. Nobody ordered six people to spend a weekend in Maryland, and nobody ordered a Major to write a note to a graduating cadet.
Tomorrow is Veterans Day. I am thankful for the people I served with, and for the ones I went to school with who went out knowing they were in full service of their country. The patch on my old squadron jacket says Catch Us If You Can. This weekend it took me five hours of driving to do it, and I would drive it again tomorrow. Class of '88, you were the best to date, and I cannot wait to see the rest of you at the fortieth.
