The uniform fades, the memory doesn’t. The war ends, but the echoes remain.
On Veterans Day, we remember the courage it took to serve...and the grace it takes to keep living beyond it.
For those who served during war, or peacetime...every act of service carries a story. Some told. Many silent.
Veterans Day reminds us that freedom isn’t just defended in battle, but in the lives lived honorably after.
Have a very pleasant Veteran's Day!
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December 1975: An Airman’s Journey Home Through Chaos and Kindness
I guess you can call this a kind of upbeat blog today. I could say, talk about the three deaths we had on base during my time there, or more just before I arrived, and many other things, but being Veterans Day, I'd like to keep things lighter for a change.
It was late December 1975 when our bus full of airmen and airwomen rolled out of Rantoul, Illinois, heading north to O’Hare for the holidays. I was fresh out of tech school at Chanute AFB, wearing my Air Force dress blues like we’d been told to. Most didn’t. They laughed at us who did, calling us uptight or old-fashioned, but regulations were regulations. I’d been raised to follow orders and respect the uniform, even if it made me stand out.
We hadn’t gone far when the bus slowed on an on-ramp. A small car had slid into the grassy center of the cloverleaf. Someone grumbled that we’d miss our flights, but the driver said it was illegal for him not to help. That was that. A few of us said, “Then let’s get it done,” and we piled out into the cold, breath steaming in the frozen air, pushing the car free before scrambling back aboard. Just another moment of teamwork among strangers—routine for the military, but it would set the tone for what was to come.
O’Hare in Chaos
When we reached O’Hare, I was stunned. I’d traveled before—Spain when I was three, family trips to the coasts—but I’d never seen anything like that terminal. Luggage was everywhere, long lines coming from the check in agents into the walkway in double lines, up against the walls. Passengers sat or slept on their suitcases, with lines stretching into every corridor.
The loudspeakers droned on with the same message:
Flights delayed or canceled due to fog on the West Coast.
I didn’t know it then, but a massive fog system had shut down Seattle–Tacoma International Airport for nearly two days, grounding thousands. NOAA’s report for December 22, 1975, would later note: “Dense fog for about 36 hours caused delays and cancellations for an estimated 20,000 passengers.”
The ripple effect reached all the way back to Chicago, where westbound flights were simply stacking up with nowhere to go.
When the airline finally handed out hotel vouchers, I took one and spent the night near the airport, restless and anxious. I was supposed to be getting married in a day or two, and all I could think about was getting home.
Winnipeg: One Degree and Nowhere to Go
The next morning, a flight opened—not to Seattle, but to Winnipeg. I grabbed it. At least it was west.
When the plane landed, the air hit me like a slap: one degree Fahrenheit, dry and cutting. My short military haircut offered no protection. The airport was quiet, frozen in both weather and schedule. There were no flights moving west.
I needed money, so I took a taxi into downtown Winnipeg. The streets were deserted, snow glowing under streetlamps, the kind of cold that hums in your bones. I stood there on a side street, lost and unsure what to do, when a Black man in a leather coat walked up and asked what I was doing.
I was wary—this was unfamiliar territory—but he said he’d been Air Force too, once stranded just like me. “You shouldn’t be standing here,” he said. “Not safe. Come on, I’ll take you somewhere you can use a phone.”
I hesitated, but something about him felt steady. I followed. He took me to a hotel, warm and bustling with guests in the lobby. He pointed to the phone booths, said I’d be okay now, and went upstairs. That was it. No agenda, no catch. Just a stranger helping another serviceman.
I called, got oriented, found a business that could advance me funds, and took a cab back to the airport—grateful and a little shaken by how easily kindness can find you when you least expect it.
The Boy at the Gate
Back at the terminal, two seats opened on a flight to Vancouver. I’d been talking to a teenage boy earlier, both of us stranded and tired. I managed to grab one of the seats and told him. He asked if I’d bought the other for him. I said no—didn’t even think to.
His expression changed; he said he would have paid me back, and before I could explain, he rushed off to try for the other ticket. It was gone. I apologized, but he was too hurt, and I never saw him again.
Even now, I still think about that moment. I wasn’t trying to be selfish—I was just exhausted, desperate, focused entirely on getting home to get married. But it stays with me, that small failure to look beyond my own fatigue.
The Road Home
When I finally landed in Vancouver, my parents had driven up with my fiancée to meet me. The fog that had shut down Sea-Tac still blanketed the entire region. On I-5, visibility was so poor that we could barely see the taillights ahead. My parents drove painfully slow, crawling north through the gray. I lay in the back seat with my head on my fiancée’s lap, unable to sleep but too tired to talk.
I got about five hours of sleep that night before the wedding. My brother later said he thought it was funny that I looked like I was standing at attention during the ceremony—which was fair. I was so used to military posture, and so tired, that I probably was.
After the wedding, my new wife and I drove north through that same fog to Harrison Hot Springs for our honeymoon. Around two in the morning, I found myself stopped at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere—fog so thick I couldn’t see twenty feet in any direction. I got out, stood in the cold silence, picked a direction, and drove on. Within minutes, the lights of the resort glowed faintly through the mist, like a promise kept.
It was sad leaving her a few days later to fly back to Chanute for the rest of tech school. But she joined me soon after, flying out so we could live off-base together. That got me out of the barracks—every one of which was its own kind of zoo—and into a small life of our own.
After the Fog
Looking back, that week in December 1975 feels like a condensed lifetime: confusion, exhaustion, small acts of kindness, and the strange luck that guides you home.
There was the car stuck in the cloverleaf, the laughter of young airmen pushing it free in the cold. The stranger in Winnipeg who helped me without question. The boy at the airport whose disappointment I still carry. The endless fog, and the lights of Harrison breaking through it at last.
I left Rantoul as a rule-following airman in dress blues and came home a married man—slightly older physically, but emotionally humbled, and a little wiser. The fog had lifted, but I never forgot how it felt to move through it, uncertain yet still moving forward, trusting that somewhere ahead, the light was waiting.
Allow me to end with this, about today...
One thing that’s changed since my Air Force days: we used to fix our own equipment.
We had the manuals, the parts, and the know-how — because the military owned the intellectual property.
Today, we often don’t.
Contractors hold the rights, so we have to pay them to fix what we used to handle ourselves.
That loss of technical ownership means higher costs, longer downtimes, and fewer skilled hands in uniform.
We’ve traded self-reliance for dependence — and that’s a dangerous trade in any fight.
But do have a happy Veterans Day!
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
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