YANKEES GO HOME

Written July 15, 2007

I spent most of my first 18 years living on or near NATO Bases during the Cold War era. My family never lived anywhere longer than 3 years. We moved to Spain when I was 10 yrs old in 1983. I start here because this is the time period when I began to learn the hardest lessons about the world and its people.
I’d like to add, I love Spain. I have many fond memories along with these not so fond ones. The experiences I’m going to share now, I feel contributed to my attitude today.

My dad was stationed at Torrejon A.F.B, just outside of Madrid. Only American officers were allowed to live on base housing so we lived in a little town named Daganzo. There were only a handful of A.F. kids in the town. Most were too young to play with and my brother was four years my junior. My only companions were Yvette and Natasha, their mother was Australian-American. There were many Spanish children in Daganzo but they weren’t friendly toward us. They made it quite clear they disdained our presence with rocks and taunts.

I did befriend one Spanish girl in Daganzo. She had just moved there to live with her grandparents. I met her in the little market my mom used to send me for groceries. We ended up spending the day together. We decided, we were to be best friends. The next day, I knocked on her grandparents door and my new friend answered. She said. “My grandfather says I can’t be your friend because you are American.” “Why?” I asked. “I don’t know.” I still sometimes think about that little girl. She would be in her 30's, as I am. I wonder how she feels about Americans now? For that one day we spent together as children, she didn’t know the difference.

A school bus picked us up from Daganzo to deliver us to the elementary school on base. The scenery through Torrejon was plastered with posters and advertisements on the sides of buildings. My favorite was the one with Ronald Reagan. His face was half peeling away to expose a lizard alien underneath. Taken from the TV mini-series “V”. I have the DVD now. On the back it says, “They Come In Peace- To Enslave Mankind!” 24 years later, I find it ironic.

When we arrived at the base, there was a sign announcing, Torrejon A.F.B. Someone spray painted in red, “YANKEES GO HOME”. The first time I saw it, I thought the person who did it was a baseball fan. Every morning a Spanish M.P. with a gun strapped to his back would check each and everyone of our I.D.’s. They never spoke nor smiled.. One particular morning a kid had forgotten his I.D., they made him get off the bus. I remember looking at him through the window with his backpack and lunchbox as he started to cry. Those M.P.’s scared the hell out of me too. I never once forgot my I.D. the entire 3 years I lived there.

I wasn’t a great student. I guess it was hard to keep up with all the moving. Still, I loved going to school and being with other American kids. During my many schools across the states and in Europe, I’d learned every kind of drill...earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, etc... In Spain, we learned the bomb threat drill. We even had actual bomb threats, but it didn’t scare us. There were so many, we stopped taking them seriously. Our parents were not even notified. I remember watching Reagan on the news in class. He was likened to a superhero. We were the good guys and anyone against America were the bad guys. I was told many people across the world didn’t like us because they were jealous of what we had in the states and they wanted to take it from us. At this point, I started to believe it. I wasn’t afraid though. Everyone knows the good guys always prevail. For many of us A.F. brats...color, ethnicity, religion, etc...didn’t matter because most were bi-something anyway. We were American.

Americans stationed at Torrejon had a favorite restaurant, Casa De Castillos. It was influenced by American cooking. We ate there almost every week. It was bombed.


Restaurant Bombing in Madrid, Spain
Date: April 12, 1985
Location: Madrid, Spain

Description: A bomb explodes in a restaurant popular with American servicemen in Madrid, Spain, killing 18, all Spaniards, and injuring 82, including 15 Americans. It is the worst act of terrorism in Spain since the end of the Spanish civil war in 1939. Various groups claim responsibility for the bombing in calls to news organizations, including the Basque separatist group, ETA, and the Islamic Jihad organization.

Aftermath: Within days, Spanish authorities determined that the claim made in Beirut by the so-called Islamic Jihad organization was the most credible, although they conceded that anyone could have used that name as a cover. No arrests were ever made. According to Spanish officials, it remains the only major terrorist attack in the country's modern history that has not been solved.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company


The joke circulating among the adults after the bombing. “The Rib House had already started plans to be rebuild but they will be changing their menu. They no longer will be specializing in ribs. The new menu will be serving Sloppy Joe’s.” At age 11, I didn’t think it was funny. I guess it was too adult for me.

My parents decided to divorce in Spain. My mom was homesick and claimed the military life wasn’t for her. She was tired of starting over and my dad always being TDY. He was away the day I was born on a year long tour of duty to Thailand. I was 6 months old before he saw me. My dad requested to come home to see me and was told, “It’s not their problem. The A.F. didn’t issue him a wife and kid.” My mom, brother, and I left my dad in Spain to move to Missouri. I would miss my dad but was excited to come home where I belonged.

Home wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t everything I remembered it to be or told it was. People in the states didn’t get along well at all. America is where I learned about racism and all the other petty categories we break ourselves into. At 13, I experienced “culture shock.” being so far from a military base. I wasn’t able to make friends and started failing my classes, if I went at all. A year later my dad was stationed to Luke A.F.B. in Arizona. I went to live with him, brought my grades up, and graduated high school while working at the hospital on base.

American’s reaction to 9/11 surprised me in different ways. We stopped tearing one another apart for a little while. We were compassionate and willing to help or console a stranger. But then came the fear. I saw the news reports drilling into everyone’s head the “new” dangers Americans were now to be facing. All the while I thought, this isn’t anything “new”. It’s just the realization that Americans aren’t exempt from the horrors of the rest of the world. I think Americans really hang on to the idea of fairy tale endings. Terrorism isn’t an evil supervillain to be slain. It is a mentality mixed in a civilian population. We can not wage a war on terrorism without becoming terrorists ourselves. Showing the compassion and willingness to help strangers throughout the world, as we did for one another during 9/11 is the key to curtailing terrorism. To this day, I don’t feel any safer living in America than I did as a kid living overseas. But it’s not terrorists that scare me as much as our own government and the wars it has initiated by feeding and toying with the fears of the people in this country.

"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it." -Noam Chomsky