A Child’s Christmas in Tripoli

Christmas day of ‘68 began like most days; with a guy bellowing singsong prayers in the dark from a mosque somewhere just off base. The mounted lo-fi bullhorn gave the already mysterioso liturgy a surreal 1930s radio feel – think “Libyan Rudy Vallee” if that helps. If that doesn’t help, I get it. 

Though we’d lived just outside Tripoli for nearly a year, the morning prayers remained a moderately freaky wake-up call to this kid recently of Cheyenne, Wyoming – more specifically F.E. Warren Air Force Base, about three miles west of Cheyenne. In 1967 – the flower-bedecked Summer of Love – Warren Air Force Base was home to the 90^th Strategic Missile Wing and a subterranean cluster of Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. In the event of a nuclear exchange, Warren would have been one of the first American sites to be vaporized in hellfire. These description-beggaring cataclysms wholly escaped the attentions of this jug-eared seven-year-old.

What I principally remember of Warren AFB was the MPs at the base gate smilingly saluting us as our bus drove us into Cheyenne proper and third grade. Clark Elementary on House Avenue – like many lovely things, now gone – was right across the street from where my best civilian friend lived: Kim Daifotis. I also vividly remember eating at a table in our kitchen and – when parental backs were turned – hurriedly shoveling peas off my dinner plate and behind the handily adjacent Air Force-issue fridge. Few things in life or my fevered imagination scared me the way peas did. What haunted me was the inevitable day movers would arrive to load the fridge onto a truck, revealing the mountain of covert peas and exposing my years of deception. “JEFFRRYYYY!!!” I was terrorized by the idea. Nuclear Schmuclear. 

Yes, I had a vivid imagination – not to mention a vaguely jellybean-shaped head and a strabismal, misaligned right eye. Family photos of that period feature a placidly smiling American family and one skinny little oddball, usually in pajamas and eyes akimbo – a chameleon bewildered by too many flies.

Gulf

I was raised on Air Force bases, my first stop (or appearance, as it were) was Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, near Bossier City. My last posting – my dad’s posting, technically – was Wheelus AFB outside Tripoli. When my dad received what would be his last Air Force assignment, we drove from Cheyenne to a bewilderingly idyllic place on Florida’s Gulf Coast called Treasure Island. It was absolutely nothing like Cheyenne. The trip was my first glimpse of ocean and I was completely flabbergasted. The several Gulf Coast months there in a tumbledown beachfront apartment are some of the most piercingly redolent sense memories of my life. 

I befriended Jimmy – a skinny little kid my age whose southern accent entranced me. This was not a Treasure Island accent. Like a lot of the folks in those apartments, like we Wings, Jimmy and fam were on their way to the rest of their lives. One day on the barefoot boardwalk that led to the water’s edge Jimmy stepped on a thorn burr. I’m sorry to report that his shouts of pain prompted me to laughter. “It horts, it horts!” he screamed, hopping on one foot. “It what?” “IT HORTS!” Hahahahaha! When we would go up to his apartment he would ask his mom if we could have “Cocola.” I tried to instruct. “Jimmy, it’s called ‘Coca-Cola.’” “Yuh. Ah said it. Cocola.” Hahahahahah!

My dad went on ahead to Wheelus to “make arrangements” and several months later we joined him. My last day on Treasure Island Jimmy and I surprised ourselves by sobbing together under the thatched community quonset. We didn’t hug or shake hands, just stood there and shook uncontrollably in the grip of this mysterious seizure of tears. “Bye, Jimmy..” “Bah, Jeff.”

Came the day my mom, my little brother, my older sister and I boarded an outlandishly huge jet bound for Africa via Frankfurt. I’d never been on a plane before, and spent the days preceding our departure in stark terror. Ultimately it was fine. We clasped our decorous little seat belts and as the enormous technological wonder sped down the runway with a deafening roar I explosively wet my pants. Haha.

4G

We were in quarters 4G on Wheelus AFB. There is much I could write about that base and that time, but my MJ masters wisely leash me to a word count lest I take off over hill and dale and exhaust you. (Yes, I know I’ve exhausted you each in your turn; it’s just a question of degree). Here are some representative, if disparate, deets. 

Day or night, the air was ceaselessly fragrant with the perfume of the crushed dates that were always underfoot. We could walk from our quarters to the azure, bath-like Mediterranean in about 10 minutes. 

A frank 15’ wall topped with razor wire and jagged green shards of glass surrounded the base. Nevertheless we would all routinely visit the souk, just outside Wheelus’ east gate; an open air bazaar and market. I vividly remember the camel stall – 6 or 7 severed camel heads hung by their esophagi in a dripping row over their respective tubs of meat. Shoppers would check the camels’ teeth, judging by the worn dentrifice the animal’s age and likely toughness of the flesh. I’m sure steak sauce figured into this somewhere. 

I also clearly remember a sweet, handsome Libyan guy we all knew named Omran – sharp dresser, always in cowboy boots and Stetson and funny as hell. I can see him at our quarters laughing and saying “malesh!” (very approximately “whatever!”) and lavishly shrugging. 

And there were two camels penned in our schoolyard. They could launch a weirdly coherent ball of slime some 40 feet and hit you in the head if they wanted to – and more often than not they wanted to. Soon enough you learned – when they pursed their camel lips in a certain way – to hug your books and run. 

In September of ‘69 Libya’s slowpoke, America-friendly King Idris would be rudely shunted aside (while conveniently away in Turkey for a medical appointment) by an opportunistic colonel from his own army, a Mr. Gaddafi. Once Gaddafi was in power, Wheelus AFB would be given six months to clear out. That meant ½ days of school on Saturdays, after which we kids would all go to the base theater and catch a movie. After the coup we never saw Omran again.

Oh yeah, Christmas. Santa came to the school on a camel, and for Christmas I got a Johnny Astro (you can look it up), a record player, a Batman LP and some other stuff. Some young airmen gave my parents Murano glass bowls, an Austrian cuckoo clock, and some green alabaster grapes. My mom and Dad – Bob and Aloha – are gone. But I’m looking at those grapes and cuckoo clock as I type this, and that is really something. Life is an unremitting storm and we’re kites. Feel it with all your love and wonder. And Happy Holidays.