Journey Read online

  Suzie and I thanked them profusely as we bid them goodnight on the steps of the Lt General’s home, having just experienced the night of our lives with the finest boss—and mentor—one could ever imagine. If only we had known that in less than five years their lives would be cut short when the general’s CT-39 Sabreliner would experience a mishap upon landing at the Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport, killing Jerry, Diane, and the three others onboard.

  As Senator Barry Goldwater (chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time) pointed out on the floor of the Senate, “Jerry O’Malley was a true rising star in all the military. At fifty-three years of age and already a four-star general, I am certain, destined to command our Air Force and, one day, likely even to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  Following their parents’ death, the Air Force and the O’Malley children established the General Jerome F. O’Malley and Diane O’Malley Award in memory of their parents. The award honors the Air Force wing commander and spouse team whose contributions to the nation, Air Force, and local community best exemplify the highest ideals and positive leadership of a military couple serving in a key Air Force position. I had the personal honor of bestowing this award in each of my four years as Chief, with the O’Malleys’ daughter Sharon at my side to memorialize the legacy of her parents.

  Jerry O’Malley sent me to Hurlburt and special operations. How different our course would have been without his intervention.

  Suzie: It turned out to be a pretty good summer. I entertained myself during the days, walked to Crystal City (Pentagon City Mall would have been much closer, but that wasn’t built for another nine years), spent some time at the pool, and I even tried to cook—which for me was a major achievement.

  But as summer wound down and the daylight hours diminished, it was time to trade in my vacation gear for my gradebook and fly back home to begin preparation for the new school year.

  Norty dropped me off at National Airport and we stumbled through some pretty uncomfortable goodbyes. “It was nice having you here,” he said with a smile. “So we’ll talk on Sunday?”

  “You know where to find me,” I quipped, feeling more than just a little uneasy.

  Mom and Dad picked me up at the airport, and Dad had barely swung my overstuffed bag into the trunk before my mom—who doesn’t know the meaning of the word “subtle”—excitedly blurted out, “So is anything going to happen?”

  That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? And it was one that swirled inside my head for the entire three-hour flight home. I took a deep breath, then shared my unfortunate conclusion. “No, Mom, I don’t think so.”

  She didn’t even try to mask her disappointment.

  “I really love being around him, and you know full well how kind and wonderful he is … But his career is so important to him that I don’t believe he sees me figuring into the mix.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “It’s what he didn’t say that spoke volumes. Bottom line, I’ve already spent two years with him—not to mention lived with him for an entire summer—so if he still doesn’t have any desire to move forward, it’s pretty obvious he never will. I think any more time with him would just be a waste.”

  Norty: Suzie didn’t realize that since the moment she stepped onto that plane, I pondered the question endlessly: Was Suzie in fact the girl for all time? Evidently my anxiety was fairly obvious. At least Al Navas picked up on it. By midweek, he approached me.

  “Got any plans for tomorrow night? Barbara’s looking for a guinea pig to test out some new stuffed cabbage recipe. She cooks enough to feed a whole squadron, so I could sure use a wingman.”

  As was so often the case, Al seemed to know me better than I knew myself; I would welcome his shrewd advice (as well as Barbara’s delicious meal). But the office was certainly not the venue for such a discussion. We were always meticulous in keeping our personal and professional interactions separate.

  Al’s living room—between dinner and Barbara’s famous peach cobbler—would provide a more appropriate setting for our session.

  “Do you love her?” Al asked, cutting to the chase with an intimate candor that I never really shared with my own dad.

  “Yes … but we fight,” I rationalized, exposing my complete lack of understanding of real-life male/female dynamics.

  “Honey, do we ever fight?” he bellowed into the kitchen, where Barbara was finishing up with the dishes.

  “Believe me, they fight!” quipped a voice from upstairs.

  “Close your door and finish your homework, Kathy,” the colonel hollered back to the nineteen-year-old. He turned back to me and lowered his voice. “Hell, Norty. Everybody fights. They just don’t do it in public so you never see it. People disagree, so they argue; that’s how they work things out. The last thing you want is somebody who holds everything in and doesn’t feel safe enough to be honest with you!”

  “Suzie certainly doesn’t hold things in.”

  “Great! So don’t let her get away. And don’t let your dad or anybody else get in the way.” He knew that this had been the case with a prior girlfriend.

  Al had a natural ability to separate the wheat from the chaff and make complex issues crystal clear. He was firm, often blunt, but never judgmental. I felt safe in discussing anything with him, his sole motivation being my well-being.

  Suzie: That Sunday at exactly 2:00 p.m., I answered the yellow phone hanging on Mom’s kitchen wall midway through the first ring.

  “Hi Norty,” I said, perhaps a little less enthusiastically than usual, having already decided that our situation wasn’t going anywhere.

  “I bought a diamond, so you need to go pick out a setting.”

  Those were his first words, and that was his proposal! Romance is not Norty’s strong suit. That was Casanova’s way of asking me to marry him—on the phone in my parents’ kitchen. He couldn’t even make an unscheduled call to pop the question. No, he had to wait until our weekly Sunday call. And that’s the marriage proposal that will live for all eternity.

  So I hung up the phone and joined my mom and dad on the back patio.

  “Well, what did you guys talk about?” Mom probed.

  “Nothing,” I replied, much the same as I had responded when she asked me “What’d you learn at school today?” every day for twelve years of my life. I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret from her; I think I was just a little underwhelmed by Norty’s presentation—maybe even a little embarrassed. But in my heart, I was doing cartwheels. I completely believed in him, and I completely believed in us. And somehow I thought that my outgoing personality would complement his quietness. I believed that I would draw out the best in him, and he certainly filled in so many areas that were lacking in me.

  Norty’s time at the Pentagon was winding down, and now that the tour had ended, I looked forward to him resuming his piloting career on standard airlift missions out of Pope AFB. North Carolina would be a nice, calm environment in which to begin our married life.

  Norty: In my mind I was never trained to do simple logistics missions, as important as they may be. It was Special Ops that excited me and motivated me, even though at this point they were going through some tough times. The Cadillacs of the C-130 fleet were in the special operations wings, and those pilots were the cream of the crop.

  I made it very clear to the personnel shop at MAC (I was still a Military Airlift Command asset) that my ambition was to migrate to special operations, which was under Tactical Airlift Command at the time. What I viewed as following my desired career path, they viewed as losing a high-time flight instructor and examiner. I had hit a roadblock and my only option was to escalate my case up the chain of command. My presentation to the Director of Personnel (Bagger Baginski, by the way) would have to be persuasive. Fortunately, it was, and he finally relented.

  But if I thought it was tough to convince the United States Air Force to allow me to transfer to Special Ops, I had neglected to antici
pate the depth of resistance I was about to encounter with my fiery new fiancée. We had already discussed the issue many times, and she was never shy about making her position abundantly clear. While Suzie was entirely supportive of my Air Force career, the idea of my becoming enmeshed in the special operations community sent hackles up her spine. It was just too dangerous for her. She knew that it entailed flying low-level night missions in specially modified airplanes, and she had just lost a close friend when his C-130E (the same basic plane I would be flying) crashed into the side of a hill while practicing in a four-plane formation, one of eight fatalities on that warm September night. We were still in the shadow of the Desert One debacle, and it was not a good time for transferring to Special Ops.

  So I had a choice to make: Did I go for the dream and accept the new assignment I had just been offered with the 8th Special Operations squadron in Florida, or respect my new fiancée’s concerns and take the more mainstream position at Pope AFB in North Carolina?

  Suzie was not happy when I called to inform her that I had made the decision and accepted the former. A selfish decision? Perhaps in that I knew that this road would lead to the most personal satisfaction. But from a broader perspective, I also understood that my opportunities to contribute would be maximized in the special operations community. The Air Force—and the United States—would get a bigger bang for their buck by assigning me to the highly specialized missions of which I was about to become a part.

  Suzie: I was livid and I had every right to be. First of all, Norty knew how much this kind of flying terrified me. I could not imagine any man intentionally making a choice that he knew would subject his wife-to-be to a life of abject terror. Even worse, why would he commit to this without talking to me first? Is that how this marriage was going to work? Shockingly, yes! At least for the first few years. That’s how long it took him to grasp the concept of “consult” calls rather than “you’re not going to like this but here’s what I did” calls.

  I just didn’t know how to respond to calls like this, so each time, I just said nothing.

  Norty is not an apologizer or a let’s-talk-about-this kind of a guy. He will sit there forever in silence and I couldn’t imagine anything getting resolved that way.

  But over time I learned that throwing the silent treatment right back in his face was the best way to be mad at him. As much as he liked to dole it out, he couldn’t stand it when I was the one who closed up and didn’t open my mouth. It became a great way to get his attention and get my point across when I became angry. Lord knows that in those early days the man was seldom at a loss for things that got me angry—like the time he bought our very first house.

  Norty moved down to Hurlburt (just outside of Fort Walton Beach, Florida) about six months before the wedding. As much as I would have loved to join him, I was still teaching, so I had to stay home in Little Rock up to the very last minute. Once again, our interaction consisted entirely of weekly phone calls.

  “How would you feel if I were to buy a house for us down here?” he asked in one of those calls, finally grasping the concept of what it meant to make decisions as a team. And how nice it would be to have him handle all that before I arrived.

  “I’m going to make this so easy for you, Norty, because what I want is very simple. It doesn’t have to be a mansion, but it should feel warm and welcoming … I’d like a big kitchen and a master bathroom with two sinks. That’s all I ask. Everything else is up to you.”

  Within a month he had found the perfect home, closed the deal, and moved in all his belongings. He was much faster at buying houses than popping wedding proposals, although that Sunday he did make a different kind of proposal that I promptly accepted.

  “Spring break’s coming up, so why don’t you drive down here for a few days so you can check out the house. I can’t wait for you to see it.”

  I made it to Fort Walton Beach in a little over ten hours, wondering the entire time what the house was going to look like. Sure, Norty had described it, but I hadn’t seen a single picture, and who knew if his captivating description bore the slightest similarity to reality.

  I pulled up to the house to find Norty waiting for me, standing on the sidewalk with this little impish grin. I think my first reaction upon seeing the house was one of shock. It was cute as a button, right on the cul-de-sac of a perfectly groomed, safe neighborhood that was lined with actual palm trees. Before then, I had never even seen a palm tree. Norty hit it out of the ballpark with this one.

  Ever the gentleman, he proudly opened the front door, then took a small step back for me to go in first. I was so excited! I stepped inside … and was totally horrified, struck by a monstrosity straight from the pages of Architectural Nausea. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating—but it had flocked wallpaper! A thick, gold, velvet flock that looked like it had been imported from some New Orleans brothel. The carpet was brown and dingy, and the whole place felt so dark. As for my few requests, the kitchen was tiny and the master bath had only a single sink—a small one, at that. He obviously disregarded everything I asked for.

  Norty: It was a first-generation solar home, which intrigued me.

  Suzie: We fixed it up a little so it was only semi-horrible, and it was the first street off the base, so Norty’s commute to work couldn’t be any shorter. Now that I think about it, that’s probably the reason he ignored every one of my requests and bought it in the first place—to provide himself with as short a commute as possible!

  Norty: It was the only house I looked at. So, yes—that pretty much sealed the deal for me. I actually thought it was a decent home for $69,000, but it fell substantially short of Suzie’s expectations and remains an issue to this day—over thirty years later.

  * * *

  We got married in a modest ceremony at the Little Rock Air Force Base Chapel on June 6, 1981. Guests came from all over the country. Of course Suzie’s parents were there. You couldn’t ask for finer people. Even at that early stage we had already become very close. They liked to say that I hung the moon. Suzie’s younger sister Cindy and her husband Jim came in from Christiansburg, down by Virginia Tech. She was Suzie’s matron of honor. And her brother Jeb made it in from Tyler, Texas. Of course Joel wouldn’t miss the opportunity to see his younger brother tie the knot—perhaps because he couldn’t believe it was really happening unless he saw it with his own eyes. His presence meant a great deal to me. Interestingly, my mom was there too, as fragile as she was with her illness; she still made the effort. It was a kind act of generosity on her part.

  Significantly, my dad elected not to attend. In part, somehow he viewed it as a matter of principle. He did not approve of the marriage, and he did not approve of Suzie. Our different religious backgrounds were part of it (Suzie was raised as a Catholic), but it also appeared that for some unfathomable reason, he believed Suzie wasn’t worthy. But he had no clue. He knew nothing about her and he had no desire to learn anything about her. It was also a political statement on his part; an affirmation that somehow the marriage didn’t meet his expectations given his stature in the community. That really disappointed me. Until that point, I carried the hope in my heart that someday Suzie and Dad would hit it off. But his boycott of the wedding drove the nail into the coffin. It was irreconcilable after that.

  Later on I did go to him and I chided, “Dad, get over it. We’ve been married for over ten years now so maybe it’s time you get past it and adapt!”

  I suppose he tried to do so at that point, but that attempt was marginal, at best.

  It was an awkward time, an awkward situation. But I was surrounded by so much love that day, by so many wonderful, caring, loving friends and other family members who wanted to be there to celebrate our joy, and celebrate my remarkable, beautiful bride—I refused to let him win by ruining the best day of my life.

  I think, in many ways, his absence heightened my appreciation of all those who did choose to attend. High atop the list were Al and Barbara Navas, who by this time had become my surr
ogate parents, and they considered me to be their fifth child.

  They immediately hit it off with Suzie, and welcomed her as a member of their family, too. They were gifts from heaven, given by grace. Their presence was very meaningful to me, as I believe it was to them: to support the young lieutenant that they met and mentored and coached and invested in and hoped for success, and now to hope for success in marriage. They were flattered that they served that role and it was important to me that they did so.

  Through the years, they continued to be there for me, attending almost every promotion ceremony and change of command you can think of. Whether I was taking Suzie’s hand in marriage, assuming my first squadron command, or taking the oath as Chief of Staff of the Air Force—whichever of life’s milestones I was experiencing at the time, the one constant was that I’d look out and see the pride radiating from Al’s and Barbara’s faces, and I would feel the warmth of their unconditional love blanketing me. It’s a rare—if not totally unique—occurrence for a wing commander and his wife to literally assume the role of parents for one of their young second lieutenants, but that’s what happened, and it was life-changing for me.

  * * *

  Suzie: Let me put it another way: If it weren’t for Colonel Navas’s fatherly advice to Norty over thirty-five years ago, there might never have been a wedding. Most likely, to this day Norty would still be debating whether he should propose to me, because “we fight.” And if there wouldn’t have been a wedding, then I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to test whether a white satin wedding gown can withstand Arkansas temperatures way hotter than the surface of the sun. Because that’s how hot it was on our wedding day at the Little Rock AFB chapel.

  My dressing room was stifling, and the small tabletop electric fans did little more than blast the heat in our direction. This was 1981, not 1881. Had they not heard of air conditioning? By the time the music started and my three bridesmaids led me out of that inferno, we looked like four members of the U.S. Olympic swim team who had just climbed out of the pool after the 4 x 100 relay.