First, a Definition

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the word effluent, I gleaned the following definitions from The American Heritage Dictionary (Second College Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1982, 1985):

Effluent (noun)

a. A stream flowing out of a lake or other body of water.

b. An outflow or discharge of waste, as from a sewer.

I’m Effluent. It’s the nick/username I’ve been using on the web for years now. (The definition of the word that I prefer is the second one, if you must know. :))

The Travels of Effluent

As a young airman, my father was stationed in Germany during the late 1950s. He sent for my mother (who was pregnant at the time), and I was born in a U.S. army hospital in Stuttgart in September of 1958. As you’ll see, I’ve done a lot of travelling since then.

We were sent to Arlington, Virginia after Germany, where my father served at the Pentagon. My brother, Steve, was born there in 1961.

After Arlington, Dad was sent to RAF High Wycombe in England, where I think we stayed for about three years. I don’t really remember much about those years, but from what my mother tells me, I was a holy terror at the time. (Something about falling out of a window, and something about trying to cook a plastic toy fire truck in the oven, and something about trying to run away on a double-decker bus.)

So after that, we were sent to Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma. That’s where I really start to remember things. I remember going to kindergarten there, as well as the first couple months of first grade. I remember Steve and I playing with Beverly, a little girl of our age who lived across the street. I remember Mom catching the three of us standing around in the backyard with our pants down as we stared at each other’s nakedness trying to figure out why Steve and I had penises and Beverly did not. I remember us gathering in Mom and Dad’s room on Sunday evenings to eat TV dinners and watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. It was in Altus that I have my first memory of watching The Wizard of Oz. The most striking memory of all, though, was hearing from my parents that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed. At school, they bundled us all into the auditorium to watch the funeral procession on a big old black and white television.

Dad was quite chagrined when he received his next assignment: Tachikawa Air Base, Japan. I think Mom was more upset than he was. I don’t think either of them relished the thought of spending three years in nasty old Asia. (Closet Europhiles, methinks.) The tour in Japan was a lot of fun for Steve and me. We had lots of friends and had some wonderful adventures. We lived in a large Japanese munitions factory that had been converted into apartments for military families. It was a three story behemoth called Green Park that had six or seven wings. We could climb up onto the roof and fly our paper airplanes off the top, or we could explore the basement of the building, which spread in all directions like an ancient Byzantine catacomb. Most of all, it was fun because our brother Greg was born at the Tachikawa Air Base hospital in 1967. I was nine years old at the time, and I was highly thrilled at getting a new brother to pick on.

After Japan, Dad was assigned to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. We weren’t there very long, but I do remember falling off the second-story balcony of our apartment and spraining my ankle. Boy was I proud hobbling around school on my crutches and showing off my battle wound!

While in Maryland, Dad unexpectedly received orders to attend a technical school for satellite technicians. So we moved to Shark River Hills, New Jersey. I believe that Dad attended his classes at night, and that his training center was located at Fort Monmouth. Shark River Hills was where I had my first serious fight with another kid, and the melee ended unceremoniously when I got beaned in the noggin with a rock (and got several stitches in my scalp as a result). Fort Monmouth turned out to be a bad deal for my father, because immediately after he graduated from the tech school, the Air Force sent him for a year’s tour at Dyarbakir, Turkey, where they expected him to help install a new satellite communications terminal. The bad part was that he had to go alone. Mom took the three of us to her hometown of Machias, Maine while Dad wasted away in Dyarbakir, and we spent a lonely year there waiting for Dad to come home.

The Air Force rewarded Dad for his unaccompanied assignment to Turkey by giving him a follow-on tour to RAF Croughton, England. It was heaven there. A former WWII RAF station that had been turned into a U.S. Air Force communications site, it was located in the middle of rolling English farmland. We spent our days roaming the woods and farmland in the area. Our favorite sport was trying to get the local horses, cows, and pigs (and sometimes the farmers’ dogs, too) to chase us. We toured many British historical sites during that tour, and I’ll never forget it. We saw the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, the British Museum, the British War Museum, Stonehenge, Edinburgh Castle, various Roman ruins (including the Roman baths at Bath), and many, many more.

About halfway through our tour in England, the Air Force decided to send Dad to Germany. That didn’t upset Mom and Dad at all. We drove from England to Wiesbaden, Germany by way of a cross-channel ferry we boarded at Dover, England. That was quite an adventure in itself, to catch a ferry in the shadow of the famous chalk cliffs. The ferry landed in France near Dunkirk, and Dad let us run around the beach there for a while. I found a hunk of metal buried in the sand that had somehow been melted by extremely high heat. I fancied that it was a remnant of the disaster that befell the British at the Battle of Dunkirk (and as far as I know, my mother still has that piece of melted steel).

During Dad’s two-year tour in Germany, we used practically all his leave time visiting historical sites throughout Western Europe. We visited Paris, France, where we walked the Champs-Élysées, walked through the Arc de Triomphe, climbed the Eiffel Tower, toured the Louvre, saw Les Invalides, and wandered the halls and gardens of the Château de Versailles.

We spent a couple of weeks in Switzerland, where we visited Bern, Interlaken, Neuchâtel, Zürich, and Wengen (where we took a cog train to a high mountain location for spectacular views of the famous Swiss mountains, Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.) We passed through the outskirts of München on the return trip to Wiesbaden, and we stopped to visit what is left of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. They had a very somber museum there, a prisoner barrack building that had been preserved for historical purposes, and the actual crematorium that had been used to dispose of the bodies of the dead.

We also spent a couple of weeks in Italy. We drove through Switzerland and into Italy, where we headed strait for Rome. When in Rome, we visited Città del Vaticano (to include the Sistine Chapel, of course) and the Coliseum before we moved on to Venice. On the way back to Germany from Venice, we stopped at Neuschwanstein Castle, Berchtesgaden, and Salzburg. The Bavarian Alps were simply spectacular.

At the end of our idyllic tour in Germany, Dad was sent to the mundane confines of Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base outside of the less-than-stunning little “hamlet” of Belton, Missouri. Shortly after that, he was sent to Sunnyvale Air Force Station in California, where he retired from the Air Force in 1977. I graduated from Piedmont Hills High School (San Jose, California) in 1976.

But the travelling was not over for me when Dad retired from the Air Force. You see, I enlisted in the Air Force in November of 1976. I enlisted with a guarantee to be to be trained as an aircraft maintenance specialist. Of course, things don’t always work out the way you expect them to. While in basic training at Lackland Air Force base outside of San Antonio, Texas, I was compelled to take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (a test). And I passed. So to my surprise, my specialty was changed from aircraft maintenance to something called “cryptologic linguistics”. In other words, the Air Force sent me to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California to learn the Korean language.

I’ve been long-winded enough. The following is a condensed version of what I’ve done in the thirty years since I graduated from high school in 1976.

• Air Force Basic Training (Lackland Air Force Base, Texas)
• Basic Korean Language Training (Monterey, California)
• Cryptologic Skills Training (Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas)
• Cryptologic Linguist (6903SS, Osan Air Base, South Korea)
• Intermediate Korean Language Training (Monterey, California)
• Cryptologic Linguist (6903ESS, Osan Air Base, South Korea)
• Cryptologic Linguist (National Security Agency, Laurel, Maryland)
• Cryptologic Linguist (6903 ESG, Osan Air Base, South Korea)
• Military Language Instructor (Monterey, California)
• Cryptologic Linguist (303 IS, Osan Air Base, South Korea)
• Cryptologic Linguist (National Security Agency, Laurel, Maryland)
• Retired from the Air Force in February of 1997
• Golf Course Maintenance in Arizona (irrigation and management)

I got sick and tired of the political side of golf course maintenance and decided to give it a break a couple of years ago. Now I collect a small military retirement and live a quiet life in south central Arizona.

I got married in 1980 to an “interesting” Korean woman. I eventually divorced her in 1996 after a protracted 16 years of nastiness, but not before she presented me with a wonderful son (who shall go unnamed here). The courts of Maryland saw fit to give me custody of my son, so he’s still with me today. He’s 25 now, and his girlfriend recently gave birth to my grandson (the light of my life and my pride and joy). I call him “Bebop”. He has a real name, of course, but I’m not going to reveal it on the internet. (I will post some pictures, however.)