Jet missing 60 years: Flying Tiger disappeared with 93 soldiers who trained at Fort Huachuca

Photo: Carrying soldiers in 1962, a Flying Tiger Lockheed Constellation like this one disappeared on its way to Saigon.

Flying Tiger Flight 739, carrying 93 soldiers who had trained in Fort Huachuca, was lost over the Pacific Ocean on March 16, 1962, on the way to Vietnam.

Including the flight crew and three South Vietnamese, 107 were aboard the jet. The U.S. soldiers had trained for at least a short time in Fort Huachuca. One report said they were Army Rangers. Five of them lived in Sierra Vista. After the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines searched more than 200,000 square miles, all on board were given up for dead.

As I understood it, the soldiers were supposed to train the South Vietnamese in more effective fighting, and to build radio towers for the South Vietnamese army.

A year later, the Army sent my father to Vietnam. He was there for a year and came back fine.

Frank Warner

 

What is an Army brat? Where does the term come from?

Photo: Army brats normally wear civilian clothes, but here in Fort Huachuca of 1963 is my brother George, for the fun of it, wearing a small Army uniform that his three older brothers wore before him.

An Army brat is the child of a soldier. Usually, the term is applied to those children who have moved more than once, sometimes overseas, because the Army has ordered their fathers or mothers from one post to another.

“Army brat” is a respectful title, as are the similar designations for children of the other military branches, Navy brats, Air Force brats, Marine brats, and Coast Guard brats. Navy brats and Marine brats also are called Navy juniors and Marine juniors.

The word “brat” goes back at least 1,000 years, when it was applied to a blanket or clothing for an infant or toddler. By the 1500s, “brat” simply meant a child. By itself, the word can have humorous, even insulting meanings. In a scolding tone of voice, “brat” implies a child is annoying, selfish and nasty.

Term of endearment. But for children of the military, “brat” is a term of endearment that recognizes the blessings and hardships, the bonds and separations, the introductions and farewells of their nomadic lives. An Army brat’s childhood involves repeatedly leaving old friends and homes, so the “brat” title also refers to the ability to adjust to losses, and to adapt to new people and places with resilience and a smile.

Some say the term “brat,” as applied to children of the armed forces, dates to around 1920. It was then that Britain officially used the term British Regiment Attached Traveler (BRAT) to identify any soldier’s family member – a spouse or child – who was permitted to go overseas with the soldier. The word also may have been a contraction for “barrack rats,” a term used in the 1700s to describe children allowed to live with soldiers in a barracks.

The term doesn’t appear to have been commonly used in the United States until just before World War II. An April 4, 1938, article in The Lincoln (Nebraska) Star mentions a short trip taken by “Army brats,” two daughters and two sons of officers stationed at Fort Omaha, Nebraska.

No offense. The Columbus, Indiana, Republic on March 30, 1939, reported that “One of the 43 boys and girls in the Edinburgh [Indiana] senior class is an army brat, which is a term Army people apply to their own children and others of Army parentage indiscriminately and not meaning any offense. She’s Sophia, 15-year-old daughter of Capt. George Middleton. He’s been in the Regular Army about 20 years and of course has been moved around a lot, so Sophia’s gone to school several places, including three years in the Hawaiian Islands. She a bright little girl, and will be the youngest student ever to graduate from Edinburgh High School.”

Brat general. Lt. General Hugh A. Drum, who served the U.S. First Army in both world wars, was known as “the Army brat” well into his adulthood because he was born in Fort Brady, Michigan, and grew up in various other Army posts with his father, Capt. John Drum. Capt. Drum was killed in the Spanish-American War in the 1898 Battle of San Juan Hill, Cuba. President McKinley responded by giving 18-year-old Hugh Drum an immediate lieutenant’s commission, no West Point needed. Hugh Drum went on to fight in the Spanish-American War in the Philippines in 1899, and eventually became a general, active in the Army until 1943.

A Brat’s Opinion. In spring of 1940, Catherine Unger of Fort Knox, Kentucky, sent a poem written by her daughter, Bette, to The Louisville Courier-Journal, which published it. Bette’s father was Army Col. Charles H. Unger.

Bette’s poem was called “A Brat’s Opinion”:

I was born to the boom of a cannon,
And a drum’s loud rat-a-tat-tat;
No, I’m not a German immigrant,
I’m just an Army brat!

I’ve packed my little suitcase
All over the U.S.A.:
Will probably never settle down
’Til after judgment day.

I’ve left good friends a-plenty,
At every “port of call”;
But we really never say goodbye,
’Cause the world is awfully small.

For Army brats today, that description still seems to fit.

Frank Warner

In ‘Tumbleweed Forts’ book, hear the voice of an Army brat

What is “the voice” in the book Tumbleweed Forts: Adventures of an Army Brat?

Elizabeth Wrozek, curator of the Henry Hauser Museum in Sierra Vista, asked that great question in the June 15th discussion and book-signing at the museum. My simple answer: The boy is narrating the story as it happens. He knows only what he’s seen and heard, and he’s not going to tell you any more until he knows it.

WROZEK: A thing that I’m impressed with is the voice that you use in the story. Now you’ve been a news reporter, and you’ve worked as an editor, so you know quite a bit about that. But when you’re reading the book, and you’re a grown man who’s looking back on his childhood and writing from that child’s perspective, the voice in it is so well done, and you forget you’re actually reading the words of a grown man.

WARNER: Elizabeth, you caught something there. A few editors I know have read the book and mentioned the point that you’re bringing up, the voice. There are very few books written from the voice of the child. It’s usually someone, an adult’s voice, describing the child. Huckleberry Finn is one of the exceptions. It’s in Huck Finn’s voice. He’s got that dialect, the Missouri dialect, the Southern dialect. I don’t use a dialect in my book because I spoke pretty ordinary American English as a boy. My mother was terrific with words, reciting poetry all the time, and my father was a good writer himself.

So I hope my voice is very plain and clear in the book, and it is from the perspective of a boy, initially seven years old and growing to 12 by the end of the story. I tried to keep to that. I said to myself, this is going to be the boy talking – me, but only how I felt then, and I wouldn’t describe anything I didn’t know at the time, or anything I wouldn’t know within a few days. If I found out something important 10 days later, I might mention that for perspective, but you’re finding out, in the book, what I’m learning as I learn it.

First-person limited. The first-person pronoun “I” tells the reader that the story is coming from the main character’s point of view. From a “first-person omniscient” perspective, an author could choose to describe all sorts of things the main character couldn’t know. But I don’t do that in Tumbleweed Forts. My book is from a “first-person limited” voice.

In my book, if the main character doesn’t know whether he’ll get in trouble for not doing his homework, or whether the steam-shovelers will find gold in Huachuca Canyon, the reader doesn’t find out either -- not until the character finds out.

To me, the first-person limited voice seems the best way to keep the reader thinking from the youngster’s perspective. The reader is in the boy’s shoes, and imagines how the boy is responding to every new adventure, acting with no knowledge of what happens next.

The in-the-moment voice is intended to build some exciting tension and give the reader a few extra surprises. I hope it works.

Frank Warner

Photo: Huachuca Canyon as seen from Reservoir Hill in Fort Huachuca, Arizona

Growing up in Fort Huachuca, I saw no javelinas

I heard about them. My father hunted them. But the javelinas, wild pigs of the Huachucas, never crossed my path when I lived in Fort Huachuca in the 1960s.

So I was surprised June 16th this year when, in a visit to the fort, I saw this javelina bothering a food caterer’s van during a colonel’s farewell ceremony on Brown Parade Field.

It was about 7:20 in the morning, the sun already bright, when the two-foot-tall spiked critter showed up at the south end of the field.

As I made my way from the flagpole toward the gazebo, the javelina approached the food van, and caterer Colleen repeatedly yelled, “Shoo!”

I moved in a zigzag toward the animal, to avoid spooking it. The javelina trotted away a yard or two at a time, and then disappeared across Grierson Avenue, Colonels Row.

Several experts later said it is unusual for a javelina to approach humans alone. They also guessed that this javelina’s family was nearby, but out of sight.

I was happy to see just one.

Frank Warner