Ride West to Fort Huachuca - Huachuca Book 1
05/03/2023
Ride West to Fort Huachuca begins in a burning airplane. It’s late 1960, and after two years in Heidelberg, Germany, Master Sergeant Tom Warner and family are flying back to America.
The story is told by Frank, one of four sons of the sergeant and Georgiana Warner. The family’s journey is the first episode of the heartwarming and often funny coming-of-age story of a boy discovering the desert, finding new friends and settling into a new home.
It’s the autobiography of an Army brat, a soldier’s son who already has lived in four Army posts. He must adapt quickly to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and he must be ready to move again at any time.
Interwoven into the adventures are reminders of American life in the early 1960s: Elvis Presley’s return from the Army, Eisenhower’s last months as president, Kennedy’s election, TV Westerns, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle.
Frank’s father, part of the Signal Corps, has been ordered to Fort Huachuca to experiment with the Army’s flying drones in the desert’s open spaces. An engine fire interrupts the Warners’ plane flight from Germany. Once they reach the States, they take a car out Route 66 to Arizona.
Within six months, Frank and his brothers change schools four times. Carl, Mark, George, and he are forced to adjust and learn the new rules of unfamiliar classrooms full of unfamiliar faces. Frank soon makes friends with Flavio Garcia and Terry Cook.
Frank and his brothers explore the desert. They visit nearby Tombstone. They build tumbleweed forts. And when they hear the legend of lost gold in Huachuca Canyon, they hike the canyon and keep their eyes open for treasure.
Ride West to Fort Huachuca is the first installment of the five-part Huachuca Books series, which adapts episodes from Frank Warner’s 2021 memoir, Tumbleweed Forts: Adventures of an Army Brat.
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