During the second year of my Air Force enlistment, having long-since tired of the drudgery of the Pentagon, I put in a request for a transfer somewhere, anywhere. The request was borne out of desperation for something other than the secretive dreariness of our basement facility, or if I was lucky, the solitary 8-hour shifts locked behind a foot-thick steel door in a metal box on the third floor of the world’s largest office building. My request, and the subsequent reassignment, was a mistake, or so I thought at the time.

I grew up hearing, briefly now and again, stories of my father’s time in the military. He too was in the electronics field in the Air Force. All told, he spent seven years in, only leaving it to care for his dying father, though he didn’t know at the time his father was beyond saving. But my dad was stationed in western Europe–Germany and Italy primarily–though he traveled all over during his free time.