My parents live in Oklahoma. When I was getting ready to begin my final year of high school at the International School of Stavanger my family moved to the United States and I expressed my great reluctance to join them. I stayed behind in Norway and finished high school while, ironically, doing a home-stay with an American family there. Since then I have frequently visited my parents in Oklahoma, especially at Christmas time. I arrived last night in Tulsa, Oklohama after my cheap Expedia travel arrangements took me through Milwaukee (which is a city in Wisconsin, apparently) and Dallas.
I have often flown through Dallas before, but this time I was struck by the huge number of military personnel traveling through both the E and C terminals of that airport yesterday, especially when compared to Boston and Milwaukee. I have a few theories about why this might be the case: 1) Dallas is a large hub and since it is getting close to Christmas many military personnel are going on leave to visit their families. 2) Dallas happens to act as a hub which connects somehow to whatever transportation network that the military has set up for its forces going on leave. 3) Perhaps American Airlines, which uses Dallas as a hub (especially C gates), is especially good at providing for military personnel through various services and discounts. 2) Dallas is in the South and connects to many cities in the south. Perhaps there is a larger percentage of military from the South than other areas of the United States. If this is true then the stereotype that the South is more nationalistic or militaristic or, more likely, the fact that there are a lot of the poorest states in the United States located in the south combined with the fact that the military has a disproportionately larger percentage of recruits from poorer classes can help explain this.
A few further things that struck me. First, I made a rough count of the soldiers I came across, and while this is perhaps not a good sample, I was really surprised to see that a full 1/3 of the soldiers I counted were female. I wonder how female recruiting has changed and what percentage they have come to occupy in the overall makeup of the United States military. I wonder if the struggles to meet recruiting targets in the current wartime circumstances of the US has lead to any changes or special efforts to make further inroads in recruiting women?
I don’t know if it is the only one, but American Airlines opens all its “Admiral Clubs,” which are usually for first class passengers, to military personnel when they show their military ID. They advertise this on a large sign in front of the club’s entrance. I didn’t find this too remarkable. American Airlines can benefit from promoting its nationalist image and its support for the troops, many of which are returning from a wartime theater or going to one.
I was also struck by the strong support for the troops among American travellers. As I walked from about gate C20 to my gate C37 I walked behind a young soldier. In that short 5-10 minute walk I saw two different adults and one child randomly approach the soldier, slap him on the back or shake hands, and give him various words of thanks and support for his efforts. The child that ran up to him gave him some kind of a gift but I couldn’t make out what it was.
As I started thinking about this I realized I had really mixed feelings about all this. Last Christmas when I arrived in Tulsa I saw a couple sit down next to a soldier returning from Iraq near the baggage claim and ask him sympathetically about the challenges of his military duty there. I remembered how difficult it seemed to be for him to put his experiences into simple sentences to share with these inquisitive strangers.
The collection of mixed feelings this all gave me really came to a head when I arrived in Tulsa last night. When the flight landed in Tulsa, there was an extra message issued at landing. The American Airlines stewardess announced that, “I have a favor to ask everyone. In seat 23C we have one of our military boys who has just come back to Oklahoma to visit his wife and family. When the seat belt sign turns off I would like to ask everyone to remain seated and let him get his bag and get off the plane first so he can get to see his wife who is waiting for him outside.” When the seat belt light went off the whole plane erupted into applause and loud hurrays. These continued as the young man in 23C, who was not wearing his military uniform, removed his baggage from the overhead compartment and ran triumphantly off the plane. As far as I could see I alone refrain from shouting and applauding, but instead sat quietly in complete shock and disgust. I felt suddenly and strangely nauseous, even as I tried to reflect on the reasons for own reaction while watching the man and the passengers around me.
This experience was made all the more bizarre because in the seat behind me was sitting another, this time female soldier, still dressed in her fatigues and heavy boots, who told her boyfriend (I learnt later that she was engaged) on her cellphone that she had arrived and would be disembarking soon. She waited patiently as the 23C military man was drowned in shouts of support and ran off the plane, propelled all the more quickly by the back slaps of other passengers.
I heard an older woman sitting next to the female soldier say sympathetically, “I think it should be standard policy to always let all the army people get off planes first.”
I walked just ahead of the female soldier as we approached the baggage claim area and left the secure area. There was a whole crowd waiting for her with signs of support and welcome. Her fiance, who had a military style hair cut, was waiting for her in a wheelchair and held a sign, “So, J. are you ready to sign your life away AGAIN?” He read out the sign he was holding as she approached him. After she answered in the affirmative everyone went wild and crowded around her with congratulations.
To be honest, my thoughts and feelings on all of this are just too unprocessed and complicated for me to feel comfortable discussing them here. To cap off an evening of complex emotions, it just so happened that the Netflix movie waiting for me to watch last night when I got to my parent’s home in Bartlesville was “The Best Years of Our Lives” This award winning 1946 movie about three soldiers returning from World War II includes the story of a disabled veteran (apparently he was disabled in the war) who is worried his fiance back home will only stay with him out of pity and cannot possibly love him as he is.