San Francisco, part 1

Other than the few months I lived in Concord, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've been to the bay area. It's a special place. Such a unique city, with such a unique character. And that bridge. That giant masterpiece of a bridge, pure in design, elegant in character, and so jaw-droppingly beautiful. More than just a connection between the chaos of the city and the serene beauty of Marin County, that bridge serves as a poignant symbol of the power and industry of the people that built it. And, ironically enough, it has a special place in the hearts of three cowboys from Arizona.

The first of those three cowboys was my grandfather Reggie. Reggie came from a family of cowboys, mostly old Texas Rangers and their ilk, but by his time they had all settled in Arizona. Reggie did not have an easy life. He was 10 in 1929 when the stock market crashed, forcing his father out of business and spliting up the family. He and his dad took jobs with the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, created by President Roosevelt to help give Americans meaningful work. The CCC was responsible for many of the improvements done to our national and state parks; my grandfather spent most of the 1930's up on Mount Graham in eastern Arizona building roads and campgrounds. In fact, he lived in a tent for over 12 years, if you include his time spent in North Africa during World War II. Somewhere in there, he got married, had a child, then left for basic training to fight the Axis. He was a Master Sargeant by the time the war was over, and a master carpenter. His job in North Africa was to build airfields for the Army Air Corps' fleet of B-24 heavy bombers. He was there for some of the first Allied raids on Axis territories. One in particular was Ploesti. The following exerpt in part describes Ploesti:

"Ploesti is to the US Air Force (successor to the US Army Air Corps) what Tarawa is to the US Marine Corps. Because a third of Germany's oil came from the Rumanian fields at Ploesti, it was the most heavily defended target in the German Reich, even more than Berlin. The air attack hoped, but failed, to achieve surprise and the result was bloody for the attackers.

They pushed their attack with a blind determination and a complete disregard of their own lives unprecedented in air warfare. The Marines at Tarawa fought like madmen because they had no choice: stranded on the beach they either advanced or died where they lay. At Ploesti, however, each and every aircrew had a choice of proceeding or aborting, and the conditions were such that no one could have blamed them for aborting - in most armies, soldiers are not expected to commit suicide when the issue is not one of life and death.

Of the 178 aircraft out, 163 made it over target. Of these 41 were lost in action, 8 in Turkey, and 5 due to miscellaneous causes. Three hundred aircrew were killed, 140 captured, and of the crew returning, over 440 were wounded. The B-24 carried a 10-man crew, so casualties ran to 55%. Only one in six bombers were in flyable condition with the mission complete. The 30% aircraft loss rate is appalling in terms of modern loss expectations, and was so even for those desperate days."

5 Medals of Honor were awarded for the Ploesti raid. In subsequent years, my father would tell me of how Grandpa Reggie would see planes start taking off from his airfields before dawn and keep taking off all day into the late afternoon, when the first ones would start returning. He said sometimes, half would come back. My Grandfather experienced a lot of death.

Eventually, the war ended, but it still took him six months to get home. Grandpa Reggie ended up circumnavigating the globe. He left the US from the east coast, sailed across the Atlantic, spent 3 years in North Africa, then sailed through the Suez canal, and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans home. He spent several weeks in Bombay, another experience he talked about often. He said he thought he grew up in poverty until he spent time in Bombay.

It was the end of that journey around the globe that forever connected him to the bridge. He was on the deck with his fellow weary countrymen as his transport ship approached the bay and sailed under the bridge. It was the first piece of America the master carpenter had seen in over 3 years. The technological grandeur of the bridge stood in stark, beautiful contrast to the primitive existence of wartime North Africa and Bombay. As he would later recount to my father, it was the most beautiful and moving sight he had ever seen. This was his homeland. This is what they fought for. Grandpa was home.

End of part 1.