Do You Long To Be Known?

“Did we know each other thirty years ago?”

My husband and I recently attended a reunion of the 524th Bomb Squadron (BMS) in conjunction with a celebration commemorating the 25th anniversary of the closing of Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Huron. (That’s about knuckle high on your pointer finger–if you aren’t from Michigan, check out this hand map, and you’ll understand)

My husband was a B-52 pilot, and this was our first base assignment as newlyweds. We called Wurtsmith home for four years, and our first child was born there. Wurtsmith and Oscoda hold cherished memories.

The BRAC Commission Armed Forces draw down placed Wurtsmith on the base closure list in 1991, and the front gates were closed for the last time in 1993. Everyone moved somewhere. Some people crossed paths with each other during their Air Force careers. Not us. We never saw any of the 524th BMS people again.

So here we were, in a room full of people we weren’t sure we knew, searching the deep recesses of our memories for shared experiences. Hence the opening line, “Did we know each other thirty years ago?”