Posted on 11/27/2002 7:40:07 PM PST by Mr Rogers
What makes a boarding school-educated single mother from Ipswich want to join the US Air Force? David Rennie finds out
When Michelle Johnson left England to marry an American airman, her neighbours in Ipswich had her future all worked out. Everyone, from her father to near-strangers, told her that she would be back within a few years - with children and no husband, just like all the others. To local gossips, her tale was especially gripping. She met her husband while she was still at boarding school. He was 10 years older and he was black. For a while, her story looked like fitting the stereotype that East Anglia has known since the Second World War, when the first waves of American airmen were "oversexed, overpaid and over here". Michelle was 23 when her marriage unravelled, leaving her with two small boys in her husband's home town of Savannah, Georgia. He had left the familiar world of the US military a while before, plunging his young family into civilian life, and into the ancient racism and grudges of the Deep South.
It was at that point that Michelle - who describes herself as "extremely stubborn" - departed from the familiar script. The young British single mother took herself to a recruiting office and asked to join the American air force. Under a little-known law, foreigners are allowed to join the US military - at the last count, there were 31,000 non-citizens serving, half of them in the navy. Only a tiny band of them are British. Foreigners can be sent to war, though as non-citizens they have low security ratings, which bar them from sensitive areas. Many are from Latin America or the Philippines, and are looking for a better life. Others simply want to fight for the biggest, most powerful military in the world.
Michelle wasn't looking to fight anybody and she didn't even like aeroplanes or flying when she decided to join up. But life on a big airbase had seemed to offer a stable and disciplined environment for her children. "I liked the community, the environment, and I missed that when we got out," she says. "I knew, eventually, that my marriage wasn't going to work, and I didn't want to go back to England with my tail between my legs."
The US military seemed to offer young men and women a second chance at education and a career. It was also racially diverse, and tolerant - qualities that appealed to Michelle after a childhood spent partly in Britain, partly globe-trotting with her father, a British construction engineer, and her Argentine mother.
Though she loved much about Britain - and still does - her family were subjected to some unpleasant small-mindedness. During the Falklands conflict, her mother was sacked as a seamstress, after her employers learnt she was Argentine. Neighbours would cross the street to avoid them. At school, Michelle was taunted as "the Argie". When the family moved to Indonesia, Michelle was sent to boarding school in Suffolk - first to Brandeston Hall prep school, then Framlingham College - and found herself having to negotiate the maze of English snobbery. "I didn't come from a family that had a history of going to private schools - it just so happened that my father could afford for me to go. I didn't have a clue about social events, or private tennis lessons and the way you wore certain things. "I was always second-guessing how to pronounce unusual words. It was really important what you looked like, and if you didn't grow up around certain types of people, you didn't have a clue."
When Michelle met her future husband, she was just 15. She was sketching with an art class in Ipswich when an American pulled up in his car. "I didn't really pay attention, until he got out and said: 'I've been driving round and round and you haven't said Hi'." He was 25, and a sergeant from a local air base. "As we got talking, he seemed to understand a lot of what I wasn't able to talk to anybody else about - racism and things. Nobody seemed to understand it at school." He kept the relationship a secret for over a year - Michelle only realised later that he knew he was risking serious trouble. "We weren't open about what was going on until I was 16, going on 17. I never went on to the base with him until I was 18." In the meantime, she left school before finishing her A-levels. "People were quite blunt. They said: 'It's not going to work. You're just going to be like everybody else'."
After they married, Michelle and her husband were posted to Germany, where she found herself alone with a new baby in a house miles from the airbase. A year later, the family were sent back to RAF Fairford, the sprawling US base in Gloucestershire. Some of Michelle's happiest memories are of Thanksgiving, when her husband would invite other American airmen to his home, and she would cook. "I got on better with people in the military than with their wives," she says. She tried going back to school, to complete her A-levels.
But then her husband decided to leave the military and return to America. Michelle's father did not want her to go with him. "He said: 'I guarantee you'll be back'. That's probably why my marriage lasted as long as it did, because I didn't want to be another statistic."
The social divisions in America surprised her: in particular, the level of racism. "In England, it's more reserved. I don't know whether that's any better, but it's just not quite so blatant. In Georgia, it was just" she shakes her head. "I'd seen things on television, or in films, but I never thought they really happened." Michelle found herself caught between two polarised communities. "My ex-husband is African American, and my children, obviously, are mixed. I had it from both sides. And I had really never experienced that on an air base. I think people in the military are more diverse, and more open to other races."
But when she joined the air force, she felt accepted immediately. "I felt as though I was finally going somewhere, not just following somebody. I was finding me, for the first time since getting married." Even basic training - clambering over assault courses while being yelled at by drill sergeants - was a positive experience. "I lost a lot of weight, all my baby weight. I didn't like the obstacle course - I fell in every water element you can imagine. But basic training taught me that you can achieve what you set your mind to. You don't have to depend on somebody else to give that to you."
At 25, Michelle was some eight years older than most raw recruits. "They made me an 'element leader' because they heard my accent and wanted an excuse to hear me talk - that's what the training instructor said. A lot of people didn't realise that I could join." Seeing her now, the senior airman in camouflage fatigues at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, it is hard to connect her with her East Anglian roots. She finds that some of her colleagues are hazy as to where, exactly, Britain is.
Michelle has now applied for American citizenship. She is fiercely attached to her new country, she says, though it took the September 11 attacks to help her understand exactly why. "In England, I was always British, but I'd been made to feel different. Because I was half Argentine, people would say things like: 'Go back to your country, you don't belong here'. Well, I've never had that here. It's so diverse here, it's huge and there are so many different cultures, and they're all American, ultimately." September 11 woke her up, she says: "Before, it was like looking through something blurry as to why I was in the military. But after that, everything made sense. Before, I wouldn't have been able to say quite as definitely that I would be prepared to go to a war zone - but now, there's no doubt in my mind."
She is due to receive her citizenship next year, and has already decided to re-enlist. If she is sent to war, she will go, though she admits to being frightened for her sons, Darrell and Joshua, now nine and four years old. "The US military is the best in the world, and it protects everybody," she says, as spy planes rumble overhead. "It protects the whole world. And I'm part of that now."
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