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Today's Featured Biography

 
Tim Moriarty

After graduation in 1974 I attended NOVA for a semester; however, things went south with my parents and I left town by joining the Army in early February 1975. After basic training at Fort Jackson, SC, and then railway crew training at Fort Eustis, VA, I was sent to Frankfurt, Germany, for the remainder of my three-year enlistment, where I was assigned as a conductor on the Berlin Duty Train, a night sleeper running between Frankfurt, West Berlin and the port city of Bremerhaven. In this position I was able to make a number of day trips through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin, plus while on the train I would trade East German marks for Soviet Army belts (featuring a hammer and sickle in the center of a large star on a brass buckle) with Soviet soldiers at the East German border railway station in Marienborn. In early 1977 the Berlin Brigade took over the conductor positions with its own personnel and I was reassigned to Rhein Main Air Base, just south of Frankfurt, where I saw how “the other half” (the Air Force) lived. Enjoyed the German discos, weinfests, skiing in Garmisch in the south, quick flights to the UK and the clothes-optional recreational beach at a lake near the base. Europe is indeed a very different place.

Got out at the end of my enlistment, got a job to last until the end of the summer, got accepted to GMU to start in the fall of 1978, joined an Army Reserve Airborne unit at Fort Meade, MD, and went to jump school that summer. During my college years I took two years of German and, having lived in Germany, did very well. This would come in handy later. Halfway through college I transferred to Air Force ROTC, graduated in May 1982, got commissioned, and left the area again in October. Within two years I was back in Germany where I found an apartment with a scenic view in the white wine village of Traben-Trarbach on the Mosel River, midway between Koblenz and Trier. My two-year assignment stretched to over four and during that time I traveled to numerous countries, making parachute jumps with the Airborne forces of Israel, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Taiwan (Republic of China), and South Africa. I also jumped in Karlsborg, Sweden, and earned the Swedish Army Parachute Ranger (Fallskärmsjägarkåren) badge, the Golden Eagle, and made a total of 26 jumps with various West German Army (Bundeswehr) Airborne battalions. While in Germany I also went on weekend volksmarches in countless German villages, usually 20 kilometers but also longer marches going on for 42 Km, 80 Km (40 per day in Diekirch, Luxembourg), 160 Km (40 per day in Nijmegen, Holland) and 100 Km (Pays de Bitche, France – yes, that’s its real name). Also went to numerous weinfests along the Mosel and Rhein rivers, skied in Zell am Zee, Austria, visited Paris and Normandy, France; Amsterdam, Holland; London, UK; and many other cities and festivals large and small, plus I learned how to SCUBA dive.

I returned to the States at the end of 1988, hoping to return to Germany within two years, but East Germany imploded within a year, the Cold War ended, and the drawdown began. After attending evening classes to get an MBA I took a very generous buy-out offer, left active duty at the end of 1992 and returned to northern Virginia, where I took night classes to earn an IT degree. I went to work for a publishing company and have remained there for 20 years.

While in Germany in the fall of 1987 I flew to Taiwan with a Bundeswehr paratrooper friend to jump from Korean War-era C-119 transports with the Nationalist Chinese. We went to South Korea for a few days on the way back to Germany and, when I returned, I found a new person assigned to my squadron, having just arrived from RAF Alconbury in the UK, was a young lady named Sohee, born and raised in Seoul. I left a year later and she returned to the States in late 1989 for an assignment to the staff of the military medical university behind Bethesda Naval Hospital. She and I stayed in touch, started dating when I returned to the area, and she reeled me in on April 1998 when the impossible happened – I actually got married. Still on active duty, she left in late 1999 for a one-year tour at Osan AB, Korea, after her mother in Seoul was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. I came over for a three-week visit in April 2000, a month after her mother died. Sohee returned to the States in late 2000 and retired from the Air Force in 2003.

After leaving the active duty Air Force at the end of 1992 I later joined an Army Reserve railway unit where I became qualified as a locomotive engineer, operating freight trains in switching and main line service and fulfilling a childhood dream. In 2003, however, disgusted with the blatant lies being told to a gullible public to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and no longer willing to look the other way, I retired from the Reserve, burned my uniforms with great satisfaction, and never looked back. Instead of operating trains for the Army, now I restore old railway cars and locomotives on weekends for an excursion railroad.

Sohee’s sister, Deokhee, is a popular Korean TV actress living in the fashionable Jamsil district of greater Seoul and every couple of years we fly over to visit for a few weeks. During our trips we see the sights, riding KORAIL trains to visit big cities, such as Pusan, as well as small ones, like Sintan-ri near the DMZ and the Chorwon Valley, plus we hike in the mountains and tour the ancient palace grounds. It is a beautiful, modern country, nothing like what you might see in reruns of MASH, and I’m looking forward to our next visit in the spring.

When I left home the first time in early 1975 my mother had said I was “a hateful little bastard who will burn in hell for what you put me through” and “With God as my witness, I could shoot you dead and no jury of my peers would convict me!” Later, when I was a paratrooper, my late father, a WW II veteran of the Army Air Forces in the Pacific, would tell me to "stop jumping out of those g*dd*mned airplanes like a complete sh*thead!" (He wanted me to fly aircraft rather than jump from them.) My mother lives about a mile from my office and, of all of her offspring, I’m the one who drops by every day after work to take care of her, do yard work that she can’t handle, carry in groceries from the car, etc. She doesn’t remember those earlier words (which are actually rather funny) but I’m in her good graces now.

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