She has been promoted to lieutenant since. My father, Gilead, passed in November of 2025, 6 months after the predicate act. He was 85. He had a good month in October, three consecutive lucid weeks during which he and I drove the 2009 F250 to every familiar place he had ever asked to go. He died in his rocking chair on the porch on a Tuesday afternoon with a wool blanket on his lap and the eastern Laramie mountains visible through the screen door.
Mire and Enz and I buried him beside my mother at the FE Warren Air Force Base Cemetery. The honor guard fired three volleys. A young senior airman whose name I did not catch presented the folded flag to me on the cemetery lawn. The senior airman saluted me. I saluted him back.
Senior Airman Saxon Otterstead and Senior Airman Meta Halverson attended the funeral in their service blues. They had asked through Lieutenant Colonel Octavia Peton whether they could attend. I had given my answer through the same channel. They stood in the second row of the burial detail for the entire ceremony. After the volleys, both of them came up to me and saluted one more time.
I returned the salutes. The two of them then walked to the rocking chair on the cemetery porch where Enz had set up a folding seat for my father's flag and stood honor watch for the next 40 minutes. I established the Brigadier General Gilead Callaway Memorial Caregiver Support Initiative in February of 2026. The initiative provides emergency respit care grants and dementia caregiver training to military families across the country who are providing inhome care to veteran family members with cognitive decline. Colonel Aurora Reinhomem serves on the initiative's board.
Lieutenant Colonel Llo Shrader serves as pro bono general counsel. My wife Morurell sits as board chair. The initiative's first grant was awarded to a 34year-old senior airman at FE Warren whose Korean War veteran grandfather was an earlystage fronttotemporal dementia. The grant funded 6 months of inhome respit care and a daughter's specialized nurse training certification. The 2009 F250 still sits in my driveway.
I drive it to the FE Warren commissary every Saturday morning. I drive it past the new Sentinel Ridge Estates HOA office on Highway 30. I drive it to my father's grave at FE Warren on the first Saturday of every month. Last night, Marray and I drove the F250 to a steakhouse in Cheyenne called the Plains Hotel. We ate prime rib and asparagus at a corner booth.
The jukebox played Paty Klene. We drove home with the windows down. The May Wyoming evening was cool. A pongghorn dough crossed Sadlidge Road in front of our headlights. I'm Colonel Whitley Callaway.
That was my father's truck. That was my wife's bench. That was my daughter's leave. That was the salute.