He retired from the United States Air Force in 1996 as a brigadier general after 34 years of service. He has been diagnosed with earlystage Louisibody dementia since March of 2022. He lives in the back bedroom of our ranch farmhouse with Marray and me. He is still ambulatory. He is still verbal most days.
He still recognizes Marray and Enz and the Katahula Kurs. He occasionally forgets which decade we are in. He drove the 2009 F250 from the day he bought it new at Grryer Ford in Cheyenne until the morning of March 11th, 2022 when he came in from the back pasture with the keys in his right hand and laid them on the kitchen table beside my coffee. He said, "Son, I do not trust myself in that truck anymore. I am asking you to drive it for me.
I have driven that truck ever since." My father enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1958 at the age of 17. He served two tours in Vietnam as a combat controller. He commanded an Air Force special operations squadron during the Mayagu incident in 1975. He commanded the 99th Air Refueling Squadron at Kadina Air Base from 1981 to 1984.
He served as a Pentagon liaison officer to NATO in Brussels from 1988 to 1991. He took his star in 1992 and commanded the 3005th operations group at Maguire AFB until his retirement in 1996. He drove the 2009 F250 to my Air Force commissioning ceremony at Yale University in May of 1997. He drove the 2009 F250 to my pinning ceremony when I made colonel in 2018. He drove the 2009 F250 to my wing commander assumption of command ceremony at FE Warren in July of 2024.
He sat in the front row at every one of those ceremonies in the same dress blues he had been issued at the Pentagon in 1992. He saluted me at the assumption of command. He cried for the first time I had ever seen him cry. He had been an Air Force officer for 38 consecutive years. His son had now been one for 26.
The 2009 F250 was in every way that mattered the vehicle that had carried our family through both of those careers. In the autumn of 2021, a development company called Sentinel Ridge Properties broke ground on a 180 home luxury subdivision on the section directly east of our ranch. The development marketed itself from the first sales materials as Cheyenne's premier military family residential community. In 2023, a 48-year-old woman named Briany Pendergast took over the Sentinel Ridge Estates HOA presidency. She drove a Pearl White Lincoln navigator with a vanity plate that read Brian P.
Her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Pearson, Pete Pendergghast, was a wing operations staff officer at FE Warren Air Force Base. He worked in the chain of command three positions below me. He had served on my staff for the previous eight months. Brianie did not yet know. Brian Pendergast's first letter to me arrived in October of 2024.
It was a Sentinel Ridge Estates HOA community standards advisory addressed to Callaway Ranch RR2 Box 47 Cheyenne WY8209. The advisory expressed concerns regarding visual aesthetics of vehicles stored on residential rural acreage adjacent to community boundaries and respectfully requested that the longtime adjacent property owner consider relocating older model commercial vehicles to enclosed structures during daylight hours. The older model commercial vehicle was my father's 2009 F250. The adjacent rural acreage was a Callaway family ranch that had been on Saddle Ridge Road 18 years before Sentinel Ridge Estates had broken ground. I read the letter at my kitchen table on a Saturday morning.
Marray was in her judicial chambers in Cheyenne reviewing a federal sentencing memorandum. My father was on the porch in a wool jacket watching the dogs. I wrote Brian Pendergast a polite letter back declining to relocate the truck. I did not yet know who her husband was. I learned 3 weeks later on a Tuesday morning when Lieutenant Colonel Pete Pendergast cleared my office door at 07:30 for the Wing weekly staff meeting.