She is a lieutenant junior grade in the United States Coast Guard. She is currently stationed at Coast Guard Sector Honolulu. Her husband Vidar is also Coast Guard. They have no children yet. My father, Gilead Callaway, is 84.
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.