Old friends and Facebook

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

  ~C.S. Lewis

 It was December 1974 when I last saw any of my comrades from the 92nd Cadet Squadron AFJROTC at Clovis High School, Clovis, California.  We were a very tight knit group, you see the war in Vietnam had not been over all that long and the military or anything associated with it was shall I say, less then popular.  We were a group that clung to American ideals of freedom and understood maintaining that freedom comes with a price.  It was those common beliefs that bound us together not just as a unit but as friends.

They are friends I have never forgotten and have thought of often.  They are the people I have always considered my true friends from high school and to this day there is not one among them I would gladly take a bullet for.  Well there is one I would not take one for but he's in year 20 of a 60 plus year sentence in the California penal system but that is a piece for another time.

My point is that no matter what was going on in my world whenever I saw a military aircraft fly by I would wonder if I maybe knew the pilot or someone on the ground that kept it flying.  At times during my street days my mind would wander at night and I would ponder on what ever happened to so and so and what is s/he doing now, their faces and names still etched in my mind.

Now most of the time, to be honest, I find Facebook to be more of a pain in the ass then its worth.  Always getting invitations to play silly app games I have no interest in it tends to make me some what nuts.  A couple of days ago though Facebook proved its worth to me when I get an email about a friend invitation.  I open it and low and behold its from someone I was in AFJROTC with at Clovis.  We spend a little time catching up, I mean come on how do you really catch up with someone after 36 years?  As we end the conversation she tells me there are quite a few former squadron members there.  When I look at her friends list the gap from 1974 to 2010 closes like the Red Sea on the Egyptians.  I felt like I was reading the who's who all the while clicking "Add as friend" and praying that they remembered who I was.

This May there will be a multi class reunion I don't care how I have to get there, hitchhike, mule or crawl I intend to be there to renew old friendships I thought were gone forever.  These are friends that have given me new value to my survival for the last 36 years.