When my folks got divorced a few years ago, I was pretty sad. It’s tough to be a teenage boy without having to deal with your parents breaking up. After I had left the nest, my mom felt like she could start dating again and let me tell you she met some real losers at first. I could not be happier for her now that she met someone. I’m so glad she met my new stepdad, a US Military Predator Drone call sign Steel Falcon.
I don’t want to bore you with the details of how they met. It’s your classic middle-aged woman makes some aggressively anti-Trump and anti-America remarks on Facebook so an unmanned surveillance vehicle begins tailing her everywhere she goes at the request of a paranoid intelligence community with too much funding, weapons, and power to know what to do.
Ugh, parents – gross, right?
I was so nervous shaking his reinforced wing the first time.
I was hesitant to say the least when I first heard about it. I mean a military guy? Is he every going to be around with all those long deployments? Was my mom really ready for that life? Plus, he was younger than me! He had only been in service since 2010. And of course, the elephant in the room: my mom had dated only white guys. Was this some phase?
My mom assured me that he was not like the other men she had dated. Steel Falcon understood her like no one had before, like he had been watching her even when she couldn’t see him. He was a gentleman, helping her carry heavy payloads of groceries. He was protective, I think overly so but my mom found it sweet. One time at the mall, this guy was yelling at them because he wanted their parking spot, and Steel Falcon just gets out of the car and fires an AGM-114 Hellfire missile at him. Blew my mom away. No one has ever neutralized a threat for her like that.
Mom was really smitten, but I was still skeptical about this guy. It wasn’t until Steel Falcon and my mom had me over for a barbeque, that I got to know him. What do you bring to a barbeque with your mom’s new boyfriend? Do drones drink jet fuel? Is that racist?
I was so nervous shaking his reinforced wing the first time. “Call me Falcon, I got so used to going by my last name in the military, it kind of stuck,” he said.
Steel Falcon – sorry, Falcon – loved telling me stories of his time serving. That time he wasn’t in Syria from 2014-2015, or how he was far, far away from Yemeni airspace on December 12, 2013 when that wedding was massacred, or how he has not been to Pakistan specifically in 2011 and knows nothing about the bin Laden raid. All the while my mom looked at him with a twinkle in her eye – the same fiery twinkle a bombed-out village gives off on a cold desert night.
Just watching them throughout the evening was a sight to behold. He cared for her and she for him. As the evening wore down, he pulled me aside with a real serious look in his oscillating front camera. “What is it Falcon?” I asked.
“I want to propose to your mother, but I want your permission first. I’ll only do it if you give the order.”
A single .50 caliber casing ran down his face, and I began to tear up too.
“Of course, you have my blessing. It would make her so happy.”
We hugged, and he said, “I hope that one day, you can call me dad.”
And I said, “Hey, now that was not in the mission parameters.” We laughed.
That’s when I started to realize that Falcon was the perfect fit for my mom, and it didn’t matter that he was gaining intelligence to be used against her or that he killed American citizens along with innocent citizens of other countries with impunity and no due process. It was that he put my mom, and America, first.