Category: Army Brats

  • ARRIVAL AT THE NEW POST, 1960 Due north of Fort Huachuca, we moved down one last, long road, a highway that cut straight through eight miles of next to nothing. The sky was dark, with a bluish hint of dawn. On the roadside, every mile or so, we saw dark, coiled, ribbon-like figures, maybe three…

  • Flavio Garcia and I walked our bikes up the Smith Avenue hill, past General Myer School on the left. It was mid-June 1961 in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, a perfect sunny day for looking around. When we reached Winrow Road, we saw a white-gloved MP holding up regular traffic. Army jeeps, trucks, tanks, and 155mm howitzers…

  • ('Solder' is pronounced 'sodder.') When he was twelve years old, Tom Warner played with his first crystal radio set in Easton, Pennsylvania. Then he got serious about electronics. When he was fourteen, he built a Hartley oscillator and connected it to a modulator. His six-watt radio signal carried across the Lehigh River to the other…

  • From 'Tumbleweed Forts: Adventures of an Army Brat' On Christmas Eve, while Dad was painting black roads on his new train set, I asked him for another look at the silver dollars he brought back from the Nevada atomic test. “I want a closer look," I said. "I might draw a picture of them. You…

  • Ride West to Fort Huachuca begins in a burning airplane. It’s late 1960, and after two years in Heidelberg, Germany, Master Sergeant Tom Warner and family are flying back to America. The story is told by Frank, one of four sons of the sergeant and Georgiana Warner. The family’s journey is the first episode of…

  • In Water Rescue at the Desert Oasis, Frank and his friend Flavio resume the search for gold in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Both boys are sons of Army sergeants. As they hike into Huachuca Canyon, an Apache acorn-gatherer warns, “Gold makes people crazy.” At home, Frank’s brother Mark and neighbor Peter conduct a dazzling electrical experiment…

  • Huachuca Drones into the Atomic Cloud moves from young Frank Warner’s home in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, to the Nevada Test Site, and back again to the fort in 1962. Frank’s father, a master sergeant who is developing drones for the Army, takes a group of Fort Huachuca soldiers to Nevada to fly three drones through…

  • A new face joins Frank’s circle of fifth-grade friends in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Emily is the new girl in class. The first time Frank sees her, she’s running after a swirling cloud called a dust devil. As it turns out, Emily dances and spells well too. The New Girl Chases Dust Devils also follows other…

  • For two years, young Frank Warner has heard about the lost gold in Huachuca Canyon, Arizona. Now, in early 1963, a serious project begins to dig up the treasure. The whole story is in The Big Dig for Canyon Gold. Army Private Robert Jones, who says he saw stacks of gold bars in an underground…

  • The five books of the Huachuca Books series are episodes excerpted and adapted for younger readers from Frank Warner’s 2021 memoir, Tumbleweed Forts: Adventures of an Army Brat. Most of the stories are about growing up in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where Frank’s soldier father was sent to experiment with drones in the early 1960s. The…