Ron Irvin served 23 years in the U.S. Air Force Security Forces. During his time in Germany, Irvin was a consumer fraud investigator for the police. During the latter 10 years of his service, Irvin’s wife Mary Walker-Irvin joined the Air Force as a weather officer.
While together in Germany, the couple got to know local people through groups like the international motorcycle club for police — which Irvin compares to the Annual South Dakota Sturgis Motorcycle Rally — and community events like the Volksmarsch — a non-competitive walk Irvin describes as a leisurely stroll through the woods. In separate interviews, both Ron and Mary said their time in the military taught them that people are pretty much the same wherever you go.
RON IRVIN: I brought some hats from some of the former communist countries when the Berlin Wall came down. My wife and I were escort officers for these individuals to show them how NATO did things and how the US military did things without getting into anything that would compromise our units.
KATIE WHITE: You were in the police and you did some investigative stuff? Did you enjoy that?
RON IRVIN: Yes, it was, for one, a challenge. You start with pieces and try to put everything together just like you see on TV — same basic idea. And it was the idea of trying to comb through the pieces and build a whole out of it. And hopefully get the bad guy off the street.
KATIE WHITE: Both you and your wife served. What was that like — that dynamic?
RON IRVIN: It wasn't much different than any other two working people, for the most part, other than you had to contend with different shifts that were rotated. And the fact that she worked on one base and I was on another. They were only 13 miles apart. So that wasn't a major problem.
We had an incident one time — I want to say approximately summer of 1992 — where there was rumors that a Russian spy was perusing the area looking to try to get on the base that she was on. And they put out a notice to look for this certain car, certain color license plate.
I was driving down one road. I thought I saw it, so I called the officer who was in charge of that stuff. A friend of mine that I had gone through ROTC with worked in that office, and he called me the next day and said, “You were right. We got him.”
I thought that was pretty nice. I had nothing to actually do with him other than seeing the car and where it was headed, but they did the hard part of getting him and taking care of stuff.
KATIE WHITE: Any experiences with locals that really stick out to you?
RON IRVIN: We had a couple of German cops that I worked with. They were brothers. I got into an argument one day with the younger brother. His name was Eric. He's the one I shared the office with.
We were just discussing race cars. He was telling me about how this one company made such a great carburetor for race cars. I said, "Yeah, what's that?"
He goes, "[Vay-ber]."
I said, "Okay."
He says, "Why?"
I says, "Cause in the US we have a company similar called Weber." We're arguing back and forth, which one's better. Come to find out that we were talking about the same thing. The Germans just pronounce it differently and discuss it differently than what we did, and we were discussing the same thing and that was funny.
Support for Bringing War Home comes from Utah State University, the National Endowment for the Humanities Dialogues on the Experience of War, and Utah Humanities.
