Remembering Uncle Phil: The Green Beret Who Saved Me With His Heart

Sergeant Major Philip J. Hoffman was a Green Beret, part of the US Army’s special operations force tasked with unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense, among other things.

After the Vietnam War, Special Forces stationed him throughout Europe, mostly in Germany and Austria. We only saw Uncle Phil on rare occasions when he was passing through Los Angeles.

In his uniform, my mom’s brother Phil was an imposing man. When he stood at attention, his barrel chest made the ponderous array of bars and medals on his jacket seem like they would pop off his outer pockets and shower us with bling.

When I was a toddler, I dashed to my mother’s skirt when Phil came through the door. Though his face looked stern, he spoke with a lively, melodic cadence that sing-song soothed my fear of him, and I quickly ventured away from my mother to be by his side.

Phil had divorced his first wife, but often visited Fayetteville, North Carolina to visit the children he had with her. When he was stationed in Austria, he took up with a Viennese woman named Elizabeth that we called “Sissy.” Phil had a daughter with Sissy, but they didn’t marry. Sissy managed to keep the child as a single mother, a request that the Austrian government rarely approved in the 1960s.