Insanity

For the first few days I was locked up in a room with just a bed in the psychiatric unit at Lakenheath AFB in England.  I heard voices.  I saw things that probably didn’t happen.  I tried to speak French.  I would have told the doctors about the voices but they were in Russian and the doctors didn’t have security clearances high enough to to know what language I was hearing.  There was even a guard outside my door until my own clearance was pulled.    

A week or so after that I had a dream.  I could tell it was a dream, a very bad dream, but I knew it was a dream.  I was getting better. 

It all  started after my family, Cathy, Sean and I, got back from 30 days leave driving to France and Italy.  It was a fabulous vacation.  When we returned it was springtime in England.  I went back to work and everything seemed to be good, very good.  I was having a little back pain and I went to see the doctor.  He prescribed a muscle relaxant, a new wonder drug called Valium. 

I took the Valium and I was off.  Gradually I slept less and less.  During that time Cathy had a miscarriage but I was so busy marveling at the wonder of my life that I missed it.  I didn’t even know it happened.  Friends of ours, Tom and Anna, had a crisis in their life and Tom and I stayed up the whole night looking for Anna.  The next day I was like a high voltage wire talking nonstop and going faster and faster. 

I went to work at midnight and sat down at my rack.  The first thing to do at work was to type in my name at the top of a blank page.  I couldn’t remember my name.  It seemed a simple thing and I tried a little harder and it got harder.  I stared at the page and tried desperately to remember my name.  I couldn’t.  I didn't know who I was.  I pulled the earphones off and I think I shouted in panic.  Whatever I did it caused quite a stir on Dog Flight in the Manual Morse Section at about 10 minutes after midnight.  Sergeant Hornbecker took me down to the Base Medical Clinic and the corpsman there tried to figure out what to do. 

Later I learned the corpsman with Horny was trying to figure out  how to undo and use a strait jacket.  While they left me alone I was sinking into a terrifying well of nothingness and I couldn’t stop myself.  I was as frightened as I had ever been in my life.  Thank God, the corpsman didn’t figure the stait jacket out before the doctor arrived and gave me a shot of Thorazine and maybe another. 

I woke up the next day and life was still wonderful, I was talking to anyone who would listen and talking if no one was listening.  The doctor explained I was going to go to the hospital up at Lakenheath for observation.  I had a reasonably calm ride up there but at the hospital everything seemed to fall apart. 

I was locked in a room and a guard was posted outside my door.  Apparently the doctor with a security clearance high enough to treat Chicksands patients was on leave and the other doctors were being careful.   After a day or two the guard was gone, but I was insane. 

I was tortured by poundings on the wall, the sound of steel beds being dragged across a hard floor in the room on the other side of the wall, there was no room, and voices I heard in English and Russian.  I didn’t know what was going on but it was terrible and I couldn’t get away.  After two or three days of this, the doctor told me he was going to give me Lithium.  He explained that it was a new drug that hadn’t yet been approved but was being used very successfully in Australia.  After a couple of days he got permission to administer it to me.  Apparently the doses I was taking were so high that there was some danger involved and a corpsman arrived twice a day and drew blood from me. 

Within a day or two I had calmed down enough to join the rest of the patients.  I think this must have been when I had my bad dream. 

There was an anorexic teenager and a couple of other airmen who seemed nice enough.  We were a little group of crazies.  We attended group sessions with a psychologist and there were nurses and doctors.  The voices continued but not as bad.  I always had to be doing something, playing ping pong or talking, or drawing or playing pool.  One time I saw an airman in a wheel chair being taken down the hall and I knew he was being taken for electroshock treatments.  There were events and amazing connections going in flashes of heightened awareness all day long.    

I know there were no electroshock treatments being done at Lakenheath but I believed it at the time and it was hard to convince myself months later that everything I saw and heard was not real.  Even a few years later when I read about the military doing LSD experiments, I thought maybe that’s what happened.  It was hard to believe it was all in my head and not something being done to me. 

There were meetings with the doctors and nurses.  One day I decided not to tell the truth about the voices to the doctor .  When he asked me if I was hearing voices, I told him, “No.”  A day or two later I got to go home. 

I have no sense of time in all of that.  The best I can do is a day or two here or there.  I think I was at Lakenheath less than two weeks, but more than a week.  I made a leather wallet in occupational therapy which Cathy carried for years after that.  

I went home with a prescription for Lithium salts.  For a few days, a few weeks, a few months, I don’t know, I was very quiet and contained.  I sat in our flat and tried to feel sane, tried to have control.  After a while it didn’t seem so hard.  Sometime on my own I stopped taking the Lithium.  It made everything taste bad.  I think the doctor went along with that

I went back to the base.  My security clearance had been revoked.  That’s when the guard left.  In the military, apparently if I didn’t have a security clearance, I wasn’t a risk.  Dog Flight’s first sergeant, Senior Master Sergeant Scarborough, tried to get me a temporary position on the base newspaper until a determination could be made about where I was going.  The Personnel Section stepped in and I was assigned to them. 

I could type and for a few days I helped out at Personnel.  They were nice enough.  I had the shift worker’s dream of a day job, five days a week, with weekends off.  By this time I was a three striper like Airman 1^st Class Steinberg, but in 1970 we were called sergeants, but we still cleaned latrines.  The assignments clerk, another sergeant left for one reason or another and I stepped into his place. 

I became the assignments clerk for RAF Chicksands.  It was during the Vietnam War and I spent my days working on itineraries and orders for Airmen and Sergeants being shipped all over the world though mostly through Travis AFB near Sacramento to South Vietnam or Thailand.  I enjoyed it.  I had a good time.  Sergeant Graham was my boss and our boss was Master Sergeant Erwin.  There was a captain as well, but Sergeant Erwin addressed the Captain in his Alabama drawl as “Son.”  I don’t ever remember the Captain as having much to do with the operation of the section.   

Sergeant Erwin brought his coffee and a sandwich to work in a net bag like the English used to go shopping and one time I saw a copy of the New Republic showing through it.  He was a World War II New Deal Democrat from Alabama and as fine a man as I’ve ever met.  He had a serious problem with the bottle and it seemed to be destroying him slowly.  

I must have done a pretty good job because at the end of six months, Sergeant Erwin and Sergeant Graham asked me what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, as something they could do to return the favor.  They thought they could keep me in personnel if I wanted to stay or let me go back to the States or whatever I wanted.  I knew that once having had a security clearance that it was never going to look good  if I lost it.  I said I wanted to go back to Dog Flight.  My base medical file was written showing a drug reaction as what had had happened.  It seems everybody was watching out for me.    

The whole time I had been in personnel, Captain Sinclair of the Air Police and in charge of security clearances for the base had been trying to get me ordered off the base, sent to Torrejon, Spain or somewhere other than RAF Chicksands and Security Service.  I was told he was writing memos that had to go through personnel and that Sergeant Erwin was attaching explanations to the memos that negated them and that there had been a running war between Captain Sinclair and the Personnel Department.  Personnel won. 

At the same time the Air Force began giving a test for promotion to Staff Sergeant.  The first one was that February.  Ron Graham, my boss and Sergeant Erwin recommended I take it.  I said I didn’t have a clearance.  They let me know it didn’t require a clearance and I took the test.  Before I left personnel they informed me I had been put on the Staff Sergeants list and I would be promoted shortly.  That day they gave me my new stripes, four of them, to take home. 

I went back to work on Dog Flight.  I sewed those stripes on a couple of months later.  I spent the rest of my six months in the service as the assistant to the First Sergeant.  I typed reports, supervised clean up details and did whatever Master Sergeant Lewis required.  It was a good time.  I enjoyed it.  I never had to listen to Morse Code again. 

This is a good place to talk about Sergeants.  Until I had my breakdown I didn’t realize how well we were cared for by our sergeants.  It was a Staff Sergeant I worked with who took me down to the Medical Clinic.  Hornbeck or Horny was a good friend and somebody who took gentle care of me that night.  Chief Madigan, Chief Master Sergeant Madigan, the senior enlisted man at Chicksands made sure my wife was able to come see me in the hospital when she needed to.  One time he drove her to Lakenheath himself to see me, three hours away from Chicksands.

When I returned from the hospital our first sergeant at the time, Senior Master Sergeant Dick Scarborough was watching out for me and working to get me a good situation and to protect me from people who didn’t care.  Pretty quickly Technical Sergeant Ron Graham and his boss Master Sergeant Erwin were watching out for me.  Chief Madigan was always there somewhere in the background. 

The military could be pretty impersonal place but the sergeants were like mother ducks, they watched out for us.  They protected their own.  Like parents they cared about us and made the system work like a family.

For the first ten years and more after that I seemed on the edge of going back there.  I think it wasn't until I got sober 13 years later that I lost my fear that it was something that could happen again.   

   

Our First Son

Cathy announced that she was pregnant in August, our first summer in England.  We were ecstatic.  Neither Cathy nor I were practicing Catholics but we certainly came from that background and during our courtship, the idea of having children was exciting to both of us.  We felt like adults.  

In August, 1968 I was 21 years old and she was 20.  We were living on our own in England. 

For the first few months Cathy used birth control but she went off the pill as soon as we had settled in.  We were the first of our set to have a child among the airmen and their wives who came to Chicksands in 1968.  The whole experience was exciting to us.  I think one day she went to the medical clinic on base and we met in the Airman’s Club for lunch.  She told me we were going to have a child together.  I remember the table we were sitting at when she told me. 

Sean was born April 25^th, 1969.  I used to always mix up his birthday with  our anniversary on April 20^th.  Then I made the mnemonic, first we were married and then he was born.  Cathy told me the gossips in El Segundo where she grew up were disappointed it was a year after we got married. 

We lived in Bedford, about 10 miles from the base.  Toward the end of the nine months Cathy had labor pains frequently and two or three times we went to the base and got prepared to go to the Air Froce hospital in London and they called it off, Braxton Hicks contractions or false labor.  The last time an ambulance came out to get her and took her to East Ruslip near London.  I was told by the doctors,one more time it was Braxton Hicks and normally they would send her home, but since we lived so far away they would keep her and induce labor the next day.  I should go home and return in the morning.  There was plenty of time. 

After a long train trip home and back, I arrived back at the base hospital  about 10 o’clock the next morning.  I got to see my son Sean for the first time.  He had been born two hours before. 

From the start, he was an incredible youngster, so beautiful and lovely to look at.  He was a delight to be around.  Early on he developed a love for cars and we began buying him matchbox cars.  He had dozens of them and would spend his time lining them up to play with them.  He slept in a crib in the front room.  At some point before he was two years old, he learned to climb out of it and play with his cars until we got up.  Usually by the time, we joined him he already had them all lined up and running with motor sounds he made. 

We bought a used Volkswagen shortly after he was born.  He could spot any Volkswagen product from long distances.  VW was beginning to manufacture squarebacks and notchbacks and it seemed there were odd VWs wherever Sean looked.  We had no clue they were Volkswagens and Sean would announce “Volkswagen!” with great delight.       

It was a wonderful time having a baby and Sean was a wonderful baby.  We took him around town in a large perambulator, pram (baby buggy) that we bought used.  We dressed him warmly and went to parks and took pictures whenever we could.  His grandparents from El Segundo came to visit him.  His grandmother was worried that if he came to harm unbaptized his soul would go to limbo.  My seminary training told me we didn’t a priest to administer the sacrament of baptism, so we baptized him at home to satisfy Minnie.  Later Monsignor (Major) O’Donnell made it official at the base chapel. 

My sister came to see him and stayed with us for a couple of weeks.  Cathy’s brother Alan, a 16 year old, came and stayed part of the summer with us.  Alan learned to drink beer at the pubs.  I came home from work and he looked dreamy eyed and punchy.  Somehow an American 16 year old looks 18 to the British.  I guess he was tall enough and well fed. My parents from Burbank came to see their first grandchild.  It was the middle of winter and we had to have a doctor to see my mother for a terrible respiratory infection.  

Sean began talking in England and by the time we came home, his grandparents and everyone else wanted him to talk to them, because he had an English accent.  I think it lasted less than two months.  When he was 20 he went back to England from Paris where he was living and got his British passport.   

Security Service

I spent six months learning Morse code at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi Mississippi.  I was not very good at it and I didn’t get much better after I was sent to the 6950^th Security Group at RAF Chicksands.  I  sat at a rack of two World War II era radios, R390s, and listened to the Russians and other Warsaw Pact members send Morse code for eight hours a day.

It was easy enough to find people sending it.  Our giant antenna array was pointed at Eastern Europe and Western Russia.  There were bands on the radio dial that were particularly rich with traffic.  We would listen to two radio operators chattering back and forth, telling each other who they were and what they were going to send, and then they settled into the body of their message sending groups of four or five letters and numbers in long sequences some going on for pages.  We couldn't read it.  We just sent it on.  I don't know if anyone else could read it.  

Sometimes we copied airplanes, civilian and military, Estimated Times of Arrival, Airports, directions and other details.  I even copied trains sending Morse code, but no one was very interested in that.  We’d look for stuff, Soviet space efforts, army units, sometimes civilian activity.  There were assignments and things we copied regularly and there were times we just searched for what we could find. 

My first summer there I copied Russian tank units.  We watched the buildup of Warsaw Pact Military Exercises in the summer of 1968.  Dubcek and the Czechoslovakian people were in the midst of Prague Spring.   Leonid Brezhnev and the hardliners in the Soviet Union were against it.  It felt like the excitement of Perastroika 20 years too early, but just as the US crushed Salvador Allende five years later, Brezhnev crushed Dubcek. 

I remember the night in August, 1968, we came to work a midnight shift.  All week we had seen Polish, East German, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Russian units staging on the borders of Czechoslovakia.  And then they went in.  It was amazing, hundreds of thousands of troops pouring into a small country and securing it in a tight lockdown in just a few hours.  They seemed to have soldiers  at every corner and tanks everywhere.  The Czechoslovakians resisted but it was futile against such a force. 

For the next few days we tensely watched as Dubcek flew to Moscow to meet the Russians.  Within a week or two Czechoslovakia had a new government returning meekly to the Soviet fold. 

The sheer naked power of the Soviet military was frightening to watch.  NATO, the U.S. and its allies, of course, went on alert.  In Security Service we were always on alert, but within a few hours the rest of the US Military in Europe stood ready if the Russians moved beyond Czechoslovakia.  The small British military was ready with us and over a period of weeks, the rest of NATO put itself into position to resist a Russian invasion.  Quickly it was obvious the only credible force between the Russians and Paris was the U.S. Military. 

I was going to work one day that week and a Britain patted me on the arm and said, “Hello, Yank, glad you’re here.” 

The rest of the time the job was mostly boring.  I did not enjoy the work and I wasn’t very good at it.  One time we were told to search everything to find out when a Soviet manned satellite would be coming down.  I told the Sergeant it would be 0126 Greenwich Mean Time or Zulu as we called it.  He came back a few minutes later and said, “You’re right!  You’re right!  How did you get that?”  I told him I read it in the London Times that morning.   

Copying Morse code for three years was not my best job.  I was proud to be part of NATO and the defense of Europe against the Russian Bear.  I loved being in England.  When it was happening four years seemed like a long time out of my life, but looking back it was a good time.  

England

I left LA hung over.  At this time in my life it seemed all my new chapters started with a hangover.  I flew to Philadelphia and took a shuttle to McGuire Air Force Base.  We waited in a cavernous hangar/terminal all day, all night and part of the next day.  Our charter flight required new tires before it could be cleared for takeoff.  Finally after enough time to lose track of time we had new tires or at least adequate used tires and we were off to England.  

We arrived some time in the afternoon to Mildenhall Air Force Base in England.  No one knew what day it was.  A few of us were going to RAF Chicksands.  We stood around lost until an Englishman gathered us up and took us there in his van.  He called us “Mates.”  I think he said, “Welcome to England, Mates.”  It was hard to tell what anyone said in those first days.  England was wonderfully foreign.  I was in Europe, not reading about it, but there.  Everything was smaller, greener, old and modern jumbled together, everything looked English, even on an American Air Force Base and the highway from Mildenhall to Bedfordshire was as though we were driving through a fairyland.  I couldn’t peel my eyes from the window of the bus and I’m sure my mouth was open the whole trip.    

We reached RAF Chicksands and the duty sergeant asked if any of us were football players.  None of us were and he lost interest.  We were assigned rooms and the next morning began processing to go to our units.  Our security clearances had to be confirmed.  We had some sort of military duties in the meantime, picking up trash or running CQ, charge of quarters, for a week or so.  And then we went to work.

Royal Air Force Chicksands was an Air Force Security Service Base.  The 6950^th Security Squadron shared the base with an Air Force Communications Service Unit.  The base sat in the middle of Osborne Farm called Chicksands Priory, a former Gilbertine Priory, with its own ghost in the Officer’s Club.  It seemed to me there were more gardeners than guards.  The base couldn’t be seen from the highway and the road in had ominous warning signs prohibiting the casual visitor.  At the center of the Osborne Farm was a FLR-9 antenna, a multi-story antenna array from a design by the Germans from World War II.  We listened to Eastern Europe and Western Russia. 

The base itself was newly built dormitories, an administrative building, a BX, a store with American goods tax free, an officers’ club, an NCO club, an Airman’s club, a library, a bowling alley and the motor pool.  On the west side of the base there was on base family housing and an elementary school.  There were no flight line and no airplanes.  All together we were about 2,000 GIs, mostly Security Service, Morse code, teletype, and Russian speaking intercept operators. 

I was assigned to Dog (Delta) Flight and given a green baseball cap.  There were Able, Baker, and Charlie Flights, blue, red and yellow baseball caps.  Between us we listened to the Russians and others 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year.  As ditty bops, Morse Code Intercept Operators, we listened to trains, planes, army units, and anyone else we could find and copied it live on Smith Corona manual typewriters.  We used 7 ply computer paper on continuous sheets with carbon between them and all of that was sent to Fort Meade, Maryland.

The messages were in code, five letter groups of gibberish, but we were more concerned with who sent it and where it was from.  Maybe at Fort Meade they could read the body of the message.  At the beginning of the transmission there was a lot of information exchanged between  radio operators and we came to know them individually, their moods and personality, which we could hear in the code just as if they were speaking.  It was apparent they were Russian GIs just like us, doing a boring job with the same enthusiasm with which we did ours.  Sometimes it was interesting, most of the time it wasn't.   

The operations building was at the top of the hill separated from the rest of the base.  The antenna was further out in the woods.  I never saw it except for the bit of construction that poked over the trees.  We wore security badges and had to pass through a gate.  During the day when an armed Air Policeman manned the booth, it was pretty serious stuff, but at night one of us manned the booth.  I liked guard duty, it was an excuse to read a novel.  Of course, anyone other than us anywhere near the building would have been a remarkable event and they would have been quickly caught.  It never happened.  

In pretty quick order I found a flat, an English apartment, the second story of a row house on a street of row houses and shops.  Mr. and Mrs. Collins owned the house at 78 Castle Road and rented both floors to American GIs and their wives.  Castle Road went by a small  hill nearby that had once been Bedford Castle.  The Collins came to adopt Cathy and me and were our friends for the three years we were in England.  They were an older couple, probably older than my parents.  They owned a little shop on Kempston Road.  It was a small shop with barely enough room to stand in next to a counter.  Behind the counter were drawers and cabinets from floor to ceiling and if you told them what you wanted, they pulled it out of a cabinet and there it was.  I remember it was mostly soft goods, knitted things, baby clothes. 

They lived in a large comfortable house on the north side of town with a ragged hedge in front and a ramshackle garden in back.  They invited us to their home a couple of times, once to tea and once when Cathy’s parents came to visit.  They were wonderful warm people and particularly took care of us.  When we talked about moving into a nicer flat after a couple of years, they talked about buying a place we would like that they could rent to us. 

The day I went to town looking for a flat I saw a newspaper in a news rack with a screaming headline.  That’s how I learned Robert Kennedy had been shot.  I had cast my first vote ever in the California primary by absentee ballot that month.  I voted for Robert Kennedy.  Celebrating his victory in California he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan.  It was a miserable day.  Unimaginably life just went on after that, but assassination  had become a part of American politics.  In five short years Kennedy, King, and then Robert Kennedy were all cut down.  A few years later George Wallace was crippled by an assassin.  

Cathy arrived from Southern California.  We moved into 78 Castle Road, the upstairs flat, and we made love and nothing was said about that last night in California.  We went out shopping in the afternoon and Cathy bought a set of crystal water glasses.  They cost 60 schillings.  She thought she had a bargain, schillings and cents, but schillings were 12 pence and 12 schillings was a pound.  A pound was worth about $2.50 in 1968.  Sixty schillings was 5 pounds, about $14, more than a day’s pay for me at the time.  Things were inexpensive in England for our dollars but not crystal glasses.  Our flat was £23 a month.  It was built in 1870 and was uninsulated brick and sat low in the ground.  Bedford was in the Fens.  We learned Fens meant swamp.  The ground was always damp and our flat was always cold. 

We learned to speak English.  There were gas fires in our flat (apartment).  We paid for the gas in a meter downstairs that took schillings.  It was a cold night when we ran out of schillings.  Later we bought paraffin (kerosene) heaters.  They were dangerous and hard to use.  If I didn’t trim the wick just right it could fill the flat with thick greasy smoke before I could turn it off.  We bought kerosene at the base and stored it in 5 gallon jugs in the back of the flat.  

Our flat was four blocks from the center of town.  Bedford was a market town, the center of manufacturing and commerce for the area around us.  Only a few blocks from us and across the Ouse River was farmland, and a path to walk to Cardington, a village nearby, about a half hour away.  Two blocks east on Castle Road was the pub, the Gordon Arms.  Castle Road around us was flats and shops, a  bakery, a news agent, an off-license, a butcher, a barber, and a couple of green grocers.  High Street in the opposite direction was crowded with shops and restaurants. 

In college I was an English major and Cathy was a history major.  We were ecstatic to be in England.  It seemed too good to be true.  Our situation was as good as anything we could imagine.  I was making $250 a month which in 1968 was the same as a teacher in England was making.  A pint of beer was less than 2 schillings or 25 cents.  The first year it seemed like times were tight but by the time we left I was making over $500 a month and we were saving money for college.  I had money in my pocket.  It took a long time to ever be that rich again.     

I worked at the base, an eight hours and then back home.  I hitchhiked into the base.  Another GI going to work would pick me up.  It was shift work.  We worked four day shifts, had 24 hours off, and then four swing shifts, 24 hours off and then four midnight shifts and 72 hours off, 3 days off at the end of each shift.   The constant change was hard on the body but the days off were wonderful.  When I went home to our flat in Bedford I almost felt like a civilian. The Air Force and America seemed very far away.  

We took buses or trains to London, to Cambridge.  We visited all the villages around us.  We loved Bedford.  Neither one of us had ever lived in a small town and in Bedford we got to know people and exchanged greetings with people on the streets, shopkeepers and neighbors.  Once we drove to Stratford on Avon and saw two plays.  We joined the film society and borrowed books at the library.  We were living in England.  It was a dream come true for us. 

After I had been at the base for awhile, I signed up to take college classes.  In Europe the University of Maryland ran an Extension program with college classes right on the base.  The first class I took was Economics.  The professor was an Englishman from the London School of Economics making a few quid on the side.  He was a good professor and it was a good class.  The next class I took was Shakespeare, two semesters of it, taught by an American professor on sabbatical in Europe.  I took four semesters of German taught by a newly minted Lieutenant who had taught as a graduate student at the University of Michigan.  I took a class in Folklore and one in American Literature.  

All together I took 60 units of college classes.  I got A's in every class except for German and then I got B's.  If we worked the night of a class they let us leave to go to class.  One night I was driving to work and there was a German quiz that night.  I wasn’t prepared and I prayed there would be some event to postpone the test.  There was a power outage.  Since then I’ve learned my powers of prayer aren’t all that great, but at the time it was a nice coincidence. 

There was a woman, Betty, who worked at the base education office,  She was English.  During the War she had worked at General Eisenhower’s headquarters.  She and a lot of Brits liked Yanks.  They seemed to be amused by our friendliness and naiveté.  They enjoyed our sincerity.  Betty liked helping the kids going to college on the Base.  There were a lot of us.  You can’t be an American GI in Britain very long before you hear the refrain from World War II, “The problem with the Yanks is they’re oversexed, overpaid, overfed and over here.”  It was Betty who told me the American response to that,  “The problem with the Brits is they’re undersexed underpaid, underfed, and under Eisenhower.” 

The English called the Americans Yanks and when they weren’t around most of the GIs called the Brits Blokes.  Overall the British were very friendly to American GIs.  The older people had a wealth of good feelings left from the War.  They knew and liked our fathers.  People our own age didn’t appreciate us much, we were still overpaid and oversexed and still in England, but the girls seemed to like the GIs.  As GIs we were treated better in England than we were in the United States.  In the US GIs were held responsible Vietnam.     

And while the sentiment in England was against Americans in Vietnam, we weren’t sneered at by anyone in England as we were at home. I wasn’t there, but from a distance in that time, it felt like we were the enemy in our own country.  In England we were respected for serving our country.   In the pub where I drank, there was a Scotsman who had served in Korea and East Africa.  He asked me how it felt to be fighting a policy war? 

I learned to act like a guest in England.  I was eager to learn everything British and enjoy it as much as I could.  Cathy and I lived in town.  We made friends in England and we did as much as we could to be a part of life there.  We even learned to speak English.  I could understand people in Bedford most of the time and many people in London, though one time we drove to Northhampton, a few miles away, and we had to ask everyone to repeat themselves a couple of times before we got anything they were saying.  Accents and dialects could vary in England in only a few miles.           

The last summer I was in England I was drinking at a pub across the street from the Bedford Times.  A gentleman from the newspaper was fascinated by my speech.  He said, “ I know you’re not from England but let me guess where you’re from.”  He went through every country in the Commonwealth and finally was frustrated to be left only with the United States as his last choice.  He said, “Well I don’t know anything about it, but you must be from New England.”

“No,”  I told him. “I’m from Los Angeles.”  He was incredulous.  In three years in England I changed to an English vocabulary and syntax.  I cleaned up my accent and stopped using  Americanisms.  People who knew called it a mid-Atlantic accent.  A local on the base who worked with Americans said he spoke half, like off, and half, like hat.  It was more than just speech, it was also clothing, haircut, and body language.  I even ate kippers (smoked herring) and rollmops (pickled herring) and liked them.  As a 21 year old in Britain when I arrived, in three years I became Hoff and Haf.  It was a great experience. 

Years later in the San Fernando Valley where I grew up I was asked where I was from.   When I went to UCLA I was downgraded on a paper because the paper size was British standard not 8 ½ by 11 as required by the university and my spellings, colour, honour, and centre were all British.  I cited the Times in a class discussion one time and had to explain that I didn’t mean the LA Times or the New York Times.   I wasn’t even conscious of it, most of the time.  Our two year old son Sean learned quickly to call lorries trucks and to make siren sounds that suited Americans instead of the wigwagging sound of British panda cars. We began to fit back into the United States but never as completely as before.  

Thirty years later I was still brewing a pot of strong English tea and drinking it with milk and sugar in the morning.   

Keesler and After

From Amarillo, Texas, I flew to Midland, Texas and then to New Orleans.  From New Orleans to Biloxi, Mississippi, I rode in a Southern Airways DC-4 prop plane.  From my window seat all the way to Biloxi I watched a bolt work itself loose from one of the engine cowlings.  It didn't quite fall out.  

Keesler AFB was a large sprawling base with a town outside the gates.  Unlike Amarillo, Mississippi was green.  The Gulf just outside the base was a turgid washed out pale blue.  I was assigned to a flight in a two or three story concrete barracks, two men to a room and then a week of KP (Kitchen Police).  All new trainees did a week of KP before starting classes.  KP went from 3 a.m. to 7 p.m. with a break in the middle of the day for a couple of hours.   On November 2^nd, my 21^stbirthday I left the chow hall at 7 p.m. and had a drink in the Airman’s club, the only time I went there.  

Those first days we were known as Pings.  Everyone at Keesler had their hair at a decent military length but we still had buzz cuts from Basic Training.    Ping was for ping pong ball.  

Class was all day long.  We learned Morse code and the basic rudiments of radio operation.  We didn’t know it at the time, but no military in the Western world used Morse code.  It is a cheap and efficient way of communicating over long distances and was used extensively by the Eastern Bloc.  We didn't know it but we were being trained to listen to the Russians and their friends.  We listened and never sent. 

Since I had joined the Air Force Cathy, my fiancée now, sent me letters every day and I wrote her back.  If we had been in love before, the letters exacerbated it and made it much more intense.  Both of us were raised Catholic and we hadn’t made love yet.  We groped each other in the letters and we talked about getting married as soon as we could. 

I was at Keesler five months and then got orders for England, RAF Chicksands near Bedford, a very secret base for which the Service Club base information corner had no information.  At the beginning of 1968 the North Vietnamese launched their Tet Offensive and threw the American effort back on its heels.  The War was more than a sideshow and it lasted another five years before we accepted defeat though that word was never used.  While at Keesler I read a copy of Mao Tse Tung on Guerrilla Warfare from the base library. From my reading Vietnam was going very well for the Communist in 1968 and right on schedule for final victory.   Going to Europe was an incredible stroke of luck. 

It wasn’t just me picked to go to Europe.  Our whole class was assigned to Europe.  The Air Force made assignments by classes.  The class behind us went to Pakistan and then Vietnam.  Another class went to South Korea and then Vietnam.  My class stayed in Europe.  It was a three year tour and that’s what we had left in our enlistment.   

I went home on leave April 3^rd.  Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4^th.

Washington D.C., Baltimore and Louisville, Kentucky erupted in riots.  I was on my way home after seven months in the service and I was getting married. 

In December at Keesler the service club had staged a play, a Fibber McGee and Molly episode.  I had never seen the program but tried out for a part.  I never could memorize by rote memory and I was a disaster with a speaking part as a visiting minister.  Fibber was played by another airman we called Stretch and Molly was a young woman from town who came to the service club.  Charlene was coming on to Stretch during all the rehearsals but the afternoon of the play, December 24^th, Stretch apparently rejected her and she turned her attention on me. 

After the play I went home with her and we listened to records in her living room.  She showed me a book of poetry she had, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  We began to make out and she said, “Wouldn’t we be more comfortable in bed?”

 I said, “Yes,” and followed her into the bedroom, scared to admit I had never done this before. 

Charlene and I lasted another week or two.  Her life was complicated.  She was married to a GI in Vietnam.  His best friend was watching out for her and sleeping with her when he could.  She hadn’t wanted to get married but her mother or her mother-in-law forced her.  I never got the story straight.   She had a child.  For all of that she was a nice girl.  She had once danced ballet with a New Orleans company.  She wasn’t much as a lover I learned later but she gave me what she could.

By the time I got married, my short experience with Charlene was a fading memory.  It should have remained that way.  Cathy Bruemmer and I did a full wedding with the church, the priest, a reception and a long list of guests.  It was all put together in three weeks from the time I got my orders and it was wonderful.

I was 21, she was 20.  We drove to San Francisco for our honeymoon.  I was nearly a virgin.  She was.     Making love to her was wonderful.  I had six weeks leave and we got back to LA and set up in a motel apartment for a week before I left for England.  She was going to follow after her school term at Mt. St. Mary’s was over.   

We played house.  I had my sister over for dinner and we drank champagne.  I drank as much as I could.  At that time I had a considerable capacity for alcohol, mostly beer but wine and that night champagne.  We had a wonderful time.  I was feeling high from life, close to Cathy and everyone.  Things were right and in my drunken stupor I had to share a piece of writing I did, a piece about Charlene. 

In my drunken stupidity I was just thinking about how good the piece was and sharing it with my best friend.  That is probably the most stupid thing I have ever done in my whole life.  

Of course, the shock of it was terrible.  Today I know men are stupid and I know we can never explain to our partners how susceptible and oblivious we can be when it comes to sex.  It was incredibly stupid not to even think about our relationship under the circumstances and then to think the whole affair was something insignificant to us.  Alcohol didn't help.  I did learn to avoid the situation, but I didn't that time.  I knew it was inconsistent with the love I felt for Cathy and sober I had enough sense to keep it to myself, but those weren't sober years.  

I left for England the next day.  Cathy was supposed to join me in a month.  She stayed in LA and struggled on her own.  I know she thought of not joining me.  She wrote me a letter that she slipped in a book she shipped to me in England.  She joined me and like the Irishman and the drunk I was, we never discussed it, never cleared it, never apologized, never repaired the damage done. 

In a short time, we began to enjoy life.  Things were good.  Cathy became pregnant at the end of the summer and we had our first son.  But I don’t think she ever trusted me as she had before.  The damage was done.   

Joining the Air Force

My grammar school classmate Larry Stephan was killed somewhere near the DMZ in Vietnam on May 1, 1967.  In August, 1967 I joined the Air Force.  I went into the Air Force because I had a 1A draft classification, I didn’t want to be drafted, I didn’t want to be killed, and I didn’t want to go to Canada.

In 1965 when the US was "attacked" in the Gulf of Tonkin I had been in favor of the war.  At 18 I thought I would go when the time came.  By 1967 I had no feelings of patriotic duty to save the world from Communism.  It was pretty obvious to me by then we were fighting a colonial war in Vietnam and we were on the wrong side of history.

In December of 1966 I had fallen in love with Cathy Bruemmer, a freshman at Mount St. Mary’s College and joining the Air Force seemed the best way to stay alive and plan a life with Cathy.

I was 20 years old and not a deep person.  I struggled some but when the time came, I just gave in.  It was easy enough to go to a recruiting office and start the process and then it took on a life of its own. I gave in to my dreams of being John Wayne, a soldier, like my father in World War II, prove myself.  It also ended any struggles I was having in school.  The semester I joined I had a D average.  It gave me a new start; let me run away from home.

In June I went to the Recruitment Center in downtown Los Angeles and went through the process.  I got in line with a hundred other young men.  We stripped down to our underwear and went from medical station to medical station.  At the end of it, we took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies.  We got to put our clothes back on for the oath, but it didn’t make any difference, we still looked naked and vulnerable.

As only made sense in the Department of Defense, I was in the Delayed Enlistment Program, which meant I was sworn in in June, but didn’t actually go in the Air Force until August.  In August I went back through the medical examination again.  The night before there had been a going away party for me at home and I had gotten very drunk and spent the night groping Cathy before I had to show up.  An Army doctor asked me if I was OK.  I must have looked as bad as I felt.  "I'm OK," I said, it was too late to go back and the process continued.  At the end of it, instead of going home like I had before , I boarded a bus and we headed for the airport.

I remember when my father said good-bye to me that morning.  He looked me directly in the eye and gripped my hand.  I could see sadness, love, and fear in his eyes, felt it in the way his hands held on to mine.   History was repeating itself in our family and it wasn't a good thing.  My parents had been in favor of the War, it was a sore subject between us when I brought it up, but a few months later my mother was working for Eugene McCarthy and my father agreed with her.

We arrived in Amarillo, Texas in the dark hours of the morning.  A couple of sergeants met us and took us on a bus to the base.  We passed under a sign that said something like “Home of our greatest weapon.”  I didn’t get it.  Someone later explained to me we were the weapon.  I never felt like anyone’s weapon.  We had breakfast in the chow hall and then were taken to a barracks.  Everyone was pretty nice to us.  That was the end of that.  No one treated us like human beings again for a very long time.

The next morning we started the process of becoming airmen.  I found myself among 40 other young men from all over the country.  There were a few of us from California and young men like ourselves from Kentucky, Georgia, and everywhere else.  At 20 I was one of the oldest, most were 18, just out of high school.  We told each other where we were from, what airports we flew from and what the trip to Amarillo had been like.  We gave our names to each other and then we fell in line.

The first day we got haircuts and uniforms.  The haircut was a buzz cut as close to the scalp as possible.  I had gotten a haircut before I went, not a buzz cut,  just short and ordinary.  In 1967 the length of one's hair was an important marker.  One or two of my fellow recruits had long hair and it ended up the floor along with everyone else's. When we were left free again that evening we were all shocked to see people we didn’t know.  We had to reintroduce ourselves.   We were bald headed young men in green fatigues and we had begun to look indistinguishable from one another.

The drill sergeants were mostly Southerners and had accents that sounded like the flat Texas panhandle of Amarillo.  Our drill instructor was Airman 1^st Class Steinberg.  Later Airmen 1st were called sergeants. As we marched by other flights Airman 1^st Class Steinberg was taunted by their drill instructors, all staff sergeants.  They attacked his name, his heritage and his rank.  Steinberg responded back in the same mean aggressive voice.  Taunting, belittling, degrading were the language of basic training.  Everybody did it and since there was nothing lower than an Airman Basic, we were taunted constantly.  Foul language, racial epithets, regional slurs, homophobia were all practiced and allowed in those days.

It was a long six weeks.  We marched, cleaned the barracks, got shots, took tests, attended a few sixth grade level classes, learned how to pull the trigger on an M16, got ready to do a one mile run in 8 minutes or less, smoked,” smoke if you have ‘em,” and went to the small BX near our barracks when we had free time, which wasn’t much.  The last two Saturdays we had day passes to go to town.  I stayed in the barracks the first Saturday because someone in my squad had screwed up.

We learned military discipline.   Do what you’re told.  The consequences of not doing what you were told were not good.   There was a motivation flight where those who needed it were harassed constantly.  Everywhere they went they marched double time.  With their hang dog beaten looks, they looked like prisoners.  Most of them got discharges after a few weeks in the motivation flight.  It was a way out, but it didn't seem worth it.  Whatever we were before we arrived at Amarillo Air Force Base, after that first day we were slicks, no stripes on our sleeves.  At the end of basic training we were promoted to Airmen 3^rd Class.  We were congratulated and we had a single stripe.   

During that six weeks, I scored the highest of any airman there on the language aptitude test.  That week there were no slots for the foreign language training institute, a two year assignment in Monterey, California, studying Russian or Chinese or one of a dozen other languages.  Instead I would learn Morse code at Keesler Air Force Base.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that was in preparation to be a Morse Code Intercept Operator in the Air Force Security Service.  Security Service is what they called the Air Force electronic intelligence gathering unit under the direction of the National Security Agency.  They had bases all over the world most of them close to the Soviet Union or China.  The NSA had convinced the Air Force to give them their top recruits.  I was always good at aptitude tests and scored very high.  When I arrived at my duty station I found myself with a lot of other college students now airmen who had also scored high.  The job didn’t require much intelligence but apparently NSA convinced the Air Force it did.

At the end of Basic Training I won the Airman something or other Medal, a medal given to the best recruit of the period.  I was selected to compete because as hard as I tried not to  appear different, I was picked as being above average in literacy and then drilled on nonsensical questions, such as how many stripes on the American Flag, what color, and in what order?  Airman 1st Class Steinberg had left on leave after a few weeks to get married, a welcome respite for us, the Sergeant from our sister flight who took over had a sense of humor.  Steinberg returned at the end of our training when I went to the General’s office to get the medal.  He was more scared than I was.  I was pretty relaxed; he was a nervous wreck.  Someone stole the medal from my locker at the next base I went to.

After graduation I stayed at Amarillo AFB for a few days and then boarded a series of planes from Amarillo to Midland to New Orleans to Biloxi, Mississippi.