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.