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. 

The Barracks

We called them The Barracks.  I was born in 1946 and I don’t remember living anywhere else before them. It was 1948.  The Barracks were Army barracks built during World War II to house the anti-aircraft units protecting Lockheed. After the war they were used to fill the housing shortage in LA for returning GIs and their families. 

Barracks similar to the ones where we lived in 1948. http://www.mtsu.edu/centennial/1941.shtml Middle Tennessee State University

The Barracks were in Glenoaks Park across the railroad tracks from Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank.  The Barracks were on the outer edge of the park starting in the middle of the Park between San Fernando and Glenoaks on Amherst where 3rd Street comes in.  In military order they ran from 3rd Street up to Glenoaks and across Glenoaks to Andover on the outer edge of the Park.  The Barracks took up about a 1/3 of the Park.  Our apartment was on a walkway between facing one story buildings, each one converted into three apartments.

My parents, my two sisters and I were crammed into two bedrooms, a living room and there must have been a kitchen.  A large bed took up most of the space in my parents’ bedroom and my sisters had the other bedroom.  I think I slept on the couch in the living room.  The front door let out onto a small covered porch with a couple of steps down to our yard bordered by a low white picket fence.  All of our neighbors had kids.  And it seemed like all the kids were my age.  There must have been a few like my sisters born before the war, but the rest of us were the post-war Baby Boom.

My two older sisters and I on the porch at The Barracks

I don’t remember spending much time indoors.  From the time we got up until dusk I ran in the park with a gang of kids my own age.  Our apartment was only a few steps down the walkway between barracks to the play area.  The oleander bushes between our house and the playground were big enough to crawl into and hide.  No one could find me.  I’d come out all sticky from the oleander.

The best thing in the park were the swings, wide rubberized straps with chains connecting to a crossbar high overhead.  With each pump we tried to get higher and higher until we nearly flew out of the swing.  There was a slide we threw sand on and rubbed into the metal to clean it and make it faster.  We climbed a long ladder up and then went down as fast as we could to catapult ourselves out into the sand.  There were a jungle gym, a huge sandbox and monkey bars. We spent most of our day swinging and climbing on the iron play equipment.  Facing the playground was a rec center where a small room on the side had a Dutch door half opened where an adult inside loaned us balls in exchange for a personal item, usually a belt.  When we were bored we would explore the rest of the park.

There were green lawns and stone retaining walls to balance walk on top of.  We could go anywhere in the park, lawns, horseshoe pits, picnic tables, ping pong tables and ball fields.  Down on the south side by San Fernando Road was a log and river stone cabin, headquarters for the Girl Scouts.  I don’t remember anyone using it but we climbed all over the cabin and its stone walls.  There was a radio tower nearby, red and white that had a blinking red light at its very high top.  We didn’t climb on the radio tower.  There must have been a good fence around it.  We climbed on and over everything else.

I saw a television for the first time in one of the Barracks up Amherst from ours.  Above us the buildings were two stories with a stairway outside to the apartments on the second floor.  We were all crammed into someone’s apartment to watch the TV.  It was a wild party of kids climbing over the couch and watching the box.  I don’t think there were any adults around, which was probably why we were let in.  One kid, I think who lived there, ran out naked from the waist down and from the back of the couch he pee’d over the crowd.  I don’t remember what was on the TV but I remember the unrestrained and screaming exuberance.  It was the beginning of a new age.

Someone owned a Flexie and we rode it down the sidewalk on Amherst Street taking turns until the owner tired of sharing took it back.  We flew down the hill without braking if we could and then walked it back up for the next kid.

Photo from the Missouri History Museum http://collections.mohistory.org/search/node/69325

The southwest corner of the park was a baseball diamond and the major league teams played spring ball there.  I remember climbing the fence to watch a Yankee’s game one time.  The game went into the night and I snuggled under a blanket with a couple I didn’t know.

I found a baseball glove wedged in some junk in someone’s yard.  I retrieved it and made my father play catch with me.  I remember the fathers in the Barracks were roughly divided between those that were around all the time and those that had jobs.  I thought of myself as one of the unlucky kids whose fathers worked.  Sometimes he worked at night and we had to be quiet during the day when he slept.

We lived in the Barracks from 1948 to 1950.  By 1950 they were tearing down the Barracks in stages.  We played in the demolished sites and across Glenoaks Boulevard where they were building new housing.  We collected slugs on the ground from the terminal boxes.  The slugs were like the steel pennies still in circulation.  We had pockets full of slugs and pennies.  A penny bought a square of bubble gum.  Slugs didn’t buy anything and didn’t fit in any soda machines.

We moved from the Barracks in 1950 and our apartment must have been demolished pretty soon after that.  The Park returned to being just a park.  On the north side they built a new recreation center with a gym and swimming pool.  Where our apartment had been was turned into tennis courts.

Seminarian

At age 17, I became a Franciscan monk at San Lorenzo Priory, a newly built monastery tucked back into the hills on the edge of the Santa Ynez Valley in the coastal mountains of Central California. I had just graduated from high school.  In August I became a postulant, the first step in becoming a Franciscan priest. 

Every morning we got up at 5, went to the chapel and chanted Prime and Matins. After breakfast we chanted Lauds, Terce and Sext. After dinner we would do Vespers and then Compline. All of this in Latin in 1964, psalms, New Testament readings, and lessons. In between the Hours of the Divine Office we did gardening, took care of chickens, rabbits, and cows. Our meals were eaten mostly in silence. We had a few classes and there was a little free time but not much. Sundays were free days, no work, but still prayers. Sometimes we got to go to Santa Ynez Mission in Solvang. 

I was at the monastery with my high school friend Joe Quattropane and three other postulants and a couple of novice brothers. The best part of it I remember was running free in the ranchland around us. We were up a hill from the Santa Ynez River, a dry arroyo with a small trickle in the center at the mouth of a canyon that climbed up Mount Figueroa. The oak grassland around us and the canyon teemed with deer, wild pigs and hawks.

Built the previous year, San Lorenzo smelled of concrete still drying. Each of us had a room, a cell, walls of concrete blocks, a desk, and a bed. Once a week we did discipline outside our cells, flagellating ourselves with a few short rosary chains without the beads, bound together; probably available in some monastery supply catalogue from Belgium or Italy. The first time we did it, it was a surprise, but reinforced our connection to very old traditions. The real penance of it was more the standing in doorways, bare asses exposed while we bent over swinging a handful of chains lightly behind ourselves. It did promote humility. It’s hard to be dignified with your underwear around your ankles and your robe pulled up over your backside.     

After three months of monastery life, we became novices and donned the full robe and hood of Capuchin Franciscans. The other monks were a couple of brothers, one was a cook and the other did maintenance work, older retired priests, one demented, one not. Another priest, a middle aged man seemed to be serving out some sort of exile at San Lorenzo away from whatever problems he had left. He didn’t seem a very happy man. And there was a novice master.

I really enjoyed the ritualized prayers of the Office, the sound and feel of the Latin. Often during meals the Rule of St. Francis was read. I enjoyed the hills and mountains around us.

At 5:30 a.m. one morning half awake in the chapel to the music of the Psalms I was daydreaming of Mary Ellen Connelly. I woke up during my daydream and thought it was time I reviewed my sacred calling. I realized I was more inspired by my wanderings around the mountain than I was by my spiritual practice. Between my daydreams and my love of the mountain I thought I probably didn’t have much of a calling to the priesthood. 

It still amazes me that I was at any time a seminarian. I grew up Catholic, attending Catholic grammar school. I was an altar boy. I went to a Catholic high school. The nuns and priests always pitched a vocation to the priesthood as the highest calling a person could have. I wasn’t a goody two shoes, but I was always trying and I appreciated any praise I got from adults. Answering the call to the religious life was encouraged. 

In high school when I had no clue what I was going to do after graduation and my best friend was grooming himself to enter the priesthood. I went along. It solved the problem of how to apply to college. My parents had not attended college themselves. My older sister had gone to the Sisters of Charity college in Iowa on a full scholarship and my eldest sister had become a nun. I didn’t know anything about applications, selecting a college or anything else about going on after high school and it seemed no one was helping me. 

As soon as I said I wanted to be a priest it was all taken care of. After the seminary I figured out on my own how to apply to Loyola University and eventually 8 years later I graduated from UCLA. 

I never put San Lorenzo on my resume or even told many people about it. I enjoyed it. I was always glad I did it; I just didn’t want to be categorized as an ex-seminarian. In my mind six months didn’t qualify me for that. It became a habit not to mention it. When I remembered, sometimes it was funny to surprise someone with the information.  My eldest son was particularly suprrised at the age of 24 to learn I had been a seminarian. As an adult no one thought of me as an ex-seminarian and in my own mind I wasn’t an ex-seminarian, an ex-monk maybe, but then for only six months. It was a short retreat from the material world. It did cost me a draft deferment. Two years later I was classified 1A because I had not been a student continuously since high school. 

It was something private that I kept to myself, but it was a good time in my life, time spent outdoors and time spent in prayer and contemplation, good preparation at the threshold of being an adult.

Wearing a Gun

I’m not a gun person.  Personally I don’t need a gun, never have.  In the Air Force, once a year for four years we did weapons training, an afternoon away from my usual radio duties.  I barely qualified.  Sometimes on vacation there was target shooting at some relative’s farm, mostly .22 rifles.  So it took a little getting used to when I started wearing a .40 caliber Smith and Wesson to work every day.  Becoming a police officer was never something I seriously expected to be, so when it happened at age 58, I was a little surprised.

At first in the Academy we wore all the equipment, a duty belt with pouches, rings and a holster.  We put red plastic guns in the holsters, realistic looking things except for the red color.  We practiced drawing them and pointing them.  One of my classmates ridiculed me for the way in class she saw me reaching for it, almost caressing it, getting used to the feel of it.  It took some getting used to.  After six weeks in the Academy we went out to a shooting range and began learning how to use the real thing.  It was a challenge.   

For three long days we fired the weapons, stood, aimed, fired, fired, and fired.  The third day when we broke for lunch we were all standing in a row in front of the targets and we all raised our hands and said, “We still have a round in the chamber.” 

“Yes,” the instructor responded, “so go to lunch.”

There we were, 30 new recruits all sitting around on benches near the range eating bag lunches, all of us with loaded pistols, cocked and ready on our waists.  I’m sure I wasn’t alone in reassuring myself we had all been carefully vetted for our self restraint.   I think until then most of us never thought about how police officers always wear their pistols hot, no loading, no cocking, no safety.  Out of the holster, one pull on the trigger and it was a lethal weapon.   From that day on at the Range we wore our guns “hot.”    

Four months later we went to work in our Parks, a uniform, a badge, and wearing a .40 caliber pistol, 11 hollow points in the magazine and one in the chamber ready to fire.  For the next three months we learned to do our job in the field under the careful eye of a training officer always watching us.  Then one day I came to work, reported in, got in my car and began patrolling by myself, wearing a gun. 

It was about two months after I started patrolling alone, two months wearing the gun, when my radio crackled, “1358” my badge number.  “Central.” 

“Go ahead, Central.”

“Report of gunfire in the Park, Mitchell Canyon area.”  

“Enroute,” I responded. 

It had been a slow day, now something exciting.  I headed for Mitchell Canyon and left the paved road travelling down into the canyon in my 10 year old four wheel drive Jeep Cherokee.  Bouncing along I was having fun, and then the thought came like a voice in my head, “Gunfire in the Park!  Are you out of your mind?”

For a moment I felt the fear common sense required.  I looked at it and consciously decided to be cautious and continued down the road.  “It’s what I do.  I’ll handle it carefully and hope I don’t get hurt and that no one else has to be hurt.”  Mitchell Canyon is an area of the Park on the edge of widely spaced suburban housing to the west and ranch land to the east.  I drove down the canyon stopping frequently to listen through my windows for more gunfire.  Nothing.  A kid with a .22?  A rancher firing at bottles?  A backfiring car?  Whoever it was, they were gone by the time I got there. 

Another day and another call at 2 a.m. was to assist a Ranger on a medical.  And then we were confronting a subject whose ‘seizures’ were related to ingesting methamphetamines or something worse.  He threatened to attack us with a knife he said he had.  He didn’t and he was arrested. 

It didn’t happen very often but once a month or every few months, something would come up and wearing a gun enroute and having it when I got there was an important part of the job.  It made it possible to respond to calls, two men fighting or the backcountry at 2 a.m.            

That’s why they gave me a gun, so that I was prepared to go into situations where common sense said  go the other way. 

There are regular reminders of how dangerous that can be.  Somewhere all too frequently and sometimes very nearby, a police officer is shot doing his duty.   They aren’t shoot outs like on television.  More often they are ordinary situations gone very bad, stopping a car, calling to someone acting strangely to stop and chat, chasing a thief, or searching a house.  Sometimes an officer is caught off guard; someone has a grudge or a mental illness or wants to make a point and decides shooting a cop is the thing to do because they wear badges and guns.   One time I attended a funeral for four cops.  For the 20,000 of us there, it was a lesson in how dangerous this job could be.    

We frequently remind each other, be safe, be cautious, be wary.   

So at the end of the day when I took off the gun, it was a great relief.  It was heavy to wear and even heavier on the mind.  Without the gun I could relax.  I didn’t have to protect it; no one was going to call on me to solve a situation beyond their threshold of fear. 

I enjoyed being a police officer.  It was cool.  I enjoyed being powerful and I enjoyed solving problems that before I would never have taken on.  I never got in the habit of carrying a gun off duty like a few of my coworkers did.  I could easily do without the power and I preferred not being so vulnerable.  As one instructor in the Academy told us, off duty he preferred being a very good witness to being an active participant. 

And when I retired I enjoyed taking the gun off for good.  I have a gun now, the first weapon I was issued.   I purchased it when they were replaced with newer models.  I have magazines and bullets for it.  I am well trained on how to use it.  But most of the time it’s securely locked up.  I never expect to use it.  Maybe on vacation I’ll take it out in the desert and fire off a few rounds.  This time I expect to hit the bottle.