Poetry, Part Twenty-one

Had we been stupid, or arrogant, enough to go to nuclear war, would any of us have survived? Would those survivors have--finally--learned anything of lasting value from that manufactured holocaust? We have never taken that path in all of the years those missiles have been in place; but, again, I often thought of many possibilities when it came to what could happen.

The Last War Like

Sparks
crossing silent
skid the air--

We are the chance for war
and imagine some, or maybe all of us,
gone in his own glory
blazing.
Each a personal vision
like hell.
Our beliefs were
no more horrible than orbiting
within range of an uncontrollable sun.
A merely sooner tiring of human tensions,
we cannot refuse,
for what remains may be a knowing
never moving to this end a second time.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty

At least one time while I was stationed at Minot, the red lock boxes containing the launch keys and authenticator codes were opened and the launch keys were removed and inserted into the launch switches. Had only two of the fifteen crews merely enabled the "birds" and turned their pairs of launch keys, we would all have experienced nuclear war, first hand.

Sometimes, it's beneficial to be reminded of the past, no matter how long ago the experience may have occurred.

Nearing War

Yes,
even I question why all this is written,
but then in the early darkness of any day
a twisting of wrists...

We have been close.

While you sleep, we could be shaking
a new world awake--
that uncovers countless
without protesting the transition.

Not even will exist an instant
long enough to add reacting thought to realization.
Only blinding terror surging at the tip of burning winds
is recognized
and then forgotten.

---

Poetry, Part Nineteen

The underground Launch Control Center consists of two, cement rooms: the LCC and the Launch Control Equipment Building (LCEB). The LCEB was a square room that housed the non-emergency equipment to power and cool the capsule (LCC) equipment. The reason that the LCC is referred to as a capsule is that it is also made of cement but was built in the shape of a hollow capsule. The room with the targeting computers and control panels and bed and refrigerator and chairs the crew sat on is a rectangular "box" that is suspended from the ceiling of the hollow capsule by four, giant shock absorbers.

The crew enters the underground LCC by first passing through a secure door upstairs, guarded by the flight security controller. He checks the crew's IDs and then buzzes them through. Once inside, they take an elevator down the 60 or so feet to the tunnel junction blast door, a huge metal door with pins that extend to keep it fixed in place. Once through the tunnel junction blast door, the crew checks the equipment in the LCEB and then waits for the on-duty crew to open up the LCC blast door, another large, thick, metal door. The two crew members duck to walk through a short cement tunnel behind the open LCC blast door, then over a short metal bridge, and then enter the suspended launch room to conduct change over with the departing crew.

On the outside of the suspended LCC, along the cement capsule wall at the far end, was a round metal door, bolted to the wall at an upward angle. Behind that round door, which the crew could reach from above the commander's console within the suspended launch center, was a corrugated metal tunnel filled with sand. There were tools affixed to the capsule wall, beside the round door, to unbolt the door, dig out the sand, and then remove the few feet of dirt between the tunnel of sand and the open air above ground. This sand-filled tunnel was the only other exit should the regular means of the two blast doors and elevator be destroyed. One caveat could block this final exit for the crew after a nuclear war: a nuclear blast produces intense heat. Intense heat can turn sand into glass. The crew might be stuck beneath the earth in the LCC with a large telescope of glass blocking their exit. After the food and water ran out, the crew could die in place of starvation. (I won't even get into the notion that one crew member might kill and eat the other to survive a while longer, especially if hope for rescue in a post-nuclear holocaust world might be slim indeed.)

But I always thought outside the box (or outside the capsule, if you will) during my years on assignment at Minot AFB. The following is a product of that kind of thinking:

Evidence

In your cringing helplessness,
will your buried missile men,
undisguised in this defense,
be blamed for all of the destruction?
Accused and unearthed in capsules
built only to save them
for the time it took to launch?

Gone:
Friends, support, the foe,
who will have vanished, doubting their resolve.

Proof could merely be detecting wreckage
to those living enough to care.
If the crew are eventually found trapped, intact, underground,
encased in concrete,
the trace left of all of us can too clearly show
who was at fault.

---

Poetry, Part Eighteen

For every trainer "ride" and every check ride (standardization board evaluation) in one of the two missile launch control simulators on base, the simulation would always end with some scenario in which the missiles were enabled and both launch keys turned, indicating that one or more ICBM's were launched.

In the early years of single warheads on single missiles, with less sophisticated computer equipment and a very limited variety of launch scenarios, the simulations always involved all missiles being launched at the same time. As the MRVs (multiple reentry vehicles) and then the MIRVs (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles) were designed and installed on the Minuteman III missiles, and more sophisticated nuclear war scenarios were envisioned and computerized within the targeting systems, a simulation could involve the launch of a single missile (with three nuclear warheads), or the launch of a few missiles, or the launch of many missiles or even, once again, the launch of all missiles in the 91st Strategic Missile Wing.

For anyone opposed to the use of nuclear weapons for war or as a viable instrument of national policy, this new situation was likely more disturbing rather than less. The military and the government could certainly envision, and more likely carry out, the launching of a single missile to deter an enemy. Whereas before the only solution was to launch all missiles or no missiles, now a solution could involve weighing several options. And the more options that were available, the more likely nuclear combat could become. (Or not. It depends upon your feelings about the notion of deterrence and military threats on a national level. Debating any of this would probably be as difficult as debating the effectiveness of the death penalty.)

I am also certain that many would not be comforted to learn that in all of our training and evaluations, we launched at least one missile with three nuclear warheads aboard at the end of the scenario. Of course, our overall mission was actually deterrence: we existed to try to prevent nuclear war by deterring any enemy from attacking the U.S. and its allies. If we failed in our mission of deterrence, then we were required to do our job of actually launching missiles in retaliation for being under attack.

Retribution

Between abundance and shortage,
losses and what is regained,
we match the measure of your impatience.
And while we wait
we train
and simulate that you have died uncounted times
when any could be your death.
Certain these are causes
turning the keys--
keys rotating to turn this world over
to new orders.
An improving method
of blasting off the old unworthy ways
no longer our way.
When the earth-thick skin
is pierced again with renewed eruption,
all will be revenge.
No more the mild alterations most never want;
and for those who are so often demanding,
there will be change.

---

Poetry, Part Seventeen

None of us, certainly not me, ever anticipated the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. We definitely did not anticipate the end of the Soviet Union in our own lifetimes or the breakup of the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Before many of us were born, the Cold War began soon after the end of WWII. That's all most of us knew through the Eisenhower years and the U2 debacle, and the Cuban Missile Crisis under President Kennedy, and the Vietnam War during the terms of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford.

Although the Cold War did end, and many of the U.S. land-based missiles have been removed, and a few missile bases have been closed, the 91st Strategic Missile Wing is still there at Minot AFB, one of only three remaining operational missile units. (When I was on active duty, there were, I believe, three Titan missile units still active, as well as the six Minuteman missile wings. The Titan missiles and wings were deactivated back in the 80's.)

The three Minot missile squadrons--the 740th, 741st, and the 742nd--are still there. The 5th Bomb Wing of B-52H's is also still there. And, unlike in the days before the personal computer, the base, of course, now has a Web site:

http://www.minot.af.mil/index.asp

Last week, someone even crawled over the fence at an LF as "a sign of protest", prompting a significant security response. Under the link "Art" you can even find the squadron patches that are similar to the ones we wore back then (the name of each squadron is now beneath the main part of the patches, which have not changed). "Clavis Pacis" is still the motto of the 742nd: "Key to Peace". It is now featured above the same main section of the patch: where the blue-outlined, white missile; the green olive branch; the red lightning bolt; and the yellow key are still as they were in my day.

I still have one of my old "crew-blue" uniforms in a plastic bag in the closet. The "Combat Crew" patch is above the right breast pocket. The missile badge is on the left pocket. On the left shoulder is my "Crew Member Excellence" patch that I earned after I received five Highly Qualified (HQ) ratings during my Standardization Board (Standboard) Evaluations as a deputy and crew commander.

I actually received two HQ ratings and two Qualified (Q) ratings as a deputy, and five HQ ratings as a crew commander. I never "busted" a Standboard evaluation. I was the exception to the rueful remark that was often made: "There are two types of crewmen: those who have busted and those who will bust" an evaluation.

Given that most of what I knew from 32 years ago is still in place and functioning, though the equipment has probably seen a number of significant upgrades and improvements, some of what I wrote below at the time I was stationed there is still true, even if the Cold War enemy was defeated a decade after I left Minot.

Resolve

Lengthening
hours of the years we monitor missiles and wait.

I see no change.
Only defeat seems the end of distrust.
The launchers will never dismantle
before they rust,
unless some new device,
some great outmoding force,
appears to replace.

---

Poetry, Part Sixteen

From January 1974 until June of 1978, while I was stationed at Minot Air Force Base, I went on 235 alerts during my missile tour of duty. The first hundred or so were on the old 36-hour schedule where a crew spent 12 hours underground, then 12 hours or so upstairs, and finally the last 12 hours or so back downstairs in the LCC before the relief crew arrived. Under the old schedule, we could be on the day shift or the night shift, the night shift departing base at 20:00 hours. Under the 24-hour schedule, we always drove out and back in the morning after the predeparture briefing at 08:00, weather permitting. Obviously, the following poem was written during a return to base after a 36-hour tour that ended when it was getting dark.

Because Minot was a missile, bomber, and interceptor base, it would be one of the primary targets of a Soviet missile first strike were a nuclear war to break out.

Returning to Base, Minot AFB

At most a smear of lasting glow
dims as an angle off the surfacing earth.
As on nights when I walked fire watch,
to protect the training of Marines,
still enough active war endured back then
for me not to see.

Now, coming toward this northern outlay of lights,
I know ours is a leisurely defense,
with none of the arrogance of a top target.

Never has there been this distance between enemies.
But the time for attack is short.
And this long and fatal involvement
becomes an ease for all of us to deceive.

---

Poetry, Part Fifteen

Besides being squadron supply officer, I had other additional, though temporary, duties now and then. I had to accompany a section of a missile containing the top secret data and targeting equipment for the whole system back to Ohio aboard a government-contracted cargo flight, an old converted Lockheed Electra. Along the route, stopping at northern tier bases such as Duluth, Kincheloe, and K.I. Sawyer, I and an enlisted man sat in separate passenger seats by the front door. We'd have to ensure that no one messed with our cargo during the unloading and loading at those bases. We finally arrived at Columbus, Ohio, and turned the "can" over. We took a civilian TWA flight back in uniform, but we had to make sure that they knew we were carrying 45's in our checked luggage. (I am sure these days this would not be allowed.)

Another time, I had to go out to an actual launch facility (one of the 150 LF's throughout the state of North Dakota) where each separate missile is housed within a fenced area and under a massive, heavy blast door. This was the missile silo where maintenance crews worked on a missile in place. I wasn't much older than my mid-20's, but these maintenance men looked even younger. Much too young to be responsible for nuclear weapons and the complex launch systems for a Minuteman III missile. But then, I guess, we were all too young for such significant responsibilities.

In the Silo

I recall the surgeons, bent by their work
across the patient: tall,
rough in metal skins--
multicolored, yet all dull tones.
Beheaded of its triple threat.
Never anticipating eventual re-mating,
but held unarmed,
awaiting passive signals or potent birth.
Mindless, but no monster.

All seeming about some harmless device--
wired,
lost in all those minor techniques of surgery.

Wise of their youth:
two stripes and three, trained above this potential.
Men mined for connecting these gaps.
Wiring with the confident skills
of all who doctor life.

Tools,
never so terrible as what they tighten
or unleash.
Never smeared of the blood
they might heat.

---

Poetry, Part Fourteen

Despite all of the talk of First Strikes versus retaliatory strikes; and Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D.); and throw weight; and MRVs and MIRVs; and a nuclear triad of land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles, and armed bombers on Alert 24/7; somehow the whole crazy scheme, in retrospect, worked. Despite the fears and the enormous costs and all of the sacrifices by everyone involved, the United States and its allies, nuclear and non-nuclear powers, and the Soviet Union and its allies never did turn the keys (it was not a "button") to launch the missiles that would have effectively destroyed the world.

Despite all of the many brinkmanship crises during the Cold War and the several hot wars that flared up around the globe, it never came to that.

Those of us on alert simply hauled our alert stash out each 36-hour or 24-hour alert in large, green, canvas crew bags. Within them we carried out our own food when we got very tired of the generally bland or nasty-tasting foil packs that they served at the sites. We also brought out books and magazines and porn and newspapers. Before there were radios and TVs in the capsules in my last year or so on alert, we did whatever we could to pass the long hours when we didn't have anything else to do but watch the many missile status indicators, answer the phones, communicate with topside personnel, and wait for our relief to arrive at the end of our shift(s) below ground.

Some of us worked on getting a Master's Degree. Even though we weren't supposed to for the first few years I was at Minot, at least one of us was asleep most of the time. Later, they cut the size of the crew force by one third to save money, adjusted back to 24-hour alerts, put a magic strip of tape over the Plexiglas covers that guarded the key holes, and one crewman at a time could now legally sleep on alert. Rarely were alerts anything but boring. But the boredom and the threat of complete annihilation kept the peace for approximately three decades until the Soviet Empire fell apart and the Cold War faded into memory and history books.

Missile Launch Facility (Golgotha)

I know it now.
As long ago as these were implanted
there is no war.

At the point of succeeding fear,
through the great, wide extremities of earth,
these silver spikes are driven.
The heart is spared,
but spirit urges lie as a sacrifice.
Fenced-in, connected sections cross the plains,
stunned against the thought of taking life.
We bind both savior and vampire alike--
each victim.

---

Poetry, Part Thirteen

Attending missile school at Vandenberg Air Force base was fun for a few months. I was back in California where I could visit friends and family in the LA area on weekends, at least for the first several weeks. Soon, though, the gasoline shortage crisis made the trip tougher. I'd have to get up early on Saturday morning, to try and find an open gas station to fill up before the trip back on Sunday afternoon. Because my car had California plates that ended in an even number, I could only get gas on even days. I finally gave up trying to make the drive because one weekend I returned to the base on fumes, afraid that I would not make it back.

I drove to Minot when missile school was over with a friend, Tim McConnell. We tried to drive through Yellowstone, but the roads were snow covered and finally they were snow packed and impassable. We had to return the way we came and then drive around the park on the west side and eventually through Montana to the north of the park.

I had already been assigned to the blue squadron, the 742nd in the 91st Strategic Missile Wing. (The 740th--red--and 741st--green--were the other two squadrons.) I was given the additional duty of Squadron Supply Officer, ensuring that each new arriving officer got his issue of cold weather gear.

Lt. Mitchell from Alabama was my first commander. I had two others before I was able to upgrade from Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander to Commander as a 1st lieutenant, probably in late 1976. I was assigned for most of my tour at Minot to Kilo Launch Control Facility (LCF), one of the farther launch facilities, to the far northwest of the base itself. We served our tours 60 feet underground in one of the fifteen Launch Control Centers (LCCs) or capsules.

I would read the LA Times newspaper on alert which I had subscribed to for most of my tour of duty in Minot. If I found an interesting article, with a pointed remark within it, I'd cut out the statement and secretly tape it over the door at Kilo or at one of the other launch sites we'd be sent to over the years from Alpha to Oscar.

The most amusing statement I read was from an appropriate article about nuclear war. It advised, "The best way to survive a nuclear blast is to not be where one goes off." Our launch sites were likely the primary targets of any Soviet first strike against the U.S., so there was no way we could obey this suggested safety advice. We could harden our LCC and hope to ride out any actual first strike attack, launch our retaliatory missiles, and then leave the LCC eventually, even if we had to dig our way out.

My commander and I were out on alert during the Bicentennial celebrations on Independence Day in 1976. We had received warnings at our predeparture briefing about possible protesters showing up (I don't believe anyone thought we'd see any actual terrorists). They might try to disrupt events around the country or even make threats against our military facilities. We had to treat any strange event or sighting as a potential attack. What our security personnel saw that early morning in the dark could simply have been a drunken local farmer, whooping and hollering it up along with the rest of the country. Or it could have been a local kid out for a joy ride who decided to give the Air Force a brief scare. Who knows?

4 July '76 -- Kilo LCC

Farther from freedom this early morning,
amid the year of celebration,
we manually harden our separation to protect us
as quiet threats increase to noisy gestures:
an elusive figure clings to the topside fence
and then is gone.

We had been warned.
Valves close,
emergency air flows,
and we know how blind we become down here.

These are striking depths,
deep for feeling patriotic.
More confusion as I react,
only man alert among these Minutemen.
Questions confirm I am correct,
lifting switch guards, punching buttons.
I had practiced my response.
Though never was it for real. Not like this.

Sounds flow disturbingly.
Most of them dull.
A few so rude that I jump in sleepless anger--
irritated to fight each noise any night.
I would challenge Edison,
and all who improved him into this--
this capsuled form for our fears--
lighting and powering someone's vision of final revenge.

Never in your dreams,
Rarely in your thoughts,
But always in our reliability.

---

Poetry, Part Twelve

I was fated to become a missile officer.

I went to OTS to become an Air Force pilot; but during the three-week Flight Screening Program at Hondo Field, flying the T-41 single-engine Cessna, I kept getting airsick. I never got caught up and eventually washed out.

I returned to a new squadron other than the one I was in when I first got to OTS. It would take some time to process my discharge paperwork. I tried to fit in with my new squadron, but I knew that my days in the Air Force were numbered. Then, one day by the slow-pitch softball backstop during a game, my flight commander told me that my paperwork had arrived. I would be discharged the next day.

Then the miracle happened. We began to hear rumors that the Air Force needed volunteers for missiles at such bases as Grand Forks and Minot AFB in North Dakota, and Whiteman AFB in Missouri, and two other bases, one in South Dakota and one in Wyoming. The Air Force was focusing their search primarily upon prior service Air Force enlisted men. (Women were still not allowed to serve in missile launch control facilities.) Those of us who had washed out of the Flight Screening Program were not even an option.

During lunch that day, I was sitting in the cafeteria with others in my flight, feeling sorry for myself. The others told me to get myself over to the OT club where the briefings were being held and tell them I wanted to volunteer for missiles. I had no time to ask for permission, so I went anyway. I was not alone. Two or three of the other washouts from FSP were also there. We were not given much encouragement by the primary missile recruiter, but we weren't going to give up.

The next morning, I was in class with my flight mates when the squadron commander paid us a surprise visit. One of my flight mates brought up my predicament to him and of my effort the previous day to be considered for missile duty. Everyone else in my flight began to speak up on my behalf. The Major looked surprised at this show of support for me, and I was completely stunned. Obviously, I'd made a few more friends than I had anticipated. The squadron commander looked to our flight commander and told him, "Hold up on Greg's paperwork for now and I will see what I can do."

Weeks would go by with no word at all. I'd continue to go to class and participate in flight activities and wait. Once in awhile, I'd get some positive news that some high ranking officer or other would mention that the Air Force takes care of its own and point to my situation. Finally, just a few days from graduation, I got word to report to a sergeant in an office not far from the OT Club. When I arrived and told him who I was, he slowly told me as I stood, waiting impatiently at each spoken word, about to fall over at any second with anticipation, that my application for missiles had been approved. I was ecstatic. I now had a career path laid out: Minot Air Force Base for my four-year missile assignment, and Vandenberg Air Force Base for missile school in California in the late winter and early spring. I was about to become an Air Force second lieutenant and a missile officer.

My mom flew to San Antonio for my graduation, and we drove back to California in my new 1973 Chevy Camero. I spent Christmas in San Pedro at my mom's newly rented house where she had moved from South Gate after I had left for the Air Force (my sister had moved out on her own a few years earlier). In early January 1974, I flew to Minot and got off a Frontier Airlines 737 at Minot International Airport. My face was met by the coldest blast of winter wind I had ever felt in my life, never having remembered living anywhere other than Southern California. The sun may have been shining, but the temperatures and the wind chill were well below zero. I didn't care. I was home at last.

Missile Combat Crewman

Feeling more secure than any other living,
I have been where sun and moon
draw from the sea a motion,
wearing the touching death edge of Point Loma.

As far as I could be a Marine,
I shared enough to feel an equal
but declined to be complete.
I thought to save lives,
but the Coast Guard never chose me.
So I pound no earth and no surf.

I am from all of that,
well beyond and beneath.
Underground is a new inspiring,
a source of unleashing so multiplied--
nearly absolutely efficient.

I am one at the consoles,
and as with others,
I await.

---

Poetry, Part Eleven

This was the late summer and fall of 1973, when I attended Air Force Officer's Training School in Lackland, Texas. In the Marines the year before, when a Marine officer at an auditorium class mentioned that we graduates might still have a chance to fight in the Vietnam War, many of the young officer candidates--those who had not had prior military service--were verbally and loudly gung-ho about the possibility. I glanced over at Zebal, a guy who had been a Marine enlisted man in Vietnam, and he was simply shaking his head at the foolishness of the others who did not know of war first-hand.

During one of our classes in the large auditorium at OTS, however, when an Air Force officer mentioned the possibility of our getting a chance to fight in the war before it ended for U.S. forces, he was roundly booed. These men and women were no longer fooled by the lies we'd been told about the war. Nixon may have been massively reelected the year before--I'd proudly voted for George McGovern in my first election now that I was 21--but the President's administration was already beginning to experience the first stages of coming completely apart the following August because of Watergate.

The war was not only winding down, the several branches of the military were beginning to downsize, as well. The need for officers and enlisted men and women was no longer as great as it once had been when the war was at its height. Significant changes were in the air.

The F-102 Delta Dagger was the Convair fighter jet that had entered service back in the 50's, before the more-advanced F-106 Delta Dart.

Air Force OTS, 1973 (Forbes Hall F-102)

I was a small part
of a greater diminishing
in barely noticed ways.
Numbers were not the need,
and there were enough weekends
through the window where I could see
fewer officers train to salute in passing.

We were more significant now;
not like the powerless fighter on display:
winged
without insides remaining sufficient to fly.

---

Poetry, Part Ten

The Marines weren't for me. It was a supreme challenge, one that I will never forget; but once I realized that I could meet that challenge, I knew that I didn't want to live in tents for my military career. After I left Marine OCS and returned home to South Gate after ten weeks away, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. This was now the summer of 1972, and the draft was fading as a threat as the war was slowly winding down. Also, now that the airlines were mandated to hire men, as well as women, as flight attendants, I even applied to Continental Airlines and TWA at LAX for a job. I wasn't hired, but my straight friend Pat Byrne was.

For a few months anyway, I went back to working at A.U. Morse & Company, the wallpaper warehouse in Los Angeles where I had worked for almost all of my college years--my dad worked there as a salesman and got me the job after high school. I even moved into the office to take orders instead of filling them in the warehouse. But this was a dead end job for me and I knew it. Besides, I had actually enjoyed being in the military, even if not in the Marines. So, I soon applied to attend Coast Guard Officer's Training School. But sitting in an office and gaining weight from not exercising enough after leaving the Marines, and being too concerned about my future at this stage, almost every time I was tested, my blood pressure was too high.

I soon got fired from my office job for taking a couple of days off to relax and get my head together, then collected unemployment for a few months and tried to work on getting my blood pressure down so that I could get into the Coast Guard. I never got accepted because, while the airlines might have been hiring men for jobs that were previously only for women, the military services were now accepting women into their officer schools in far greater numbers. I then got a job as a security guard after the unemployment ran out and worked the swing shift through the spring and early summer.

One door closes and another opens: Out of the blue, literally and figuratively, the Air Force came calling. Whereas my test scores had not been good enough before, they were sufficient to spark interest in me then. I would get a pilot assignment through Air Force Officer's Training School. I passed my physical easily at March Air Force Base, a base I'd visited with my dad when I was a kid back in the 50's and he was in the Air Force Reserves. I was soon bound for OTS in August of 1973. I bought a brand new 1973 Chevrolet Camero for $4,000 after the GM strike was settled, added an 8-Track tape deck in the glove compartment, packed up some of my possessions, leaving my comic book and record collections behind, kissed my mom and South Gate goodbye one early morning, and drove from Southern California for San Antonio, Texas.

I spent my first night on the road at a Holiday Inn in Phoenix, met a cute guy in the Marine Reserves who worked road construction in Arizona and who was staying at the motel and swimming in the pool. We struck up a conversation after I'd complimented him on his diving, enjoyed one another's company, and later met for dinner in the motel restaurant. I kept hoping he'd invite me back to his room; but he had an early morning wake up call, so we parted company and I was off for El Paso, my next stop where I met up with three other guys the following evening who were also driving to OTS from Southern California. I may have had a sense of Deja Vu after we arrived and were soon assigned to our cadet squadrons, but I quickly found that AF OTS was decidedly different:

The Officer Schools

A deep, indelible blue
on the light concrete between
marches to the sun of another day;
a cadence reminding me of a different service,
and a different uniform: starched
but fading green, and rifles of Marines--
arms ordered slung to my indifference
one morning back when I trained again.

---

Poetry, Part Nine

In the late 60's and early 70's, my best friend Michael and I would drive to San Diego on Saturdays or Sundays to get away. For me it was cathartic when we would drive past the Edson Range training facility at Marine Camp Pendleton and the Marine and Navy Recruit Depots in San Diego. We soon even found our way to the Point Loma Military Cemetary. Besides the remarkable view of the city, the cemetary was a poignant reminder of our own mortality.

It was also a stark reminder of the casualties of the war in Vietnam. After every Memorial Day or Veterans Day, flowers would cover many of the graves. Some families and friends would place letters to the dead on the graves. Mike and I were in college then. Perhaps we had just turned twenty, not even old enough to legally drink. Yet this cemetary, or one very much like it in L.A., could be in our future if we were caught up in the war.

Coming up against mortality like that was terrifically sobering. These were young men of our own generation. That had not been true of the war in the beginning. But the conflict had continued, and even widened, throughout the 60's, so that some of the soldiers and airmen, sailors and marines, were now slightly younger than we. As I would feel more than a decade or two later when those of our generation began dying of AIDS, I had a trememdous sense of guilt, as well.

My family--consisting of my mom, my sister, and me--was lower middle class, living in a rented, two bedroom, one bath house in South Gate, CA, a suburb of LA; but I was able to work part time and pay my own way through college in those days. I had a used 1966 Mustang GT convertible that I also paid for myself (mom co-signed on the loan). I didn't drink or smoke or use drugs, and so I remember the '60's well enough. When I finally graduated from college in December of 1971, I owed no money to anyone. But I had to find my own way then, and the military seemed the only alternative while the war was going on.

Point Loma, on the slopes

No one seems to tremble.
No fear for what once was
when all ceased to be soldiers.
I am terrified,
yet even the graves assure me--
we are veterans,
we survived.

---

Poetry, Part Eight

Perhaps partly from my reading of comic books at the time, specifically the Legion of Super Heroes set in the future, I always thought of the Vietnam War in cosmic terms. Also, throughout high school, I checked out from the South Gate High School library, read constantly, and carried around for months, the Time-Life science book: THE UNIVERSE. It was filled with remarkable and colorful images and fantastic notions of black holes and theories about a potentially expanding and contracting universe.

Most of my poetry later in the decade utilized the terminology and those cosmic concepts that had excited my imagination in high school. Perhaps it was also a form of escape from the realities of being drafted and sent off to a war that was using up U.S. forces endlessly in a war that might not end before it was my time to serve.

Reserves

Your silence scorns our uniforms
now that the planets are taken.
Our guns drain whole star clusters
and you have never raised them.
We have launched galaxies at one another,
shredding them in the infinite,
as we bloat the bounds of battle.

There must be some forgotten front
in need of wasting units.

---

Poetry, Part Seven

During the Vietnam War, there were far fewer set-piece battles between U.S. forces and Viet Cong/North Vietnamese forces. Khe Sanh was an exception. Lyndon Johnson did not want that battle to be another Dien Bien Phu, the battle where encircled and trapped French forces were forced to surrender after several months of losses. That battle was the final, significant action before the French were forced to recognize Ho Chi Minh's victory and leave Vietnam. We Americans essentially took over the war after that through the southern half of a now-divided country.

In a way Khe Sanh did become another Dien Bien Phu because that battle was the major diversion that the northern forces used to keep American forces from realizing that the Tet Offensive was about to explode throughout the whole of South Vietnam. While the northern forces were decimated by these almost-suicidal attacks against American positions and bases throughout South Vietnam during Tet, the American public felt that the war, if the enemy could mount such wide-spread attacks, could not be won. That the public had been lied to about the potential for victory in Vietnam all along.

The publicity battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, as a whole, was now lost.

Khe Sanh, In Defense

They did not flee.
The stars could not be reached.
The continents were occupied.
The homeland was controlled.

But alien explorers, excavating,
will generalize their fate,
and unfairly judge--
as foreigners always do.

When the results are released,
the galaxy will carry the globe reluctantly,
constellations may shift away,
and comets will shower it with spittle.

The planet is the naked outcast
when all of its defenses are crushed, or dead.

---

Poetry, Part Six

Back in the 1960's and early 70's, when the Vietnam War was at its height, draft physicals were also at their height. If you passed your draft physical, you were almost always immediately inducted into the U.S. Army and, later, the Marine Corps. Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant gave us one view, though for most potential inductees the experience was not at all amusing. Even one of my favorite rock bands the Byrds sang a very somber Draft Morning.

I would have my own physicals to take in the early 70's after my college deferment was up because I had graduated and Nixon had initiated a draft lottery (my number was an uncomfortable 119--most of those below that number were called up and had to serve, which was why I soon decided to join the Marines as an officer candidate, or eventually the Air Force, also as an officer trainee, after I decided that the Marine Corps was not the branch I wanted to serve in for my entire career).

Several of my friends had draft physicals but were not called up for various physical or even psychological reasons. My best friend at the time, Paul David (Dave) Moore, was so concerned that I picked him up the night before and we drove around, stopping at the famous chapel in Palos Verdes. I tossed a coin into the wishing well and asked the fates to take care of him. The next morning when I dropped him off at the downtown LA induction center, I drove to work and remained concerned about him for the rest of the day. Later, I was surprised when he called me and I learned that he had been rejected. (At the time, I liked to think that my wishing well offering worked a bit of magic.)

The following was the first of many poems I would write in the next few years as I battled my own demons about whether or not to serve in the military and in Vietnam as my college years began to move toward their end even as the War itself dragged on interminably:

Morning, Time to Report for Induction

The sun fires tracers outward,
piercing a new hold.
The weight is pulled up
over the edge of the earth.
With fatigue
the fiery mass sits down.

---

Poetry, Part Five

Last year was the 30th anniversary of my resignation from the Air Force. I had every intention of simply letting the year pass by peacefully. No trip to the Academy to reminisce. No private observance. I wasn't going to get out any memorabilia or reread any poems. Nothing. It was all 30 years before and my life had moved forward. I was over all of it, I told myself, especially since President Obama was likely, now with the support of many military officials, to repeal DADT and allow gays to serve openly, at long last.

As what typically happens in such matters, fate stepped in and decreed something else: A pipe broke in our storage room and, as all of my items in that space were in cardboard boxes, everything that I had saved from my Marine OCS days and Air Force OTS days and Air Force years, including the Academy, was sprayed or soaked. Little had been untouched.

I was forced to painstakingly remove each box, unload all of the varied contents, and separate out every piece of paper, booklet, pamphlet, item, object, whatever, and hope that they dried out and were not totally destroyed or stuck to other items and become fused together. Unfortunately, since I wrote so much of my experiences on paper with the kind of color pens that easily ran when wet, many journal pages and notes and scrawls were completely ruined. Some were only partially damaged. Fate had randomly eliminated some of what I had experienced, some of my memories, while preserving others completely.

I even found a paragraph/poem by Philip Levine that I had written down by hand and that had obviously resonated with me then (and does even more now): "Once, as a boy, I climbed the stairs in a sleeping house and entered a room no one used. I found a trunk filled with post cards and letters from a man who had traveled for years and then came home to die. In the moonlight each one said the same thing: how long the nights were, how cold it was so far away, and how it had to end."

So, whether I had intended to or not, I was forced by a burst pipe to review the distant past and make a bit of sense of it all, all over again. The poetry I wrote in those days was another artifact that certainly needed revisiting:

Camouflage

In homes,
away from public buildings,
in the hills overlooking a chapel,
and hushed behind partitions,
we speak of freedom
and rights
as in tones of voices
heard just before waking.

We are masters when disguised;
trained in codes
as secretly as spies. We subvert
as love is treason here
as no one knows.

---

Poetry, Part Four

While I was teaching at the Academy, after Christmas break, word began to spread that a cadet, Dan Stratford, was discovered to be gay. His friends also came under suspicion because they were his friends. All three of their cadet squadrons were soon tarred with suggestive names such as, "Rebel Eleven, Homo Heaven". Dan's squadron was dubbed, "Queen Fifteen". It was all childish and insensitive and stupid. But these were young men and women, some of whom were also gay, who did not want to be exposed, as well. It was exactly like telling, or laughing at, gay jokes so your co-workers won't suspect that you are gay.

How did the authorities find out Dan was gay, you may wonder? This was a conspiracy between two, straight, Christian cadets in his squadron who did not like him and suspected that he was gay because, when on leave, he went to cities such as Dallas or New York or other such sin capitals that were probably homo havens to these two emotional neanderthals. Most importantly, during the search for proof, the two of them conspired and lied about how they came upon the incriminating evidence that proved Dan was gay.

While he was gone one weekend, they went looking through his personal possessions. This itself was questionable on their part. They later claimed to have been looking for a physics paper. This was, certainly, a lie. For what they found, and what they opened and read, was a personal letter to Dan in an envelope. It later turned out to be from a Canadian attache in Denver who was gay and wrote some things that made it clear he, at least, was gay. By knowing Dan and writing to him, he put Dan under suspicion. Of course, Dan should never have kept the letter among his personal things at the Academy. But cadets should not normally be digging through other cadet's possessions without permission, even if they were actually looking for a physics paper, which obviously does not look anything like a personal letter in a stamped envelope.

The fact that they lied, conspired together to lie, and that their lie, while transparent, was not as easily proved, should still have brought an immediate investigation, and subsequent expulsion, of these two cadets because their statements were a clear violation of the Academy honor code. But since they found evidence that another cadet might be gay, there was a bigger fish to fry than two lying, though straight, cadets.

Years later, after I had moved to Denver, I was put in touch with the late Randy Shilts, who had written the wildly successful 80's AIDS investigation and expose, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON. He was in the process of writing a book about gays and the military, a book that was to be called, CONDUCT UNBECOMING. He was interviewing as many gays whom he could find who had been forced to resign. We spoke several times on the phone. I was briefly mentioned in chapter 34, page 327, though not by name but as the instructor who had been cashiered, while Dan's experience was specifically detailed in pages 326-7.

I wrote the following poem for Dan, not knowing, of course, that something very similar would soon happen to me. The title of the poem is the French motto for Squadron Fifteen, meaning "to the utmost". Dan died of AIDS in 1995. His partner, who had helped him during the investigation and with whom he lived in Denver from 1979, Dick Tuttle, died in 1989, of AIDS. Dan's one cadet friend George Gordy also died of AIDS in 1989.

"PLUS OULTRE" (Spring 1979)

For Dan Stratford

Backed against the eastern slope
to revive the one remaining fear,
we cast him outward,
at once graduated and then expelled,
with no hope of resurrection.
Where bound decisions
always bind us to misjudgment.
Washing with the past
without compassion;
absolving ourselves in precedent,
in committee.
Secretly unable to swerve
from practicing precision.
No courage to tolerate now
what will be accepted
in the months when we debated,
when we cared.
So we turn now in farewell,
knowing when we'll each forget.

Who were those before?
Who after?

Ignoring strength;
advancing no one.

---

Poetry, Part Three

I wrote three volumes of poetry before I stopped: SONS OF MEN, COMING OF NUCLEAR AGE, and NO SECOND SAIL. Volume One was primarily about my thoughts on the Vietnam War and mortality. Volume Two was mostly about my years in Minot and my thoughts about nuclear war and mortality. Volume Three was about my time at the Academy and the aftermath of my forced resignation. There was some overlap, to be sure.

When I was stationed at Minot AFB, I lived in the Bachelor Officer's Quarters (BOQ). I knew two officers then who claimed to be bisexual and with whom I had sex a few times over my four-year assignment. I was also friends with three pilots from the 5th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, the Spittin' Kittens. Roger, Tom, and Larry flew aged, twin-seater T-33 aircraft as targets for the squadron's aged F-106 Delta Dart interceptors. Arguably, the F-106's were the most beautiful fighter aircraft ever designed, the T-33's the most ungainly looking.

We were all stationed there at the height of the Cold War. We never knew for certain if any of our training exercises or active duty alerts might result in our going to total war. It all seemed unthinkable. But it was never an impossibility. We were young and in our prime of life, our 20's. Those years and our youth never to come again.

In 1978, I left Minot for Colorado. Roger, Tom, and Larry also left in the years soon thereafter. In the early 80's, while Roger was stationed in England, Tom was training to fly the F-15. One day I picked up the Colorado Springs paper and read that Tom had been killed in a training accident over Arizona.

Tom also loved the song by Simon and Garfunkel, The Only Living Boy in New York.

Eager To Fly

Thomas Worthington Brundige, IV
F-15 pilot and our friend

Fall is the wary promises
winter wearily disappoints.

And though we
are also temporarily assigned,
his flight surely grieves us
as our own.

He ejected into what we train
might be survival, might be safety;

escape is only a chance,

and a possible intercept,
so he kept ascending.

What matter the expense,
technology fails us,
and when it eludes,
we are all victims.

Like an Academy falcon
flown too far,
he exceeds that obscure horizon
where eyes and instruments cannot go.

But the mind succeeds after what is taken;
we land what the great blue stole;
as often as we want when we journey,
our time together and Tom enfold.

---

Poetry, Part Two

The year I taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, 1978-9, was their 25th anniversary of existence. Not at the current location, though. They first began operation at Buckley Field in Denver until the new campus was completed near Colorado Springs later in the 1950's.

The English Department decided to do something special with the cadet creative writing publication, ICARUS, to commemorate the anniversary. The cover included four different, previous covers of ICARUS. Inside the issue, volume XIV, from 1979, they allowed me, one of four moderator/editors, to include a poem that I had written about the Academy when I visited the campus for interviews in 1977, while I was still stationed at Minot AFB. I was a bit surprised that they used my poem because it wasn't entirely complimentary, but this was all before my exposure and the subsequent investigation.

The Academy

I remember the trees...
Pines in their natural formation
randomly cover the hills at noon.
We visitors are about the lunch procession:
Cadets marching to a mid-day meal.
We each observe;
and I have my impressions
but hold them in suspense,
matching my integrity with these surroundings.
The steel cathedral rising to the skies
points with the evergreens close behind.
Yet neither competes now with this parade.
I must choose my words as wisely.
True to thoughts and fairly
I see this formation of youth pivot
in a movement that must come to no meaning
in time, with practice.
Men and women emerge,
contrasting even as trees grow to these hills.
All to leave this merging as one mass.
Pushed, at last, to different duties,
and a similar discipline.

I am always nudged by sadness
by such a place as this.
Resentful that I can neither confront nor conform.

I forget how it was for me when I marched.
As they will forget.
As we must remember.

---

Poetry, Part One

From the late 1960's until the early 1980's, I wrote poetry. I also kept a journal. My East Los Angeles Junior College (they were not called Community Colleges then) English instructor Miss Nancy King encouraged me to write poetry and to keep a journal. Perhaps she knew that they could each keep me company during the lean times of my years ahead. The following was my first organized poem. I wrote it after reading Dante's INFERNO for class, inspired by the Terza rima rhyme scheme. Miss King helped by lopping off some of the opening lines and a few lines at the end that were unnecessary. In the college creative writing book, MILESTONE, it received honorable mention in the Spring of 1969:

Tourist Trap

Now only tourists poke
around the ruins just for fun,
taking souvenirs away. No one spoke

of girls throwing wilted lives toward the sun,
while more boys went to war although some returned
in boxes, parts, and pieces.

They explored, exploded, and ignored atrocities
while crawling around on their feet
building weapons, so don't waste your pities

on them. They starved for the food they could not eat.

Obviously, the then-interminable Vietnam War was going on. I also remembered scenes of young women joyously throwing flowers upon departing soldiers in World War I. Someday, our war would be over and, likely, be a distant memory and even, as with previous wars, a place where people went to pay homage or to recall where they had served.

---

I Have Regrets, Part Three

When I was forced to endure the humiliation of being fingerprinted and investigated and eventually forced to resign from the Air Force and the Academy in the summer and fall of 1979, I experienced some situations that surprised me and others that deeply disappointed me, as you might expect.

One day, when I was required to visit Harmon Hall, the administration building, I decided to walk across the Terrazzo level from the academic building. I got no more than a few yards across when several former students noticed me, saluted, and stopped to talk. Soon, others joined them and there was a crowd. When some were forced to leave, others took their places. Most knew what had happened and were, I suppose, showing their support. Eventually, I had to leave to make my appointment. When I got to Harmon Hall and spoke with the officer with whom I was required to meet and told him what had happened, he said, "I hope the commandant [of cadets] didn't see that."

Soon after all of this occurred, someone higher up in rank decided that I should not be sitting in the English Department each day that I was required to come in. I suppose they felt that they were somehow showing support for my situation and so I was transferred to Harmon Hall on an editing project, just to get me out of sight and out of mind. I used to drink milk in those days and bought some from a vending machine in the building. I lifted the carton to my lips and drank deeply. It was badly spoiled and I nearly gagged. That felt like one more humiliation on top of so many others.

On my last day in the Air Force, I was finally allowed to remove all of my possessions from my former office, all of my books and other personal property that the OSI had sifted through for more evidence of my perversion. These items had been boxed and set aside. Nobody helped me, but I had already gotten used to being shunned by my former colleagues because they had good reason to keep their distance. (A few of them had taken me to lunch at the golf course cafeteria, to show their support, soon after the OSI appeared with their accusations and proof in the department on that fateful day. Across the dining room this noon time, I noticed the same two OSI agents having lunch and mentioned it to the others. That was the last time I ate there with any of my former colleagues. I had been banned from eating in the cafeteria in the academic building since cadets occassionally ate there, so I would have to get into my car and drive to the golf course to eat lunch every day. I didn't want to get the others in trouble or have them be accused of being gay since the military often covered someone under a dark cloud of suspicion for merely "associating with known homosexuals".)

On one of my last trips up the elevator from the parking garage below, the elevator stopped between floors and the door opened only slightly--not enough for me to even think of trying to get out. I could see people's feet walking past and that was about it. Even trapped for a few minutes (it eventually continued its lift upwards and then fully opened), I kept thinking that the building itself didn't want to see me go. But I eventually took the last box out, said goodbye to a few of the others, including the secretaries who seemed saddened by my departure, and I left without any ceremony and drove home.

It had been on my 30th birthday, a Sunday, September 23rd, 1979, that one of my military attorneys called to say that my forced resignation had been approved. I supposed that happened that way because fate wanted me always to remember the significant phone call and that day and date forever.

When I first arrived at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota in January 1974, I needed an alarm clock and bought one at the base exchange my first week there. I used that clock to wake up for the next four years at Minot until I left in June of 1978, for my Air Force Academy assignment. I took it to Colorado Springs and used it there until my forced resignation was approved on October 12, 1979. Less than one week later, I awoke in the middle of the night and heard that clock laboring to keep time, whining and throwing an electric fit. Needing sleep, I got up and unplugged it. The next morning, hoping that those rude noises were a temporary glitch, I tried plugging it back in. It was dead. I liked to think that it had performed its mission while I was in the Air Force and since my Air Force career was over, it had no further need to function properly.

I still have that clock among my possessions as a souvenir of those terrible times. So anyone who sifts through my things, tossing out what they deem useless, or should they wonder why I kept this non-functioning alarm clock, they'll know why. If they do decide to toss it out then, they will at least be aware of its significance. It won't be like Rosebud in CITIZEN KANE and go to the raging furnace without a second thought.

More than two years later, not long before his graduation, I saw one of my former students at a retail store on Academy Blvd. He was with his girlfriend and told me they were planning to get married soon. Tragically, a few years later, I discovered that he had been killed in a plane crash. His name was on a memorial plaque affixed to a boulder off of the main, paved path between the Goldwater Visitor's Center and the Academy chapel. (Ironically, it was Goldwater, a retired military officer and former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate in 1964, not long before he died who wrote an editorial, supporting the right of gays to serve openly in the military.) Don certainly knew what had happened to me, but it didn't seem to matter to him as we spoke and then wished one another well when we had to leave.

Along with my roommate at the time, Gary, I went back to the Academy in June of 1982, for the graduation of those who had been my students in the academic year of 1978-9. I remembered them all, those many who had persevered and completed their four years. Except for Don, I don't believe there were any others who had died while on active duty. In 2002, they would have been eligible for retirement. Again, I don't know how many of them stayed in the Air Force long enough to retire, but the numbers are typically high for Academy graduates. They were 17 or 18 years old when I was their instructor. I was 28-29, not that much older.

It was a long time ago. And we were all so much younger then. The first day I walked into my first classroom to begin teaching I don't even recall. But I do remember several of my students, and several of the moments in those nine classrooms where I taught in the fall and spring and the one summer makeup class, as well, before my military career ended.

And I remember the lyric from the Air Force song that they always sing at graduation. It seemed to apply to me especially: "We live in fame or go down in flame. Hey! Nothing can stop the U.S. Air Force!"

---

I Have Regrets, Part Two

I never entirely abandoned my search for a teaching job once I moved from Colorado Springs in 1991.

In 1992, I believe, I was between my second and third assignments at IBM (not knowing that I was going to be hired for a different project after six weeks away). I began applying for several different jobs during my time of unemployment. One propect would have been at Hewlett Packard, just a few yards west, across an open field, from where I had worked through most of the 1980's, at Kaman Corporation, on Garden of the Gods Road in Colorado Springs. I still owned my house there and would simply have moved back in, perhaps to the delight of my cat, Schnozz. But, again, as with the Pikes Peak Community College (PPCC) teaching assignment, I was second to a younger woman whom they hired instead.

An even more unlikely prospect was back at the Air Force Academy itself. I have written about this before, but they were mandated to hire several civilian instructors to augment their previously all-military faculty. I knew this was not going to happen, given my previous history. But I was better prepared to teach, after having been a part time college instructor at PPCC, and having been a technical writer and editor from 1980 until then. I had also gone back to college in 1988-9, to get a secondary certification to teach English. But with 100 applicants to choose from, I was not hired, and I was certainly not surprised.

At the same time, there was an English Department opening at the Community College of Denver. I was among 20 preliminary finalists, and we all met at the college one afternoon. The department chair was a man, but most of the preliminary finalists were, again, younger women. They chose seven finalists from among us. Curiously, I was not one of them, even given my extensive, and recent, teaching experience. When the names were released, I believe that all of them were women. I had experienced something similar when I was fresh out of teacher certification in Colorado Springs. The high school where I had an interview for an opening had all of the current faculty meet with me for the interview. The head of the English Department was a man. However, all of the other teachers were women, mostly older women. I was not hired even though I would have taught the very students who had been my students during my student-teaching at the feeder middle school.

Just last year, I learned of one opening each at two Denver-area community colleges. Not only had I been a technical writer and editor in the work force for nearly 30 years at that point, had that teaching experience from 1978 until 1991, and had the student teaching experience in English, I now had published ten novels, in addition to three volumes of poetry I had written from the late 1960's until the early 1980's. However, from one job prospect, after sending in a lengthy resume and curriculum vitae, as well as transcripts, I heard nothing. From the other, I received a negative response, telling me that the finalists whom they selected more completely fit their needs. A generic reply if ever I heard one.

I wondered if I was not a finalist because of my age, and/or the fact that I had not been in the classroom for 18 years, though I did include the fact that I always trained the new hires at my current IBM assignment. Having direct work place experience as a writer and editor, as well as being a published author, in addition to my years in the classroom, I figured the applicant whom they finally did choose must have been one, incredible teacher. (I suspect, as with PPCC in the late 80's, they probably chose a person whom they knew and who had been a part time teacher for them as I had been for PPCC. Why choose a man in his late 50's who had been out of the classroom for 18 years, whom you do not know? Besides, I had been in the military. With all the returning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I thought that might be a plus. However, for those from the post-Vietnam era, it could just as easily be a negative.)

For that same Denver-area community college the previous year, I had applied for a part time teaching position in history. But I was, again, not selected. I wasn't even able to get my foot in the door so that they would know me personally the next time a full-time position came open.

Elsewhere around the country, because of budget cuts, teachers at all levels are being laid off. I suspect that many are attempting to find jobs in other states like Colorado where there is at least limited hiring. It's a bad time to be out of work or to be trying to find a job teaching, I suppose.

At 60, with retirement looming in the next decade, I think back and realize that, instead of attempting to join one branch of the service or another in the early 70's, I ought to have stayed in college, gotten my Master's Degree, and then began an earnest effort to be hired at one of the many community colleges that were established or opening in Southern California in the 1970's, when education was expanding.

I would have had a safe, secure job all of these years. Of course, I never would have experienced the Marine Corps and the Air Force. Would never have lived in Minot, North Dakota, and been a missile combat crew commander. Would never have lived in Colorado nor taught at the Air Force Academy. Would not have been forced to resign for being gay. Would not have had any of the many experiences I have had or met all of those whom I did meet all along the way and who have remained friends to this day.

And, most important, perhaps, I would certainly not have written and published the Rainbow Arc of Fire series of novels.

---

I Have Regrets, Part One

Something about reaching the age of 60 has made me reflect all over again about the path that my life has taken since I was forced to resign from the Air Force and teaching at the Academy in Colorado Springs.

If my life's journey were a stream, I feel as if I have gotten caught in one of those edges of the stream where the water flows in a circle, off from the main current. It essentially stagnates. Perhaps it is merely gathering strength before moving onward or forward. Or perhaps this is merely a pause in the continued and downward path to mortality.

Sadly, though not morosely, this is a time of one's life when a person realizes how many of one's contemporaries are gone or going fast. Many of those icons, or simply those whom one remembers from before, TV and film stars and personalities, wind up in the obituaries. And you realize that many of them are not much older than you are, especially when only a decade or two separates you from the age that they are when they die.

This is also a time in which one realizes one's mistakes from the past that have severely impacted where one is right now. Frankly, this is not where I thought I would be. Or, rather, and more specifically, this is not where I intended or hoped to be.

I have a job but, working for IBM as a consultant, it's not all that secure, and certainly not for the next decade, especially when I have worked there for the past two decades, since 1991. Unfortunately, I am one of those who did not plan for his retirement. I used the retirement money I'd earned from teaching part time from 1980 until 1991, to publish volumes two and three of Rainbow Arc of Fire back in the late 1990's. Any number of financial advisors would have told me that $17,000 of teacher-retirement pay should not have been touched, and certainly not have been used to pay for self-publishing two more volumes of a series that had not showed the first volume to have any legs.

I was still in my 40's at the time I used those funds; and 60 years old seemed far away, and retirement at 65 or 67 or 70 a long, long way off. But now retirement is less than five, seven or, more likely, ten years away.

Besides the fact that my pay was cut by 20 percent over a year ago, on January 1st 2009, and won't be restored any time soon, and that my job is not at all secure, my medical benefits have also been eroded over the past several years. What's left would not cover any kind of significant injury or illness. So, while in the early 2000's, I might have felt a bit more secure regarding my overall financial situation, now it's gotten much more unstable and likely to get even worse. (I know many people are in worse shape than I right now.)

Where did I go wrong besides spending my retirement pay foolishly and prematurely on my books? And where did I imagine myself, ideally, at this time in my life?

Teaching, actually.

I had always imagined myself as a teacher. When Spock tells Kirk in Star Trek II that being a Starship captain was his first, best destiny, I knew whereof he spoke. Teaching was my first, best destiny. At the Academy in the beginning, of course. Then in evening classes for Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs. After nearly nine years of teaching part time, the college had an opening in the English Department. But I came in second. They hired a woman whom they knew better. She had been teaching part time on the main campus while I had been teaching at Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base. Frankly, and not at all bitterly from my perspective, they'd rigged the selection criteria so that she would get the job. I was told that she had taught a few more English classes than I had, so she was hired instead of me.

What they failed to take into account were the nine English classes I had taught full time at the Air Force Academy from 1978-9. What they also refused to count were the dozens of humanities and communications and history classes I has also taught for Pikes Peak College at Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base in the previous few years.

As I said, they'd rigged the selection criteria so that she would be hired instead. I still have no problem with their hiring her and not me. As I said, they knew her (they never came over to Fort Carson to see me teach, BTW), they must have liked her and favored her, and they clearly wanted to hire her as a permanent colleague. My only problem was that their selection criteria was so obviously rigged as to be rather silly. Had they come to me and told me that they wanted to hire her instead, regardless of the reason, I would have had no issue with that decision.

The problem was that by not hiring me--and the fact that there were no other openings in any other department at Pike Peak Community College while I lived and worked in Colorado Springs from 1980 until 1991--I had no other choice but to move to Denver when the IBM job was offered to me. My further mistake was not to realize that the teaching situation at Pikes Peak would not always remain so static. After I had moved, the population of the region almost doubled over the rest of the decade. I didn't realize that the college itself grew substantially. They even opened a northern campus not far from the Air Force Academy, just across the freeway.

Had I paid attention to what was happening, had I not become so wrapped up with writing and then publishing Rainbow Arc of Fire, I would have been aware that there were likely several openings in all academic departments for which I might have been considered and hired, given all those years of teaching so many classes for the college.

I would have had a permanent teaching position with a much more stable salary and benefits. I would not have had all of these regrets anyway.

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