Poetry, Part Fifty-two

On this Memorial Day, I want to recall at least one whom I knew in the service who was gay.

During the ceremonies yesterday at the San Joaquin National Military Cemetery, when the African-American retired Army general spoke at length about all of the men and women who have served, most especially the Buffalo Soldiers and then other ethnic minorities, and women, who have proudly served their country, I half-expected that he would mention gays and lesbians who have also served, though in silence, who might soon be able to serve openly. But he did not mention our contributions. Despite the patriotic songs and prayers and speeches, and all the talk of fighting wars to seize and maintain freedom, we were not mentioned. I wonder how, if this measure finally passes, we may be mentioned next year, when it isn't an election year and most of the local politicians are not at ceremonies such as this because they have been reelected or tossed out.

I wrote the following poem after Dan Stratford's graduation when he was not allowed to attend to receive his diploma because he was not, like the others, to be commissioned. He received his diploma separately and simply left the Academy and moved in with Dick Tuttle in Denver. All the money spent to educate and train him to be an Air Force officer went to waste. But that was tax payers' money and the military didn't have to be accountable. I myself would be offered $10,000 if I would simply leave quietly. Just like Leonard Matlovich was offered $140,000, which he also took, to end his suit and go away.

I felt a particular sense of loss at the graduation since I had contacted Dan after hearing about the investigation surrounding him and wanted to offer him my support. Now that he was gone, and George Gordy and Bill Ryder, his two friends, were also gone, I sadly looked forward to the next academic year without any of them. Of course, I was not to know that in about three weeks, I would be on my way out; and I was no longer going to have to think about being at the Academy teaching without any of them.

USAFA Commissioning (1979)

We are all at a time
dismissed,
like these cadets here
this day.
Responsible
for our deviations
as others define.

Now I am allowed to know
within the souls of a few,
and, therefore, in all spirits--
To catalogue the violations of each.

Hypocrisy is best here and sincere.
Do not demean;
For all they demand
are those who know from this act
not to openly disgrace.

We count before us
those who conspicuously deter:
Unrevealed for four years
by act or regulation. Those never betrayed.

The few who are missing
missed because of prevailing proof.
They were not cautious.
Unlike the Thunderbirds
who practice to look like performers:
Talent maneuvers to survive.

So, too, are we like these survivors.
Some secrets are less dark from exposure,
some not. We meter liberty as light.

The silent are merely suspected,
not condemned,
as no one is deliberately discredited
without cause;
As we are safe now.

---

Poetry, Part Fifty-one

I am currently at my aunt's home in CA, to drive her and her brother-in-law and sister-in-law to the veterans cemetery where her husband, who fought in WWII, and her son, who was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War era, are buried. The cemetery in the central valley of California provides a Memorial service each year before she takes artificial flowers and small American flags to place upon their grave stones. The cemetery is fairly new and beautiful, set against barren, windy hillsides. The services are provided by local veterans groups and attended by families of the dead.

This is the third year that I have been here to accompany my aunt to the cemetery and attend these services. I always stand when they ask for those who served to rise and be recognized as honored veterans. Even though I was forced to resign, they were never able to take those years of my service from me even when they took away my dignity and my self-respect and my career. I now hope that this will be the last year that I will attend while gay and lesbian service members are forced to hide who they are or fear exposure, investigation, and automatic discharge. Let this be the last year for all of that.

Conduct

We have but one point
of forced return
like swallows who have
in their congested valley
no private flight.

So I have remembered the many retreats
of people
with whom we have, at times,
lost understanding.
For reasons long picked of sense,
where all exposed are soon disgraced,
where justice is scaled like fish
for market,
for bait,
fed to the migration schooled each spring.

Always the talents of the fishermen
returned to the nets to pick us clean;
obsessed with tides
and the temperature of policies
as a precaution,
cleansing the clear waters
where we squirm.

---

Poetry, Part Fifty

One of my favorite films, though not a movie that was well-reviewed at the time, was A Separate Peace, based upon the John Knowles novel, which I read after seeing the film in the spring or summer of 1973. I was working as a security guard, my first assignment in a guard shack late at night for a trucking company, before I headed off to Air Force OTS in August. I listened to Lakers basketball games on the radio in the shack at night. During the day, I would drive to malls and catch inexpensive matinees before heading off to work, especially after I got the swing shift at a German-owned manufacturing company in Santa Fe Springs called AccuGlide. I had my new Camaro after the Chevy strike was settled in 1973.

One day, on my way to work at this second assignment, I saw something on the painted center line of the busy street where Accuglide was located. When I got closer, I realized that it was a tiny little kitten just sitting there in the middle of the road. How it got there and where it had come from, I didn't even have time to think about. I quickly slowed enough as I got nearer, came to a full stop, opened the car door instantly, and scooped up the little guy. Just a short distance ahead, I pulled into the parking lot of Accuglide and parked. I went inside and told a sympathetic secretary what had happened. The only recourse I had was to call the local Humane Society and have them pick up the little guy and hope they found him a good home. I was leaving for the Air Force in a few weeks, and my mother would not have taken in a kitten under any circumstances. How he had managed not to get run over already was almost a miracle because he appeared to be very young and hardly capable of even getting to where I had found and rescued him.

I suspect that the following poem refers to my feelings about what was happening to Dan Stratford at the Academy because this poem and the next, which I will post tomorrow, appear just before "Plus Oultre", the poem I posted a few weeks ago, the one dedicated to Dan Stratford in NO SECOND SAIL.

Discipline

Where there is no right,
but at least true to some
balancing inner sense,
we seek always to be fair.
At odds we lose civility,
condemning again at the fateful tree--
stretched out and parted over the river.
Where fear for our decency disturbs the limb,
our desires drop furiously downward
like justice from our gods.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-nine

How many nuclear weapons and delivery systems were enough? Bombers and land-based missiles and sea-borne missiles were designated a "Triad" of nuclear weaponry in the 20th century. The analogy was to a stool with three legs. That it is more difficult to knock over such a sturdy device.

Of course, the numbers of weapons were only to ensure the complete destruction of the enemy's offensive and defensive systems. Millions of citizens of both countries, and many more around the world, were going to die in the process of accomplishing that mission. Perhaps most of the population of the world might have died in the process of reducing each other's military infrastructure and capabilities.

It would have been madness, of course, to have fought any nuclear war, even a "limited" one. Fortunately, at times, both sides tried to curb the numbers of those deadly weapons, even while calculating their ability to maintain sufficiently lethal strike forces and endure afterwards.

Arms Negotiations

From strength,
forced and finding ourselves
computing a world beyond the war.
Rather than lives improving the quality of living,
we calculate interruption,
to crush any qualitative advantage.
Leads neither nation ever overcomes now
as we stretch out and atrophy.
To finally counter those
who prefer to maim rather than deter;
who prefer to be maimed rather than deter.
To fight,
accepting the loss of a single limb.
Acceptably losing all limbs,
save one,
to fight on
and then recover.

---

House Votes to Repeal Don't Ask; Don't Tell

Even though it does not help me or my situation since my forced resignation was 31 years ago, when I had just turned 30, I have watched and awaited with great anticipation the results of President Obama's pledge to repeal this measure. Over two hundred House Democrats but only two Republicans voted for the repeal.

I never was critical of President Clinton's Don't Ask; Don't Tell policy because I knew that temporary, interim steps such as that would first be required before something more like full equality would occur. In addition, the Pentagon is completing a study to be published on December 1st. The President and the service branches will have to then sign off on the new policy after that. So, final victory is far from won. But when even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tells military personnel at the Academy that change is coming and ought to be accepted and will be good, then a great step is now being taken.

We have served in silence for generations. Many of us have died in silence during those same generations, serving our country and being patriotic in our nation's defense. We just were not given much credit for serving and dying. To my mind, Sgt. Leonard Matlovich was the first significant service member to fight the Pentagon's prejudice when he fought the Air Force back in the 70's. I awaited the results of his struggle since it began just a few years before my situation occurred. The Pentagon's policy left open the possibility of gay service members being retained under certain circumstances; however, the policy never defined what those special circumstances might be.

We were automatically assumed to be security risks because we were thought to be easy targets for blackmail by foreign agents. Though it was the Pentagon's own threat of automatic discharge that made us potential targets. That and the notion that we would impair unit morale. Now, seventy percent of Americans believe that we should be allowed to serve openly, just as most of us are allowed to live openly in American society.

We have served and died for this country. We have earned full equality with our blood for generations.

When I often began to doubt that I would ever see this occur in my lifetime now that I am 60, I take great courage and personal pride from this significant step forward. It is never too late to recognize the worth of people in our society. I now feel as if my full citizenship has finally been restored. At long last.

---

Poety, Part Forty-eight

This poem must surely have been written during my Christmas break drive to California, my first--and only--year at the Academy. Driving across from Tucson, where I stayed at a motel after dropping off the cadet, would have taken me directly into San Diego. I know I could not have resisted the need, after several years away, to return to where my obsession with military service became more pronounced because of the war in Vietnam.

On the tarmac of North Island Naval Air Station several years before had sat so many long-range civilian airliners, leased by the government to fly replacement troops to the war. In late 1978, however, the war was over and South Vietnam now a part of a reunified Vietnam. In the 2000's, especially, war veterans such as my gay friend Bill had returned to that country on guided tours. He did not tell anyone he met, however, that he had served there in the war, though I cannot imagine that anyone there didn't suspect.

That war had dominated our lives, and our youth, as had the Cold War. Just as the fight for equality would continue despite the thousands of deaths from AIDS and from hate that would soon consume my middle age after my resignation from the Air Force. We always seemed to be burying people prematurely.

We may not have been deemed "The Greatest Generation". We were certainly The Generation of Constant Conflicts: The Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, civil rights, the Middle East, Oil, Watergate, AIDS, the environment, and more. At 60, having been shaped by all that I have experienced--and yes, suffered--I am still finding my way toward equality and hope. I just never thought it would take this long.

Renewal

I passed through the zone on the border
that loans me an hour
to return to San Diego.
This day I counter years of exile,
never before aware of the pace accelerating here.

Easing the pedal down, I am as well disguised
until I turn back toward the main gate
and am untransformed.

Again confident of rank and mission,
I pass the small, grass field
where a girl from Norway and I hesitated,
inspecting weapons for Vietnam.
I turn by the inlet of water
where a lance-corporal, back from the war,
and his girlfriend paused--
peaceful always, as memory.

Parked off the drill pad and observing,
I now understand the precision of a sergeant's command.
I listen as would a monarch
who balances to serve all subjects.

Why like this generation
have my rebellions recessed?
I have not forgotten angry years,
each return to this base,
nor any sorrow.

Still, Point Loma summons me and I go
where in quiet sunlight I am judged.
Names and dates--each year unopposed--
are friends in place of my own.
But the dates once cut are not inclusive--
men are dead here every day.
Calendars repeatedly push them beyond us,
where numbers retain our only touch
until we recede.

Time enough unites us to our era
where we bury war-dead
and soon go after:
Mother reunited with son
and the sons of others.

An age so like a severed nerve,
where no scars
but newer tissues
cover now and repel.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-seven

I felt not only as if I had been kicked in the stomach but had almost certainly been stabbed in the back. I had had no idea as I later read the charges against me and Cadet Bostic's (mostly false) confessions to the OSI that what had happened was even real. I walked around the English Department in a fog that day. After leaving the conference room, the two agents invaded my shared office, to ransack it for clues and further evidence against me. My office partner looked at them and me with wide-eyed amazement and then fled.

After the agents left, I went to see Colonel Shuttleworth, to figure out what I ought to do next. I had been given an attorney who was based at Peterson Air Force Base, but he was away on a remote assignment and would not be back that day or the next couple of days. Col. Shuttleworth suggested I go to the Law Department, to discuss my situation with an officer there.

I believe it was on that day, or the next, that I met my other Air Force attorney who would help during my limited fight against being shoved out of the door prematurely. Nothing now would save my career, but at least I had two military attorneys, and I would also be advised to hire a civilian attorney--the one who had represented Dan Stratford against the Academy--to at least ensure that my limited rights were not violated. And the Air Force, or certain officers within the system, would indeed try to violate my rights, repeatedly, during the continuing process.

I was no longer allowed to use the Academy gym facilities to work out. I was offered the use of the gym by the based exchange and commissary instead, where I would have to drive. I was no longer allowed to eat at the cafeteria in the academic building but would have to also drive to the clubhouse restaurant at the Academy golf course to eat. After a few of my fellow officers had lunch with me there the next day, to show me some support in this difficult time--and the two agents were seen eating there--I would eat the rest of my meals by myself over the next few months, until my final discharge in mid October.

I went home early that first day in complete shock. All that I had told my attorney was proven false the next day when I finally got the charges against me and Bostic's confessions. I had initially assumed he'd been coerced in some way into turning me in, but then I and my attorney realized that he had been the instigator the entire time. That he had been advised not to pursue his course of action on more than one occasion but had not been dissuaded from what now appeared to be a vendetta.

As the next months unfolded, I realized that I must turn against him to protect myself to a degree, as well as to discredit his statements against other officers and cadets whom he had also dragged into the net of suspicion by turning them in, as well, or providing their names to the OSI for being gay or lesbian. The information that he had imparted to me before, that he was an orphan and that his adoptive parents had used illegal means to provide him with the identity of their dead son so that he could eventually enter the Academy, had also been imparted to cadets whom he had known over his two years at the Academy.

My two Air Force attorneys had already interviewed him and he had denied to them, on tape, that he had ever said any of this to anyone because it was not true. But several cadets who knew me and/or knew him came forward to admit that they had been told by him the same details about his past life. He was now being caught in his own web of lies by the same system that he had used against me. The Academy, and the OSI, quickly realized that the situation was becoming so sordid that they would not even use the Cadet Honor Code system, involving a cadet board, to investigate him and recommend his expulsion for violating the cadet honor code: "We Will Not Lie, Steal Or Cheat, Nor Tolerate Among Us Anyone Who Does."

The problem was that their single witness against me, the lying cadet, could not be expelled before he might have to be utilized to give testimony against me should this entire matter come before a courts martial. And, of course, neither of my military attorneys, nor the Academy itself, was prepared to have this matter go to court, the details of which might become public. They did not want any publicity. So I was offered an honorable discharge, with full severance pay because I had earned a regular commission and was entitled to severance pay upon discharge. It would be about $10K.

I was desperately writing in my journal every day. I was only slowly recovering from the emotional devastation of what had happened but full recovery would take years. I looked for solace anywhere I could find it. I came across the line in the novel 1984: "Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me." We had certainly not been lovers, but we were very much like Winston and Julia, exchanging vicious accusations before the state. Soon, nothing could alter our individual fates within the Air Force legal system: the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Academy's cadet legal system.

As the following years went by, I never really learned why he had done what he did to me. No excuse or reasoning seemed to justify his stupidity and meanness. Perhaps it was his own profound self-loathing for being gay. Perhaps fate had prepared me to knock him off his course toward becoming a military officer even though it had initially seemed the other way around. Who knew for certain? He was never going to tell me.

The military attorney assigned to him from the Law Department and I had known one another from our shared orientation to the Academy the summer before. I had even gone over to chat with him periodically during the investigation before Bostic was formally charged, and one day I saw that his door was closed. Intuitively, I sensed that my accuser was behind that closed office door and I was right.

The weeks and then the months passed. I could not accept the fact that my career would be over any day now. I could not bring myself to look for another job, my own sense of self-worth having been devastated. My last officer effectiveness report was filled with attacks upon my judgment, ability and character. Fortunately, my one Air Force attorney had discovered that the results of an on-going investigation cannot be used to populate an effectiveness report, and the officer who put the final, negative comments in my report was forced to rescind them and leave his portion of that final report blank. It must have made that general seethe to be told to take back what he had vindictively written.

My final day, a Friday, finally arrived. I took my books and personal possessions home, took off my uniform for the final time, watching myself do it in the mirror of my guest bathroom at my house in Colorado Springs. The following Monday morning, I forced myself to go to the unemployment office for help finding a job. I stepped inside the door and was instantly ready to flee. But I made myself just stand there inside the door until I could muster the courage to approach someone at the end of one of the lines of those also looking for work. Unfortunately, the rest of the year would pass and I would have no job, living off my severance pay and the money I got from cashing in my government savings bonds--I figured that if my country no longer invested in me, I could no longer invest in my country.

After the first of the year, I went to a job interview at Canon City, to become a prison guard at the maximum security prison there. After the interview, I drove to the Royal Gorge nearby. Snow was beginning to fall as I crossed the bridge over the gorge. No one else was there as my 1973 Camaro made tracks in the heavy, wet snow on the wooden planks of the bridge. I finally drove back home and learned, a few days later, that I was hired if I wanted the job. But I could not make myself take it. The pay was so much less than my Air Force salary, $13k vs over $17k. And I would have to commute a long, long way to Canon City from Colorado Springs. It wasn't nearly enough money each month to even keep my home in the Springs. I turned their offer down and kept sending out resumes but got no other full-time job offers for the next several months.

I finally did get hired to teach one part time literature course at Peterson Air Force Base for Chapman College. Then I got several part time teaching assignments for Pikes Peak Community College at Fort Carson. I eventually came in second for a full time technical writing job at Kaman Sciences on Garden of the Gods Road. Finally, in late May, I got hired for a second technical writing job at Kaman. My severance pay was gone. My savings bond money was gone. I had put my house up for sale and it had sold. However, the young couple did not qualify for the loan at the last minute, and the Kaman job literally came through at the last possible moment. I continued to teach part time for Pikes Peak College at Fort Carson and also at Peterson Air Force Base in the evenings for the next decade and more because my Kaman salary was only $13k, not nearly enough. My mom gave me $1,000 in order to make my mortgage payment in June, and I tried in the following months to move on.

The following poem was, I am certain, written that first winter after my forced resignation.

Winter Survival

I struggle along,
as westward wagons must have fitfully rolled
before ambush,
before the trap that winter creates,
when we are
of our own flesh
consumed.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-six

Occasionally, I come across a poem in SONS OF MEN, the title I gave to the overall collection of 100 poems as well as to the first volume in the trilogy, and I simply do not recall what motivated the writing of that poem.

The following is another poem that I also do not recall specifically when I wrote it, except that it was while I still taught at the Academy, and was likely written before I was being investigated and finally forced to resign.

I arrived at the Academy in late June or early July of 1978. By June of 1979, I had just finished teaching a summer makeup English class. During the next academic year, I was to attend an advanced Air Force officer's career development school, I believe in Alabama, for one semester. But the day after I had finished teaching that course and while I was debriefing with a few fellow officers in one of their cubicles, the Chairman of the English Department poked his head in and asked to see me. As I accompanied him, I could immediately sense that something was very wrong; but I had no idea what it could be. He finally mentioned that we were going to see two men in the department conference room who had business with me.

As we entered the room, Colonel Shuttleworth introduced me to the two OSI agents and uncomfortably departed. They invited me to sit down. One of them opened a brief case on the conference table and frankly revealed to me, "We have the letters."

I suspect that they hoped I would be sufficiently stunned by the news that I would tell them anything. I said nothing. I was too shocked to speak even if I were the type to rat on my fellows which, obviously, I am not. When they asked if I would reveal the names of any other gay or lesbian officers at the Academy, or any others whom I had known before, because we were all security risks, I defintely said nothing. They then--finally--advised me: "Well, you know you are allowed to have an attorney." Their report of our meeting, of course, did not bother to mention that they had tried to pressure information out of me before I was told of my right to have an attorney. If you didn't suspect this already, the OSI, too, can be liars if the pose suits their needs.

You see, the cadet with whom I had become personally involved, though not sexually, had pleaded with me that he needed to go on leave to visit his parents in Maryland rather than attend a makeup class that summer at the Academy. Since I was his humanities adviser, I visited the officer who had taught the class that Cadet Bostic had failed and needed to make up, explaining his personal predicament. The other instructor granted my request and off Bostic went on leave. But before he left, what I did not know was that he had been seeing the OSI for a number of weeks before that. Every time we met or he had visited my house or come to my cubicle to speak to me, he reported to them what had happened and whatever we had spoken of during our personal encounters.

Of course, when I later read the report of these surreptitious OSI meetings, what he had told them was not always the total truth. About one third of his statements were the truth. One third of what he said to them was a subtle or obvious twisting of the truth. And one third of his statements to them were total lies.

A few months earlier, after I had become his advisor, he would come to see me whenever I was showing a film as Officer-In-Charge (OIC) of the Cadet Film Club. He'd also stop by my cubicle in the English Department to chat. But not long after that, he became quite overtly friendly toward me. Sometimes he'd become physically close, almost intimate. One time in the projection booth, when I placed my hand on his shoulder to explain about some Academy group and program that he might consider joining, he immediately wrapped his arm around my waist as if to hug me. Cadets were coming and going from the booth before the film started, and I was surprised at his rather overt form of contact.

After this and other sorts of physical, and soon verbal, forms of flirting--there was no question that he was attracted to me as I became attracted to him--he was the first person to act romantically interested in me, ever--I realized that what was happening could be dangerous for both of our careers. I called him one Saturday morning, drove up to the Academy to meet with him, and we headed over to the Overlooks to privately discuss what was occurring between us. (I didn't trust the phones, and I certainly did not want to speak to him in any of the Academy facilities where our conversation might be overheard.)

It was one of those bright, blue, beautiful, almost-cloudless afternoons in Colorado that might as well be framed as a post card. The Academy itself was arrayed before us as we spoke on the cement path to the fence where tourists can see the entire academic and athletic complex at a glance. I soon explained that we must be extremely careful. That any physical forms of intimacy such as he had displayed in the film booth were dangerous should someone put the pieces together. He agreed with me that we needed to be careful.

Our discussion essentially over, I asked him where he wanted me to drive him next: back to his cadet dorm or elsewhere? He smiled and told me that he'd like to go to my house.

In those days, I was extremely naive. I never saw that his request was anything more than curiosity to see where I lived. I did not expect that he was asking to go there and for the two of us to become intimate, and perhaps he wasn't making that kind of request. Or perhaps he was.

I was, on my part, still working through me feelings toward him and what they meant. There was, obviously, a double standard at work here in the service. While Cadet Bostic told me at some point that he considered himself bisexual, it was clear to me that he was, like me, gay. But in those days, many celebrities such as Elton John or David Bowie claimed to be bisexual when they might have actually been gay or had only experimented with same-sex intimacies but were probably, or primarily, straight. But in the military, and he being my subordinate, relations between us would still have been inappropriate were we of the opposite sex. But we were gay, and any revelation of that fact to the authorities would have meant our unqualified expulsion from the service. If we were of the opposite sex--he was a female cadet instead of a male cadet and we were discovered to be in a relationship--I might have been reprimanded, forced to resign from the Academy as an instructor certainly, been given a bad performance evaluation that could have irreparably damaged my chances of a military career, but I would not have been forced to resign from the service.

Three years earlier, a famous female Olympic diver, who was also an Academy diving instructor and an Air Force officer, married the captain of the swim team almost immediately after he graduated in the summer of 1976. She was a captain at the time and he was a second lieutenant upon graduation. Clearly, it was highly unlikely that their passion for one another suddenly exploded the moment he graduated and that they had kept their feelings for one another entirely platonic and above reproach the entire time that he was a cadet and she was a diving instructor. However, what could the Academy prove? Common sense dictated that something had to have been going on well before they walked down the aisle together, but what proof was there? Eventually, she might have been reprimanded by the Air Force; but she was also a famous gold-medal-winning diver. Unlike me, she was not forced to resign from the service and retired a decade and a half later as a colonel.

When Cadet Bostic and I got to my house, I showed him around. We watched a little TV in the family room. We might also have had some lunch, and then it was time to take him back to the Academy. We did not touch. We did not kiss. We certainly did not have sex. I was still conflicted about our relationship and the appropriateness of that relationship. But I liked him and he certainly seemed to like me. On the drive back to the Academy, he told me personal details of his life that, were they widely known and been proven, he would have been expelled from the Academy.

Not more than a week later, though, he started to see the OSI and make his periodic reports to them about me. Before seeing the OSI, however, he had first gone to speak to one of the Air Force chaplains who performed services at the Cadet Chapel, I later learned. That officer had told him to forget the whole thing and not to ruin someone else's career. Bostic chose to ignore that advice and turn me in instead. In his periodic reports, he painted a very different picture from what the situation was actually like between us. Perhaps the OSI suspected more than what they were being told by him, but they simply wrote down that he was an entirely straight cadet whom this predatory gay officer had sought out and was making unwelcome advances toward.

However, they, too, needed proof of my guilt, and he appeared to be the only one who was capable of obtaining that proof. So, even though he said that my unwelcome advances disgusted and repelled him, he would continue to see me on a regular basis, in hopes of providing the OSI with the necessary proof.

But in the two months since we had met and spoken on the overlooks and he had asked to see my home, he had not been able to provide them with any actual proof. He was about to go on leave, so a more direct approach was now necessary. They had him write me a note, inviting me to write to him while he was on leave, in hopes that I would communicate something in writing that would prove I was gay. They put the note into an envelop and, while I was at the gym during lunch one day, slipped into my cubicle and placed the note on my desk. The trap was now baited.

Retirement

With youth go the warriors
and their campaigns.
Coaches now and generals.
No longer organized
into battalions
into teams--
not even out as friends
gathered wildly in the night--
we volley at individual sports.
Singly served and surrendered
as surviving creatures,
as crowds,
who know that the time remaining
is for entertaining alone.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-five

The following is one of the longest poems I had written, to date, back in 1978-9. After rereading, it was obviously written after I got to the Academy, especially when it refers to the "high jet trails" because, back in that era of far more transcontinental flights and fewer airport hubs, above Colorado Springs were typically dozens of contrails almost daily. Also, once I got to the Academy, I did a lot of running on the grounds at noon to keep in shape. It seemed a particularly Colorado thing to do. And working out and running at noon seemed a particularly Academy thing to do.

In addition, I wonder if this was written after I was under investigation by the Office of Special Investigations, the OSI. It reads very much like a melancholy summary of my life prior to that. I was still only 29 years old when I wrote this but sound like someone who feels that his life is just about over, at least the life he had known up until then.

Recall

On the screen was footage
spliced together to create scenes
of the war we have not fought.

And the personality
some people keep to themselves.

Sacrificial fatigue.
I leaned my head
against the vibrating enclosure every night.
Saw the face of aging loneliness
unable to find a temptor
to sell my soul to for sleep.

In my youth the high jet trails
were always from military jets--
an isolated few and guarding for me.
But above where I run now,
through the clean skies of Colorado,
civilians outnumber and surpass:
Crossing here,
horizon to horizon in repetitive lengths,
while retracing familiar routes
like missile paths up off the coast.

I run to prolong a youth now having no purpose.
Ran as a child for joy, from fear,
under clearer skies of California.
Never needing to know then:
How would I wander from promise to this place?

If we,
step-by-step,
walk ourselves to where we are,
when did I misstep?
I was not aware that I should leave a trail,
a child unwisely surviving in the woods.

There must have been a time
quite farther back
when I was untroubled.
Loved before I lost the memory,
or lost the woods where memories walk.

Like the trains that nightly thundered through Quantico,
leaving us rattled in our barracks
and following out of sight.

A black and white picture of me on a sled,
as a child.
Now I step in prints in the snow
to get less wet.
I run on dry mud
until I see feet slip aside,
and then I look for drier ground.

Ran in Virginia because I had to,
marching muddy and unconcerned.
Warmth always awaited the evening,
or the next day.
As in Minot where the sun would
warm above us when we ascended,
or when a blizzard lifted.
As step follows step when we run,
and when we stop running.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-four

As a deputy or a crew commander, you never chose your crew partner. He was almost always chosen for you. Sometimes it was difficult to understand why they thought someone would be an ideal partner. Often they paired a strong commander with a weak deputy. Other times, it was a strong deputy paired with a weak commander--and any observer in a trainer ride or a standboard evaluation could tell that the crew was being run from the back (deputy's) seat rather than the way it was supposed to be. (Often, if the strong deputy realized that the weak commander was about to make a critical mistake, he would try to ask if, perhaps, another course of action might be preferable. If the weak commander weren't a total fool, he'd listen to the deputy and quickly change course.)

My first commander was very strong. My second, much less so; but we got along together quite well. My third commander was also a nice guy but somewhat weak in his knowledge of the weapons system. My first deputy was strong enough, but he'd gained the reputation as a great potential new deputy in missile school at Vandenberg. We got two HQ ratings while we were paired; but I soon realized that while he was smart, he wasn't nearly as strong as the evaluators thought he was. He was still a rookie who had a lot to learn. And I often felt that our HQ ratings were thought to be more his doing than mine.

At this point, however, I had four HQ ratings and two Qualified ratings. My first two commanders had made enemies of certain members of the standboard evaluation staff. Each got screwed out of an HQ rating because they'd been maneuvered into making an error by the evaluator. On my very first standboard "ride", I wasn't even a part of the error made by my commander; and it should not have been assessed to me. But their word was final, and I was stuck with the results. (I even read their report afterwards, and it was clearly written almost as a cover up for what had been done to our crew.)

My second deputy was extremely weak. I had to do my job as commander of the crew, but I also had to continuously monitor what my deputy was doing at all times, to ensure that he did not make an error on his own. (The standboard team often tried to get commander and deputy to separate during the evaluation so they could focus on each individual member rather than the team. It did not seem always realistic because you operated as a team in the field, but who were we to question standboard?) I was now up to six HQ ratings, paired with two commanders and now two deputies while being evaluated.

My third deputy and I seemed to get along well enough. Or so I thought. He was often quiet and sometimes seemed rather moody. On one alert, unfortunately, we were having a severe electrical storm above ground. That always played havoc with the phone lines to the LFs. They would start ringing even though no one was at any LF trying to call us. If you pressed in the lighted LF comm line button, the ringing would stop. But it would not stop if both the commander and the deputy were pushing in ringing buttons at the same time--it only made the situation worse and the ringing would continue. We also had a team of maintenance men outside the acoustical enclosure working in the capsule during this alert.

At one point, the ringing was getting annoying and both I and my deputy were pushing in the buttons at the same time, and the noise was not stopping. I calmly said aloud (my deputy almost never spoke to me), "Either you push in the buttons, or I will push in the buttons, but not both of us."

All of a sudden, he jumped out of his chair and started yelling at me. It was unbelievable and shocking and totally insubordinate on his part. I was stunned. Perhaps he'd never liked me or harbored some grudge against me even though he and I had gotten an HQ rating, my seventh overall, while crewed together. Regardless, on the drive back from alert, I could tell that he was still seething, so I calmly told him, "If you would prefer a new crew pairing when we get back, ask the squadron commander for a change."

What I did not realize was that, after we got back, he must have gone to see the commander immediately--while he was still angry. What he said about me must have been horrible even though he had been insubordinate on alert, though I never brought that up to anyone. When I was called in and notified about the crew change, the squadron commander chewed me out, ominously adding, "If they [the Academy] knew these things about you, they might not hire you."

I was totally shocked once again. What was the squadron commander even talking about? What had my deputy of only a few months said to him about me? I wasn't even given the benefit of being told what was said behind closed doors. After four years on the crew force, and the most number of HQ ratings of anyone in our squadron, and only two behind the most by one other commander in the wing who had been at Minot for years, I was being thrown under the bus by a deputy who had not even been on the crew force for more than a year. And this squadron commander had also not been at Minot that long either.

Fortunately, that squadron commander was replaced not long before I was to leave Minot; and, fortunately too, my final written evaluation at Minot was exemplary because that commander didn't write it. The squadron operations officer had seen to it that I got a good evaluation instead of relying upon what had been said about me behind closed doors.

On my final alert, my 235th at Minot, I expected to at least be recognized for my four years on the crew force. However, somebody simply did not get the word about this being my last alert. The pre-departure briefing was interrupted to recognize the achievements of a standboard evaluator who was leaving Minot early for an assignment elsewhere. He had been at Minot for only two years and, because standboard only pulled two alerts a month instead of the seven or eight we line crews pulled, he had only pulled a fraction of the number of alerts I had. But his contributions were being recognized and I had been totally overlooked.

After what had happened with the previous deputy, and knowing that I only had a couple of months remaining on the crew force, I was a commander who was left unpaired with a permanent deputy. I was given any deputy who was spare because his commander was on leave or he was about to be switched to a different commander. On one alert, I was embarrassed to learn that I was to be paired with a major (I had only recently been promoted to captain) who had busted a standboard evaluation as commander and was demoted back to deputy--a humiliating situation for him.

Before that pre-departure briefing, a thoughtless fellow commander came up to me and snarkily asked, "I didn't hear that you'd busted." (He had obviously assumed that they would not put a captain in charge of a deputy who out ranked him.) Without being any more specific in this already embarrassing situation, I flatly responded, "I didn't bust." Out at the LCF, the embarrassment continued when the security chief, assuming that the major was the commander of our crew (except for a bust, no captain was a deputy at Minot), began addressing him as to the security status of our flight rather than addressing me. Mercifully, the major informed the chief that I was in charge of the crew.

So, my final couple of months on crew had not gone well, at all. On this final alert, now paired with yet another temporary deputy, I was sitting there, listening to how wonderful this other officer was while no one was there from our squadron to recognize my contributions to the wing. But even my temporary deputy knew this was my final alert after more than four years, and he was determined to speak up on my behalf; but I firmly told him not to say anything. If I had to ask to be recognized, I didn't want the recognition.

Still, when I finally left Minot I was saddened that June morning of 1978. Roger and the others were still living in the BOQ. I had a few other friends at the base whom I was leaving behind. When my car passed the final LF off the highway, well to the south of the town of Minot, Jimmie Rogers was singing, "The World I Left Behind" on my cassette player (I'd sold off my 8-track player a year or two earlier). It seemed an appropriate way to leave.

I again do not know what motivated the writing of the following poem, which might have been penned while I was at Minot, or it could have been written after I arrived at the Academy. Just two to three years hence, it would have been an appropriate reaction to so many fellow gay men dying of AIDS beginning in 1980.

Autumn

Some will have no cure.

Disease meant to remain inside us,
leveling always,
and wept.
We question, "Shall I be the one
selected for notoriety?"
As an example,
stretching our to a few,
and so finally?

A progression in collapse
with all changing things.
With friends who would as soon be dead.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-three

The seasons of the year have always fascinated me. Even growing up in Southern California, one notes especially the subtle changes. In North Dakota, however, the seasonal alterations were far more dramatic and, except for winter, all too brief.

Spring

A poet crouched at the wreckage of achievement,
taking notes:

At fated aircraft,
whose splinters of flight burn now--
obscuring dignity.
At the demise of kings.

Sighting ironies at excavated stone--
any rock once mislaid upon another
and fallen.
Recalling all armies mislead.

A writer of greetings
for as yet unrevealed celebrations,
unappreciated.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-two

As I have written, I never could conceive of a time when the ICBM's would be gone. Of the thoughts expressed in the following poem, clearly some bases were closed, some missiles removed, and some silos filled in. But not at Minot. At least not yet.

On Alert

I am unable to envision at time
(quite beyond this one, of course)
when these holes are filled.
Where will they find the dirt taken
when these were so deeply dug?
I cannot conceive of any of this abandoned;
Having a use to which no one returns
like a mine cleared of all potential.

We pass lives back and forth here
in a continuous current.
A living some day drained of our blood
and our sacrifice?
I think of the personal, the professional, investment,
and I am curious.
Will I live to see this replaced?
May I watch the workmen
as soil fills these cavities
until I am full again?

There was a beginning;
I am not to be part of the conclusion.
I do not mean any ultimate end.
No one believe these missiles would be used;
just the thought of the threat is all.

Four years on this line is not enough.
At least not yet.

I see the scars, the scratches, and the paint chipped
by other lives who shared this watch with me.
We transfer weapons:
at our sides,
at a distance,
and do not think about it much.
Why should we?
The ritual is too often for us.
We lose meaning in our years.

But sit with me.
We are sentries.
Unreasoning emotion is out there. In the darkness. Risen from the sea.
As it was beyond the Great Wall.
As it broke through the gates of Constantinople.
We are to see inside and out.
Men strengthening or weakening their resolve.

But the war is never here.
Only in the trainers back on base.
The residue remains in our minds, however,
so we cannot be taken.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-one

I experienced my first physical, for the draft, at the Wilshire Blvd. draft center in early 1972. A Marine Corps physical, which was much more pleasant, occurred at the same center, also in early 1972. I was given a Coast Guard physical in one of their facilities in San Pedro, CA, later that same year. In 1973, I had my first Air Force physical out at March Air Force Base near Riverside, CA. So, I had endured plenty of physicals before I entered active duty.

In addition, being involved with nuclear weapons, we were required to have random drug testing at Minot several times over the four years I was stationed there. After my impending discharge from the Air Force at the Academy, I had to have a physical in the first floor of the academic building. The officer who was tasked with my physical seemed disgusted when he read on my report why I was being discharged. He told me that he would try to make it as quick as possible as he drew the curtains of his large office that had a view in three directions, toward the library and the grass parade field below.

Because of where this poem was placed in the final volume, NO SECOND SAIL (like SONS OF MEN, a phrase from an A.E. Housman poem), I doubt if the poem was written in response to that final military physical, but it might as well have been written after that one.

The Physical

It will have been years ago
from each naked humiliation to this:
At the various layers of peace and war,
we come to our own inspection.
And so we are fitted.
The chilling of nerves
where stainless floors numb us together,
even flesh becomes official
when bare before each counting army.
Our bodies tremble,
but our feet are firm to orders where we stand.
So often waking to this
(but never like cattle),
we are the finer breed:
Nothing scars and our petty deformities
and are insulted.

---

Poetry, Part Forty

On the walls of the 91st Strategic Missile Squadron were pictures of larger, and more numerous, red Soviet missiles along side the three smaller U.S. missiles in the active arsenal: Titan, Polaris, and Minuteman. (And the largest U.S. missile, the aging Titan, was also in need of replacement.) Size, indeed, seemed to matter.

To assuage the feelings of inadequacy that this unfair comparison engendered, the positive spin became that our MIRV's were far more accurate than theirs, which was certainly true enough. Our nuclear warheads did not have to be as destructive nor carry as much megatonage to do comparable damage to Soviet forces as their big "blunderbusses" would do to ours.

The U.S. was, however, developing a larger missile, designated the MX. Eventually, the Peacekeeper missile would be completed and deployed into former Minuteman silos in Wyoming. But until that scenario played out, all sorts of wild schemes were discussed and depicted. (Originally, even Minuteman missiles were considered for rail deployment so that the Soviets could never easily hit a moving target because the rail-borne delivery system was always on the move at any time of day or night.)

One of the more exotic and expensive ideas for deployment of the MX was to build many bunkers, up to ten different sites for each single MX missile. Like an elaborate shell game, the missiles could be moved randomly among the several concrete bunkers so that the Soviets would not be able to target any one bunker as easily and would have to target all of the sites where a live missile might be contained at any one time. However, the amount of concrete alone that would be necessary to build the hundreds of bunkers, in addition to the interconnecting miles and miles of roads in the wilderness of Utah or Arizona or Colorado or Idaho or wherever they were eventually constructed, became absurd to even contemplate. I'm not sure the government even wanted to calculate the environmental impact of such a massive complex. Furthermore, to provide security for constantly moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what was formerly nowhere was going to be another nightmare.

The most ludicrous deployment scenario, to me, involved interconnecting trenches dug underground. The buried missiles could pop up through the thin layer of soil and be launched. Sadly, the comparison to earlier, deadly warfare was too easy to imagine, and reject.

Fortunately, as I wrote earlier, the more cost-effective decision was simply to place them into modified Minuteman missile silos at one Minuteman missile base in Wyoming, F.E. Warren, and be done with them. When the Soviet Union crumbled not long after full deployment, and the goal was then to reduce the number of offensive missiles on both sides, the Peacekeepers were negotiated away and the Minuteman missiles remained at just three bases, including Minot.

But until the history of ICBM's actually played out in the next decade and more, the MX program was food for poetic conjecture on my part.

MX

They threaten now
and again of using trenches.
New trenches for our future defense
as an old attrition.
Again we settle in at our tables for this stagnation.
For we have it best.
This same front will bleed us a new way:
without our blood, so we need not ration.
Gambling in our cards with renewing fevers
and renewable obsessions.
Not needing lessons from this present siege
to compare with the past.
At most we require a more prolonged protection:
Payments stretched to begin now what we may need then:
Newer weapons aging to be replaced
on terms beyond our own.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-nine

The following is obviously a love poem. To whom or about whom, I frankly do not remember. Before the service, while I was in college, I had a crush on two guys, first Daylin and then Pat, both of whom were straight. I even visited Pat and his girlfriend on Long Island while I was stationed in Minot. I'd lost touch with Daylin after I entered in the service, though I did visit him and his wife in Ann Arbor, MI, where he was in graduate school; but I still communicated with his brother, Darryl, a classmate of mine in high school. Their family lived in South Gate for years. Last year, I found Daylin on the Internet and sent him an email. Like my sister and I, I learned from him that both their parents are gone, as is their older sister.

It must have been my final year in Minot, in the Fall of 1977; but I decided to take a monster plane trip that would likely be impossible or incredibly expensive these days since many of the airlines I took back then are no longer in existence and few airlines today allow one-way flights.

I began my epic journey on a North Central Airlines DC-9-30 from Minot, through Fargo, ND, to Minneapolis. I changed airlines there and took an Ozark Airlines DC-9 to St. Louis where I stayed with a friend who had been a missile officer at Minot but was now stationed there.

I was supposed to take TWA from St. Louis to Indianapolis and then a small commuter airliner to Bloomington, Indiana; but my ticket had the flight departure time wrong and I missed the flight. I waited around the airport with my Air Force buddy until the next flight but had to call Darryl to come pick me up in Indianapolis and drive me to his and his wife's apartment in Bloomington where he was attending graduate school. I next flew from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh on an American Airlines BAC-111 through Columbus, Ohio.

From there, I took a small commuter airliner to Morgantown, WVA, to visit my Air Force friend, Chuck, in Morgantown. He had also taken the early-out program and left the service earlier that year. A couple days later, I took a twin-engine, four seater from Morgantown back to Pittsburgh. As I sat in the airport, I saw flights arrive from Colorado, filled with Air Force Academy cadets. From Pittsburgh, I flew on a Northwest Airlines 727-200 to Philadelphia to stay with David Zito. Even though I had lived all those years in Minot, I was never as cold as I was in Philadelphia that Thanksgiving weekend. Dennis and his wife met up with David and me at their parents' home. Back in Philadelphia, I caught a terrible cold. I was miserable in the airport, waiting for my American Airlines flight to Los Angeles via Dallas, TX. I was even more miserable on the plane, hoping not to infect my fellow passengers with my misery.

I recovered a bit, staying with my mom in Long Beach. A week later, I took United Airlines to Denver. The Frontier flight from Denver to Minot was cancelled, so I caught a Northwest flight back to Minneapolis and finally a North Central flight back to Minot via Fargo. I think the ticket was $728.00.

Getting back to the poem, the term that is the title of the poem refers to the electrical connections between the LCCs, where the crews spent their alerts, and the LFs where the ten-flight, and fifteen-squadron, missiles were kept, no closer physically than three nautical miles from one another or from the LCCs. The many connections and system redundancies allow the crews from at least two LCCs to launch all of the squadron's missiles even if some of the connections are damaged or destroyed.

Interconnectivity

Status lights dim or brighten on my end only.
On the snow-submerged, opposing end,
mystic shafts of untold emotions are driven.
So steel as it functions ages less,
so love that we strangle dismantles within.
My teams determine as they can
priority for repair.
I help them when I must,
for we all maintain the system.
And as we each preserve ourselves,
I preserve missiles as a threat.
As on lines where we talked
that do not always function,
I no longer speak to you. No malfunction.
Love that is my link to friendship
is my frustration when it ends.
Like breaks in the connections
between these active missiles and me,
I know that no commands,
no pleading, will bring results with damage.
I am forever like some wizard
whose wonders never work.
I know as disenchanted lovers disunite--
spells cast now by mortals
are always broken.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-eight

While the normal tour of duty was four years, and I spent several months longer than that at Minot, some of those whom I knew there left before serving their full four years. In the fall of 1977, I was back from my Academy interviews in the summer and finishing up the final two semesters of my Master's Degree in the Humanities. Now a captain and entitled to larger quarters, I had finally moved down the hall from my warm, single room over the building's furnace room beneath to a one-bedroom, one-bath BOQ room with a separate living room, and a kitchen that I did not have to share. I was now living next door to my friend Roger.

Someone who had lived in that same room before had put florescent stars on the ceiling of the bedroom. My grandmother Sanchez died on a visit to Mexico while I was living there and was buried in Mazatlan because of the legal requirement to bury someone within 24 hours of his or her death. Her family was German immigrants in the 1800's who had settled in Wyoming. I am uncertain as to how she and my grandfather Sanchez met and married since he was a sole immigrant of his family who came to America from Spain in 1919. But they lived and raised a family in California in the 1920's and 1930's. Their infant daughter died, but my father and his younger brother thrived. Dad had a few months of junior college and was able to become an Army Air Corps officer and bombadier on a B-24 Liberator. His plane was so riddled on one of the Ploesti raids that the crew had to bail out over enemy territory. He was soon captured and sent to a P.O.W. camp in Germany for the remainder of the war. His brother was attending college in Arizona and did not want to serve as a draftee after learning of my dad's fate--I believe, as was typical of those war years, the family did not learn that he had survived for several months after his capture. So my uncle simply left the country for Mexico and eventually became a Mexican citizen.

Tim McConnell was in my missile class at Vandenberg AFB in the Spring of 1974. He lived in the BOQ upstairs from me. We participated on several of the Wing's sports teams over the years. It was he who took an early-out offer when the Air Force decided to downsize the crew force so that one officer could legally sleep while on alert. I already knew when I was going to depart for the Academy in 1978, but it was still sad to see those whom I had known so well depart Minot for other assignments or for civilian life once more. Tim and I kept in touch for several years after that. I even visited him once in Rhode Island, but then we lost touch after the mid-80's. The same was true of my friend Chuck Gover from West Virginia, with whom I kept in touch until the late 1990's.

Fall Again at Minot

For Tim McConnell

On fields that wait for winter
no promises remain.
My four years end next May.
I can stay no longer--
this duty wears me away.
Crews are rearranged;
countless evaluations are completed;
I am sent again to other capsules,
so there is no change.
I live for the time my tour ends
(a hostage now as your protection).
There are others who know as I,
as most of you do not,
how lonely a man becomes buried
with these machines.
I know all noises and their meaning;
never need to look for sources,
as each is too familiar to me now.
Responding to one another with no surprises,
we opposing vibrations
hum and rattle together
without sympathy.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-seven

I applied to teach history at the Academy in early 1977. In the Spring, nearly a year before I would finish my Master's Degree in the Humanities, I was invited by the History Department to come and interview. Almost as an afterthought, I called the English Department, told them I was coming, and they also wanted to interview me while I was there.

I rented a car and was going to stay with a friend in the mountains. But, from the airport, I kept driving and driving, following his detailed directions; but I never seemed to get to his trailer. Finally, I called from a pay phone in a small mountain town and told him I had better stay at the Visiting Officer's Quarters (VOQ) at Peterson Air Force Base so that I could arrive early enough in the morning to interview all day. I returned to Colorado Springs and got a room at the VOQ; but when I got to the room, I realized that a senior officer had taken up the two adjoining rooms and, without his knowledge, I was told to move his stuff out of my side, close off the doors between the two rooms, and get some sleep. I was concerned that he'd return to his room, be upset that someone taken half his space, and demand that I get out and make other arrangements. Fortunately, that didn't happen; but I still worried about it until I finally dropped off to sleep.

The first full day of interviews with the English Department went quite well. The second day of interviews with the History Department went well, too, except for the final interview with the Department Chairman. I was tired and blurry minded at that point, after two days of constant interviews and different meals and sleeping in a strange place. My final interview did not go well, and I could tell he was not warming up to me at all.

But during the noon break the first day I was there, I hiked down to a level of the academic building where I was told I could watch the cadets marching to lunch. It was indeed impressive, and I wrote the poem, The Academy, after having been inspired by what I saw that day (see the Poetry, Part Two post, in April).

When I returned to Minot, I awaited a call from either department, hoping that I would get a job at the Academy, a dream assignment after Minot. A week later, I got the call from the History Department Chairman that I expected: they chose six other officers instead of me. But the colonel did say that the Deputy Chairman of the English Department wanted me to call him as soon as possible. He was delighted to offer me a job, and I was accepted by the English Department. Such became another link in why I would be forced to resign two years hence. Had I not been in the English Department, I would not have been asked by a captain who had been assigned as my sponsor at the Academy in 1978, to take over an additional duty from him. He was leaving the service and wanted me to assume advising a cadet named Keith Bostic who would need a new Humanities Advisor on the English faculty. What I was surprised to learn was that this cadet, whom I did not know, had asked for me personally to be his new advisor.

It was rather fitting that during my only year at the Academy, I overheard that at least two of those new instructors hired by the History Department had given the Chairman nothing but grief. I suspected that he had probably soon realized that he'd made a mistake in not hiring me when he saw how well I was fitting in with the English Department, one time even greeting me warmly in the hallway between the two departments to ask me how things were going.

But, prior to all of that, I had one year left at Minot before I could move on. I would earn a regular commission; be promoted to captain; rack up 235 alerts; and earn my final Highly Qualified ratings, giving me seven total, and five as a commander. And I had a few more poems to write.

Across the Northern Tier (strategic bases)

Here we do not speak of
Heroes.
No way to recognize.
And all would so swiftly be embarrassed
if anyone should try.
We carry personal recognition.
Acknowledge privately
this war without battles.
(No one wounded that you could see.)
Yet I have witnessed our attrition:
Machines outlast men and women here,
though few of us have died.
You
accept the loss:
Our youth that is our lives.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-six

The following is the last poem I included in COMING OF NUCLEAR AGE. Two current events would surprise all of us who served in missiles back in the 70's. The first was that, by the end of the 1980's, the Cold War would effectively be coming to a close. The second was that, well into the 2000's, with the Cold War over for two decades, missiles would still be in place in Minot and missile crews would still be pulling alerts.

And I am not sure which event would surprise any of us more. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, whom I followed in the Calendar section of the L.A. Times, drew a cartoon of a boy and then young man who was dogged by the Vietnam War much of his life, not knowing what to do were it to be over. Those of us who were born and lived much of our lives with the Cold War, with the belief that it was fated to remain a conflict for our entire lives, took a number of years to realize that the world was different, though conflicts and nationalistic passions would continue.

Cold War

Each unwise succession,
bound to view all enemies as overpowering,
is forever, "How do we compare?"
We ask lest, by our not asking,
we be surpassed.
No situation, as such, precedes us,
so we comfort ourselves with uneasiness.
Marking any eve or event--
thrilled to feel that each is brightest,
each best, that we are a part.
You know this,
that other years beyond our own
prophesize themselves the last.
The constant blade of doom or disaster
that seems a threat across our whole historic length
is no closer then as now.
But far past and farther futures
threaten from self-importance:
Reminding of sabres, cannon, lasers,
mounted, dusted, on shadowed shelves,
as sun and soil fulfill.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-five

Nearly a year after I returned home from Marine OCS, in the spring of 1973, some of the guys I went through the program with were now at their advanced training assignments such as 29 Palms, CA, or duty assignments such as Camp Pendleton, CA. I remember one drive to San Diego when I stopped by the main gate at Camp Pendleton and chatted with a couple of them on the phone. They were too busy to get together that day. Dennis Zito, with whom I had become close friends, was stationed at 29 Palms in the desert north of Palm Springs. I drove out one late afternoon, arriving there just after dark at his rented trailer near the base. I took the top down on my 1966 Mustang GT convertible and looked up at the stars since he wasn't home yet. I believe we had dinner at the Officer's Club that night. A few weeks later, he drove to South Gate, CA; and I believe he was with me on that drive to San Diego.

When I returned from Air Force Officer's Training School in mid-December of 1973, Dennis' twin brother, David, was going through back-seater training at Edwards Air Force Base, CA, in the high desert, flying in the F-4. One of my earliest memories was of being left off by one of my parents, probably my mom, at the day care center at Edwards in the early 50's. All these years later, I wore my new Air Force uniform with the 2nd lieutenant's bars to visit David. I was so proud of finally having become a commissioned officer that I wasn't a bit bothered when another guy who was training with him chided me for having worn my uniform for the brief visit.

What I am uncertain about was the trip that inspired the following two poems about Point Loma and the military cemetery there. I certainly did not drive down to San Diego when I was home on leave from OTS in December 1973, before I flew to Minot on January 2, 1974. I also don't recall driving down to San Diego when I returned to Southern California to retrieve my 1973 Chevy Camero so that I could visit friends and family on my weekends off from missile school at Vandenberg AFB in the spring of 1974. And though I flew to Southern California several times on leave while I was stationed at Minot from 1974 until 1978, I would not have had my '73 Camero, now up at Minot, to drive down to San Diego. I would have had to ride with someone else or borrow my mom's car to make the trip.

However, I did drive to California during my first Christmas break at the Academy in 1978. The route I took, accompanied by a cadet, a student of mine whom I dropped off in Tucson, AZ, took us through Albuquerque, NM, and across the southern parts of New Mexico and Arizona. I did stop in San Diego briefly before heading north to stay with my mom in San Pedro where she had moved back in 1973, when I went off to San Antonio, TX. So, while these were two of the final three poems in COMING OF NUCLEAR AGE, I might have written them after that Christmas break in 1978-9, before my Air Force career fell apart.

Back to Point Loma

Few are more eternal than men to represent us.
That granite is here a repetitious sign of death
now that we are so many.
Where each caring seems trying to touch eternal
beyond another birth in flames;
flames too cool to call us yet.
But such is always for the patient
who have endless time for possibilities.
The hardened carvings should have further use,
like pyramids,
past erasing by the latest sun,
now that our stones have lost the arts.


Unlike Summer 1970

The last time I purposely saw Point Loma,
the dead companion,
I knew the atmosphere absent.
Knew I tried to revive my former feelings
but drove away from there much as elsewhere,
having lost another friend.
And losing another obsession.
Returning to parallel as before.
Sensing more than I have written,
perhaps I cannot word anymore.
Probably never that close
to what is always felt with others:
love that is the diversion
until death cuts across.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-four

Over the years, Marine Corps training has been tough. Rarely, though seemingly with a kind of tragic regularity, it can even be deadly for a few recruits. Most of the time, the deaths of recruits are preventable. Most newspaper articles about the death of one or more trainees bring up the worst number of deaths to have occurred at one time: those at Parris Island, South Carolina, where six recruits drowned on a "night punishment march". The first two poems below were written and included in the first volume, SONS OF MEN. The third poem about a recruit who died at the San Diego depot I wrote and included in the second volume, COMING OF NUCLEAR AGE.

The San Diego Recruit Depot is on the other side of a high fence from the San Diego airport. My best friend Michael and I used to grab a window seat and look down as our flights back to L.A. took off. When we drove down to San Diego on other weekends, we'd approach the entrance but turn away at the last moment from the main gate because we did not know that we could drive inside and look around, even though we wanted to see the place first hand. One day, when we were convinced that we could visit the facility, even though we were civilians, we nervously drove up to the guard shack and were allowed to enter. This was the first time that I'd been on a military base that was not Air Force. (My dad had been in the Air Force Reserves in the 50's, and we went to March Air Force Base when I was a kid to see a static air show. My late cousin was in the Air Force in the later 60's, and I visited him and his wife in Anchorage, Alaska, while he was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base.)

Marine Corps service would have been in my future had I remained at Quantico, VA.

U.S.M.C. Recruit Depot, Parris Island, 1956

Perhaps,
when our race melts into a more forward future,
those foreigners will discipline the past.

If their thoughts, through rippling perspective,
conceive of what once was,
they may pause.

They may even allow this quaint, sad obscurity
to tingle their sensations.

We can expect no more.
All we know of aliens--
they are not human.


San Diego Boot Camp, From View

Vistas tatter further through fences.
Surely such a slashed across scene is lesser vision,
but some men make much of shreds,
and some shred smaller still
until the image pumps harmlessly.

Many follow force here--
while the world rolls, jets and wanders outside--
ignored.


Killing Marines

Unmoving nights in San Diego.
If I saw the trouble then,
no one else looking
could see. I showed you.
Like the fences encircled,
past the runway unused to escape,
how do you evade?
How do I escape the blame
who might have been there,
preventing this time? Or at Parris Island?
I showed you.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-three

When I was at Marine Officer's Candidate School (OCS), I realized that I didn't want to spend my career living in tents and marching for miles and miles. I resigned and left after the mandatory ten weeks of training (out of twelve). I flew to Maine to stay with a high school friend who had moved there to attend college and live with his brother and his brother's family. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life at that point.

But there were no job prospects for me in Maine, and so I bought a ticket back to Virginia to attend the graduation of those with whom I had trained for those first several weeks. I met up with Lt. Nichols, the platoon commander, and he asked me if I had regretted my decision to leave OCS. I told him I had not but wished that I never came to a time in my life when I would regret my decision to leave.

The following year, when I was still trying to get into the Coast Guard's OTS, I returned to Virginia to stay with a Marine OCS friend and his wife and infant son. We went back to Quantico to walk around the barracks and the obstacle courses and confidence courses. Life always seems to afford me opportunities to think again about my life's choices.

Obviously, a few years later, in Minot, I was again thinking about my earlier choice.

Marine OCS, Quantico, Virginia

I still feel that I am running there.
Not like this thinking war at Minot,
easy to neglect.

Stranger still
locations return me
to admiring us again.

A uniform never losing our youth
when resigning admits we are adults.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-two

The following poem was initially written about the Vietnam War. But when the war was over for the U.S. and our forces withdrew and I was stationed in Minot, I changed it to be about the B-52's based there.

Jon was a navigator whom I knew in the BOQ who, with his first Betamax, patiently taped all of the Mary Tyler Moore episodes.

I suppose I am as equally surprised that the B-52's are still around as I am about the missile silos and LCF's still being in place.

5th Bombardment Wing, Strategic Air Command, Minot AFB

For Jon

We never think it odd to find an aerie
on seemingly strange low ground;
concrete hard and man infested,
our nature to adapt outraces all terms applied.

The steel breasted brutes within the fences
move like patient cripples on rolling stumps,
determined, as always, to fight their way back to flight--
a programmed escalation when they rise
toward a distant, highly silent search for prey.

As with other atmospheric forces
of a short flash superiority,
each boasts of claws that crush
yet cannot grasp its victims.

Still they will toss their talons down
until they are no more,
as if caught by some age-old fault with creation.
And so it is with most mutations,
once twisted into unfulfilling predators,
destruction's origin ceases before its objective.

The blasts will themselves be shaken off.
And soon enough along time, earth recovers,
targets resurrect,
and whatever remembers,
forgets the once bombing force from the far air blue,
the B-52's.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-one

Four of us used to meet for breakfast on Sunday mornings in Roger's BOQ room at the end of the hall on the first floor. The other three flew with the Spittin' Kittens Aerospace Defense Command squadron. They flew the unarmed T-33 target aircraft, simulating Russian bombers attacking the U.S. Larry left the service several years ago and, last I heard, lives in Florida. Roger and I are still friends all these years later. Tom was killed in an F-15 training accident in the early 80's. (Roger always thought Tom was the most gifted pilot he ever knew.)

The following was my way of honoring their service back when we were all in our 20's and life was stretched out before us with all its promises and possibilities.

BTW, Roger used to tell me about this truism when referring to the radar scope in the cockpit: "One peek is worth a dozen sweeps".

T-33--5th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (Target Aircraft)

For Roger, Larry, and Tom: In friendship, admiration, and envy

(What radar fails to sweep)
There!
A gray motion crossing the sky--
A reflection,
crying for all to attack,
in sight and then in scopes.
Locked in the dual vision, as in love,
when we see and then we feel.

In short, slow turns against the sun that shadows,
skill escapes.
Tightly together targets and attackers move,
wise to the way each eludes.
But these missions,
simulations for some effect,
end in no conclusions,
just results.
And targets return in two's.
Above the base, they turn as nearly as one.
I watch them as parallel;
in tandem even as they bank;
almost bound together.
Knowing each pilot grips tightly to this formation,
this joyous discipline to perfection,
just beyond the point of contact.

It is like that with my love,
as in this tension.

Holding firmly in the seconds of eternity
it takes to land, we touch ground.
Never too close to collide,
or crash.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty

The F-106 was the last of the "Century Series" of fighters from the 1950's: F-100 Super Sabre, F-101 VooDoo, F-102 Delta Dagger, F-104 Starfighter, F-105 Thunderchief, and F-106 Delta Dart. To me it was the most beautiful fighter jet ever designed and built.

The Darts were all-weather fighters. Sometimes, they would practice flying and landing at night at Minot AFB. They were the last line of defense against Soviet bombers. But their time was not going to last. I was later told by Tom Brundige that only the two-seater trainer version ever actually did touch and goes. (But, of course, that wasn't the full meaning of the term, for me anyway.)

Aerospace Defense Command, F-106 Touch & Go

A trio of linking triangles
tires to tap and cross again,
rolling a turn aloft,
as if a thing advancing
from some other world.
Another slight of air amazing
where wizards of night and weather
practice as our protection.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-nine

This poem must have been influenced by something I read or saw about dolphins that would have beached themselves and/or dolphins that got netted when the fishermen were catching tuna. As I said, I would carry out several issues of the LA TIMES newspaper to entertain myself on alert.

Even if I were as far inland as one could get, growing up near the coast in California ensured that thoughts of the sea were never far.

Dolphin Navy

I have tightened these thoughts
like trawler nets
caught about some illegal catch
bound to the sea.
Of ashes and dirt
in need of the ocean's sweat.
Blessed are drops that bind us again,
where we lost our trace in the sand.
I would not so splash,
except as an expiring fish,
I have no dignified flesh with death;
Cannot so decompose
that a segment of embarrassment does not remain.

Impressed against the beach--
where a wary humanity, seeking to anoint,
pushes all back into the sea to swim.
And like a slave-ship,
mastered by demands to sail,
I cannot resist.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-eight

As the years passed, the assignment at Minot became a grind, especially when friends and acquaintances left for other assignments or left the Air Force entirely.

And, in my third year there, I also had to think about my next assignment, my Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move. It would, of course, be the Academy; but I certainly had no idea what awaited me there.

PCS

I take from Saturn when I see her closer
the gravity we know
and wonder why she yields to our darkness
her reflection.
To never be one of earth's own,
I would claim another planet,
barren as we sense them
so as not to be some court recorder
whose minute of recollection is lost
amid trials seemingly more abundant
than miles a light year detects.

And then I could say I just landed to scan all of this.

I am unable to order my cells forth.
And when other men at last leave this earth,
my body will have reached a limit long before.
Yet in the show of our star near dying,
the fiber once us may fire off
and never be asking from which weakened world
each found release.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-seven

With so much time on my hands, and with my casual grounding in astronomy (I did take an astronomy class in Junior College but did not do well because I never quite understood the mathematics involved in such concepts as right ascension and right declination and such), I frequently thought, as I have said, in cosmic terms. I was also influenced by Arthur C. Clarke's books such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and many more that I read, even on alert. The film certainly had a lasting impact on me.

Instead of space stations on the moon and manned expeditions to Mars and beyond, we built launch control facilities and missile sites for nuclear weapons aimed at one another. We created vast reserves of weapons of war rather than building vehicles for peace and exploration (discounting the notion of these weapons being for deterrence rather than for actual use).

It's now 2010. While we have an international space station orbiting the Earth, we haven't been back to the moon in decades. We have landed unmanned devices on Mars, and manned expeditions are in the planning stages. We have space telescopes in orbit, not just spy satellites. So, there has been progress. But had I been told back in 1976 of our progress in space exploration in 2010, I still feel that I would have been disappointed at what we had not accomplished, so far.

Trajectory

There should be times
when those temporarily tired of this living
would be left alone.
As with waves crawling over each other
only to collapse on the land,
crossing takes strength and will,
diluting purpose.
So many stones unearthed are slow to flight.
Still solid with the soil,
none has desire to trade
one orbit for the next, or another beyond.

We have not gone farther. And in this betrayal,
our vengeful, silver vessels
cross only the war-like palms of our limitations.
A trick turning on the present crowds
who marvel at each trivial jump
exceeding their own.

Some future sense,
poised off receding planets,
may survey back before launch
and see between our few floating, muted metals
those who spun off their chance to escape.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-six

I arrived at one LCF one day while there was a commotion within the fenced area. After we parked the vehicle, I got out and was told that the site security police were cornering a rabbit that had gotten inside the fence and could not get back out. They were trying to kill it for supper with rocks lying around.

I was disgusted but did not know what to do to stop them from needlessly tormenting an obviously terrified animal. But I quickly saw that they had already hit it and one of its front legs was noticeably broken even though it was running at top speed to get away on that now-destroyed limb. Crushed at their insensitivity, their cruelty, I turned away and walked inside but remained bothered by the entire incident during the whole of that alert. It bothers me still, all these years later.

Trapping Animals

Never see the end.
But still it will shatter as I imagine,
like a broken limb where it wildly flops
is the fatal loss of flight.

Never that speed anymore.
When it turns to blur and brake
as if twice an image escaping
blurs again.

Siding with beasts
cornered to stone.
Cornering with those unable to see
the tightening zone where we turn.
Knowing I am a part of the rocks
not yet tossed to knock the world off course.
Fusing with the sun
as it turns again.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-five

While I had experienced thunderstorms previously in California and even Kansas, the thunderstorms were especially remarkable in North Dakota back in the 1970's. Of course, the blizzards we had back then were also unbelievable. I was stuck out on alert three times during my four-year tour: once for four days, once for three and a half days, and once for three days.

Generally, once a blizzard begins, you are advised to simply stay where you are. If you get lost, you can die. You cannot see very far and the wind chill is sometimes 100 degrees below zero. You will not survive for long no matter how warmly you are dressed. Even if you momentarily see lights in the distance, you typically will not live long enough to reach them and safety. Vehicles usually get stuck or stall, and you often cannot walk your way to safety with any certainty.

Under the old 36-hour alerts, the first crew and my crew simply changed over repeatedly for the full four days, every twelve hours, until the weather lifted and the relief crew finally arrived. By the end, we were walking zombies who actually had to read every line of the changeover procedure because we were insensible at that point. The site was running out of food so we had to ration. Everyone ran out of cash and coin, and the Coke machine ran out of product. One time one security team fortunately made their way to a barn after their vehicle became stuck. They felt their way along its sides and luckily soon found the barn door. They road out that storm in the barn and survived.

Weather could not be taken lightly in North Dakota. And even thunderstorms seemed, to me, a metaphor for something much more deadly.

North Dakota Thunderstorm

I understand now
the worship of weather.
I, who have no gods,
marvel at the display
and the stumbling ability
that seems to understand conclusions so firmly.
Yes, an unravelling power to rival our missiles.
Yet behind the most stubborn and rugged front
there is no simple thought.
This opposition is a kind of force
to lean on for comfort.
You never think it brings relief.
Off balance, but it works.
Releasing all other forces
building elsewhere.

---