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.

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