Mom and then me and the Oscar cook, August 1974

There's the basketball backboard in the background.

The Oscar cook, whose name I readily recall but will dispense with here for reasons that will soon become apparent, is out barbecuing lunch, a rare event.  This cook was a nice kid, but one night he exercised terrible judgment.  He and some friends had been out with some girls from Minot State College in downtown Minot.  The girls had to get back to their dorms by a certain hour or could face discipline.  The cook said that he could take care of that and called their dorm to make a bomb threat, figuring that that would alloow the girls to stay out later, without getting into trouble. 

Then wasn't today, but bomb threats were still taken very seriously, even if this was a fake threat.  The college authorities and the police figured that at least some of the girls in the dorm knew who had made the threat and, when confronted, they quickly confessed that it was this Air Force cook.  He was arrested quickly, and the Air Force immediately discharged him.  Later, I read in the local paper that while he was on a road gang, working off his lengthy sentence, he simply walked off.  He was soon caught and even more time was added to his sentence. 

He was a nice enough kid and was a decent enough cook.  But now his life was ruined and getting worse, all because he thought he could get away with something really stupid.  I always wondered what eventually happened to him and if he ever got paroled.

In a different vein, once when I had to go on alert the roads were so bad from snow that the Air Force flew all of the crews out on Huey helicopters.  We made a combat approach and landed on the Oscar helipad, just outside the main gate, partly visible in the first picture with mom and me . 

Each LCF had a helipad for emergencies, and they used to fly the crews out to alert all of the time.  But I was told there was a crash and loss of life, and with the added fuel expense of a helicopter vs a vehicle, the crews returned to going out on alert in Air Force Blue Chevy Suburban vans.  Now, I suppose they would be referred to as SUV's.


Alert

Even when a warming phase of world relations
pressures forth green and grain,
we drive the gray miles hard
and slow on the long, rural roads
that seem toward an end of the earth.

The intervals of cold that stiffen our movement
never delay, never delay.
In the capsules we are boring parallel
to this humming underground.
What we keep here is presence,
and the patience to replace.

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