Air Force Academy 1978-9

The above official photo is me receiving a Distinguished Service Award from Colonel Jack Shuttleworth, head of the English Department, while I was an Instructor of English at the U.S. Air Force Academy, 1978-9.  Likely this ceremony took place in the fall of 1978.  Below the medal, which is hanging from my jacket pocket, is my missile badge.  The star atop the badge indicates that I had spent over 4 1/2 years as a deputy and combat crew commander at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.

It was this service for which I was being given the award, after 235 missile alerts under that state from late Spring 1974 through early Summer 1978.  I'd gotten 7 Highly Qualified and 2 Qualified ratings while being evaluated by various Standardization Board crews at Minot over those several years of service.

The reason for this tentative walk down memory's dark alley is that my husband, while training in GA for his current government job, bought each of us a couple of T-shirts at the gift shop at the training base.  Thinking that I would wear one of them to the gym yesterday morning, I took one of mine out of the clear packaging and stared closely at the lettering on the front of the shirt:  "U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations", OSI for short.

There was a time, during the Spring and Summer of 1979, when the OSI was my ultimate nemesis, my Lex Luthor or Dr. Doom.  And for most of those fateful months, I was not even aware that I was being investigated, that the career I had worked so hard to further was on the brink of ending.  By extension, some of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues at the Academy would also come under scrutiny.

Mark was aware of what I had gone through so many years ago, but I do not believe he had made the connection between my eventually being forced to resign from the Air Force and the role the OSI agents played in that resignation.  The first volume in this Rainbow Arc of Fire series does detail some of what happened.

It was the OSI agents who had taken the notes each time the self-loathing cadet, Keith Bostic, came to their offices to recall what had happened when the cadet and I met at several times and in several places and just talked about being gay.  It was they who had him create a hand-written note to me which they put in an envelope and dropped off on my desk in the English Department when I was at the gym during the lunch hour, a note that provided Bostic's home address, inviting me to write to him while he was home on leave--leave that I was able to get for him, leave to which he would not otherwise have been entitled.  It was they who provided the rather large official report that was given to the Academy legal department and then, eventually, to me and my lawyers when the time came to defend myself against the many charges therein.

Unfortunately, it was those six letters to the cadet that doomed my career.  No other proof existed that I was gay.  In the letters, though, I had poured out my heart in writing to another man for the first time in my life.  The most pathetic aspect of those letters was that Bostic only opened up the first letter and the last letter.  The other four he received from me he never even opened.  But the OSI agents, likely all straight and possibly homophobic, read every single letter, every single word of my feelings and emotions.  My words probably disgusted them.  But they dutifully photocopied them to include in the several copies of their report.

This was, of course, years before the current policy that allows us to serve openly (though Herr Trump is now trying to eliminate trans members from serving).  This was also years before "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" came into play.

We had no protections then.  None whatsoever.  Gays and lesbians were not supposed to serve in the several branches of the military.  We would destroy morale.  We would be extreme security risks.  The Russians would surely blackmail us into giving up national security secrets.  We would easily become traitors to protect ourselves.  (Let that sink in as you contemplate the ongoing Trump-Putin love fest.) 

That June of 1979, I had finished teaching a summer makeup class for four cadets who had done poorly during the regular academic year.  I was in the office of my supervisor who was in charge of the summer program when Col. Shuttleworth came into the cubicle and said that he needed to speak to me.  I had no reason to feel alarmed.

I was scheduled to attend an advanced service school during the next academic year, Air Command and Staff School, I believe.  I had already been chosen to co-teach the prestigious Academy television course, Blue Tube.  I was likely going to be offered enrollment in a PhD program in a year or so, returning to the Department to work for a few more years of my career, likely able to retire after 20 years of service.  My career was on the verge of soaring.

But like the Academy gliders attached to tow planes as they jointly soar aloft, I was about to become detached.  Permanently.

On our puzzling walk to the Department's conference room, Col. Shuttleworth earnestly mentioned that there were two OSI agents there waiting who needed to speak to me.  My heart instantly froze.

The OSI wanting to meet and speak to you was never a good sign.  Someone was in trouble.  I quietly vowed that if any of my colleagues was going to be accused of being gay, I would say that I had no knowledge of that.

I was quickly disabused of the thought that this involved anyone else after I was introduced to the two agents, Col. Shuttleworth left, and the three of us sat down.  The one agent opened a brief case on the table in front of him and calmly told me as I became shocked by the contents staring up at me, "We have the letters."

He could have shot me with a pistol and I would not have been any more startled.  

Never in my most insane musings could I ever have imagined that Cadet Keith Bostic had easily handed over those letters to the OSI.  He had somehow been coerced.  I thought that perhaps his parents had come upon them and forced him to turn them over.   I never conceived of the fact that he had been going to the OSI regularly for several weeks.  I would not discover that stunning fact until my first Air Force lawyer handed me a copy of the OSI's exhaustive, thick report a day or so later when the full truth of what had been going on was fully revealed.

"Under the spreading Chestnut tree/I sold you and you sold me." -George Orwell, 1984

Cadet Bostic had been going to the OSI of his own volition for weeks.  We would later find out that he had first gone to an Air Force Chaplin who had advised him not to pursue the matter.  He would ruin an officer's career, the Chaplin told him.  Bostic did not heed the Chaplin's sound advice but then went to the OSI.  Unfortunately for Bostic, he lied during the questioning of those agents, though they believed, and wrote down, everything he told them (they had no reason to doubt his sincerity).  He would later lie to my two Air Force lawyers when they questioned him.  In the report that I poured over several times after I got my hands on my copy, I eventually concluded that one third of what he had told the OSI were lies.  One third of what he told them was distortions of the truth.  Only one third of what he said was the truth.  

The most damning lie was that I had tried to kiss him, against his will.  (We had never kissed.  We had never had sex.  We hugged once.  This was all new to me at the time and I was going very slow.)

The most damning distortion was that he implied that he was this innocent, totally straight Cadet who was being implausibly stalked by a predatory gay officer/instructor who was using his position of power to take advantage of him.  If my attentions were thoroughly unwelcome, why did he continue to tolerate me as his academic advisor for so many weeks before and after he began going to the OSI?  Why did he visit my house more than once?  Why did we meet on several occasions in various locations to talk?  Why did he come to the booth more than once when I was showing films to the Cadet Film Club in the Academy auditorium?  Why did he put his arm around my waist the second time he visited me there?  Why did he tell me over the phone, when I realized we were becoming too unprofessionally close so that I had asked another instructor to take over as his academic advisor, only to have him regretfully respond, "I never asked for that."

The major problem for him was that Cadet Keith Bostic had told me that that name was not really his own.  He had been adopted by a couple who had lost their only son and tried to replace him with this adopted son, using an expensive lawyer to facilitate the identity transfer.  He had, according to him, gotten into the Academy solely by having this new identity.

The second major problem is that while, as a suspected homosexual trying to protect my career, I was not to be believed; Bostic had foolishly told other cadets pieces of the same story he had told me.  Yet, when interviewed by my well-prepared Air Force lawyers, he denied ever saying any of that--to anyone.  None of the story I claimed to have heard from him was true, he exclaimed to the two of them.  But when you lie to Air Force lawyers, when you have told similar tales to cadets who have no reason to invent what they claim was told to them, and you have a Cadet Honor Code which proclaims, "We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does", you have cornered yourself.

Two religious upper classmen, who were friends of his and had conducted prayer sessions with Bostic in their dorm rooms before this situation unfolded, were also caught up in the investigation because he had told them things he should not have.  Soon, my Academy lawyer revealed to me, "Now, everyone's got a lawyer."   The OSI--when informed that their apparently reliable witness was now also under investigation for lying to them and to my lawyers--was also in a bit of a bind.

But for me, unfortunately, there were still those six letters.

And the authorities determined not to charge Bostic until I had been dealt with.  (Given the ludicrous nature of the charges against Bostic, and involving the investigation against me in which I might have had to become questioned, the Academy staff decided not to utilize the normal Academy cadet honor violation process to charge Bostic.)

While all of this was going on, however, I was banished from the English Department and exiled to the Academy administrative building, Harmon Hall, to do routine paperwork--I was to be gotten out of the way.  Bostic, however, was allowed to attend classes as if nothing was happening.  

One mid-day, early in the process, while I was still working in the English Department, I was summoned to Harmon Hall--it might have been the time I was asked to be fingerprinted.  I decided to walk across the Terrazzo, the open area between the dorms and academic and administrative buildings and mess hall.  I was met by a couple of my students who had heard something of what was going on.  Soon, more cadets joined them.  Then more.  As some would depart for class, others would take their place.  At one point it appeared to me to be at least a dozen or more surrounding me and voicing support.  When I finally had to leave but mentioned what had happened to my Academy lawyer, he said, "It's a good thing the Commandant [of Cadets] hadn't seen that."

Eventually, Cadet Keith Bostic was forced to resign from the Academy for breaking the Cadet Honor Code.  My resignation would follow a week later.

Almost exactly forty years ago.  

And yet I cannot remove that personal tragedy from my life and expect that I would be here where I am today.  

I would not have realized that it was forty years ago had Mark not bought that T-shirt that I wore to the gym yesterday morning, almost as a badge of defiance.

As I believe I said in the first book, A Mile-High Saga, I have come to realize at some point along the way that it was not the untrustworthy Cadet who had knocked my career and life off course.  It was I who had prevented such a dishonest individual from graduating from the Academy and having a career that could have engendered more loss than one officer's career.   

  

https://youtu.be/srtCRYR3SoY

Kiki Dee, "One Step" from her 1978 album STAY WITH ME.