It was forty years ago today
I was forced to leave the Academy
Certain significant days in one's life are lodged in the mind and remain stuck there indefinitely. This was one day I will not forget.
The investigation had been going on since the Spring when corrupt Cadet Keith Bostic ignored an Air Force Chaplin's advice not to ruin a man's life. Instead, he went to the Office of Special Investigations and laid out the personal events between himself and me. He tailored his story to leave out the important part that he himself was gay, that I had never made physical advances toward him, and that his tale would be embellished many times over the coming weeks with lies.
Those lies would eventually get him expelled from the Academy, and he would leave a week before I would. But nothing was going to happen to him until I was forced to submit my resignation. Alternatively, I had been removed from teaching cadets for the English Department. I was forced to provide the OSI with a set of my fingerprints. I was required to provide the OSI with writing samples. I was exiled from the Academic building. I was no longer allowed to work out at the Academy athletic facilities but told I would have to work out at the enlisted athletic facilities along another ridge of the massive Academy complex. I also could only eat lunch at the restaurant at the Academy golf course, nowhere near any cadets.
The entire experience was humiliating and degrading.
My first day of eating at that restaurant, a few other instructors joined me as a show of support. Unfortunately, that day the two OSI agents who had come to me with the charges against me in the English Department conference room that first day in June, were eating at a nearby table. I mentioned this to the others, and that was the last time anyone in the Department ate lunch with me at the golf course restaurant. (A fellow instructor would stop by the house, looking for my help recording some favorite music on my cassette system. I would learn a few years later that he had died of alcoholism, and that news saddened me.)
On that final day forty years ago, I was able to get the boxes with my possessions from my former cubicle in the English Department. I carried them, one at a time, to the elevator which took me down to the parking garage beneath the Academic building where my '73 Camaro was waiting. On my final trip up the elevator to get the last box, it slowed and then stopped. The elevator door opened a crack so that I could see legs and shoes walking by, but I was several feet down from the office floor. I was trapped. Eventually, help came and I was freed. (I have always believed that even the building was refusing to let me go.)
I stopped by the Officers' Club to close my account there and then drove away for the last time as an officer in the U.S. Air Force.
For the previous months, when I was working out at the enlisted gym, I would stand outside the gym and watch the cadet tow planes that would pull the Academy cadet gliders aloft and release them to glide off on their own, using the Rampart Range thermals to remain aloft. I would often see myself as the cut-loose glider, to soar away alone or float downward on my own.
I reluctantly drove home. I parked my car in the garage and entered my house. I slowly walked up the inside stairs to the top floor. Standing before the mirror in the guest bathroom off the hall, I carefully removed my Air Force uniform shirt for the very last time.
The phone rang and my neighbor below my house, Gina Martin, who also worked at the English Department, was calling to take me to dinner at a local steak house with her mother who was visiting. She was trying to divert my attention from this last day, but it only partly worked. It merely delayed my mourning for a couple of hours.
