Tim McConnell in my dorm room, Minot AFB

A Star Trek TOS calendar on the door.  A Peanuts poster on the closet door.  Tim McConnell sitting on one of those Oak chairs that the BOQ was famous for.  All of the Air Force issue furniture was the same heavy Oak style.  It could have survive a nuclear blast.  Tim could be reading an issue of THE ABSOLUTE SOUND.

Tim lived directly above my dorm room.  He shipped out most of his Oak furniture and bought a convertible sofa so that when his girlfriend visited, they could sleep together.  The Oak beds were only singles.  Some guys bought water beds, the latest rage.

I wrote this poem when Tim took the early out program and left Minot.  He was one of the few left who had been at Vandenberg missile training with me in the spring of 1974:

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;
I am sent again to other capsules,
so there is no change.
I live for the time when my tour ends
(a hostage now as your protection).

There are others who know 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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