Before it all fell apart a couple of months later, I was awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal for my years of distinguished service in Minot as a missile combat crew deputy and missile combat crew commander.
I should have known better that nothing good lasts.
After I got my regular commission and captaincy in Minot, a disgruntled deputy made negative allegations about me to my Squadron Commander--what he specifically said I never was told--when we had a disagreement on alert one afternoon. I had told him that if he was not happy with me as his crew commander, he should ask for a new crew pairing.
Rather than simply do that, he told the new squadron commander and operations officer all kinds of nasty things about me--things nobody else had ever accused me of. Rather than ask me my side of the story, or if the allegations were even true, whatever those allegations were, I was called into the new squadron commander's office and told that I would likely not even get my assignment at the Academy if those at the Academy knew what I was really like. What the heck that meant, I had no idea. I was so stunned that anyone, knowing me at all, would ever make such a remark about me, I never did ask what the heck that deputy even alleged to be true about me.
Now, after I received this award at the Academy, and was chosen to be an instructor for the prestigious Blue Tube television course in the fall, Cadet Keith Bostic went to the OSI and told them that I was this predatory homosexual officer who was making unwanted advances toward him, a straight cadet, when exactly the opposite was true.
As I have maintained, about a third of his allegations in the OSI report were outright lies. One third of what he claimed about me were significant distortions regarding what actually happened between us. Only one third of what he said about me and other gay instructors or cadets was true. But rather than question what he told them, they wrote it all down, lies and all; and I was under secret investigation for a couple of months when I had no idea that the investigation was even going on.
Meanwhile, he continued to come over to my house and visit me in my office and ask for academic favors from me as his humanities advisor, including not having to take a failed spring course over the summer and get leave to go home to Maryland instead.
The day before he left, having no proof as yet of what he claimed to be true about me, the OSI had him write a note to me, providing his address in Maryland in the hopes that I would write to him over the summer. The OSI sneaked into my cubicle and left the note on my desk.
Foolishly, I did write to him. He kept the letters and turned them over to the OSI when he returned from leave. He then promptly left for an Air Force training camp at Fort Carson later in the summer while expecting that I would be charged, resign, and leave in disgrace, presumably without going after him for all of the lies he told, and not just about me.
He misjudged the type of man, and officer, I was. Because not only had he implicated me, but he implicated other cadets and officers whom I knew. Unless I discredited him and what he said, others might be accused of being gay and be investigated and forced to resign, as well.
For the next couple of months, I found cadets who were able to corroborate what I knew about him, what he had told me about himself. If true, he never should have been accepted to the Air Force Academy in the first place. If not true, he should have been tried and convicted of repeatedly lying while an Academy cadet and been forced to resign from the Academy.
That, of course, was what eventually happened. One week before I left the Air Force, he resigned in disgrace and left for lying to Air Force authorities, and my Air Force lawyers, repeatedly. A fitting end for such a scoundrel and cheat. But, of course, I was forced to resign because I was gay.
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