Inadvertent as it may have been, this could have been the last photograph taken of me before I learned that Cadet Bostic had turned me in to the OSI and my career was effectively over.
I cannot even say who might have taken this picture of me on my back patio, except that it might have been one of the two gay Cadets, George or Bill.
The young couple next door with the infant were building that tall fence. It was too tall and rather ugly, and so I was happy when the next owners, not that long after, moved in and tore it down, building a lower fence that restored the view from my back patio.
The patio chair I was lying on I believe I bought in Minot.
I would drive in that final innocent morning with Bruce Degi, with whom I shared a cubicle. I was to attend Air Command and Staff College in the fall and he would attend in the Spring. That's why we were sharing the same cubicle.
I had finished up my summer course for students who had failed the freshman English course during the Spring. I was speaking with a couple of other officers in another cubicle when Colonel Shuttleworth stuck his head in and told me that he needed to see me.
On my walk with him toward the department conference room, I had a developing sense of unease. He said nothing at first, but I knew something was very wrong. Before we reached the door, he told me that there were two gentlemen to see me, he may have even said that they were from the OSI. That's when my heart seized up in terror. There was nothing good about a visit from those scoundrels.
We might have been in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, and I was being told that the KGB needed to question me.
They were in civilian clothing so that no one would know their actual rank. The first words out of their mouths as they opened the brief case on the long table was, "We have the letters."
There inside were every one of the six letters I had send Cadet Bostic while he was on leave, the leave in Maryland that I had gotten for him. To say I was stunned would have been insufficient. Paralyzed was a better term. My mind was racing, wondering what had happened. Had his parents discovered the letters and demanded that he turn me in? Had something else totally inexplicable occurred?
I could not suspect that he had done all of this on his own. That he had lied to me and lied to others, to end my career so viciously.
They then launched into complete BS by attempting to get more out of me, "If you know any others, we need to know their names." They explained that every homosexual was susceptible to blackmail, so they needed their names, as well. I was too paralyzed to say anything, but I certainly was not going to rat on anyone else, on my friends. George, Bill and Dan were all gone. Only those few instructors such as Gina and Arlene (the Army Captain) were left to turn in at the Academy.
When they realized that I was not going to offer up anyone else's name, they then finally told me that I was allowed to have an attorney and pushed across the name and phone number of one at Peterson Air Force Base.
They, of course, claimed in their report that they had offered the legal help BEFORE asking for any information from me. That was--entirely--a lie. They could not even do their jobs without being devious and dishonest. "I will not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate among us those who do." That was the Academy motto, and these two, who may have been officers or may have been enlisted, lied in their report.
When I was also given their report, which contained the minutes of all of the meetings between Cadet Bostic and the OSI, I was further slugged in the stomach. I had not been able to reach the Air Force attorney at Peterson, so I did not know what to do next. Colonel Shuttleworth suggested that I see someone else in the Academy Law Department. It was this officer, a major, I believe, who poured over the OSI's report. It was only then that he confirmed that Bostic had been reporting to the OSI for two months, almost from the beginning of our association. I quickly realized that he went after we had met and gone to the Overlooks to talk, where I warned him that he was being too overt in displaying his interest in me. We then drove to my house. I had given him the choice of my driving him back to his dorm or to wherever he wanted to go otherwise. He told me that he wanted to go to my house.
I now believe that I may have mentioned to him that I had discussed him with George, Bill and Dan. Keith had already known about Dan and his situation. Their investigation had long ago concluded when Dan agreed to resign and just accept his diploma and leave at the end of the spring term.
Perhaps he thought he would somehow become entangled in that investigation, and his going to the OSI a first strike on his part, to prevent his being thought of as gay and come under investigation. However, what he did and, further, what he said to the OSI simply implicated not just me but several others. Furthermore, he pretended to continue to be attracted to me and to visit my house. But every time he left my presence, he went to the OSI and made yet another confession. And he lied. Repeatedly.
After that, I had no other course of action to protect myself and others but to turn against him and expose his lies. As weeks passed, other cadets came forward and told their stories, stories that corroborated my information. Soon enough, I had another Air Force lawyer, one in the Law Department who assisted with the lawyer from Peterson AFB, and a civilian attorney who had helped Dan, Mr. Boomes.
When two other cadets in Bostic's Squadron 15, who knew about Bostic and were forced to admit that he had also told them he was an orphan with adopted parents who paid someone so Keith could use their dead son's identity to get into the Academy, my Law Department attorney proclaimed in derisive laughter, "Now everyone has an attorney!" Bostic had lied to both of my Air Force attorneys when they questioned him since they knew everything that I had told them about him.
He did not have a chance. They trapped him in every one of his lies.
When the cadet honor system OIC took a look at the charges against him, that officer knew that they could not even allow a cadet board to investigate these charges. The whole incident was much too sordid.
All of that time and energy and those resources that the taxpayers funded to investigate and kick out gay officers and cadets was an incredible waste. So many lives had been ruined thereby. For an institution that promoted honesty, they had created an environment that promoted lies and dishonesty. For a system that valued security, they had fostered insecurity and fear.
Congress finally ended all of that just a couple of years ago. We are all the better for it. The nation is the better for it. As Dalton Trumbo had proclaimed about the McCarthy Era and the communist witch hunts, "It will do no good to look for heroes and villains. There were none, only victims." (I first heard this narrated by Henry Fonda in LIFE GOES TO THE MOVIES; however, I cannot find it elsewhere--but it reflects the antigay witch hunts equally well.)
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