Poetry, Part Forty-six

Occasionally, I come across a poem in SONS OF MEN, the title I gave to the overall collection of 100 poems as well as to the first volume in the trilogy, and I simply do not recall what motivated the writing of that poem.

The following is another poem that I also do not recall specifically when I wrote it, except that it was while I still taught at the Academy, and was likely written before I was being investigated and finally forced to resign.

I arrived at the Academy in late June or early July of 1978. By June of 1979, I had just finished teaching a summer makeup English class. During the next academic year, I was to attend an advanced Air Force officer's career development school, I believe in Alabama, for one semester. But the day after I had finished teaching that course and while I was debriefing with a few fellow officers in one of their cubicles, the Chairman of the English Department poked his head in and asked to see me. As I accompanied him, I could immediately sense that something was very wrong; but I had no idea what it could be. He finally mentioned that we were going to see two men in the department conference room who had business with me.

As we entered the room, Colonel Shuttleworth introduced me to the two OSI agents and uncomfortably departed. They invited me to sit down. One of them opened a brief case on the conference table and frankly revealed to me, "We have the letters."

I suspect that they hoped I would be sufficiently stunned by the news that I would tell them anything. I said nothing. I was too shocked to speak even if I were the type to rat on my fellows which, obviously, I am not. When they asked if I would reveal the names of any other gay or lesbian officers at the Academy, or any others whom I had known before, because we were all security risks, I defintely said nothing. They then--finally--advised me: "Well, you know you are allowed to have an attorney." Their report of our meeting, of course, did not bother to mention that they had tried to pressure information out of me before I was told of my right to have an attorney. If you didn't suspect this already, the OSI, too, can be liars if the pose suits their needs.

You see, the cadet with whom I had become personally involved, though not sexually, had pleaded with me that he needed to go on leave to visit his parents in Maryland rather than attend a makeup class that summer at the Academy. Since I was his humanities adviser, I visited the officer who had taught the class that Cadet Bostic had failed and needed to make up, explaining his personal predicament. The other instructor granted my request and off Bostic went on leave. But before he left, what I did not know was that he had been seeing the OSI for a number of weeks before that. Every time we met or he had visited my house or come to my cubicle to speak to me, he reported to them what had happened and whatever we had spoken of during our personal encounters.

Of course, when I later read the report of these surreptitious OSI meetings, what he had told them was not always the total truth. About one third of his statements were the truth. One third of what he said to them was a subtle or obvious twisting of the truth. And one third of his statements to them were total lies.

A few months earlier, after I had become his advisor, he would come to see me whenever I was showing a film as Officer-In-Charge (OIC) of the Cadet Film Club. He'd also stop by my cubicle in the English Department to chat. But not long after that, he became quite overtly friendly toward me. Sometimes he'd become physically close, almost intimate. One time in the projection booth, when I placed my hand on his shoulder to explain about some Academy group and program that he might consider joining, he immediately wrapped his arm around my waist as if to hug me. Cadets were coming and going from the booth before the film started, and I was surprised at his rather overt form of contact.

After this and other sorts of physical, and soon verbal, forms of flirting--there was no question that he was attracted to me as I became attracted to him--he was the first person to act romantically interested in me, ever--I realized that what was happening could be dangerous for both of our careers. I called him one Saturday morning, drove up to the Academy to meet with him, and we headed over to the Overlooks to privately discuss what was occurring between us. (I didn't trust the phones, and I certainly did not want to speak to him in any of the Academy facilities where our conversation might be overheard.)

It was one of those bright, blue, beautiful, almost-cloudless afternoons in Colorado that might as well be framed as a post card. The Academy itself was arrayed before us as we spoke on the cement path to the fence where tourists can see the entire academic and athletic complex at a glance. I soon explained that we must be extremely careful. That any physical forms of intimacy such as he had displayed in the film booth were dangerous should someone put the pieces together. He agreed with me that we needed to be careful.

Our discussion essentially over, I asked him where he wanted me to drive him next: back to his cadet dorm or elsewhere? He smiled and told me that he'd like to go to my house.

In those days, I was extremely naive. I never saw that his request was anything more than curiosity to see where I lived. I did not expect that he was asking to go there and for the two of us to become intimate, and perhaps he wasn't making that kind of request. Or perhaps he was.

I was, on my part, still working through me feelings toward him and what they meant. There was, obviously, a double standard at work here in the service. While Cadet Bostic told me at some point that he considered himself bisexual, it was clear to me that he was, like me, gay. But in those days, many celebrities such as Elton John or David Bowie claimed to be bisexual when they might have actually been gay or had only experimented with same-sex intimacies but were probably, or primarily, straight. But in the military, and he being my subordinate, relations between us would still have been inappropriate were we of the opposite sex. But we were gay, and any revelation of that fact to the authorities would have meant our unqualified expulsion from the service. If we were of the opposite sex--he was a female cadet instead of a male cadet and we were discovered to be in a relationship--I might have been reprimanded, forced to resign from the Academy as an instructor certainly, been given a bad performance evaluation that could have irreparably damaged my chances of a military career, but I would not have been forced to resign from the service.

Three years earlier, a famous female Olympic diver, who was also an Academy diving instructor and an Air Force officer, married the captain of the swim team almost immediately after he graduated in the summer of 1976. She was a captain at the time and he was a second lieutenant upon graduation. Clearly, it was highly unlikely that their passion for one another suddenly exploded the moment he graduated and that they had kept their feelings for one another entirely platonic and above reproach the entire time that he was a cadet and she was a diving instructor. However, what could the Academy prove? Common sense dictated that something had to have been going on well before they walked down the aisle together, but what proof was there? Eventually, she might have been reprimanded by the Air Force; but she was also a famous gold-medal-winning diver. Unlike me, she was not forced to resign from the service and retired a decade and a half later as a colonel.

When Cadet Bostic and I got to my house, I showed him around. We watched a little TV in the family room. We might also have had some lunch, and then it was time to take him back to the Academy. We did not touch. We did not kiss. We certainly did not have sex. I was still conflicted about our relationship and the appropriateness of that relationship. But I liked him and he certainly seemed to like me. On the drive back to the Academy, he told me personal details of his life that, were they widely known and been proven, he would have been expelled from the Academy.

Not more than a week later, though, he started to see the OSI and make his periodic reports to them about me. Before seeing the OSI, however, he had first gone to speak to one of the Air Force chaplains who performed services at the Cadet Chapel, I later learned. That officer had told him to forget the whole thing and not to ruin someone else's career. Bostic chose to ignore that advice and turn me in instead. In his periodic reports, he painted a very different picture from what the situation was actually like between us. Perhaps the OSI suspected more than what they were being told by him, but they simply wrote down that he was an entirely straight cadet whom this predatory gay officer had sought out and was making unwelcome advances toward.

However, they, too, needed proof of my guilt, and he appeared to be the only one who was capable of obtaining that proof. So, even though he said that my unwelcome advances disgusted and repelled him, he would continue to see me on a regular basis, in hopes of providing the OSI with the necessary proof.

But in the two months since we had met and spoken on the overlooks and he had asked to see my home, he had not been able to provide them with any actual proof. He was about to go on leave, so a more direct approach was now necessary. They had him write me a note, inviting me to write to him while he was on leave, in hopes that I would communicate something in writing that would prove I was gay. They put the note into an envelop and, while I was at the gym during lunch one day, slipped into my cubicle and placed the note on my desk. The trap was now baited.

Retirement

With youth go the warriors
and their campaigns.
Coaches now and generals.
No longer organized
into battalions
into teams--
not even out as friends
gathered wildly in the night--
we volley at individual sports.
Singly served and surrendered
as surviving creatures,
as crowds,
who know that the time remaining
is for entertaining alone.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-five

The following is one of the longest poems I had written, to date, back in 1978-9. After rereading, it was obviously written after I got to the Academy, especially when it refers to the "high jet trails" because, back in that era of far more transcontinental flights and fewer airport hubs, above Colorado Springs were typically dozens of contrails almost daily. Also, once I got to the Academy, I did a lot of running on the grounds at noon to keep in shape. It seemed a particularly Colorado thing to do. And working out and running at noon seemed a particularly Academy thing to do.

In addition, I wonder if this was written after I was under investigation by the Office of Special Investigations, the OSI. It reads very much like a melancholy summary of my life prior to that. I was still only 29 years old when I wrote this but sound like someone who feels that his life is just about over, at least the life he had known up until then.

Recall

On the screen was footage
spliced together to create scenes
of the war we have not fought.

And the personality
some people keep to themselves.

Sacrificial fatigue.
I leaned my head
against the vibrating enclosure every night.
Saw the face of aging loneliness
unable to find a temptor
to sell my soul to for sleep.

In my youth the high jet trails
were always from military jets--
an isolated few and guarding for me.
But above where I run now,
through the clean skies of Colorado,
civilians outnumber and surpass:
Crossing here,
horizon to horizon in repetitive lengths,
while retracing familiar routes
like missile paths up off the coast.

I run to prolong a youth now having no purpose.
Ran as a child for joy, from fear,
under clearer skies of California.
Never needing to know then:
How would I wander from promise to this place?

If we,
step-by-step,
walk ourselves to where we are,
when did I misstep?
I was not aware that I should leave a trail,
a child unwisely surviving in the woods.

There must have been a time
quite farther back
when I was untroubled.
Loved before I lost the memory,
or lost the woods where memories walk.

Like the trains that nightly thundered through Quantico,
leaving us rattled in our barracks
and following out of sight.

A black and white picture of me on a sled,
as a child.
Now I step in prints in the snow
to get less wet.
I run on dry mud
until I see feet slip aside,
and then I look for drier ground.

Ran in Virginia because I had to,
marching muddy and unconcerned.
Warmth always awaited the evening,
or the next day.
As in Minot where the sun would
warm above us when we ascended,
or when a blizzard lifted.
As step follows step when we run,
and when we stop running.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-four

As a deputy or a crew commander, you never chose your crew partner. He was almost always chosen for you. Sometimes it was difficult to understand why they thought someone would be an ideal partner. Often they paired a strong commander with a weak deputy. Other times, it was a strong deputy paired with a weak commander--and any observer in a trainer ride or a standboard evaluation could tell that the crew was being run from the back (deputy's) seat rather than the way it was supposed to be. (Often, if the strong deputy realized that the weak commander was about to make a critical mistake, he would try to ask if, perhaps, another course of action might be preferable. If the weak commander weren't a total fool, he'd listen to the deputy and quickly change course.)

My first commander was very strong. My second, much less so; but we got along together quite well. My third commander was also a nice guy but somewhat weak in his knowledge of the weapons system. My first deputy was strong enough, but he'd gained the reputation as a great potential new deputy in missile school at Vandenberg. We got two HQ ratings while we were paired; but I soon realized that while he was smart, he wasn't nearly as strong as the evaluators thought he was. He was still a rookie who had a lot to learn. And I often felt that our HQ ratings were thought to be more his doing than mine.

At this point, however, I had four HQ ratings and two Qualified ratings. My first two commanders had made enemies of certain members of the standboard evaluation staff. Each got screwed out of an HQ rating because they'd been maneuvered into making an error by the evaluator. On my very first standboard "ride", I wasn't even a part of the error made by my commander; and it should not have been assessed to me. But their word was final, and I was stuck with the results. (I even read their report afterwards, and it was clearly written almost as a cover up for what had been done to our crew.)

My second deputy was extremely weak. I had to do my job as commander of the crew, but I also had to continuously monitor what my deputy was doing at all times, to ensure that he did not make an error on his own. (The standboard team often tried to get commander and deputy to separate during the evaluation so they could focus on each individual member rather than the team. It did not seem always realistic because you operated as a team in the field, but who were we to question standboard?) I was now up to six HQ ratings, paired with two commanders and now two deputies while being evaluated.

My third deputy and I seemed to get along well enough. Or so I thought. He was often quiet and sometimes seemed rather moody. On one alert, unfortunately, we were having a severe electrical storm above ground. That always played havoc with the phone lines to the LFs. They would start ringing even though no one was at any LF trying to call us. If you pressed in the lighted LF comm line button, the ringing would stop. But it would not stop if both the commander and the deputy were pushing in ringing buttons at the same time--it only made the situation worse and the ringing would continue. We also had a team of maintenance men outside the acoustical enclosure working in the capsule during this alert.

At one point, the ringing was getting annoying and both I and my deputy were pushing in the buttons at the same time, and the noise was not stopping. I calmly said aloud (my deputy almost never spoke to me), "Either you push in the buttons, or I will push in the buttons, but not both of us."

All of a sudden, he jumped out of his chair and started yelling at me. It was unbelievable and shocking and totally insubordinate on his part. I was stunned. Perhaps he'd never liked me or harbored some grudge against me even though he and I had gotten an HQ rating, my seventh overall, while crewed together. Regardless, on the drive back from alert, I could tell that he was still seething, so I calmly told him, "If you would prefer a new crew pairing when we get back, ask the squadron commander for a change."

What I did not realize was that, after we got back, he must have gone to see the commander immediately--while he was still angry. What he said about me must have been horrible even though he had been insubordinate on alert, though I never brought that up to anyone. When I was called in and notified about the crew change, the squadron commander chewed me out, ominously adding, "If they [the Academy] knew these things about you, they might not hire you."

I was totally shocked once again. What was the squadron commander even talking about? What had my deputy of only a few months said to him about me? I wasn't even given the benefit of being told what was said behind closed doors. After four years on the crew force, and the most number of HQ ratings of anyone in our squadron, and only two behind the most by one other commander in the wing who had been at Minot for years, I was being thrown under the bus by a deputy who had not even been on the crew force for more than a year. And this squadron commander had also not been at Minot that long either.

Fortunately, that squadron commander was replaced not long before I was to leave Minot; and, fortunately too, my final written evaluation at Minot was exemplary because that commander didn't write it. The squadron operations officer had seen to it that I got a good evaluation instead of relying upon what had been said about me behind closed doors.

On my final alert, my 235th at Minot, I expected to at least be recognized for my four years on the crew force. However, somebody simply did not get the word about this being my last alert. The pre-departure briefing was interrupted to recognize the achievements of a standboard evaluator who was leaving Minot early for an assignment elsewhere. He had been at Minot for only two years and, because standboard only pulled two alerts a month instead of the seven or eight we line crews pulled, he had only pulled a fraction of the number of alerts I had. But his contributions were being recognized and I had been totally overlooked.

After what had happened with the previous deputy, and knowing that I only had a couple of months remaining on the crew force, I was a commander who was left unpaired with a permanent deputy. I was given any deputy who was spare because his commander was on leave or he was about to be switched to a different commander. On one alert, I was embarrassed to learn that I was to be paired with a major (I had only recently been promoted to captain) who had busted a standboard evaluation as commander and was demoted back to deputy--a humiliating situation for him.

Before that pre-departure briefing, a thoughtless fellow commander came up to me and snarkily asked, "I didn't hear that you'd busted." (He had obviously assumed that they would not put a captain in charge of a deputy who out ranked him.) Without being any more specific in this already embarrassing situation, I flatly responded, "I didn't bust." Out at the LCF, the embarrassment continued when the security chief, assuming that the major was the commander of our crew (except for a bust, no captain was a deputy at Minot), began addressing him as to the security status of our flight rather than addressing me. Mercifully, the major informed the chief that I was in charge of the crew.

So, my final couple of months on crew had not gone well, at all. On this final alert, now paired with yet another temporary deputy, I was sitting there, listening to how wonderful this other officer was while no one was there from our squadron to recognize my contributions to the wing. But even my temporary deputy knew this was my final alert after more than four years, and he was determined to speak up on my behalf; but I firmly told him not to say anything. If I had to ask to be recognized, I didn't want the recognition.

Still, when I finally left Minot I was saddened that June morning of 1978. Roger and the others were still living in the BOQ. I had a few other friends at the base whom I was leaving behind. When my car passed the final LF off the highway, well to the south of the town of Minot, Jimmie Rogers was singing, "The World I Left Behind" on my cassette player (I'd sold off my 8-track player a year or two earlier). It seemed an appropriate way to leave.

I again do not know what motivated the writing of the following poem, which might have been penned while I was at Minot, or it could have been written after I arrived at the Academy. Just two to three years hence, it would have been an appropriate reaction to so many fellow gay men dying of AIDS beginning in 1980.

Autumn

Some will have no cure.

Disease meant to remain inside us,
leveling always,
and wept.
We question, "Shall I be the one
selected for notoriety?"
As an example,
stretching our to a few,
and so finally?

A progression in collapse
with all changing things.
With friends who would as soon be dead.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-three

The seasons of the year have always fascinated me. Even growing up in Southern California, one notes especially the subtle changes. In North Dakota, however, the seasonal alterations were far more dramatic and, except for winter, all too brief.

Spring

A poet crouched at the wreckage of achievement,
taking notes:

At fated aircraft,
whose splinters of flight burn now--
obscuring dignity.
At the demise of kings.

Sighting ironies at excavated stone--
any rock once mislaid upon another
and fallen.
Recalling all armies mislead.

A writer of greetings
for as yet unrevealed celebrations,
unappreciated.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-two

As I have written, I never could conceive of a time when the ICBM's would be gone. Of the thoughts expressed in the following poem, clearly some bases were closed, some missiles removed, and some silos filled in. But not at Minot. At least not yet.

On Alert

I am unable to envision at time
(quite beyond this one, of course)
when these holes are filled.
Where will they find the dirt taken
when these were so deeply dug?
I cannot conceive of any of this abandoned;
Having a use to which no one returns
like a mine cleared of all potential.

We pass lives back and forth here
in a continuous current.
A living some day drained of our blood
and our sacrifice?
I think of the personal, the professional, investment,
and I am curious.
Will I live to see this replaced?
May I watch the workmen
as soil fills these cavities
until I am full again?

There was a beginning;
I am not to be part of the conclusion.
I do not mean any ultimate end.
No one believe these missiles would be used;
just the thought of the threat is all.

Four years on this line is not enough.
At least not yet.

I see the scars, the scratches, and the paint chipped
by other lives who shared this watch with me.
We transfer weapons:
at our sides,
at a distance,
and do not think about it much.
Why should we?
The ritual is too often for us.
We lose meaning in our years.

But sit with me.
We are sentries.
Unreasoning emotion is out there. In the darkness. Risen from the sea.
As it was beyond the Great Wall.
As it broke through the gates of Constantinople.
We are to see inside and out.
Men strengthening or weakening their resolve.

But the war is never here.
Only in the trainers back on base.
The residue remains in our minds, however,
so we cannot be taken.

---

Poetry, Part Forty-one

I experienced my first physical, for the draft, at the Wilshire Blvd. draft center in early 1972. A Marine Corps physical, which was much more pleasant, occurred at the same center, also in early 1972. I was given a Coast Guard physical in one of their facilities in San Pedro, CA, later that same year. In 1973, I had my first Air Force physical out at March Air Force Base near Riverside, CA. So, I had endured plenty of physicals before I entered active duty.

In addition, being involved with nuclear weapons, we were required to have random drug testing at Minot several times over the four years I was stationed there. After my impending discharge from the Air Force at the Academy, I had to have a physical in the first floor of the academic building. The officer who was tasked with my physical seemed disgusted when he read on my report why I was being discharged. He told me that he would try to make it as quick as possible as he drew the curtains of his large office that had a view in three directions, toward the library and the grass parade field below.

Because of where this poem was placed in the final volume, NO SECOND SAIL (like SONS OF MEN, a phrase from an A.E. Housman poem), I doubt if the poem was written in response to that final military physical, but it might as well have been written after that one.

The Physical

It will have been years ago
from each naked humiliation to this:
At the various layers of peace and war,
we come to our own inspection.
And so we are fitted.
The chilling of nerves
where stainless floors numb us together,
even flesh becomes official
when bare before each counting army.
Our bodies tremble,
but our feet are firm to orders where we stand.
So often waking to this
(but never like cattle),
we are the finer breed:
Nothing scars and our petty deformities
and are insulted.

---

Poetry, Part Forty

On the walls of the 91st Strategic Missile Squadron were pictures of larger, and more numerous, red Soviet missiles along side the three smaller U.S. missiles in the active arsenal: Titan, Polaris, and Minuteman. (And the largest U.S. missile, the aging Titan, was also in need of replacement.) Size, indeed, seemed to matter.

To assuage the feelings of inadequacy that this unfair comparison engendered, the positive spin became that our MIRV's were far more accurate than theirs, which was certainly true enough. Our nuclear warheads did not have to be as destructive nor carry as much megatonage to do comparable damage to Soviet forces as their big "blunderbusses" would do to ours.

The U.S. was, however, developing a larger missile, designated the MX. Eventually, the Peacekeeper missile would be completed and deployed into former Minuteman silos in Wyoming. But until that scenario played out, all sorts of wild schemes were discussed and depicted. (Originally, even Minuteman missiles were considered for rail deployment so that the Soviets could never easily hit a moving target because the rail-borne delivery system was always on the move at any time of day or night.)

One of the more exotic and expensive ideas for deployment of the MX was to build many bunkers, up to ten different sites for each single MX missile. Like an elaborate shell game, the missiles could be moved randomly among the several concrete bunkers so that the Soviets would not be able to target any one bunker as easily and would have to target all of the sites where a live missile might be contained at any one time. However, the amount of concrete alone that would be necessary to build the hundreds of bunkers, in addition to the interconnecting miles and miles of roads in the wilderness of Utah or Arizona or Colorado or Idaho or wherever they were eventually constructed, became absurd to even contemplate. I'm not sure the government even wanted to calculate the environmental impact of such a massive complex. Furthermore, to provide security for constantly moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what was formerly nowhere was going to be another nightmare.

The most ludicrous deployment scenario, to me, involved interconnecting trenches dug underground. The buried missiles could pop up through the thin layer of soil and be launched. Sadly, the comparison to earlier, deadly warfare was too easy to imagine, and reject.

Fortunately, as I wrote earlier, the more cost-effective decision was simply to place them into modified Minuteman missile silos at one Minuteman missile base in Wyoming, F.E. Warren, and be done with them. When the Soviet Union crumbled not long after full deployment, and the goal was then to reduce the number of offensive missiles on both sides, the Peacekeepers were negotiated away and the Minuteman missiles remained at just three bases, including Minot.

But until the history of ICBM's actually played out in the next decade and more, the MX program was food for poetic conjecture on my part.

MX

They threaten now
and again of using trenches.
New trenches for our future defense
as an old attrition.
Again we settle in at our tables for this stagnation.
For we have it best.
This same front will bleed us a new way:
without our blood, so we need not ration.
Gambling in our cards with renewing fevers
and renewable obsessions.
Not needing lessons from this present siege
to compare with the past.
At most we require a more prolonged protection:
Payments stretched to begin now what we may need then:
Newer weapons aging to be replaced
on terms beyond our own.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-nine

The following is obviously a love poem. To whom or about whom, I frankly do not remember. Before the service, while I was in college, I had a crush on two guys, first Daylin and then Pat, both of whom were straight. I even visited Pat and his girlfriend on Long Island while I was stationed in Minot. I'd lost touch with Daylin after I entered in the service, though I did visit him and his wife in Ann Arbor, MI, where he was in graduate school; but I still communicated with his brother, Darryl, a classmate of mine in high school. Their family lived in South Gate for years. Last year, I found Daylin on the Internet and sent him an email. Like my sister and I, I learned from him that both their parents are gone, as is their older sister.

It must have been my final year in Minot, in the Fall of 1977; but I decided to take a monster plane trip that would likely be impossible or incredibly expensive these days since many of the airlines I took back then are no longer in existence and few airlines today allow one-way flights.

I began my epic journey on a North Central Airlines DC-9-30 from Minot, through Fargo, ND, to Minneapolis. I changed airlines there and took an Ozark Airlines DC-9 to St. Louis where I stayed with a friend who had been a missile officer at Minot but was now stationed there.

I was supposed to take TWA from St. Louis to Indianapolis and then a small commuter airliner to Bloomington, Indiana; but my ticket had the flight departure time wrong and I missed the flight. I waited around the airport with my Air Force buddy until the next flight but had to call Darryl to come pick me up in Indianapolis and drive me to his and his wife's apartment in Bloomington where he was attending graduate school. I next flew from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh on an American Airlines BAC-111 through Columbus, Ohio.

From there, I took a small commuter airliner to Morgantown, WVA, to visit my Air Force friend, Chuck, in Morgantown. He had also taken the early-out program and left the service earlier that year. A couple days later, I took a twin-engine, four seater from Morgantown back to Pittsburgh. As I sat in the airport, I saw flights arrive from Colorado, filled with Air Force Academy cadets. From Pittsburgh, I flew on a Northwest Airlines 727-200 to Philadelphia to stay with David Zito. Even though I had lived all those years in Minot, I was never as cold as I was in Philadelphia that Thanksgiving weekend. Dennis and his wife met up with David and me at their parents' home. Back in Philadelphia, I caught a terrible cold. I was miserable in the airport, waiting for my American Airlines flight to Los Angeles via Dallas, TX. I was even more miserable on the plane, hoping not to infect my fellow passengers with my misery.

I recovered a bit, staying with my mom in Long Beach. A week later, I took United Airlines to Denver. The Frontier flight from Denver to Minot was cancelled, so I caught a Northwest flight back to Minneapolis and finally a North Central flight back to Minot via Fargo. I think the ticket was $728.00.

Getting back to the poem, the term that is the title of the poem refers to the electrical connections between the LCCs, where the crews spent their alerts, and the LFs where the ten-flight, and fifteen-squadron, missiles were kept, no closer physically than three nautical miles from one another or from the LCCs. The many connections and system redundancies allow the crews from at least two LCCs to launch all of the squadron's missiles even if some of the connections are damaged or destroyed.

Interconnectivity

Status lights dim or brighten on my end only.
On the snow-submerged, opposing end,
mystic shafts of untold emotions are driven.
So steel as it functions ages less,
so love that we strangle dismantles within.
My teams determine as they can
priority for repair.
I help them when I must,
for we all maintain the system.
And as we each preserve ourselves,
I preserve missiles as a threat.
As on lines where we talked
that do not always function,
I no longer speak to you. No malfunction.
Love that is my link to friendship
is my frustration when it ends.
Like breaks in the connections
between these active missiles and me,
I know that no commands,
no pleading, will bring results with damage.
I am forever like some wizard
whose wonders never work.
I know as disenchanted lovers disunite--
spells cast now by mortals
are always broken.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-eight

While the normal tour of duty was four years, and I spent several months longer than that at Minot, some of those whom I knew there left before serving their full four years. In the fall of 1977, I was back from my Academy interviews in the summer and finishing up the final two semesters of my Master's Degree in the Humanities. Now a captain and entitled to larger quarters, I had finally moved down the hall from my warm, single room over the building's furnace room beneath to a one-bedroom, one-bath BOQ room with a separate living room, and a kitchen that I did not have to share. I was now living next door to my friend Roger.

Someone who had lived in that same room before had put florescent stars on the ceiling of the bedroom. My grandmother Sanchez died on a visit to Mexico while I was living there and was buried in Mazatlan because of the legal requirement to bury someone within 24 hours of his or her death. Her family was German immigrants in the 1800's who had settled in Wyoming. I am uncertain as to how she and my grandfather Sanchez met and married since he was a sole immigrant of his family who came to America from Spain in 1919. But they lived and raised a family in California in the 1920's and 1930's. Their infant daughter died, but my father and his younger brother thrived. Dad had a few months of junior college and was able to become an Army Air Corps officer and bombadier on a B-24 Liberator. His plane was so riddled on one of the Ploesti raids that the crew had to bail out over enemy territory. He was soon captured and sent to a P.O.W. camp in Germany for the remainder of the war. His brother was attending college in Arizona and did not want to serve as a draftee after learning of my dad's fate--I believe, as was typical of those war years, the family did not learn that he had survived for several months after his capture. So my uncle simply left the country for Mexico and eventually became a Mexican citizen.

Tim McConnell was in my missile class at Vandenberg AFB in the Spring of 1974. He lived in the BOQ upstairs from me. We participated on several of the Wing's sports teams over the years. It was he who took an early-out offer when the Air Force decided to downsize the crew force so that one officer could legally sleep while on alert. I already knew when I was going to depart for the Academy in 1978, but it was still sad to see those whom I had known so well depart Minot for other assignments or for civilian life once more. Tim and I kept in touch for several years after that. I even visited him once in Rhode Island, but then we lost touch after the mid-80's. The same was true of my friend Chuck Gover from West Virginia, with whom I kept in touch until the late 1990's.

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;
countless evaluations are completed;
I am sent again to other capsules,
so there is no change.
I live for the time my tour ends
(a hostage now as your protection).
There are others who 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.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-seven

I applied to teach history at the Academy in early 1977. In the Spring, nearly a year before I would finish my Master's Degree in the Humanities, I was invited by the History Department to come and interview. Almost as an afterthought, I called the English Department, told them I was coming, and they also wanted to interview me while I was there.

I rented a car and was going to stay with a friend in the mountains. But, from the airport, I kept driving and driving, following his detailed directions; but I never seemed to get to his trailer. Finally, I called from a pay phone in a small mountain town and told him I had better stay at the Visiting Officer's Quarters (VOQ) at Peterson Air Force Base so that I could arrive early enough in the morning to interview all day. I returned to Colorado Springs and got a room at the VOQ; but when I got to the room, I realized that a senior officer had taken up the two adjoining rooms and, without his knowledge, I was told to move his stuff out of my side, close off the doors between the two rooms, and get some sleep. I was concerned that he'd return to his room, be upset that someone taken half his space, and demand that I get out and make other arrangements. Fortunately, that didn't happen; but I still worried about it until I finally dropped off to sleep.

The first full day of interviews with the English Department went quite well. The second day of interviews with the History Department went well, too, except for the final interview with the Department Chairman. I was tired and blurry minded at that point, after two days of constant interviews and different meals and sleeping in a strange place. My final interview did not go well, and I could tell he was not warming up to me at all.

But during the noon break the first day I was there, I hiked down to a level of the academic building where I was told I could watch the cadets marching to lunch. It was indeed impressive, and I wrote the poem, The Academy, after having been inspired by what I saw that day (see the Poetry, Part Two post, in April).

When I returned to Minot, I awaited a call from either department, hoping that I would get a job at the Academy, a dream assignment after Minot. A week later, I got the call from the History Department Chairman that I expected: they chose six other officers instead of me. But the colonel did say that the Deputy Chairman of the English Department wanted me to call him as soon as possible. He was delighted to offer me a job, and I was accepted by the English Department. Such became another link in why I would be forced to resign two years hence. Had I not been in the English Department, I would not have been asked by a captain who had been assigned as my sponsor at the Academy in 1978, to take over an additional duty from him. He was leaving the service and wanted me to assume advising a cadet named Keith Bostic who would need a new Humanities Advisor on the English faculty. What I was surprised to learn was that this cadet, whom I did not know, had asked for me personally to be his new advisor.

It was rather fitting that during my only year at the Academy, I overheard that at least two of those new instructors hired by the History Department had given the Chairman nothing but grief. I suspected that he had probably soon realized that he'd made a mistake in not hiring me when he saw how well I was fitting in with the English Department, one time even greeting me warmly in the hallway between the two departments to ask me how things were going.

But, prior to all of that, I had one year left at Minot before I could move on. I would earn a regular commission; be promoted to captain; rack up 235 alerts; and earn my final Highly Qualified ratings, giving me seven total, and five as a commander. And I had a few more poems to write.

Across the Northern Tier (strategic bases)

Here we do not speak of
Heroes.
No way to recognize.
And all would so swiftly be embarrassed
if anyone should try.
We carry personal recognition.
Acknowledge privately
this war without battles.
(No one wounded that you could see.)
Yet I have witnessed our attrition:
Machines outlast men and women here,
though few of us have died.
You
accept the loss:
Our youth that is our lives.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-six

The following is the last poem I included in COMING OF NUCLEAR AGE. Two current events would surprise all of us who served in missiles back in the 70's. The first was that, by the end of the 1980's, the Cold War would effectively be coming to a close. The second was that, well into the 2000's, with the Cold War over for two decades, missiles would still be in place in Minot and missile crews would still be pulling alerts.

And I am not sure which event would surprise any of us more. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, whom I followed in the Calendar section of the L.A. Times, drew a cartoon of a boy and then young man who was dogged by the Vietnam War much of his life, not knowing what to do were it to be over. Those of us who were born and lived much of our lives with the Cold War, with the belief that it was fated to remain a conflict for our entire lives, took a number of years to realize that the world was different, though conflicts and nationalistic passions would continue.

Cold War

Each unwise succession,
bound to view all enemies as overpowering,
is forever, "How do we compare?"
We ask lest, by our not asking,
we be surpassed.
No situation, as such, precedes us,
so we comfort ourselves with uneasiness.
Marking any eve or event--
thrilled to feel that each is brightest,
each best, that we are a part.
You know this,
that other years beyond our own
prophesize themselves the last.
The constant blade of doom or disaster
that seems a threat across our whole historic length
is no closer then as now.
But far past and farther futures
threaten from self-importance:
Reminding of sabres, cannon, lasers,
mounted, dusted, on shadowed shelves,
as sun and soil fulfill.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-five

Nearly a year after I returned home from Marine OCS, in the spring of 1973, some of the guys I went through the program with were now at their advanced training assignments such as 29 Palms, CA, or duty assignments such as Camp Pendleton, CA. I remember one drive to San Diego when I stopped by the main gate at Camp Pendleton and chatted with a couple of them on the phone. They were too busy to get together that day. Dennis Zito, with whom I had become close friends, was stationed at 29 Palms in the desert north of Palm Springs. I drove out one late afternoon, arriving there just after dark at his rented trailer near the base. I took the top down on my 1966 Mustang GT convertible and looked up at the stars since he wasn't home yet. I believe we had dinner at the Officer's Club that night. A few weeks later, he drove to South Gate, CA; and I believe he was with me on that drive to San Diego.

When I returned from Air Force Officer's Training School in mid-December of 1973, Dennis' twin brother, David, was going through back-seater training at Edwards Air Force Base, CA, in the high desert, flying in the F-4. One of my earliest memories was of being left off by one of my parents, probably my mom, at the day care center at Edwards in the early 50's. All these years later, I wore my new Air Force uniform with the 2nd lieutenant's bars to visit David. I was so proud of finally having become a commissioned officer that I wasn't a bit bothered when another guy who was training with him chided me for having worn my uniform for the brief visit.

What I am uncertain about was the trip that inspired the following two poems about Point Loma and the military cemetery there. I certainly did not drive down to San Diego when I was home on leave from OTS in December 1973, before I flew to Minot on January 2, 1974. I also don't recall driving down to San Diego when I returned to Southern California to retrieve my 1973 Chevy Camero so that I could visit friends and family on my weekends off from missile school at Vandenberg AFB in the spring of 1974. And though I flew to Southern California several times on leave while I was stationed at Minot from 1974 until 1978, I would not have had my '73 Camero, now up at Minot, to drive down to San Diego. I would have had to ride with someone else or borrow my mom's car to make the trip.

However, I did drive to California during my first Christmas break at the Academy in 1978. The route I took, accompanied by a cadet, a student of mine whom I dropped off in Tucson, AZ, took us through Albuquerque, NM, and across the southern parts of New Mexico and Arizona. I did stop in San Diego briefly before heading north to stay with my mom in San Pedro where she had moved back in 1973, when I went off to San Antonio, TX. So, while these were two of the final three poems in COMING OF NUCLEAR AGE, I might have written them after that Christmas break in 1978-9, before my Air Force career fell apart.

Back to Point Loma

Few are more eternal than men to represent us.
That granite is here a repetitious sign of death
now that we are so many.
Where each caring seems trying to touch eternal
beyond another birth in flames;
flames too cool to call us yet.
But such is always for the patient
who have endless time for possibilities.
The hardened carvings should have further use,
like pyramids,
past erasing by the latest sun,
now that our stones have lost the arts.


Unlike Summer 1970

The last time I purposely saw Point Loma,
the dead companion,
I knew the atmosphere absent.
Knew I tried to revive my former feelings
but drove away from there much as elsewhere,
having lost another friend.
And losing another obsession.
Returning to parallel as before.
Sensing more than I have written,
perhaps I cannot word anymore.
Probably never that close
to what is always felt with others:
love that is the diversion
until death cuts across.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-four

Over the years, Marine Corps training has been tough. Rarely, though seemingly with a kind of tragic regularity, it can even be deadly for a few recruits. Most of the time, the deaths of recruits are preventable. Most newspaper articles about the death of one or more trainees bring up the worst number of deaths to have occurred at one time: those at Parris Island, South Carolina, where six recruits drowned on a "night punishment march". The first two poems below were written and included in the first volume, SONS OF MEN. The third poem about a recruit who died at the San Diego depot I wrote and included in the second volume, COMING OF NUCLEAR AGE.

The San Diego Recruit Depot is on the other side of a high fence from the San Diego airport. My best friend Michael and I used to grab a window seat and look down as our flights back to L.A. took off. When we drove down to San Diego on other weekends, we'd approach the entrance but turn away at the last moment from the main gate because we did not know that we could drive inside and look around, even though we wanted to see the place first hand. One day, when we were convinced that we could visit the facility, even though we were civilians, we nervously drove up to the guard shack and were allowed to enter. This was the first time that I'd been on a military base that was not Air Force. (My dad had been in the Air Force Reserves in the 50's, and we went to March Air Force Base when I was a kid to see a static air show. My late cousin was in the Air Force in the later 60's, and I visited him and his wife in Anchorage, Alaska, while he was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base.)

Marine Corps service would have been in my future had I remained at Quantico, VA.

U.S.M.C. Recruit Depot, Parris Island, 1956

Perhaps,
when our race melts into a more forward future,
those foreigners will discipline the past.

If their thoughts, through rippling perspective,
conceive of what once was,
they may pause.

They may even allow this quaint, sad obscurity
to tingle their sensations.

We can expect no more.
All we know of aliens--
they are not human.


San Diego Boot Camp, From View

Vistas tatter further through fences.
Surely such a slashed across scene is lesser vision,
but some men make much of shreds,
and some shred smaller still
until the image pumps harmlessly.

Many follow force here--
while the world rolls, jets and wanders outside--
ignored.


Killing Marines

Unmoving nights in San Diego.
If I saw the trouble then,
no one else looking
could see. I showed you.
Like the fences encircled,
past the runway unused to escape,
how do you evade?
How do I escape the blame
who might have been there,
preventing this time? Or at Parris Island?
I showed you.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-three

When I was at Marine Officer's Candidate School (OCS), I realized that I didn't want to spend my career living in tents and marching for miles and miles. I resigned and left after the mandatory ten weeks of training (out of twelve). I flew to Maine to stay with a high school friend who had moved there to attend college and live with his brother and his brother's family. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life at that point.

But there were no job prospects for me in Maine, and so I bought a ticket back to Virginia to attend the graduation of those with whom I had trained for those first several weeks. I met up with Lt. Nichols, the platoon commander, and he asked me if I had regretted my decision to leave OCS. I told him I had not but wished that I never came to a time in my life when I would regret my decision to leave.

The following year, when I was still trying to get into the Coast Guard's OTS, I returned to Virginia to stay with a Marine OCS friend and his wife and infant son. We went back to Quantico to walk around the barracks and the obstacle courses and confidence courses. Life always seems to afford me opportunities to think again about my life's choices.

Obviously, a few years later, in Minot, I was again thinking about my earlier choice.

Marine OCS, Quantico, Virginia

I still feel that I am running there.
Not like this thinking war at Minot,
easy to neglect.

Stranger still
locations return me
to admiring us again.

A uniform never losing our youth
when resigning admits we are adults.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-two

The following poem was initially written about the Vietnam War. But when the war was over for the U.S. and our forces withdrew and I was stationed in Minot, I changed it to be about the B-52's based there.

Jon was a navigator whom I knew in the BOQ who, with his first Betamax, patiently taped all of the Mary Tyler Moore episodes.

I suppose I am as equally surprised that the B-52's are still around as I am about the missile silos and LCF's still being in place.

5th Bombardment Wing, Strategic Air Command, Minot AFB

For Jon

We never think it odd to find an aerie
on seemingly strange low ground;
concrete hard and man infested,
our nature to adapt outraces all terms applied.

The steel breasted brutes within the fences
move like patient cripples on rolling stumps,
determined, as always, to fight their way back to flight--
a programmed escalation when they rise
toward a distant, highly silent search for prey.

As with other atmospheric forces
of a short flash superiority,
each boasts of claws that crush
yet cannot grasp its victims.

Still they will toss their talons down
until they are no more,
as if caught by some age-old fault with creation.
And so it is with most mutations,
once twisted into unfulfilling predators,
destruction's origin ceases before its objective.

The blasts will themselves be shaken off.
And soon enough along time, earth recovers,
targets resurrect,
and whatever remembers,
forgets the once bombing force from the far air blue,
the B-52's.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty-one

Four of us used to meet for breakfast on Sunday mornings in Roger's BOQ room at the end of the hall on the first floor. The other three flew with the Spittin' Kittens Aerospace Defense Command squadron. They flew the unarmed T-33 target aircraft, simulating Russian bombers attacking the U.S. Larry left the service several years ago and, last I heard, lives in Florida. Roger and I are still friends all these years later. Tom was killed in an F-15 training accident in the early 80's. (Roger always thought Tom was the most gifted pilot he ever knew.)

The following was my way of honoring their service back when we were all in our 20's and life was stretched out before us with all its promises and possibilities.

BTW, Roger used to tell me about this truism when referring to the radar scope in the cockpit: "One peek is worth a dozen sweeps".

T-33--5th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (Target Aircraft)

For Roger, Larry, and Tom: In friendship, admiration, and envy

(What radar fails to sweep)
There!
A gray motion crossing the sky--
A reflection,
crying for all to attack,
in sight and then in scopes.
Locked in the dual vision, as in love,
when we see and then we feel.

In short, slow turns against the sun that shadows,
skill escapes.
Tightly together targets and attackers move,
wise to the way each eludes.
But these missions,
simulations for some effect,
end in no conclusions,
just results.
And targets return in two's.
Above the base, they turn as nearly as one.
I watch them as parallel;
in tandem even as they bank;
almost bound together.
Knowing each pilot grips tightly to this formation,
this joyous discipline to perfection,
just beyond the point of contact.

It is like that with my love,
as in this tension.

Holding firmly in the seconds of eternity
it takes to land, we touch ground.
Never too close to collide,
or crash.

---

Poetry, Part Thirty

The F-106 was the last of the "Century Series" of fighters from the 1950's: F-100 Super Sabre, F-101 VooDoo, F-102 Delta Dagger, F-104 Starfighter, F-105 Thunderchief, and F-106 Delta Dart. To me it was the most beautiful fighter jet ever designed and built.

The Darts were all-weather fighters. Sometimes, they would practice flying and landing at night at Minot AFB. They were the last line of defense against Soviet bombers. But their time was not going to last. I was later told by Tom Brundige that only the two-seater trainer version ever actually did touch and goes. (But, of course, that wasn't the full meaning of the term, for me anyway.)

Aerospace Defense Command, F-106 Touch & Go

A trio of linking triangles
tires to tap and cross again,
rolling a turn aloft,
as if a thing advancing
from some other world.
Another slight of air amazing
where wizards of night and weather
practice as our protection.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-nine

This poem must have been influenced by something I read or saw about dolphins that would have beached themselves and/or dolphins that got netted when the fishermen were catching tuna. As I said, I would carry out several issues of the LA TIMES newspaper to entertain myself on alert.

Even if I were as far inland as one could get, growing up near the coast in California ensured that thoughts of the sea were never far.

Dolphin Navy

I have tightened these thoughts
like trawler nets
caught about some illegal catch
bound to the sea.
Of ashes and dirt
in need of the ocean's sweat.
Blessed are drops that bind us again,
where we lost our trace in the sand.
I would not so splash,
except as an expiring fish,
I have no dignified flesh with death;
Cannot so decompose
that a segment of embarrassment does not remain.

Impressed against the beach--
where a wary humanity, seeking to anoint,
pushes all back into the sea to swim.
And like a slave-ship,
mastered by demands to sail,
I cannot resist.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-eight

As the years passed, the assignment at Minot became a grind, especially when friends and acquaintances left for other assignments or left the Air Force entirely.

And, in my third year there, I also had to think about my next assignment, my Permanent Change of Station (PCS) move. It would, of course, be the Academy; but I certainly had no idea what awaited me there.

PCS

I take from Saturn when I see her closer
the gravity we know
and wonder why she yields to our darkness
her reflection.
To never be one of earth's own,
I would claim another planet,
barren as we sense them
so as not to be some court recorder
whose minute of recollection is lost
amid trials seemingly more abundant
than miles a light year detects.

And then I could say I just landed to scan all of this.

I am unable to order my cells forth.
And when other men at last leave this earth,
my body will have reached a limit long before.
Yet in the show of our star near dying,
the fiber once us may fire off
and never be asking from which weakened world
each found release.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-seven

With so much time on my hands, and with my casual grounding in astronomy (I did take an astronomy class in Junior College but did not do well because I never quite understood the mathematics involved in such concepts as right ascension and right declination and such), I frequently thought, as I have said, in cosmic terms. I was also influenced by Arthur C. Clarke's books such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and many more that I read, even on alert. The film certainly had a lasting impact on me.

Instead of space stations on the moon and manned expeditions to Mars and beyond, we built launch control facilities and missile sites for nuclear weapons aimed at one another. We created vast reserves of weapons of war rather than building vehicles for peace and exploration (discounting the notion of these weapons being for deterrence rather than for actual use).

It's now 2010. While we have an international space station orbiting the Earth, we haven't been back to the moon in decades. We have landed unmanned devices on Mars, and manned expeditions are in the planning stages. We have space telescopes in orbit, not just spy satellites. So, there has been progress. But had I been told back in 1976 of our progress in space exploration in 2010, I still feel that I would have been disappointed at what we had not accomplished, so far.

Trajectory

There should be times
when those temporarily tired of this living
would be left alone.
As with waves crawling over each other
only to collapse on the land,
crossing takes strength and will,
diluting purpose.
So many stones unearthed are slow to flight.
Still solid with the soil,
none has desire to trade
one orbit for the next, or another beyond.

We have not gone farther. And in this betrayal,
our vengeful, silver vessels
cross only the war-like palms of our limitations.
A trick turning on the present crowds
who marvel at each trivial jump
exceeding their own.

Some future sense,
poised off receding planets,
may survey back before launch
and see between our few floating, muted metals
those who spun off their chance to escape.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-six

I arrived at one LCF one day while there was a commotion within the fenced area. After we parked the vehicle, I got out and was told that the site security police were cornering a rabbit that had gotten inside the fence and could not get back out. They were trying to kill it for supper with rocks lying around.

I was disgusted but did not know what to do to stop them from needlessly tormenting an obviously terrified animal. But I quickly saw that they had already hit it and one of its front legs was noticeably broken even though it was running at top speed to get away on that now-destroyed limb. Crushed at their insensitivity, their cruelty, I turned away and walked inside but remained bothered by the entire incident during the whole of that alert. It bothers me still, all these years later.

Trapping Animals

Never see the end.
But still it will shatter as I imagine,
like a broken limb where it wildly flops
is the fatal loss of flight.

Never that speed anymore.
When it turns to blur and brake
as if twice an image escaping
blurs again.

Siding with beasts
cornered to stone.
Cornering with those unable to see
the tightening zone where we turn.
Knowing I am a part of the rocks
not yet tossed to knock the world off course.
Fusing with the sun
as it turns again.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-five

While I had experienced thunderstorms previously in California and even Kansas, the thunderstorms were especially remarkable in North Dakota back in the 1970's. Of course, the blizzards we had back then were also unbelievable. I was stuck out on alert three times during my four-year tour: once for four days, once for three and a half days, and once for three days.

Generally, once a blizzard begins, you are advised to simply stay where you are. If you get lost, you can die. You cannot see very far and the wind chill is sometimes 100 degrees below zero. You will not survive for long no matter how warmly you are dressed. Even if you momentarily see lights in the distance, you typically will not live long enough to reach them and safety. Vehicles usually get stuck or stall, and you often cannot walk your way to safety with any certainty.

Under the old 36-hour alerts, the first crew and my crew simply changed over repeatedly for the full four days, every twelve hours, until the weather lifted and the relief crew finally arrived. By the end, we were walking zombies who actually had to read every line of the changeover procedure because we were insensible at that point. The site was running out of food so we had to ration. Everyone ran out of cash and coin, and the Coke machine ran out of product. One time one security team fortunately made their way to a barn after their vehicle became stuck. They felt their way along its sides and luckily soon found the barn door. They road out that storm in the barn and survived.

Weather could not be taken lightly in North Dakota. And even thunderstorms seemed, to me, a metaphor for something much more deadly.

North Dakota Thunderstorm

I understand now
the worship of weather.
I, who have no gods,
marvel at the display
and the stumbling ability
that seems to understand conclusions so firmly.
Yes, an unravelling power to rival our missiles.
Yet behind the most stubborn and rugged front
there is no simple thought.
This opposition is a kind of force
to lean on for comfort.
You never think it brings relief.
Off balance, but it works.
Releasing all other forces
building elsewhere.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-four

Obviously, it was difficult not to think in apocalyptic terms while serving as a combat crew member. We had so much time to reflect. With 36-hour and 24-hour alerts, we had time. With the average driving distance to a launch control facility being significant and the Air Force requiring that we not exceed the 55 MPH driving speed, we had time. Most crews had to double up to save gas and conserve crew vehicles (Chevy Suburbans) by dropping off one crew at one LCF and then driving on to the other LCF where they served their alerts. So even the long drives provided even more time to think.

We attended classes each month that focused upon our top secret mission (Emergency War Order, or EWO), and we were tested after each class. We had trainer rides scheduled periodically, and evaluations that often were no notice. So, it was not as if we weren't having to retain what we were taught at all times.

When I wasn't on alert or in class, or working out at the gym, or playing badminton, or participating on a missile squadron or wing sports team (flag football, basketball, or volleyball--I didn't play softball), I would be back in my room in the Bachelor Officer's Quarters (BOQ). Living there with me were other missile officers or bomber or tanker pilots or navigators or security police. We found it all too easy to talk shop, even on our days off.

I also read or watched some TV (Betamax VCRs and cable TV would not arrive until my last year in Minot, and there were only two network television channels anyway). I listened to music frequently. After a few months living on the base, I stopped eating at the Officer's Club and began to cook my own meals in the kitchen that I shared with another officer. I shopped at the Base Exchange or the Base Commissary. Each of us officers did have our own bathroom and a one-room, one-closet combination living room/bedroom (there were other, older quarters that had more space or rooms, but the officers living there had to share even bathrooms--though, after a time, the brass mandated that officers, at least, must each have his, or her, own bathroom). We had single beds and large oak furniture in my two-story BOQ, and a pair of shared washers and dryers in a laundry room on the second floor that everyone shared.

My BOQ room looked out across a large field toward the main gate less than half a mile away. With the long, cold winters, even with several friends and acquaintances and co-workers living nearby, duty at Minot could be very lonely for many of us, gay or straight, whether we had companions or were single.

Minot AFB

Darkness.
Without pairs of rolling lights from the main gate,
I would lose one way out to blindness.

If the only connection between Point Loma
and this base is mine, I am
no less free than I have been.

And since I never hear about those dead,
or ever know a living thought
saving my own,
I have no communicating as others.
Worthlessly still I arrange
contact on paper,
trying to continue through any interruption.

One and then another day's distractions
prevent succeeding grief's reaction.
No scale or grid of suffering
(enough to realize what hurts--
that any pain is well enough).

I know as much will remain
as sufficient to remember what was lost.
Of cities pushed from civilization
as they no longer link to provide.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-three

One of the significant temporary assignments three missile crews could have was to be selected to launch an actual missile at Vandenberg AFB in California. My commander, Tim Sholtis, and I were chosen as one of the three crews to launch a special missile with a top secret warhead.

At the time the U.S. and Soviet Union held Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), and to reach, and sign, agreements related to reducing the numbers of missiles or their warheads. Instead of the normal three MIRVs on this missile, the missile we were to launch had significantly more warheads than three.

Now, exactly how many warheads, at the time, was top secret. We were told how many we were launching. And the Russians always had spy trawlers anchored in international waters off Kwajelein atoll. So, when the several separate warheads hit those same waters, the Russians would be aware of how many there were.

I mean, that was the whole point of conducting this test launch: let the Russians know that if they did not agree to our objectives during the SALT talks, the U.S. might deploy these new many-headed warheads on all land-based missiles. They could not keep up with the proliferation of nuclear warheads at this rate.

It was a wonderful assignment. We got to fly out to California in a KC-135 tanker. We got to lie flat on the boom operator's console and look out the lower back end of the tanker as we crossed over the snow-covered Rocky Mountains. We landed at Vandenberg. We got to pull our rotating alerts in the launch center that was above ground. We could leave the door open and simply step outside to a fenced-in patio and look at the California coast and feel the warmth of the sun. On our days off, I could visit friends or relatives near LA. We got to eat at local restaurants that were far superior to anything in Minot.

It was a great two-week vacation and a definite highlight to my entire four-plus years in missiles. And, of course, the launch was a complete success. Now, because my commander and I took the shift schedule that got us an extra day or two off, we were not one of the two crews who actually turned the launch keys and launched the missile. But we were able to step outside and actually watch the missile rise out of the LF. We could bring our cameras and snap away. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Pave Pepper Missile Launch, Vandenberg AFB 1975

The phenomena of manning flight
have lost significance
(and remember the expense).
But launching missiles preserves the Fourth of July.

The flashing of thrust and the roar
is a wonder never every day.
With all the tense anticipating of a match
set to the first fuse,
we waited for the tilting thing to lift its big foot
before putting down--
adding some grains of pepper
to all this SALT talk.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-two

I grew up in California. From the very early 50's, until 1973, when I finally left to join the Air Force, I spent all of my youthful years there. So far, while I have returned many times to visit friends and family, I have never gone back there to live.

The state may have its mountains and deserts and burgeoning cities, but the coastline is what I always recall. Obviously, for me, with my time pursuing a military career during the Cold War and Vietnam War, I also saw the state through a military perspective. Throughout the 70's, for me it was the Air Force, the Marines, and the military cemetery that dominated my thoughts.

California Coast

I have heard them stepping off
above the beaches of Vandenberg,
to splash a foot down the test range.
All those prints on Kwajelein
pattern a new misuse of the islands,
as closer we are
to shedding the wings on our weapons.

Yet Pendleton against the sea
fails to prove any urgency.
There I understand a sadness to the feeling
that men of earth still train to be tough.
They roll up eroding shores
while a sense of dust
wears at the fiber of former marines
who washed ashore years before.

South to San Diego I saw
efforts for our defense now outnumbered.
But as leisurely as most of the growing seems,
the age is years of losing youth through the wars.
Like the vessels in the harbor
no longer in commission,
even the view that is Point Loma will be sold.
Scraps in the way and discarded
like inconvenient memories.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty-one

Had we been stupid, or arrogant, enough to go to nuclear war, would any of us have survived? Would those survivors have--finally--learned anything of lasting value from that manufactured holocaust? We have never taken that path in all of the years those missiles have been in place; but, again, I often thought of many possibilities when it came to what could happen.

The Last War Like

Sparks
crossing silent
skid the air--

We are the chance for war
and imagine some, or maybe all of us,
gone in his own glory
blazing.
Each a personal vision
like hell.
Our beliefs were
no more horrible than orbiting
within range of an uncontrollable sun.
A merely sooner tiring of human tensions,
we cannot refuse,
for what remains may be a knowing
never moving to this end a second time.

---

Poetry, Part Twenty

At least one time while I was stationed at Minot, the red lock boxes containing the launch keys and authenticator codes were opened and the launch keys were removed and inserted into the launch switches. Had only two of the fifteen crews merely enabled the "birds" and turned their pairs of launch keys, we would all have experienced nuclear war, first hand.

Sometimes, it's beneficial to be reminded of the past, no matter how long ago the experience may have occurred.

Nearing War

Yes,
even I question why all this is written,
but then in the early darkness of any day
a twisting of wrists...

We have been close.

While you sleep, we could be shaking
a new world awake--
that uncovers countless
without protesting the transition.

Not even will exist an instant
long enough to add reacting thought to realization.
Only blinding terror surging at the tip of burning winds
is recognized
and then forgotten.

---

Poetry, Part Nineteen

The underground Launch Control Center consists of two, cement rooms: the LCC and the Launch Control Equipment Building (LCEB). The LCEB was a square room that housed the non-emergency equipment to power and cool the capsule (LCC) equipment. The reason that the LCC is referred to as a capsule is that it is also made of cement but was built in the shape of a hollow capsule. The room with the targeting computers and control panels and bed and refrigerator and chairs the crew sat on is a rectangular "box" that is suspended from the ceiling of the hollow capsule by four, giant shock absorbers.

The crew enters the underground LCC by first passing through a secure door upstairs, guarded by the flight security controller. He checks the crew's IDs and then buzzes them through. Once inside, they take an elevator down the 60 or so feet to the tunnel junction blast door, a huge metal door with pins that extend to keep it fixed in place. Once through the tunnel junction blast door, the crew checks the equipment in the LCEB and then waits for the on-duty crew to open up the LCC blast door, another large, thick, metal door. The two crew members duck to walk through a short cement tunnel behind the open LCC blast door, then over a short metal bridge, and then enter the suspended launch room to conduct change over with the departing crew.

On the outside of the suspended LCC, along the cement capsule wall at the far end, was a round metal door, bolted to the wall at an upward angle. Behind that round door, which the crew could reach from above the commander's console within the suspended launch center, was a corrugated metal tunnel filled with sand. There were tools affixed to the capsule wall, beside the round door, to unbolt the door, dig out the sand, and then remove the few feet of dirt between the tunnel of sand and the open air above ground. This sand-filled tunnel was the only other exit should the regular means of the two blast doors and elevator be destroyed. One caveat could block this final exit for the crew after a nuclear war: a nuclear blast produces intense heat. Intense heat can turn sand into glass. The crew might be stuck beneath the earth in the LCC with a large telescope of glass blocking their exit. After the food and water ran out, the crew could die in place of starvation. (I won't even get into the notion that one crew member might kill and eat the other to survive a while longer, especially if hope for rescue in a post-nuclear holocaust world might be slim indeed.)

But I always thought outside the box (or outside the capsule, if you will) during my years on assignment at Minot AFB. The following is a product of that kind of thinking:

Evidence

In your cringing helplessness,
will your buried missile men,
undisguised in this defense,
be blamed for all of the destruction?
Accused and unearthed in capsules
built only to save them
for the time it took to launch?

Gone:
Friends, support, the foe,
who will have vanished, doubting their resolve.

Proof could merely be detecting wreckage
to those living enough to care.
If the crew are eventually found trapped, intact, underground,
encased in concrete,
the trace left of all of us can too clearly show
who was at fault.

---

Poetry, Part Eighteen

For every trainer "ride" and every check ride (standardization board evaluation) in one of the two missile launch control simulators on base, the simulation would always end with some scenario in which the missiles were enabled and both launch keys turned, indicating that one or more ICBM's were launched.

In the early years of single warheads on single missiles, with less sophisticated computer equipment and a very limited variety of launch scenarios, the simulations always involved all missiles being launched at the same time. As the MRVs (multiple reentry vehicles) and then the MIRVs (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles) were designed and installed on the Minuteman III missiles, and more sophisticated nuclear war scenarios were envisioned and computerized within the targeting systems, a simulation could involve the launch of a single missile (with three nuclear warheads), or the launch of a few missiles, or the launch of many missiles or even, once again, the launch of all missiles in the 91st Strategic Missile Wing.

For anyone opposed to the use of nuclear weapons for war or as a viable instrument of national policy, this new situation was likely more disturbing rather than less. The military and the government could certainly envision, and more likely carry out, the launching of a single missile to deter an enemy. Whereas before the only solution was to launch all missiles or no missiles, now a solution could involve weighing several options. And the more options that were available, the more likely nuclear combat could become. (Or not. It depends upon your feelings about the notion of deterrence and military threats on a national level. Debating any of this would probably be as difficult as debating the effectiveness of the death penalty.)

I am also certain that many would not be comforted to learn that in all of our training and evaluations, we launched at least one missile with three nuclear warheads aboard at the end of the scenario. Of course, our overall mission was actually deterrence: we existed to try to prevent nuclear war by deterring any enemy from attacking the U.S. and its allies. If we failed in our mission of deterrence, then we were required to do our job of actually launching missiles in retaliation for being under attack.

Retribution

Between abundance and shortage,
losses and what is regained,
we match the measure of your impatience.
And while we wait
we train
and simulate that you have died uncounted times
when any could be your death.
Certain these are causes
turning the keys--
keys rotating to turn this world over
to new orders.
An improving method
of blasting off the old unworthy ways
no longer our way.
When the earth-thick skin
is pierced again with renewed eruption,
all will be revenge.
No more the mild alterations most never want;
and for those who are so often demanding,
there will be change.

---

Poetry, Part Seventeen

None of us, certainly not me, ever anticipated the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. We definitely did not anticipate the end of the Soviet Union in our own lifetimes or the breakup of the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Before many of us were born, the Cold War began soon after the end of WWII. That's all most of us knew through the Eisenhower years and the U2 debacle, and the Cuban Missile Crisis under President Kennedy, and the Vietnam War during the terms of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford.

Although the Cold War did end, and many of the U.S. land-based missiles have been removed, and a few missile bases have been closed, the 91st Strategic Missile Wing is still there at Minot AFB, one of only three remaining operational missile units. (When I was on active duty, there were, I believe, three Titan missile units still active, as well as the six Minuteman missile wings. The Titan missiles and wings were deactivated back in the 80's.)

The three Minot missile squadrons--the 740th, 741st, and the 742nd--are still there. The 5th Bomb Wing of B-52H's is also still there. And, unlike in the days before the personal computer, the base, of course, now has a Web site:

http://www.minot.af.mil/index.asp

Last week, someone even crawled over the fence at an LF as "a sign of protest", prompting a significant security response. Under the link "Art" you can even find the squadron patches that are similar to the ones we wore back then (the name of each squadron is now beneath the main part of the patches, which have not changed). "Clavis Pacis" is still the motto of the 742nd: "Key to Peace". It is now featured above the same main section of the patch: where the blue-outlined, white missile; the green olive branch; the red lightning bolt; and the yellow key are still as they were in my day.

I still have one of my old "crew-blue" uniforms in a plastic bag in the closet. The "Combat Crew" patch is above the right breast pocket. The missile badge is on the left pocket. On the left shoulder is my "Crew Member Excellence" patch that I earned after I received five Highly Qualified (HQ) ratings during my Standardization Board (Standboard) Evaluations as a deputy and crew commander.

I actually received two HQ ratings and two Qualified (Q) ratings as a deputy, and five HQ ratings as a crew commander. I never "busted" a Standboard evaluation. I was the exception to the rueful remark that was often made: "There are two types of crewmen: those who have busted and those who will bust" an evaluation.

Given that most of what I knew from 32 years ago is still in place and functioning, though the equipment has probably seen a number of significant upgrades and improvements, some of what I wrote below at the time I was stationed there is still true, even if the Cold War enemy was defeated a decade after I left Minot.

Resolve

Lengthening
hours of the years we monitor missiles and wait.

I see no change.
Only defeat seems the end of distrust.
The launchers will never dismantle
before they rust,
unless some new device,
some great outmoding force,
appears to replace.

---

Poetry, Part Sixteen

From January 1974 until June of 1978, while I was stationed at Minot Air Force Base, I went on 235 alerts during my missile tour of duty. The first hundred or so were on the old 36-hour schedule where a crew spent 12 hours underground, then 12 hours or so upstairs, and finally the last 12 hours or so back downstairs in the LCC before the relief crew arrived. Under the old schedule, we could be on the day shift or the night shift, the night shift departing base at 20:00 hours. Under the 24-hour schedule, we always drove out and back in the morning after the predeparture briefing at 08:00, weather permitting. Obviously, the following poem was written during a return to base after a 36-hour tour that ended when it was getting dark.

Because Minot was a missile, bomber, and interceptor base, it would be one of the primary targets of a Soviet missile first strike were a nuclear war to break out.

Returning to Base, Minot AFB

At most a smear of lasting glow
dims as an angle off the surfacing earth.
As on nights when I walked fire watch,
to protect the training of Marines,
still enough active war endured back then
for me not to see.

Now, coming toward this northern outlay of lights,
I know ours is a leisurely defense,
with none of the arrogance of a top target.

Never has there been this distance between enemies.
But the time for attack is short.
And this long and fatal involvement
becomes an ease for all of us to deceive.

---

Poetry, Part Fifteen

Besides being squadron supply officer, I had other additional, though temporary, duties now and then. I had to accompany a section of a missile containing the top secret data and targeting equipment for the whole system back to Ohio aboard a government-contracted cargo flight, an old converted Lockheed Electra. Along the route, stopping at northern tier bases such as Duluth, Kincheloe, and K.I. Sawyer, I and an enlisted man sat in separate passenger seats by the front door. We'd have to ensure that no one messed with our cargo during the unloading and loading at those bases. We finally arrived at Columbus, Ohio, and turned the "can" over. We took a civilian TWA flight back in uniform, but we had to make sure that they knew we were carrying 45's in our checked luggage. (I am sure these days this would not be allowed.)

Another time, I had to go out to an actual launch facility (one of the 150 LF's throughout the state of North Dakota) where each separate missile is housed within a fenced area and under a massive, heavy blast door. This was the missile silo where maintenance crews worked on a missile in place. I wasn't much older than my mid-20's, but these maintenance men looked even younger. Much too young to be responsible for nuclear weapons and the complex launch systems for a Minuteman III missile. But then, I guess, we were all too young for such significant responsibilities.

In the Silo

I recall the surgeons, bent by their work
across the patient: tall,
rough in metal skins--
multicolored, yet all dull tones.
Beheaded of its triple threat.
Never anticipating eventual re-mating,
but held unarmed,
awaiting passive signals or potent birth.
Mindless, but no monster.

All seeming about some harmless device--
wired,
lost in all those minor techniques of surgery.

Wise of their youth:
two stripes and three, trained above this potential.
Men mined for connecting these gaps.
Wiring with the confident skills
of all who doctor life.

Tools,
never so terrible as what they tighten
or unleash.
Never smeared of the blood
they might heat.

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