Let's Take A Closer Look

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When I joined the United States Air Force, I was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio for basic training.

What was boot camp like, aside from the obvious weapons training, long marches, exhausting obstacle courses, and relentless calisthenics?

Here are some examples of the way the military used to go about dehumanizing new recruits before building them up the unquestioning military way.

We would march to the mess hall for every meal and get in line as our drill instructor ordered

We got whatever food they gave us and had to eat it all or be punished, toughest on the finicky eaters. When we had our tray of food, we didn’t choose where we sat. We were ordered to go sit where there was an open seat. The first man to arrive at a table would put his tray down and remain standing with one hand held high over his head, three extended fingers indicating three open seats. The second guy that arrived also stayed standing as the first now held up two fingers, and so on.

All remained standing until the last man arrived, then all sat down at once

As incentive not to dawdle over a leisurely meal, the rule was the first three to finish eating got to walk away and the last to finish had to take all four trays to the kitchen and scrape the dishes.

Squeamish? Skip the next two paragraphs

Recruits were only allowed to use the toilet when told. When someone had to go desperately, he had to run around the barracks perimeter, twirling his flashlight over his head, whooping siren sounds and shouting “Request permission for emergency latrine break, sir!” You can easily imagine how this humiliation training cut down on unscheduled bio-breaks.

Arriving back at the barracks (my first experience with an open floor plan) from the gun range, calisthenics, or a long hike, all 80 sweaty, stinky men were required to use the toilets at the same time

There were five commodes in my barracks. They were placed side by side without partitions or doors.

A man sitting on the toilet would have a man a foot away on his right, another a foot away on his left, and a dozen men in line directly in front of him waiting for their turn while he performed what had heretofore been a private function

Not much dawdling here either. The idea was to subject us to relentless humiliation and they did — every chance they got.

At our graduation parade, thousands of men and boys marched in and out of the parade grounds

We had been drilled ruthlessly until everyone’s columns and rows were lined up precisely while marching, arms swinging the prescribed twelve inches forward and six inches back. In between, we were made to stand rigidly at attention for hours. Some would faint and we were not permitted to look at them or attend to them as we stared straight ahead into the setting sun.

This marching and fainting business sounded funny in Catch-22, but that’s fiction

Stripes, by the way, should have been titled The Three Stooges Join the Army, but that’s the movies.

Airmen Third Class now, thousands of us were put on buses and sent to different training schools across the country

Along with a couple of hundred others, I rode one of the buses for 20 achy hours to Chanute AFB in scenic Rantoul, Illinois. There they trained me to be an aircraft mechanic, code 43151E, which specified training on planes with four or more jet engines.

My first duty station was Kincheloe AFB, 350 miles north of Detroit and 20 miles from the Canadian border

I was assigned to the Strategic Air Command’s 449th Bombardment Wing. They in turn assigned me to the Organizational Maintenance Squadron, who assigned me to one of four teams, each with a crew of a dozen mechanics entrusted with the care of four B-52s. Bomber Four, our group, look care of tail numbers 60-028, 60-032, 60-044, and 61-013.

Below is my former winter barracks, now a federal prison

Ninety-nine percent of our work in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was outdoors

I spent the first of four bitterly cruel winters (I summered in Southeast Asia) there on the tundra (frozen tundra is redundant) in the middle of nowhere. Our day-to-day responsibilities included inspection, repair, testing, refueling, towing, and emptying the flight crew’s onboard toilets.

Throughout the long winter

We climbed up on the wings, swept a foot or two of snow off them with long-handled push broom, and sprayed hot, wet, and sticky de-icing fluid (anti-freeze without the rust inhibitors) on all the control surfaces prior to take-off on daily training missions.

I had been a tow truck driver as a civilian

That experience earned me one my best assignments, driving the 54,000-pound four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering MB2 diesel tugs used to tow the 160-foot long, 185-foot wide bombers. When their tanks were filled with 312,000 pounds of jet fuel (kerosene), the 185,000 pound B-52s weighed nearly half a million pounds, about the weight of three fully-loaded 737 airliners.

Pulling them was easy

Look how far the front gear are behind the plane’s nose. Pushing B-52s back into position was much trickier with the 43-foot, double-jointed towbar and three steerable axles.

For a similar experience, hook a boat trailer to your truck’s rear hitch and hook a second boat trailer to the back of your first trailer. Now back the whole thing into a barn on your first try.

Because I was good at it, I became my team’s primary driver

It took five men to tow a B-52 and only one was inside the Euclid’s cab, dry when it was raining and warm when it was cold.

When I was promoted to sergeant, I became a Crew Chief, the leader of a team of mechanics  

At Kincheloe, half of our B-52s were hot-armed with live nuclear bombs

The bombay held four long innocent-looking silver metal tubes as big around as a log. Each had 16 times the explosive force of all the bombs dropped in World War II. These massive bombers were backed into concrete parking pads in a fiercely guarded area on full Red Alert. It was called the Christmas tree because of its configuration, as you can see.

Flight crews and ground crews needed to be ready to respond instantly to the very real threat of nuclear war with Russia

So we lived next to the bombers, underground in the basement of the windowless molehole. Crews ate, slept, and lived there around the clock, working 48 hours on and 48 off, the way firemen do it.

This was excellent duty for enlisted single guys

All but one crew member (the tail gunner who no longer sat in the tail but operated the 9-barrel Gatling gun by camera from up front with the rest of the crew) on each B-52 were officers whose rank entitled them to much better treatment than enlisted men in every way.

With too few sergeants to warrant a separate (but not equal) mess hall, crew chiefs like me got to eat all our meals with the officers

In the enlisted men’s mess hall where I ate when not on nuclear alert duty, breakfast was cold toast, raw bacon, and runny scrambled eggs we scooped out of steam table trays with bent aluminum spoons. In the molehole we were eating at a posh resort, served made-to-order omelets and hot toast by well-behaved enlisted mess attendants, yes, sir.

Each morning after breakfast, crews would be briefed on the weather to our assigned targets

The best part was those times we would be shown films of Top Secret Soviet military installations, including Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) bases. Taken surreptitiously by spies using concealed miniature cameras, they were grainy black-and-white low-resolution films.

The first real Russian spy film I ever saw was so jerky and poorly-focused that as we were watching it, one pilot wisecracked “Nice work for a shoe camera, I’d say.”

Being ready at any moment to respond to sudden nuclear attack means a lot of practice

Again and again at any time of day or night, red lights would flash and klaxons would bellow the ah-oogah sound movie-watchers associate with submarines crash-diving in emergencies. Crews scrambled, racing to their planes. You can hear a few seconds of the klaxons that came from half a dozen horns in the molehole here. Now imagine that a few feet from your head in cinder block rooms and halls loud enough to shake your fillings, over and over again without interruption until the nuclear alert had been declared ‘only a test.’

A typical alert went like this

When the six flight crew members arrived at the airplane, I already had my wired headset (no Bluetooth, kids) with 100 feet of cord plugged in to a fitting in a small hinged door on the lower fuselage. I had the large trailered MD-3 ground power generator roaring away unmuffled and supplying electrical power to the plane, the front chocks removed, and waiting for my flight crew members to arrive and fire this thing up.

In winter, I also had to remove sixteen large red intake and exhaust engine plugs and clear them to the side. This nearly doubled the get-ready time.

When the last crew member was aboard, I closed and locked the hatch

Seconds later the pilot would ask for clearance to ignite the 8-pound, milk jug-sized gunpowder cartridges and I would give it to him. Take 1:19 and watch a B-52 emergency start and takeoff here.

Once the pilot had his engines started, their internal generators would come on line

That’s when I’d pull the incredibly heavy monster extension cords from the socket in the plane and close and lock the door. When all eight engines were producing all the onboard power the pilot wanted and he’d completed his checklist, he’d come on the intercom and say, “Ground, disconnect headset and ready to taxi.” 

One day the pilot didn’t

With my headset still plugged in, I freaked when he started to taxi without warning and in violation of all protocols for not following his etched-in-stone checklist. B-52s start rolling really slowly, so I was never in real danger of being crushed unless I slipped on the ice that covered all the paved surfaces.

I was still faced with the problem of having to pull my intercom plug and close and latch the access door of the moving airplane I was standing under

Only seconds later, the huge black front tires had rolled past me.

It was no longer possible to run to the side as I had been trained, so I dropped to the ground and was battered by the thrust of eight shrieking jet engines at full throttle

As soon as the last bomber had taxied away, the big brass who always watched the alerts in person from their trucks came over, surrounded me, and told me to keep quiet about this because we don’t want to ruin a good man’s career. I kept quiet, of course, and no one ever thanked me. Of course.

Back to what happened the hundreds of times I wasn’t run over

“Roger, disconnecting headset,” I’d say, pulling the plug, closing and securing the access panel. Coiling my hundred feet of cable as I went, I hustled to my position beyond the wingtip and raised both arms, the indicator for clear and ready to taxi.

When the pilot was ready, he’d flash his blindingly bright landing lights and I’d wave him forward

Once he was rolling, I’d salute him, just like in the movies, and when he was gone, I’d secure the area and go collect the 16 plastic plugs that had been blown to the blast fence by the hurricane-strength jetwash.

Within as little as three minutes from the alert signal, as many as half a dozen bombers would taxi, 48 jets engines screaming, to the end of the runway, ready to take off and go to war

The sight of these monsters lumbering down the taxiways led to the procession being called The Elephant Walk. This was the scary moment, because we were never told beforehand that the alert was only a test, so as far as we knew, it might be real. The called it readiness training and I didn’t know until later psychologists call it operant conditioning, reinforced over and over and over for years.

When the B-52s didn’t take off, we towed them back into place, topped off their fuel tanks, and went inside to be graded on our performance

The first time they actually took off, I was petrified, because now we would be packed inside transport planes and flown to secret destinations thousands of miles away to deal with who knows what. It turned out be just a readiness test and the planes soon returned, but watching them take off was terrifying, all of us believing a nuclear war had just begun.

As a crew chief, I was required to fly a mission every month in helmet, flight suit, and parachute

The cabin was kept brutally cold because of all the onboard electronics. There was no room to get up and walk around. Flights were 12 hours of petrifying boredom between takeoff and landing interrupted only by an hour of practice bomb runs over remote areas.

Unlike airliners, there is no plumbing on board

A tall metal cylinder served as the flight crew’s urinal. Excrement was collected in plastic bags and secured with tape for removal after landing. Ground crews were required to empty what everyone called the piss can. Flight crews had to remove their own excrement, though.

Several hours into my first airborne mission and riding in the jump seat, I was called up to sit in the copilot’s place so he could take a break

As I nervously fumbled my way into the ejection seat, the pilot casually asked me if I had ever flown one of these. How droll. When I said no, he said it’s time I learned and handed me control of this monster, uttering the protocol “You have the airplane.” Make a gentle turn to port he said, and I turned the yoke a bit. Nothing happened, so I turned it some more. Still nothing, dammit, and I turned it even farther.

All at once the “heavy” control systems caught up with my three attempts and we swung wildly to the left

Mortified, I cranked the wheel too far back right, overcorrecting and sending us banking wildly to the right.

“Seems like you have a real feel for this,” said Colonel (REDACTED)

Just then the bombardier called over the intercom, “Who in the hell is flying this thing? We’re all puking back here while you’re all over the sky.” This was big fun for all of them and their way of hazing crew chiefs. When other pilots asked me if I ever flew one of these, I said “Yes, sir, I sure have.” (Watch this 1 minute scene aboard a B5-2 from Dr Strangelove – it’s one of my favorites.)

Older, less sophisticated B-52s were deployed to Southeast Asia

Every day hundreds of them flew bombing missions over North Vietnam out of U.S. Air Force bases on Okinawa, Guam, the Philippines, and Thailand. Armed with 70,000 pounds of iron bombs (conventional explosives), their missions lasted up to 13 hours, refueled in-flight by KC-135 aerial tankers.

While stationed at Okinawa’s Kadena Air Force Base, I was a crew chief on KC-135s

Their mission was to refuel B-52s from bases across the Pacific Ocean. In-flight refueling is quite a sight and I’ve had a front-row seat from both planes. Here’s a 1:44 video of how it’s done.

As a KC-135 crew chief, I’d fly on refueling missions, lying on my belly in the tail next to the KC-135’s Boom Operator as he plugged into a bomber’s roof at more than 300 miles per hour

It’s scarier from the bomber side as the boom connects with a force that shakes the bomber and a metal-on-metal collision so alarmingly loud it sounds like the roof is being torn off.

Small world

We worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week (Okinawa is where I learned to sleep standing up). One day we parked a KC-135 just in from U Tapao Air Base in Thailand and a roommate from back in the States stepped off while we prepared to refuel his plane for a quick turnaround (you’ll read more about him later).

A month later, a typhoon was headed our way

So we packed up our gear, loaded our planes, and flew to Ching Chuan Kang AFB near Taichung, Taiwan. Now on emergency 24-hour typhoon shifts and finally getting to eat at 3AM, I went to the enlisted men’s mess hall and bumped into a friend from high school. Really small world.

The times they were a-changing

Eager to serve in Vietnam for reasons still unclear to me, I was one of 24 chosen from thousands of volunteer applicants for training as English Language teachers.

Training was at the U.S. Department of Defense Language Institute at Lackland AFB, where three years earlier we had been green kids at boot camp

This time around, we were amused by the newly-enlisted kids who would salute us wherever we went.

The first question we asked our instructor was if we had to learn Vietnamese

No. We would be using a method that never involved translation, forming instead a direct mental connection. To illustrate, he took his watch off his wrist, held it up, and said “Saat.” He wrote it on the chalkboard and repeated it. Then he pointed to his watch, shrugged his shoulders, and pointed to one of the students. Using only hand gestures, he coaxed first one student then another to say the word out loud until each of us had said it.

Then, like a conductor, he motioned for us all to say it in unison

Pointing at himself, then pointing to the watch, he said “Bu BENIM saat,” wrote it on the board, and had us do the drill as before. As surely as we knew “saat” meant watch, we knew “benim” meant “my,” no translation necessary. He moved closer to one of the students wearing a watch of his own, pointed first at him and then at the student’s watch, and said “Bu SIZIN saat,” which of course meant this is his watch. It was so powerful a lesson that 50 years later, I still remember this little bit of Turkish.

Using Department of Defense workbooks, we were shown how to lead drills

It all started with simple common nouns, the instructor holding up a pen, saying “pen,” and writing “pen” on the board. Pen, pencil, book, chair, window, one common noun after another.

Backwards buildup was the technique we all used

Starting at the back of the sentence, I’d say book, they’d repeat book. Everything I said, they repeated.

• Book, book.
• a book, a book.
• This is a book, This is a book.

By repeating “This is a (book/chair/window/etc.)” alone and collectively, students learned verbs and articles without any discussion of parts of speech

Holding one aloft, instructors said “THIS is a pencil.” Pointing at a student’s pencil, instructors said “THAT is a pencil.” Holding up one, said “THIS is a pencil” and then holding up three or four, said “THESE are pencils,” heavily stressing the S.

We broke into small groups

Each of us trainees worked with an instructor and were assigned classes where we learned all the skills we would need to teach a 16-week class alone and without supervision.

My students were uniformed military men from Pakistan, Venezuela, Germany, Japan, and Thailand

Imagine having to learn five languages to teach them via translation and by declining verbs and you can easily see another advantage of teaching a language without translation, the way Berlitz does it.

After training, we were shipped to San Francisco

Only days away from a new reality, we gladly paid exorbitant prices at the Condor Club to drink watered-down liquor and stare goggle-eyed at Carol Doda, the famous silicone-aided topless dancer.

We flew to Than Son Nhut in Saigon, were issued M16 semi-automatic rifles and housed three to a room in the White Hotel in Saigon’s Chinese district, Cholon

There was no elevator so we clomped up and down ten flights of stairs twice a day in our boots. Water had to be carried up in old liquor bottles. We had electrical power for a random hour or two a day.

These were really crappy conditions when compared to the made-to-order breakfasts and comfortable surroundings I enjoyed on nuclear alert back in the States

But stacked up against the obvious contrast with solders in the jungle being blown up every day, it was the equivalent of a five-star hotel.

Soft duty, we called it, because we were in the city and not in the jungle with people shooting at us

Nearly three million military personnel served in Vietnam and tragically, more than 300,000 of those brave troops were killed, wounded, or captured and sent to prison camps. 

Our pupils were South Vietnamese fighter pilots who spoke no English

Students were not permitted to speak any Vietnamese in classes, especially not to each other. They had a powerful incentive to learn because those who didn’t catch on quickly were transferred to the infantry and sent into combat. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, we added new vocabulary and different verb tenses as they learned how the language works. Pretty simple, right?

We taught classes six days a week

We had one set of students for six hours in the morning and a second set of students for six hours in the afternoon. The curriculum was so effective that in just sixteen weeks (576 classroom hours) students could speak, read, and write with the vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension of American high school students.

There was one unintended consequence no one had imagined

Each class had the same teacher for all sixteen weeks. While they were learning the language, it turned out they were also learning the teacher’s accent and syntax.

This was discovered at the close of the first term when officials saw the students could understand each other’s English within their own group but not across all groups

Students with teachers from the Deep South would greet colleagues with a “Hah, hair y’all doin’? Ahm fahn.” Students with teachers from New York and New Jersey would say “Hey! I’m walkin’ heah! Fuggedabout it!” while the groups looked dumbfounded because neither one could understand the other.

Officials quickly decided the solution was to have students change instructors every two weeks

Now learning from eight different teachers instead of just one, they were able to learn the language as spoken by many different American dialects and accents.

I was shipped back to the States just in time for a fourth Kincheloe winter

My new assignment was to take charge of two ragtag crews of misfits and malcontents. Enough people called us the Dirty Dozen that we proudly adopted the name. We worked the graveyard shift from midnight to 8AM, refueling and towing B-52s and KC-135s every night, all night long.

Working the graveyard shift meant the only foods available to us before and after work were runny eggs, undercooked bacon, and cold toast

Try that before and after work every day. 

Civilians inevitably ask “Why didn’t you just eat somewhere else?”

Clearly they had never lived on a remote nuclear facility with no restaurants, gas stations, or stores of any kind within 20 miles and no on-base food options other than the mess hall that served a fixed menu at a fixed time. We ate only what they served us and only when they told us to.

The guys on the midnight shift had always been either bomber specialists or tanker specialists

I decided to cross-train them so everyone was qualified to refuel and tow both B-52s and KC-135s. The work was distributed more evenly (tankers are easier to tow and refuel than bombers) and the ground crew and the brass were happy, a rare situation, indeed.

One bitterly cold night while both crews were outside refueling bombers, I got a call on my radio telling us to drop everything and come inside immediately

The temperature was 35 below zero, deemed a threat to human life. Pet owners will be glad to know that the Air Police guard dogs were always taken in whenever the temperature dropped to -20 F.  

Forty-five minutes later the control tower sent us back outside to resume our normal duties because the temperature was now only 34 degrees below zero

Now I live in South Florida and never complain about the heat.

I was Honorably Discharged for my honest and faithful service on March 12, 1972 after giving the United States military four years of my life for about $100 a month

Discharged too late to begin the spring semester at university, I built stoves on the assembly line at General Electric until I couldn’t take it anymore. Strapped for cash, I took a full-time day job installing whole-house air conditioners and a full-time night job pumping gas. Two jobs meant two incomes and also left me with no time to spend what I was making.

Like most veterans who have been around the world during wartime, seeing and doing so much while still just kids, I had very little in common with wide-eyed freshmen away from home for the first time

The Dean of Men figured that an older (23!) globe-hopping sergeant who had led teams of men in tough situations was more responsible than most students. When he offered me a job as head dorm counselor, I took it.

Another big boost came when I was admitted to the doctoral program at Indiana University

Because of my experience in Vietnam, I was assigned to be a teaching professor’s assistant. With his help, I became the first ever first-year graduate student to carry a full teaching load, and I continued to teach Sociology full-time all the way through the program.

This valuable experience led to adjunct professor positions at the University of Miami (Research) and the University of the West Indies (Human Behavior), which led to my starting this blog in 2016. Ain’t life something?

The shirt on the left is the same one I am wearing in the photo of me on the rooftop of the White Hotel in Saigon’s Cholon District in 1969.  Every Veterans Day I wear it, and it still fits if I don’t button it.

A few random thoughts

This week I got a call from former Staff Sergeant Bill Mathe, who I hadn’t talked with for many years.

Best friends at Kincheloe AFB, we spent a delightful hour recalling people and incidents, including the time we got his car stuck in the boonies in the middle of the night and had to steal a tow truck from the Forestry Service (we brought it back).

Sad Sack is an American comic strip and comic book character created by Sgt. George Baker during World War II

Set in the United States Army, Sad Sack depicted an otherwise unnamed, lowly private experiencing the absurdities and humiliations of military life. The title was a euphemistic shortening of the military slang “sad sack of shit.”

Bonus

One winter, a dirt-poor “Sad Sack” Kincheloe roommate (the one who got off the plane in Okinawa) and the sweet girl back home got married in the base chapel. She had ridden the bus all alone from Philly (what he called it), clutching a small bouquet. She had no girlfriend with her and knew no one at the base but her soon-to-be husband. Her loneliness was so palpable I can still picture the bride-to-be headed for the Great White North on that bus, a frightened high myope all alone, huddled in her best cloth coat and rubbing a greasy, dirty window to watch for two days and nights as the width of Pennsylvania, the corner of Ohio, and the length of Michigan crawled by.

Last month I saw this picture for the first time since it was taken in 1966

It’s the official wedding photo. That’s me on the left. The groom was the roommate who got off the Thailand plane at Okinawa. Next to him is his Best Man, John Raley, a huge Buck Owens fan.

We called the Air Force blue Class A suits we were wearing our bus driver uniforms

The bride needed someone to hold her bouquet during the ceremony, so I was asked to join the wedding party. This, I think, made me the de facto Maid of Honor, my second best wedding story.

The peace movement was at its height in the Sixties and Seventies with college students across the country protesting against the war

Safe at home, students vilified soldiers and sailors whose only crime was to serve their country in a time of war. Vietnam veterans are still the only ones who were condemned for their service. Some were even spat upon when they arrived back in the States, a shameful chapter in American history and incomprehensible today.

Please thank a Vietnam veteran this week and welcome him home

To this day, that’s how Vietnam veterans greet each other: Welcome Home.

Aftermath

Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth still gives me chills, as does Peter, Paul and Mary’s Blowin’ in the Wind and the films The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now.

The Best Years of Our Lives is the movie I watch every year on Veterans Day

It is the story of three World War Two veterans from different social strata returning home to small-town America. Each discovers how they and their families had changed over the years they were away at war, as a bombardier, and infantryman and a sailor.

Casting Harold Russell in the role of Homer Parrish was genius

In the Army, he lost both hands to an explosion. Following his accident, Russell was sent across the country on war bond drives where he would speak about his own experiences. The film director William Wyler recast the role of Homer Parrish and asked Harold Russell to play it.

Russell chaired the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped under the Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter presidencies and co-founded the advocacy organization AMVETS.

Bonus

Harold Russell is the only actor to win two Academy Awards for the same role. Later in life, he sold his Best Supporting Actor Oscar to pay for his wife’s medical expenses.

If the subject of underappreciated American military veterans interests you, read my history of black men in the military and the history of women in the military.

Want to look at old things in new ways, see the commonplace in more detail and hear complicated subject matter explained in simple terms?

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