Enter Kowalski

Chapter #4

For Want of a Nail

So I am back in San Angelo, coughing up scabs as the antibiotics I got on leave begin to heal my basic training lung infection, slowly regaining my strength,  and starting my communications analysis training.  The first half of the course does not require a NSA clearance,  which gives them time to perform an extended background investigations on all of us,  these will need to be completed to clear us to begin the advanced portion of the course.  I will be at Goodfellow AFB for five months as the course is one of the Air Force's longest.

In retrospect the whole thing will be a great example of how a disaster usually occurs because a whole series of independent things go wrong and produce a cascade effect, acting together they somehow bypass the various fail safes that would have prevented anything serious from happening.  And had any single one of these factors of causality been negated the disaster would not have occurred. 

The group in my class are all guys whose last names end in M – Z, the only exceptions are Richard Eckert and myself – the two who won the squadron lottery the day after we arrived and then went on leave for a week because our original A - L group was too large. These M-Z other guys all got out of basic training a week after Rich and I,  the A-L guys who arrived with them got channeled into a Vietnamese class.  Rich and I had been told before we left that we would study Russian which proves to be accurate.   The alphabet got swapped each week.

Classes are from 6AM till noon each day, the group I was to have been with has class from noon till 6PM.  One of them (Hegel) is my roommate,  he and I were the only ones from our Lackland busload assigned to this barracks and were originally to be in the same afternoon class.  These are the old two story open bay wooden barracks built for WWII.  Ours is deluxe in that the top floor is partitioned off into two-man cubicles with swinging doors.  The partitions start about 18 inches from the floor and are about six and a half feet high.  Originally these were trainee pilot cubicles,  the only remaining trace of their occupancy can be found above our heads,  an attic full of dust covered empty 1940's and 50's liquor bottles which you can see by standing on a chair and lifting up a ceiling panel.  I am the only one from my class in this barracks and the only one in this barracks with morning classes.  Not an ideal situation, as almost everybody stays up past midnight because they can sleep in to 10AM.   I get along great with these guys (much better than with those in my class) and take a nap each afternoon when they are in class to make up for the loss of sleep.   I try to be quiet getting up each morning and considerate with my alarm clock – once I get in a regular sleep pattern I am able to wake up without an alarm.   It is actually really peaceful rising before the others. 

What I don’t realize "at first" is that this setup is wrong.  It is a mistake that I am still in this barracks, they should have moved me to a morning class barracks when I returned from leave.  What I have yet to learn is that the barracks are intentionally arranged to keep the airmen in the 6AM classes in separate buildings from those who can sleep in.  I’m sure now that I could have changed barracks, yet it did not occur to me that switching was even a possibility. In fact for the first couple weeks it did not occur to me that the barracks were segregated in this manner (duh) – I just assumed that it was the luck of the draw.   

Given my relief at starting to feel well again - I'm on a ten day antibiotics regimen my family physician in Berea (Ohio) started me on while I was home on leave -  and what with the lingering mental fuzz from weeks of low-grade fever it is not surprising that I was unable to put all this together.  

Since the barracks assignments had happened the day before the class assignments,  I believed that it all was random,  and that the squadron mixed AM and PM people together in every barracks.  Several weeks into training a couple replacement airman are assigned to our barracks - they take over cubicle spaces just vacated by graduating airman who leave for their assignments.  There had been the ritual posting of a set of orders on cubicle doors with the acronym FIGMO (fuck I got my orders) hand written in large red magic marker *.  All the replacements are in afternoon classes.  It was only then that I finally put the barracks assignment system together and realize that I should have been moved and that I should bring this to someone's attention.  But by then I am having too good of a time to raise the issue.  50 years later I suspect that my bottom line motivation for staying was that having the barracks to myself for six hours each afternoon offered an amazing opportunity to sneak a girl up there.  Given the consequences that were to cascade from my inaction,  it is amusing to put it all together and realize that something so banal drove my decision.  But the power of such trivialities seems to be what the human condition is all about in the free will vs destiny argument.

* Speaking of orders there is a strange poignancy about the extremely transitional nature of active duty military training barracks.  When Hegel and I first carried our duffel bags into that second floor cubicle,  we were surrounded by cubicles filled with slightly senior airmen, all of whom seemed to know far more about the nuances of Air Force life than we did.  Over the course of the next five months the barracks slowly transitioned as these guys completed the 202 course and were sent to Security Service locations around the world.  Eventually even Hegel left - a week before I did.  So when I woke up on the December morning I was to leave and quietly hauled my repacked duffel bag to my car,  I felt amazement at the 100% turnover and a pang of intense nostalgia for the entirely different barracks of just five months ago.  And of how many times this same thing had happened during the life of this barracks.

The above photo is WWII era Goodfellow,  my 1971 barracks is the one in the lower left marked with a "X".

Meanwhile I am cruising nicely through the course,  #1 in my class with the only downside several late arrivals to class.  My mental alarm clock wakes me before six but sometimes cuts it too close and I am 5 to 15 minutes late getting all the way to the other end of the flight line.   We work out preventative measures, to the dismay of those in my barracks I go back to using an alarm clock. 

 As there is someone on duty in the Squadron orderly room at all times (two different squadron members each night split charge of quarters duty), the first sergeant makes waking me if necessary part of the written CQ duty list during their 5-5:30AM walking inspection of the squadron area.  Problem solved.  Strangely the first sergeant does not raise the point that I should not even be in a PM class barracks,  probably because I am in the farthest barracks from the orderly room and it serves his purpose to insure that the CQ airman walk all the way through through the squadron area just before his staff arrives for work.   As it turns out I am always up by the time the CQ comes into our barrack's bay and never again late for anything; with one notable exception (more about this to come).

Then in early fall my Air Force veteran friend Tom (who I had worked with in the Sports Information Office back at WKU) drives my beat-up Austin-Healey 3000 down from Kentucky and I drive him to the airport and purchase a ticket so he can fly home.  He promised to do this if I enlisted and left the car with him for this purpose.   During his visit he tells me that Western’s first basketball game will be against Texas Tech in Lubbock, about two hours north of San Angelo.   They are planning to leave four tickets at will-call for me if I will do game stats for the Sports Information Director.

Having a car improves the quality of my life because it allows me to work Sunday mornings as the desk clerk at the Ramada Inn in San Angelo,  the big perk being their Sunday buffet.

https://sites.google.com/site/tvcwrt/home/austin-healey-3000

The fly in the ointment, which I try not to think about much, is that since getting my clearance I have begun to learn about the actual job I will be doing and am having reservations about being part of this mission.  Remember I am someone who grew up watching Patrick McGoohan in “The Prisoner”, where much of the story was about his constant surveillance by ubiquitous monitoring systems.   I was relentlessly open about my concerns to my instructors,  how I did not volunteer for this and how it will be putting me in a huge ethical dilemma,  but could not get anyone in authority to take me seriously.  Of course I was also joking that when I enlisted I thought I was going into the infantry.  And I still believe that the AECP is a viable option,  that if I just keep my nose clean for a few months this troubling situation might end up being irrelevant.  And despite their efforts to kill me during basic training I discovered that I really like the Air Force and I am delighted by the prospect of being sent to England!

Click Here For AECP enlistment-reasons

So two weeks before graduation four of us from my class drive up to Lubbock in Terwilliger's Colorado car to see the Texas Tech - WKU basketball game and we do not get back to the base until almost 2AM.   Although the CQ on duty in the squadron orderly room is supposed to wake me up,  I also set my alarm clock.  The next thing I know it is 7AM, nobody woke me up and either the alarm did not go off or I turned it off without waking up.  

The next day I am called into the squadron commander’s office where I explain what happened, reminding them that I am the only one in my barracks getting up early and reminding them of the CQ situation they set up.   He and the first sergeant don’t want to hear it,  citing the earlier lateness incidents they chew me out and issue formal discipline papers,  making sure I know that this unfavorable information will be sent on to my new base.  My promotion is held up for two months (more later about the long-term implications of this), I forfeit a modest amount of pay (we were being paid so little that even a month’s pay would have been a modest amount), and I am confined to base for my remaining two weeks at Goodfellow (so no more Sunday buffets).

On the face of it I was not particularly upset, it was small potatoes compared to the looming mission issue.  And it was my choice to go to the basketball game and to take the associated risks.  I did not dispute that I screwed up and deserved to be disciplined.  Yet my poor barracks assignment and the failure of the CQ to wake me gave them enough justification for some leniency, they were just not inclined to extend it.  Although some of the punishment fit the crime, some was pretty chicken shit.  The situational factors behind the problem would go away when I moved on to my next assignment,  but they had unnecessarily structured the punishment to insure that I would get off on the wrong foot upon arrival. 

Interestingly the squadron commander cited my #1 class ranking as a factor favoring a harsher level of discipline, stating that more was expected of me.  Inspiring me to remedy this during the final two weeks of class.

Just yards from the finish line, he stops running and remains in place, despite the calls, howls and protests from the Ruxton Towers crowd.

In close-up, Colin looks directly at the governor with a defiant smile,

an expression that remains as the Ranley runner passes the finish line to victory.

Of course having this level of discipline against me meant that my AECP chances were toast,  thereby eliminating any possibility of a non-confrontational way out of my career field.  Three years into my enlistment I discovered that the program was largely a recruiting tool and never a realistic possibility. The irony being that for most of my enlistment I believed that but for this incident I would have been able to get into the program,  meaning the Air Force had effectively shot themselves in the foot because as long as they could hold the bogus AECP opportunity out as a carrot they had some leverage over me.    Without that it was “The Revolt of Gunner Asch” and the activation Corporal Kowalski.

Lance Corporal Kowalski was the character with whom I most identified in Hans Helmut Kirst’s “Gunner Asch” series,  which I was checking out from the base library and avidly reading at the time. Typically while drinking cheap wine , as I had just turned 21,  and blasting the "Who's Next" album from my new eight track player.  "Won't Get Fooled Again" seemed especially apropos to my present circumstances or perhaps "The Song Is Over".

Kowalski was also the last name of the guy in the bunk on the other side of the cubicle wall from me,  who I looked up to - in part because he averaged 27 hours of sleep each day.  The literary Kowalski did not aspire to military advancement,  allowing him to go his own way in the stories.  But he had Asch’s back and could be counted on to assist Asch with his ongoing struggle as an honest individual trying to maintain his identity and humanity in the illogical world of the military;  something to which I could certainly relate after the Air Force doctors at Lackland allowed my lung infection to become life threatening rather than treat it with antibiotics. 

Despite this adversity the six months time at Goodfellow AFB was the best period of my life,  go figure.

Note:  Looking back I see Goodfellow as a strangely triumphant time for me.  After having my identity completely shattered at age 12,  I had been getting by with whatever identity elements I was able to salvage and loosely cobble together with marginally adequate substitutes.  My experiences during basic and then at Goodfellow provided the key pieces that finally crystalized into the identity that I would have for the next 45 years.  And thanks to the Air Force it was an identity the opposite of the misandrist caricature — viewing "compulsive braggadocio, bawdy innuendos, and shameless, nigh-simian dominance displays" as embarrassingly pathetic.   The irony being that the recently reintegrated "shit disturber" & "risk taker" portions of my identity were most likely the same sort of compensation mechanisms.

Chapter #5

Austin-Healey?  No thanks I already have one.

When I got out of tech school in December 1971, I sold my Austin-Healey 3000 to Richard Vincellette,  a guy I met in Basic Training.  At some point during our six weeks together at Lackland, my discussions of my cool English sports car had piqued his interest.  When we got our orders and discovered that our training bases were only 240 miles apart he asked me what I was going to do with my car if I was sent overseas.  We came to an arrangement that if I was sent overseas and he was remaining stateside,  then I would show him the car and sell it to him at a bargain price if he was still interested.  What is notable about this ordinary bit of commerce almost 50 years later is that what would be logistically simple today was quite a challenge back then.  There were no cell phones,  we would not get military addresses until after we arrived at our new bases,  and even then our only access to a phone was likely to be a bank of pay phones somewhere on each base. 

We had only our parent's addresses and at some point letters were forwarded,  new base addresses exchanged,  and plans were made by letter for me to drive the car to Sheppard Air Force base (San Angelo to Wichita Falls) one Saturday.  Someone rode with me, probably John Morrill (who I had nicknamed "The Moral Man" - most everyone had a nickname back then) from my class who was seeking a little weekend adventure.  Fortunately the trip was uneventful,  the test drive went well,  and that afternoon we reached an agreement on the price.  My father hated the car and was anxious for me to get rid of it before going to England.  He had financed most of it and was willing to take monthly payments of $50 from Rich until what he was owed was paid off.  I agreed to write-off all that I had invested in the car,  so Rich got a good deal or at least it seemed so at the time.

We were then faced with how to get the car to him before I left for England.  Since Sheppard was just north of Dallas and I was southwest of Dallas,  we decided that rather than my flying to Cleveland from San Angelo I would drive the car to Dallas and fly home from there.   I would park the car in the airport parking structure and mail Rich the car keys,  the floor & space number,  and the parking stub. 

Somehow all this worked out reasonably well,  although something relatively minor (I think the tailpipe had worked loose and was dragging the last few miles) had gone wrong with the car on the way up and Richard immediately had something to repair.   And of course the car developed other issues over the next two years (the joys of Austin-Healey ownership) which strung out his payments a bit longer.   By that point I was blissfully out of the line of fire.   I swear that I was operating in good faith throughout this whole process,  I was just naive and stupid,  and ultimately very lucky.

A few months after arriving in England somebody in our barracks put his red Austin-Healey 3000 up for sale as he had just about completed his assignment.  It was in much better shape than either of mine and I was tempted to buy it,  I masochistically loved those cars.  But I successfully resisted the temptation and got a 1965 Volkswagen instead. 

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business.

The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?

Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

Hugh Fennyman: How?

Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.