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Short Story
"The Building Disappeared?!"
Steve Levi
Fresh out of graduate school, one of my early, regular jobs was teaching American History on a Top Gun base.
Pat Elder/Google Images“The Building Disappeared?!”
“What do you mean, ‘the building disappeared?!’”
“Really? I mean, how can a building disappear?!”
“Well, it did, (pause), sort of.”
But that’s the point of the story.
Fresh out of graduate school, one of my early, regular jobs was teaching American History on a Top Gun base.
Really, it was!
But it wasn’t a Top Gun base like you have seen in a Tom Cruz movie. This one was quite different. It wasn't for TAC fighters. Or, for that matter, SAC or MAC pilots. It was for NATO bombing crews. A 12-week, intensive bombing training for the NATO pilots. The British would be at George Air Force Base for 12 weeks. Then they would leave. Then the French would arrive. Or the Germans. Or the Israelis. And I wasn't sure Israel was in NATO, but here the Israelites were in Victorville, dropping bombs on targets in China Lake.
Don’t go looking for George Air Force Base on Google, by the way. It doesn't exist anymore. It did in the 1970s when I was there. But it vanished to become two prisons, FCI Victorville, a medium security institution, and USP, a high-security institution. Today, it houses some very bad characters: terrorists, murderers, spies, and crime family enforcers. I was there in the salad days when the most dangerous things were tumbleweeds and drunk drivers going to the Roy Rogers Museum in Apple Valley – which also no longer exists.
I got to George in 1973, just as the Vietnam War was winding down. I was there for about 18 months before I left for another job. It was an odd time in American history, and it took me more than a few decades to realize how lucky I was to have spent about 18 months on the base.
It did not dawn on me for several years how odd it was that NATO pilots were being trained to bomb anything! Everyone knew the Vietnam War was ending, so what were we training NATO pilots – who were not in any war – to learn to be better bombers? But I was young at the time and quite happy to have any job as a teacher. I was looking for a full-time job and George Air Force Base was the best I could get. It was the early years of Affirmative Action, and if you were a white male – which I was – you were not at the back of the bus. You were under it.
I got the job on a fluke. The man who had been teaching the classes on George had committed suicide, and the base office needed a teacher pronto. And there I was. So I took the job. The timing turned out to be perfect. I had been selling computerized education programs for a company that evaporated about six months after I went to Victorville. I had been living at home then, and the job in Victorville paid enough for me to move up to the high desert.
If you have never been to Southern California, you do not know what the high desert is. For your education, most of the Los Angeles megalopolis is about 300 feet above sea level. Just high enough to avoid being swept out to sea in a tsunami. When you drive east, you will reach the end of a wide fjord where there is a range of mountains, the San Bernadino Mountains. To get over the mountain range, you will drive up through Cajon Pass at 3,776 feet. When you go through the Pass, there is no ‘downside’ to the mountain range. It is a desert, the high desert. Where a 100-degree day is ‘cool.’
My day job was to teach in what was then the BASIS program. The focus of BASIS was to teach GED to Air Force recruits who had dropped out of high school to join the Air Force. They had figured they didn’t need to read and write if they joined the Air Force.
So they didn’t learn to read and write.
Then, when they entered the service, the first thing they had to do was take BASIS classes to learn how to read and write. But since they had dodged learning in high school, in the military, they were as far behind educationally as they had been in public school.
Or private school.
Or charter school.
Or home school.
Even more important, from my perspective, my students were from all over America. George Air Force Base may have been in California, but the students came from every corner of the nation. The only thing they all had in common was their lack of a smidgeon of the reading, mathematics, biology, and social science they should have picked up in whatever high school they had flunked out of. They were snapshots of the failure of American education, which, sadly, continues to this day. In the 1970s, American schools were on par with the rest of the First World. Fifty years later, we are something like 13th in the world and lower depending on the subjects.
Sadly, ‘education’ has gone down from there. Thirty-three percent of high school graduates never read another book. Forty-two percent of college graduates never read another book. Eighty percent of families did not buy a book last year. If you are not reading, you are not learning. Even scarier, half of all Americans in the workplace received their education from textbooks and software programs designed in the 1960s while, at the same time, students from the rest of the First World are excelling in all subjects. It will not be long before American-educated college graduates will be stuck in low-paying jobs because of what they didn’t learn in the high schools and colleges public money is funding.
Mine was not a good job in the sense there was an occupational food chain for me to advance upwards, but it did give me the right to say I had experience as a teacher. For me, now, I’d say it was more of a learning experience than training to be a better teacher. Most importantly, it gave me a ground-level look at what can go haywire when you work for a large organization.
It was an unusual job at an unusual time in American history. During the day, I was teaching young men and women who just entered the military. In the evenings, I was teaching men who had been combat pilots in Vietnam. The recruits needed a GED to get promoted, and the fighter pilots were required to have a master’s degree to make more money in the Air Force. Wherever the fighter pilots went in the United States to finish their masters, they were going to need American History I and II, and I was one of those teachers who made history both entertaining and educational. Better yet, for them the classes were free.
I was blessed because my students – both GED and officers – were my friends. I was not in their chain of command. This meant whatever they told me could never ‘get back’ to the chain of command. So, when I asked a question, I got an answer, not a dodge.
As a very good example, I was driving off base one day, and I saw several of my students putting computers on a slab of cement. Not in a building, on a slab of cement, exposed to the elements. George Air Force Base was on the high desert and there was sand as far as you could see in every direction. But here, these men were piling computers – not in boxes or crates – in the raw on a cement slab. There had been a building there. You could tell that by the footings around the edges of the slab – but there was no building there now.
I pulled over and asked what they were doing.
“We’re putting computers in this building,” one of my students told me.
I gave him a don’t-pull-my-chain look.
And he gave me a you-don’t-think-I-don’t-know-it look.
I shook my head like a cartoon character who has been told an absurdity and then did a look-around as if I was missing something.
“Nope, nothing here but the cement slab,” my student told me as he outlined the cement foundation of the building that was not there with the forefinger of his right hand.
I was silent for a moment and then said, "What am I missing?"
"A building," my student said. "On the map of the base there is a building here. We're to put the computers in this building."
“But the building is not here,” I said. “Again, what am I missing?”
He smiled. "Chain of command, Steve, chain of command. The Lieutenant says there's a building here. It's on some map. When we told him there was no building there, he said there was. It's on the map of the base. Then he gave us the order to put the computers here."
I was silent for a long time. Then my student said, “That’s the way the military works, Steve. If you get an order, you follow it, period.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “But isn’t someone going to get in trouble when they see the computer exposed to the sand and tumbleweeds?”
He shrugged. “We’ve got our orders.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
So I didn’t.
A year later, as I was leaving George Air Force Base because the BASIS program had been defunded, the computers were still there—on the cement slab—and slowly being transformed into sand dunes.
I wasn't fresh out of college at the time, but I had not been living at home for years. I come from a middle-class family with four kids. I was the oldest, and believe me when I tell you, the moment I got the chance to go, I went. To college. Six hundred miles from home. And I was an athlete, so I did not ‘come home for the holidays.’ Christmas, yes, for about a week a year, but I worked at the college during the summer to pay for my education. This meant I did not get many of the ‘maturing experiences’ other young people get ‘along the way’ in their neighborhoods and churches. As an example, drunks. There may have been drunks in my neighborhood or church congregation when I was growing up, but I didn’t know they were there. None of my friends talked about their drunk parents, so when it came to drinking, I did more than my fair share in college, but it had tapered off substantially by the time I was working at George.
My introduction to the world of drunks came when some of my students/friends suggested I go with them to watch Roy Rogers get drunk. I thought he was kidding, but who was I to pass up a chance to drink?
At this point in my story, it is necessary to describe what Victorville was in the 1970s. It was a waystation between Los Angeles – and specifically Hollywood – and Las Vegas. If you left Hollywood by five, you’d be in Victorville by eight, where you’d spend the night before going on to Las Vegas the next morning. Usually Saturday morning. High rollers, movie stars, directors, whatever, with their protégés along with young actresses, sleeping their way to the top would be in Victorville at the Hilton for a Friday night. Hollywood only interested me as a place to sell screenplays I had yet to write, so I was more interested in meeting agents than actors. Or actresses. Over the two years, I was in Victorville, I can safely say I did not recognize a single actor or actress in the Hilton bar or restaurant. And I spent a lot of time there. This is largely because I did not read the movieland tabloids and found most movies b-o-r-i-n-g. I met a few actors through friends in Victorville, but they were bit players looking for the big break. When I went to the Hilton with them on Friday night, they pointed out actors and actresses who looked like regular folks to me. When I was shown magazine stories of the same people I had seen on Friday night without makeup, it was clear why makeup professionals make so much money.
To this day, I can only recall one high-profile actor I saw in Victorville. But he wasn't at the Hilton. It was in the bowling alley bar. That was Roy Rogers. But I didn’t go to the bowling alley for the booze or the food. I was going to watch Roy Rogers drink until he fell off a bar stool.
At that time, the Roy Rogers Museum was in Apple Valley, about 15 miles outside of Victorville. To get there, you took a road out of Victorville across the desert, and when the city lights faded behind in the distance, you took a left and dropped into a watershed. Victorville had been established because it has a river. This is another 'sort of.' Yes, the Mojave River runs through Victorville, but it is mostly underground. For whatever geological reason, it surfaces on the desert in Victorville, runs through the city and then disappears back into the sand of the high desert. But it appears long enough that wagon trains used it as a stop on their way to the Los Angeles Basin. What this means for my Roy Rogers story is that Apple Valley was lush enough to grow apples – no surprise there. Victorville, just 15 miles away, was the perfect breeding ground for tarantulas, rattlesnakes, and scorpions.
Once you took the roadway to the north, it was a straight shot to the Roy Rogers Museum. Rather, the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum. Several years after I left Victorville, it was moved into Victorville, and then, in 2003, to Branson, Missouri. Then it went belly-up and closed. No surprise there; the era of the Western was over and with it all, remnants of the past.
The Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum in Apple Valley was a must-see attraction for Victorville newbies like me. For a very simple, visual reason. As you were heading down to the museum by the river, the first thing you would see over a rise in the road was a massive, rearing Trigger. The statue was a good ten feet tall with clearly visible testicles. Testicles that pranksters kept spraying with luminescent paint. So, as you drove toward the museum at night, the first visual clue you were near the museum were the testicles of Trigger illuminated by your car’s headlights.
I only visited the museum once. The only thing that impressed me was Roy's 1964 Pontiac Bonneville, which had silver dollars and pistols and miniature horses for door handles and knobs in the car. I was running on empty at the time and marveled that anyone would have so much money they would have squandered it like that.
Then, when I went to see Roy Rogers in the bowling alley, I got a second snapshot of reality if you have too much money. He was born poor and made oodles of money and clearly had no idea what to do with his wealth. I only went to the bowling alley bar one night, and it shocked me that a man with that kind of money was such a drunk. When he was first pointed out to me, I didn't recognize the man. Then, as I took a second, third, and fourth look, yes, it was Roy Rogers.
And he was drinking.
I do mean drinking. I mean getting a drink and swallowing it in a gulp and tapping the bar counter for another one. Drink after drink after drink. The bartender did not say no and no one else at the bar seemed to care. Finally, Rogeres kind of slumped and slid sideways and fell onto the floor. When that happened, a man I had not noticed before rose out of a booth in the back of the bar and picked Rogers up off the floor. The night I was there, Rogers was somewhat ambulatory. But I was told on bad nights, it took a few men to get him out into a limousine to go home.
Ten years later, I talked with Alaskans who had dealt with Rogers when he came to the Arctic to film a program. They told me what I already knew: Rogers was only coherent for a few hours in the morning, and then he was worthless on camera. He died in Apple Valley in 1998 at the age of 86, and how he lasted that long, I do not know.
I did not live on the Air Force Base, but I was out there from my first class at 8 am and often did not leave until after my last class at nine pm. I ate on base and, of course, drank there as well. Not as heavily as Roy Rogers, but on too many occasions I should not have been driving at all. But I did. On base, I drank with my students, which gave me an inside look at the military and how sometimes simple things can be blown out of proportion because someone has to cover themselves, and – inevitably – the person or persons who get the blame are not even the people involved.
I was midway through a BASIS class one morning when one of my students who was not in the class came in and opened up the closet door in the back of the room. The supply door closet. The closet might have been for clothes in some bygone era, but the bygone was bygone, and then the closet was just shelving for teaching supplies. I knew that. The student doing the searching knew that. So, what was he doing in a classroom where he was not a student opening a closet door where he knew what was in the closet? So I asked him.
“I’m looking for a missing [bomber whose name eludes me now.]”
“That’s a plane.” Even I knew that.
"Correct. One's missing."
“A plane is missing, and you’re looking in a closet?”
“Yes, sir.” And he left.
A couple of days later, I cornered him. "Let me get this right: you were looking for a plane in a closet?"
“Right. It’s a long story with a short ending.”
“I’ve got all afternoon.”
Then he told me a story that epitomizes what happens when an organization gets so monstrous logic vanishes.
At some moment in the past, coming back from a bombing run to China Lake, the bomber for which my student was searching developed a mechanical problem. The pilot radioed he – presumably a ‘he’ – and had a problem and was taking the bomber to the mechanical hanger.
So he did.
However, it was at the end of a traffic controller staff shift. What usually happened at the end of a staff shift, at the bare minimum, the Air Force air traffic controllers counted the planes on the runway and put the number in the logbooks. Since the plane in question was not on the runway, it was not counted. There was no reason to tell anyone the plane was in the mechanical shed so, on paper, the plane had disappeared. Several days later, when the plane had been repaired, it was rolled out onto the runway, where it was counted.
No big deal.
Well, it was a big deal when there was an IG inspection. The IG bean counters looked over the air traffic controller logbooks and – WOW! – a bomber had vanished! It had been gone for several days, and then, poof! reappeared. Where had it gone? Had the pilot sold out to Russia? Maybe flown the plane to a secret landing strip in the desert to let 'our adversaries' look over the instruments! Who knew what evil might have occurred?
So, even though the bomber had allegedly disappeared months earlier and was back on the landing strip, there was, to the IG, something suspicious going on. An alarm was set off. When an alarm is set off, the base goes into lockdown, and every place an evil-doer could be hiding has to be searched. Building by building, room by room, closet by closet.
I never did find out what the resolution of the vanishing aircraft was. However, I was told that several Article 15s had been issued to Air Force personnel. Which was a hoot because, as I was told, of the Article 15s issued, several of the men had since retired, and the others were at different bases. So, at the end of the day, the Article 15s were just CYAs for the IGs.
This, as I learned, was SOP for the military. And, over the years, the same for the civilian population. A ‘problem’ no longer needed a solution; it just needed someone to blame. The punishment had to result in some paperwork that could be filed somewhere in some archive never to be seen again. If there was blame to be assessed, it was flopped on the lowest possible personnel. On an Air Force base, officers made no mistakes; the enlisted class did.
As an example, I was told of an incident where a plane had been damaged by some mechanical mistake. Whether the story was apocryphal or not I never knew, but enough of my students knew of the matter to tell me about it. And laugh. As the story went, the 'mechanical mistake' occurred when some enlisted men were ordered to do something that caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to the plane. Someone had to be blamed, so the onus fell on two one-stripers. There also had to be some restitution because there was a dollar loss. So, in typical military fashion, the two one-stripers were ordered to pay for the damage. The bill was never going to be paid out of their salary, so the Air Force promoted their monthly pay to that of a general and then, monthly, took out the difference between the general's pay and what they usually made.
This solved the payback problem.
But opened the door to another one.
As long as the two one-stripers stayed in the Air Force until they retired, they would retire on a general’s retirement pay. Whether this ever happened, I do not know the story, but all of my students knew of the matter, true or not.
This, interesting, fell in line with some advice my father had given me. He had grown up in a very wealthy family. In the depths of the Depression the family had been worth in the range of $100 million. There were only two problems: the money was in Italy, and the family was Jewish. Yes, in September of 1939, when World War II started, the family was worth $100 million. The next May, my father, uncle, and grandparents were in New York where they were not worth $100 million. They were refugees, immigrants on their way to becoming enemy aliens, did not speak English, and, worst of all, were Jewish at a time when there was horrendous discrimination against Jews.
My father was 26 at the time and, in Italy, he had been a lawyer. But not just 'a lawyer.' He was being groomed to the lawyer for the $100 million business. So he got the plumb assignments to 'learn from the inside' the nuts-and-bolts of the reality of the world of business. One of the bits of advice he gave me was to "beware of the man who comes out of the water dry." When he gave me that advice, I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he explained. It was an adage that meant a clever person in charge never took the blame for any mistake. It was always 'someone else's fault.' You never want to work for a man like that, my father advised, because you will end up smeared with his bad news. He will 'come out of the water dry,’ and the blame will blemish your record forever. It was sage advice I first saw on an Air Force base and in every job I have ever held.
On the flip side of the reality coin, I also saw the impact of a good idea, the $2 day. I had never heard of the $2 day, which occurred at George, but the year before I was hired. A year later, everyone was still talking about it.
I am sure the $2 day is not a unique occurrence. And it is a good idea. Better than that, a brilliant approach to a standard problem. While Victorville is about 150,000 today, when I worked at George, the population was barely 10,000. The base population might have been about 4,000. So there was a lot of interaction between the base people and the city's population. Mostly young people. Friday and Saturday nights, the city was packed with young military personnel dining, drinking, going to the movies, drinking, bowling, drinking, driving around in fast cars, drinking and drinking. Along with the drinking came the usual difficulties with arrests, detainments, and complaints of Victorville parents that their 'kids' were being 'unduly influenced' by the 'military scum' from George Air Force Base. This was pretty standard for any remote military base in the United States.
But in Victorville, the complaints got out of hand. A 'citizens group' was formed to demand changes in how the military handled its personnel. This was ridiculous, but it was what the ‘citizens group’ wanted, and when a group of ‘citizens’ demands it, the local police have to do something. Usually, traditionally – and predictably – when the ‘local police’ are required to ‘do something,’ there is a choice of "to go" or "to show." A "to go" action means there is a bonafide legal threat by a perpetrator or perpetrators. When a serial killer is loose and on a rampage, the police must find the individual and bring him/her to justice. So the action of the police is a "to go," and actually achieve a legal objective.
A "to show" action is one ‘to show’ that 'something' is being done but not an action that necessarily leads to a solution of the problem. Action in a ‘to show’ usually involves some ‘proof of the effort.’ That is, something to prove to the concerned citizens that the “matter is being handled.” If there are too many young people racing their cars down Main Street, the police will beef up patrols on Main Street and often carry ridealong TV reporters who will cover the racing. With more police on the street, the downtown racing will slow down considerably.
Usually to move to other streets.
But, from the point of view of the community activists, the police’s action has been effective. After all, there had been television coverage proving the police had been ‘on the job’ and solved the problem. It has ‘shown’ the community activists their ‘hard work’ to get ‘something done’ about the problem the community had resulted in a change. None of this is true but, for the moment, the activists can wallow in their alleged success – until the 'problem' they keep saying they had 'solved' erupted again.
The way I heard it, the military at George would not ‘sit and wait’ for the ‘for show’ action to play out. For whatever reason, the command structure figured to solve this problem once and for all by doing it the old-fashioned way: with money.
With an end-around run.
But not by paying, by illustrating the power of the dollar.
Or, in this case, the $2 bill – actually known as the 2$ Note by a shrinking number of federal Treasury bureaucrats.
Initially, the $2 Note was oversized currency. This was probably to make room for the stereographic illustration of the famous painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the reverse – an assemblage that never occurred. A portrait of Jefferson was on the front – a very young Jefferson, by the way. In 1929, the $2 Note became the $2 bill when it was reduced in size to the dimension of the rest of the American paper currency. It was never popular, and the printing of the $2 bill – along with that of the $5 bill – was discontinued in 1966. Both are still legal tender, but over the years, there have been fewer and fewer in circulation.
For the military at George, the uproar in Victorville was another "been there, done that" problem. As the complaints grew in volume about the alleged nefarious activities of the personnel on base, the base command did what had been done in other bases when such expressions of outrage reached a crescendo. It put money where their mouth was.
In this case, $2 bills.
In one month, all payments to all personnel on the United States payroll at George Air Force Base were paid in $2 bills. This must have been a monumental task because, even then, a lot of those personnel were paid by direct deposit. Yet, in this one month, all payments were in $2 bills. So service men and women paid their rent in $2 bills. Bar tabs were paid with $2 bills. Gasoline was purchased with $2 bills. Grocery stores were flooded with $2 bills as were liquor stores. Everything from candy bars and soft drinks to automobile payments and haircuts were paid with $2 bills. And the bills flooded into the banks where they had to be counted by hand. It was a tidal wave of $2 bills.
Then there was a shortage of one-dollar bills and coins. If someone bought a pack of gum and paid with a $2 bill, change was a paper dollar and coins. Not every purchase in the store was a full dollar figure, so change had to be provided. It was a mess. Everyone in business was overloaded with $2 bills and out of $1 bills and change.
What was the point?
The point was to show everyone in Victorville how much MONEY the military base was pushing into the local economy. By using the $2 bills, all the residents of Victorville could see – quite literally – the economic impact of the base. Even if someone was not receiving the $2 bills in payment, they knew about the deluge. Suddenly, those nefarious characters everyone was whining about had a dollar sign. Or, at least, a $2 sign. I was told that by the end of the $2 month, no civic group was complaining about the base personnel.
Another reality of life I learned at George was the importance of neighbors.
Not neighborhoods but neighbors.
This requires a bit of explanation – particularly for people who live on the West Coast. For East Coast denizens, it's just a 'so what?' discussion. For those readers who have never lived east of the Mississippi, there are things on the East Coast called “neighborhoods.” People live in these neighborhoods their entire lives. So did their parents and their parents before them. While people may work outside of the neighborhood, they live in the neighborhood. And the verb live means they shop in the neighborhood, go to church in the neighborhood, go to the theater in the neighborhood, buy their clothes in the neighborhood, go to the doctor in the neighborhood, marry the boy/girl/man/woman in the neighborhood. For many residents, they rarely ever get out of the neighborhood.
For generations.
I once had a job at a university outside of Boston, and I was invited to a party in a Boston neighborhood. Everyone at work was impressed that they invited me. The invite meant something to my colleagues but little to me. I was from Southern California and rarely had I been given a formal invitation to a party. In California, I was usually told where the party was going to be held and if I wanted to attend, fine. The only unspoken requirement was BYOB, "Bring Your Own Booze."
The party in Boston was on the third floor of a high rise. In Boston, wealthy families own the entire floor with maybe a dozen rooms. The dining room was spectacular, and the walls were lined with portraits. Portraits of ancient family members. I was served a beer, which I accepted because I would take the subway home.
As I drank the beer, I wandered over to the window overlooking the street. When I got to the window, I noticed it was broken. And had been broken for a long time. Considering the apartment throbbed wealth, I was surprised the window had not been fixed. I ran the tip of my index finger over the broken glass. As I was wondering why the window was broken and not repaired, the man who had invited me to the party, another historian from the university, came over and proudly proclaimed that the window had been broken by a "British musket ball."
“A British musket ball?” I asked with incredulity.
"Yup," he replied. Then he pointed to the ceiling. There, I saw what was undoubtedly rusting remains of the British musket ball. "My great, great, great grandfather was in this room when that ball came through that window, Psheeee!” He made the sound of a flying musket ball followed by a splat.
He had just told me three things I had never realized. First, his family had been living in this flat since the 1770s. That had been 200 years! Second, frankly, "a British musket ball" was hardly a notable antique. Had it been George Washington’s musket ball, then it would have been a sacred relic. But just a “British musket ball” left me wondering why it was so honored. It wasn't much a link to the past but, then again, I was from California. Third, and most important, it told me this man and his family were locked into this community. This room, this apartment, was more than a place to live and thrive. It was a launching pad for the future. The young men and women in the room were not at a party. They were in an occupational interview for their future. They were going to be hired and working with the other men and women in the room for the rest of their lives. In the coming decades, their children would be here as well, in this room, glad-handing the movers and shakers for the jobs and opportunities they had yet to receive but were, in essence, promised because of who the family was.
What I was doing there, I had no idea. I was not on a fast track to anywhere, in Boston or California.
What did this have to do with George Air Force Base?
Well, when those NATO pilots came to bomb China Lake, they came with their families. The bombers would be in the high desert for about three months, so it was reasonable to bring their families along. Keep in mind these men, the bombers, were highly educated. What this means to Americans who have never lived overseas, it was not unusual for 'foreigners' to speak more than one language. My father, a Holocaust refugee, spoke four languages fluently and read Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. So many of these men, the bombers, had wives who spoke several languages, including English. Even more important, most of their wives were highly educated as well. These people, bombers and wives, were the cream of their nation’s crop. They were not only upward mobile, but they were also being educated and groomed for that upward mobility.
Many of those women in those families were in my BASIS classes. The classes were free and bright people did not turn down the opportunity to learn something new – and improve their English.
For those who have never been in the military, once you raise your hand to enter any service, your 'old world' vanishes. You are in a whole new reality, and those around you are your family, your neighbors, your good friends, and, often, your ongoing pain in the Brussels sprout garden. You didn’t choose them, and they didn’t choose you, but you all have to live together for better or worse.
Another requirement to being in the military is living by the rules of the city, state, and country where the base is located. You knew the rules of the city and state where you lived before you entered the military, but when you arrived at George, you had to live up to the laws and rules of Victorville and California.
I didn't think too much about reality until one day, a woman, the wife of a NATO pilot from a country I have forgotten, came to class with black eyes. She didn't make it to her seat in class before the other women surrounded her like a bodyguard entourage.
They all said the same thing: this is California and you do not beat women in California.
Her community, her neighbors, her neighborhood came to her rescue. As I later learned, before the end of the day, her husband had been pulled off the bombing runs and informed the next time his wife was beaten, he would be on his way home to wherever.
Oddly, this was an important lesson for me because, of the five Air Force bases in Alaska where I taught, four were remote. There were no families there. But family problems came with the men on the bases. Every disaster, minor or major, at home or on base played out in the middle of nowhere. Unlike 'normal jobs,' if you did not like the job or the people you were working with, you could go elsewhere and leave the circumstances behind. Wherever you went, you could choose your neighborhood, so to speak. You cannot do that in the military. Wherever you went, that was your neighborhood. You didn't choose who you would work with and you could not remove those people who you did not like.
And had best follow the laws and rules of the city and state where you are stationed.
Those ‘laws and rules’ came back to haunt George Air Force Base. It was decommissioned in 1992 when the Environmental Protection Agency found dangerous chemicals had been leaching into the groundwater for years. So, the United States government closed the base and opened a prison. What was done about the contaminated groundwater, I do not know.
I also do not know what happened to the computers on the cement slab of the building that was – and was not – there. As I was driving out of Geroge on my last day of work, sand was still piling up against their sides, and I bet they were still listed as being stored in a building that existed – on paper.
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