OTS, Lackland AFB, 1964
It took me awhile to get the hang of OTS (officer training school). At first I was too stressed out about it. Physically prepared. That wasn’t the problem. I’d run all summer getting ready and in the preceding year, my senior year of college, had worked my way up to three hundred pushups and as many situps a day. But I wasn’t ready for the head games that Captain Kafer sprung on us. He was the FTO (flight training officer), a regular Air Force captain (as opposed to a reserve officer). This was his permanent assignment, herding twelve OT’s (officer trainees) at a time through the ninety-day-wonder commissioning program that had been around since WWII.
Kafer was about five feet five and had the classic little guy complex. In fact, he looked a bit like Napoleon B. himself. Dark hair with a bit of wave, wide nose and thick lips. A bit heavy around the middle, he didn’t look like he could do half the stuff he made us do. But he ground on our flight with an amused smirk on his face, giving us the impression that none of us would ever make it. And, it’s funny how when they work you hard, throw lots of strange stuff at you, and sleep deprive you, you could start to believe that this Mickey Mouse little program was something akin to airborne training. Not even close. It was serious, though, in that it temporarily screwed up the lives of those who washed out. You had to be a college graduate to get there, but if you failed the program you were looking at four years as an EM (enlisted man), a big ego buster though not the end of the world.
Kafer enjoyed making us miserable and his favorite form of misery was the room inspection. He’d show up early in the morning wearing white gloves and run his finger across the window sill or the floor. I’d be up way before reveille to clean the linoleum with my bare hands. This saved having to hide a dirty rag. Then he’d poke in the closet to see if uniforms were hung properly and according to the drill. We had one drawer that we could actually use to keep stuff in. Everything else was a display and not useful. Kafer’s favorite part of OTS was writing up “gig slips”—AF Form_____ with comments like: “Woolies in corner.”
I didn’t even sleep under my sheets. Once I got the sheet tightened down with a Rube Goldberg arrangement of paper clips and rubber bands and my blanket snugged in, I slept on top of it. It was warm in San Antonio from August to November. Hot when we got there; cooling off when we graduated.
We had arrived in San Antonio at dawn after a red eye flight from Seattle on a commercial airliner. The sun was coming up, back lighting some puffy, blackish clouds and the air was thick and warm at five a.m.. Five or six of us had taken the oath together at a recruiting office down by the Navy Pier, said goodbye to our folks and been loaded onto a military bus and run down to Sea-Tac where we had tickets on a Continental flight that had mechanical problems and sat at the gate for several hours before takeoff. They wouldn’t serve us a drink as we were recruits.
At Lackland, the Air Force’s main basic training base in 1964, we were sent from one queue to another to get haircuts, shots and uniforms. Haircuts were first. I had already had my hair sheared into a crew cut to avoid the shock of having it shaved off. But it was a trauma anyway to have the hair mown to the skull. The ultimate humiliation was having our civilian clothes stripped and bagged then being led into a small area in front of cage where we squatted down buck naked. Then some airman guessed our sizes and hucked undershorts and shirts at us. For the majority of us our most recent event had been college graduation. Squatting naked with a large group of shaven head boy-men was a signal that things were now different. At least we weren’t paying for our new clothes.
It wasn’t long before we learned to wear our uniforms properly. We had a guy named Rasberry who had been enlisted for about six years and had worked his way into OTS. Rasberry was from Oklahoma and had a low opinion of all us college boys. But he was helpful in that he knew what a gig line was and how to do a spit shine. A gig line ran from the throat down the seam of the shirt and lined up with the right edge of the belt buckle and then down the fly. One continuous line that Kafer would gig us for if we were off a centimeter. I still check my gig line forty years later. Soon after we received the uniforms we were sent to the tailor shop to get the shirts tapered and afterwards we wore garters that hooked our shirt to our socks to to keep our shirttails tight. Even our fatigues were tailored and gave us all a thin, sleek look. We had three basic outfits: our PT (physical training) uniform which consisted of tennis shoes, gym shorts and red tee shirts that said, “Squadron 12,” fatigues and boots and a fatigue cap, and what used to be called 1505’s—tan pants and short-sleaved matching shirt with shoulder boards that designated us as OT’s .
O.T. Rasberry showed everyone but me how to do a spit shine. I already knew as my high school buddy Ron Rumery had been a shoe shine boy since junior high and had educated me on how to create a mirror finish for the horsehide brogans we all wore then.
The shock of the change to a military life soon caused me to quit thinking of anything except an honorable discharge, which meant demonstrating a medical reason for being sent home. I can remember standing at a phone booth with both my parents on the other end of the line and telling them that I wished I could come down with tuberculosis and get out of there. My dad was outraged that I could have such thoughts. But that is what lack of sleep, harassment, endless drill, high humidity and military induced depression will do for you. In his inimitable way my Dad exhorted me to do my best and told me once again that if he had been allowed into the service he would have become a general. I didn’t doubt this one bit from someone who attempted to enlist seven times and could outwork a mule. Yet I was overwhelmed with fear of failure and looked for an honorable out—the medical discharge, as contrasted with washing out of the cadet corps. One guy in our flight washed out very early. I felt so sorry for him since he didn’t have TB (tuberculosis) and would have to go to airman’s basic training and do some crud job for four years. The airmen basics, housed on a different part of the base, were so dumb and intimidated that they jumped to attention when OTs walked into their area, confused by our shoulder boards.
One day I walked by a newsstand and saw a headline about the Gulf of Tonkin. I bent over and read what I could of the article. The local paper was reporting on what has become known as “The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, that small event that gave LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson) the excuse to escalate the war, which led to his downfall and those names on the black granite war memorial in Washington DC.
I knew something about the Vietnamese war before I enlisted, figured I could go there and looked forward to the adventure. We had a friend, a fellow named Ken Burkes, who had been a foster child to my grandmother. I was, following my commissioning ceremony, to become the owner of Ken’s 63 Ford Falcon instead of my desired 64 Ford Mustang. Ken was a career Air Force NCO (non-commissioned officer), and he had been stationed in Saigon in 1962 and told me all about it. In college, I became close friends with one Gerald Delavan, a US Marine Corps veteran, a member of their First Force Reconnaissance and proud wearer of a green beret. Gerry had gone on long missions into Laos in the early 60’s. He wouldn’t tell us much. But because of Ken and Gerry I was acquainted with what was happening in Vietnam.
This wasn’t a topic of discussion at OTS, however. Instead we learned close order drill, military organization, the code of military justice and an insane game called “flickerball.” As far as I know, flickerball is only played at Air Force OTS. Recently, on a ferry ride to Alaska I met a young lieutenant who had just graduated from OTS, no longer at Lackland. “Do they still play flickerball?” I wanted to know. And, as it turns out, they do.
Flickerball is a mixture of football and basketball burdened with rules designed to frustrate and make one lose one’s composure. The ball is a football. The goal is a basketball backboard with a hole in the center. The object, of course, is to hurl the football through the hole. The offense may advance the ball by passing or latteraling. But the rule is you are not allowed to run forward with the ball. Backwards, yes. But not forward. Throwing the ball you are not allowed to move your back foot, your pivot foot in basketball terms. Thus, to advance the ball the thrower had to develop a technique of passing, while jumping backwards, to a receiver who was likewise moving backwards and who could not move his pivot foot once the ball was caught. There were no set plays. The ball was advanced towards the goal in a way that resembled a sort of retrograde rugby. We would always play against another flight and the whistles from Kafer and his counterpart, acting a referees were incessant and part of the design. Kafer would call more infractions on us than on them. The whistles were constant. Play was in fits and starts. Goals were few and far between. Flickerball got rough. If you stopped with the ball in your arms opponents would start slapping and punching at it. If someone you didn’t like had the ball you could rough them up pretty good before they gave it up.We hated flickerball. But it did offer its moments of aggressive release.
There were no women in our area. They had a separate facility for girls which must have been nearby. We did have a club where during the second six weeks, when we became the upper class, we could go and drink ourselves into oblivion. There were no FTOs at the club. I suppose the idea was to give us an introduction into the world of the OC (officers club). I usually drank four or five rum and cokes, fifty cents a piece, as fast as I could, watched the dancing for awhile, then staggered or sometimes nearly crawled back to the barracks and slept. Girls from the local Catholic women’s colleges appeared each Friday and Saturday night to drink and dance. Virtually all of the girls were Hispanic. Some could really dance. They wore full skirts that twirled around and they managed to look very foreign and exotic. We were still doing the jitterbug at the OTS club in 1964. The 60’s hadn’t happened yet and would never happen for us, locked in dance step as we were with the USAF. Though I considered myself something of dancer, I never took the floor at the OTS club. I can’t tell you why. Perhaps my shaved head made me shy.
It’s curious to me now that I didn’t make any friends at OTS. The fact is that I can recall very few individuals. Kafer, of course, and Rasberry and our marksmanship instructor Sergeant Hernandez whose icebreaker was, “If it weren’t for the siesta, Mexico would rule the world.” Somehow the faces and personalities of my fellows made little impression on me. This could be because the purpose of OTS was to temporarily strip us of personality. We were a blob of shaved-headed twenty-one year olds trying to survive by not standing out—just the opposite of the way we had been conditioned until raising our right hand. Rasberry I remember, I suppose, because he was so ornery and, at the same time, uppity. He didn’t like any of us. He had that enlisted man’s contempt for officers even though he would soon be one himself. After I set him up for the winning spike in the Group championship volleyball game, he gave me some grudging respect. Kafer was happy too as he won a case of beer on the game. We were on such a tight and busy schedule, we actually didn’t have much time to get to know one another. As I recall I got up around five to clean my room in the dark. The day would end with lights out around ten. In between there were meals, classes, drill, PT (physical training) and details (work parties). No free time. The details started before breakfast. My assigned detail was to clean the stairway to the basement of our barracks. This sounds like a mundane chore but was made lively by the fact that the basement was infested by small tarantulas who when I came near them with the broom would jump straight up in the air.
I had one interaction with another cadet that I can recall. It was rather complicated. In our flight was a young black man from the South. I’ll call him Ivory, though I’m not sure that was his name. He was light skinned but very husky. Wide and strong-looking— like a football player. He might have been a football player. He had gone to a black college and acted as if he had never been around white people before, at least not on the basis of being equal. The civil rights movement was in full swing. Yet, he had none of the assertiveness required for a sit in. Early on some of us began to get the picture that Kafer was looking for us to assert leadership qualities on the playing field or when it was our turn to lead the flight in drill. We were to take charge and demonstrate a “command voice” on our hups and toops and threeps. But this black kid couldn’t even hold his head up or look you in the eye. Kafer washed him out. So, in the second six weeks, when the new guys arrived to share the other end of our barracks there was another black cadet, also from a Negro college in the South, and I remember getting him aside and about telling him about Ivory and exhorting him to assert and lead and show command skills that would keep him on the officer track. What my motivation for this coaching and counseling session was I don’t recall. However, it represented the totality of my participation in the great civil rights movement then taking place.
In the second six weeks we were now upper classmen and given rank. Rasberry was our captain and flight leader. Two thick stripes on his shoulder board like in the navy. I was a lieutenant with one thick stripe and one thin stripe. Rasberry had led us in leadership skills during the first six weeks, but he was having trouble in academics. This is when I started to get the hang of it. If you ended up in the top ten percent of the wing you would be named a DG (distinguished graduate). The only benefit of this dubious honor would be that at some point during your four year hitch you would be offered the opportunity to take a regular commission. A regular Air Force commission meant you could stay in the service many years longer than those who only had reserve commissions. Thus, DG was a real incentive only for those people who thought they would like to make the Air Force a career—a lifer. I had no intention of making it my life’s work but I couldn’t help getting good grades on the academics because, perversely, I enjoyed study and test taking. When Kafer smoked it that I was going to be a DG based primarily on academics he took his foot off my back and made life a bit easier. The FTOs were judged on how many DGs they produced, as if they had much to do with it.
How did things get easier? For example, there were constant work parties. Nasty little jobs like picking up garbage or working in the kitchen. A call came out from Colonel Dodd the COTS (Commandant of Officer Training School) for horn players for the Wing band. The carrot was you got out of details. I told Kafer I played the trumpet though I hadn’t played since junior high school some eight years previous. He sent me right over; took my name off all work parties and told Rasberry I was going to be in the band. Band was an additional duty and would make me look even better for DG. I reported to the band detail with some concern over a weak lip but quickly discovered that the band was populated not with musicians but with guys like me who wanted a break from picking up trash. My worry over not being able to compete was soon forgotten when after the tryouts I was named first trumpet, the only time I held down first chair in my musical career.
Colonel Dodd, by the way, must have had the worst job in the Air Force. There just didn’t seem to be much to do for the OTS Commandant except issue memos that always began: “By order of Colonel Dodd.” “By order of Colonel Dodd the red flag will be raised when the heat index reaches 94.”
One of the benefits of being at Lackland in the hot weather was that when the heat/humidity index got too high they couldn’t march us or run us. Apparently they had killed someone in the past and had to make adjustments in the program. Thus, the heat index. In fact, when the red flag went up during scheduled drill or PT we were led to the coolish basement of our barracks where we would sit in the hall with our backs against the wall looking furtively around for leaping tarantulas.
On two occasions, arrival and graduation, Colonel Dodd gave us halftime-like pep talks. For some reason I recall that he told us that we were coming into the Air Force at a great time because the WWII generation was retiring and there would be many opportunities for career advancement. Colonel Dodd should have been reading Time Magazine. Then he could have told us that we were coming into the Air Force in time for most of us to win a free trip to Viet Nam. The only other things I can remember about Colonel Dodd was that he had a son who was supposedly in our class, and that the good Colonel looked like what you imagined a colonel would look. He was handsome in a John Wayne kind of way. Big and fit and craggy looking with hairy arms and senior command pilot wings on his chest. This must have the last stop before retirement. ATC (Air Training Command). What a loser he must have been. Probably a drunk.
The highlight of the second six weeks, in addition to fifty cent drinks at the club, was buying uniforms. On arrival the stuff they gave us was free as the Air Force provides for enlisted people which is what we were until obtaining a commission and taking a new oath. Military uniforms were a big industry in San Antonio with many private vendors vying for the business provided by the several military installations in the vicinity. The clothiers would pick us up on the weekend and drive us to their store where they would fit us for our class A uniform and mess dress (formal) attire. The class A was, of course, the blue suit that had become de rigeur and replaced completely and permanently the beautiful tan class A suit that had so inspired me to join the Air Force after seeing Rock Hudson wearing one while playing the Wing Commander in A Gathering of Eagles. The tan suit had real class and pizzazz. The blue suit looked like something a bus driver might wear. It was the worst uniform, and still is, of any of the services.
At the tailor shop they would ply us with complimentary bottles of Pearl beer while trying to sell us the more expensive double knit fabric. I opted for the cheaper light weight wool to go along with the free heavy wool suit the Air Force had given me. In addition, we had to purchase a dress uniform consisting of black tuxedo trousers, cummerbund, shirt with studs, bow tie, elaborate shoulder boards and fancy wheel cap (old style bus driver’s hat with leather brim) and two jackets: white for summer and black for winter. The jacket looked just like the one worn by Gavin McCloud on The Love Boat.
I still have my mess dress uniform though I can’t come close to squeezing into it. It is in mint condition as by actual count, I wore it six times during my Air Force career and only to formal events known as a “Dining In” which, I expect, was an idea of a formal affair ripped off from the Brits. At a Dining In some brash young officer would be named “Mr. Vice” which was the Dining In terminology for Toastmaster. I have no clue as to the derivation of the title “Mr. Vice.” (There were two things I worried about intermittently during my time in the Air Force. One was being named Mr. Vice; the other—Burial Officer. I dodged Mr. Vice but wasn’t quite as lucky on the other). Mr. Vice would push the limits of propriety in his toasts but not so far as to ape Stephen Colbert at a correspondent’s dinner. And, the Dining In would have a guest speaker, a guest of honor. We, of course, had a practice Dining In at OTS and it was, quite frankly, the best of the rest I attended over the next four years, which all seemed to be a haze of wine glasses, cigar smoke, the obligatory prime rib and excessive camaraderie. But at the OTS Dining In we had John Glenn— Colonel John Glenn in those days—as our guest speaker. Colonel Glenn was fresh from space, a youngish forty-two year-old Marine Colonel who looked fit and sharp. That evening he and I stood shoulder to shoulder at a urinal so I got a good look at him (although not that good a look).
The highlight of OTS for me turned out to be the Wing speech competition. Iconoclast as I aspired to be, I created a satirical talk about a fictional Air Force Command—AFAC: The Air Force Abbreviations Command. It was a parody that followed the typical text discussion of a major command such as SAC (Strategic Air Command) or TAC (Tactical Air Command). It was probably a case of “you had to be there” but the AFAC speech was immensely hilarious to each and every OT who had had it up to here with abbreviations and jargon and military hyperbole. I expected Kafer to gag on it but the little prick laughed liked a bishop and named me Flight winner and sent me on to the Squadron contest which I won in chorus of hoots. Even the FTOs who didn’t have a stick up their butt got a good chuckle and with a sort of in-your-face move they passed me to the Group contest where laughter rattled the room as cadets released pent up anger and frustration in the form of guffaws. This brought us to the Wing competition held in the school chapel full to the brim with cadets two thirds of whom expected to be bored stiff; one third of whom had heard my speech and couldn’t wait to see the reaction of the assembled staff and cadet corps. There were three of us—another guy and a female cadet. We had hardly seen the female cadets during the course but she was here now, winner of her Group. I got to go third. Perfect!
I don’t remember the first guy’s talk. Polite applause. Then the young woman gave a cheesy, patriotic oration with much emoting and articulation with allusions to missile silos in Montana defending us under blue freedom’s skies. Barf. My turn. AFAC! AFAC! Crescendos of laughter. Tears. Choking. Falling out of seats. FTOs with hands over their mouths. Deadpan, serious delivery all the way through. The zenith of my comedy career. The laughs were so big, the satisfaction so complete, I am surprised I didn’t opt for a career as a stand up.
Did I win?
Well, yeah!
Did I get the trophy? Of course not. She did. I knew AFAC couldn’t go all the way. They had to draw the line somewhere. The miracle was I made it to the finals. I felt sorry for her actually. She was sandbagged big time and afterwards I got the congratulations and slaps on the back and the poor girl got left standing alone. Probably became a life long feminist. The funny thing about AFAC was that twice during the next four years I overheard young officers at the next table or next stool telling someone about the speech. A legend in my own time.
Having arrived at Lackland in a disordered state of mind, dress and motivation, I was now pressed, starched, gartered, trimmed, slimmed and straightened up, shined and wondering where they would send me next. Everyone had a great fear of being sent to the Strategic Air Command which might mean the frigid winter climate of the Dakotas. We all felt sorry for those folks who had been sucked into signing up for the Missile Control Officer assignment where they would sit in a concrete, windowless missile container somewhere in the South Dakota or Montana wilderness while working on their MA (master’s degree). The MA wasn’t enough incentive for me. Before enlistment the recruiter had guaranteed me the intelligence field which sounded, well... it sounded grand. Somewhere towards the end of the three months I got orders to report to Denver, Colorado and the JAFAFIO (Joint Armed Forces Air Intelligence School) where I would learn to be a PI (Photo Interpreter) or AIO (Air Intelligence officer). But before that occurred we had the wing parade.
Many military people are fond of military parades. I have to admit I enjoy them myself. As with all military ceremonies from the Dining In to a burial, the parade is carefully scripted and based on a tradition of years. Of course, I would be marching in the band. We had practiced for a month or so to get ready for this review which would be our only event. Following the parade we would disband the band. (It suddenly occurs to me that I can make claim to having been in a band in the 60’s). We learned a Sousa march, the title of which I can’t recall and, of course, the Air Force Hymn: “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder, flying high into the sky”...ta ta, ta, tah ta! Now the ta ta, ta, tah ta! was a series of very high notes played on the trumpet or cornet and in our rag tag band of phony musicianship, I was the only one who could ta ta, ta, tah ta! Unfortunately, I was unable to ta ta, ta, tah ta! and march at the same time, though, I could hit the notes easily while standing still. We solved this problem by putting me in the left rear of the last rank of the band formation so that when we arrived at the those moments of the Hymn when the ta ta, ta, tah ta! was required I could stop for two beats, play the notes, then do a couple quick shuffle steps to catch up and hope no one noticed. No one did. Tah ta!
Graduation was, by comparison, an anti-climax. We all had pre-purchased gold bars pinned under our shoulder boards and when By-Order-of-Colonel Dodd finished giving us the new officerly oath to defend and obey or whatever, we took our boards off and, I suppose, tossed our hats in the air. It was the custom to give a dollar to the first NCO to salute our newly earned rank. So, all the DI’s (drill instructors) would show up in a craven attempt to make a few extra dollars. I ducked around so as to give mine to Hernandez. I favored him because of his most excellent joke about the siesta and because he had chewed the ass off a cadet who had nearly shot me at the pistol range. The idiot had turned around in response to a command with a fully cocked thirty-eight pointed at my gut. That had wakened the good sergeant from any siesta he might have been considering. And, Kafer subsequently booted the fellow from the program for, I hoped, “threatening a prospective DG with a deadly weapon.” Marksmanship training had been a huge disappointment for me as I hoped to qualify as expert and win the greenish Marksmanship Medal which would provide a bit of color for my uniform. I was hungry for that medal, like a Boy Scout after merit badges. But myopia and an unsteady hand undid me. I did learn that it is very difficult to hit what you aim at with a handgun.
Graduation wasn’t too exciting. No one was there for most of us. A handful of parents showed up. Who wanted to take a trip to San Antonio? This was, of course, before the River Walk and other tourist attractions and made San Anton upscale. I had seen very little of the city. A couple hours downtown. A trip to the Alamo. One meal out where I had the strange experience of guacamole-filled enchiladas. Curiously, these enchiladas are the only food I can remember eating during the three months in Texas.
Graduation was no big deal except to mark the fact that OTS was over. By the end, it seemed easy. A piece of cake. A walk in the park. It was difficult to recall the August/September feelings of desiring tuberculosis in November when it was finished. I packed my newly acquired B-4 bag—a blue suitcase that folded over and had many pockets—caught a bus to the airport and flew home on standby with a cheap military ticket. You had to wear your uniform. And, by then, I wanted to.
OTS had served its purpose. I was now officially hired to be an officer in the Air Force for a term of four years. As I recall, I had chosen the service as an alternative to graduate school as I no longer wished to suck from the family teat. I was possessed of the inexplicable desire to support myself. Reason number two had to do vaguely with self-image. College had put me in an identity slump and I expect I believed that military service and its attendant adventures would give me cache that would be valuable in certain circles and dupe me into the belief that I was somehow more than I really was. Strangely enough, it worked. In addition, the military life, as an Air Force officer at least, offered the prospect of smooth sailing, reasonably good pay and benefits and an interesting work environment. This shows how much I knew at that point. But, in fact, my short career with Uncle Sam did offer some, if not all, of the above. I did end up traveling to interesting locales, always had better than average facilities, met interesting people who I genuinely liked (and some I didn’t), learned the ways of organizational life, was paid every month, had my teeth fixed for free, and collected a resume of minor adventures I could use as conversational gambits for the rest of my life.
