A Baby Boomer's Scrapbook

Life's School

Year Two in the Air Force:

My friend Mike Kauppi's dad was a sports car enthusiast and had a Porsche. I got to drive it a few times and, at an early age, got hooked on sports cars and racing.

Neither of us had a car when we got there but one of my first barracks roomies was Brad Mallard who also an affinity for sport cars so we got along well. Since there were few car dealerships in Cheyenne that sold sports cars, when we could, Brad and I would take a bus down to Denver (only a couple of hours south of Cheyenne) and look for them. It was fairly easy to do because there was one main drag that had many dealers so we could walk from car lot to car lot and kick tires to our hearts content.

Brad's dad ran or owned a bank in Connecticut so he had his sights set pretty high but, without any money and no clue as to how I would pay for a car, I was just looking for anything I could afford with the smallest down payment I could make.

After two or three trips to Denver, we each found what we were looking for. Brad had picked out a reasonably new Austin Healey 3000 and, lower down the cost and quality scale, I found an old Austin Healey Bugeye Sprite that I thought I could afford. Brad easily hit his dad up for the money but with no financial history, I wasn't able to scrape up a loan in Cheyenne or Denver and eventually ended up borrowing the money from my Grandma Bishop .  

Our social life improved immediately.

Picking up girls at the drive-ins was easy. Unfortunately, after the noise and cold of some top down crazy driving, it was a lot harder to keep them in those sporty little cars than it was to get them there in the first place.

And, though Brad did better with his cash cow father, $120 a month didn't leave me much cash for entertainment and most girls sort of expected a little more than a hamburger and a wild ride up and down some mountain road.

Brad and I met Kerri and her older sister, Karmen at the Owl Inn in late February or early March. Brad didn't think much of Karmen but Kerri and I hit it off well and started dating after that.

At work, everything for me was still new and interesting. Work was distributed to teams. One team did warhead removal and replacement, another did missile removal and installation, a third did missile targeting and I was assigned to a two man "Electromechanical Maintenance Team" (EMT for short) that did most everything else. There were also Quality Control and Safety teams but these were 8 to 5 weekday only jobs so they were reserved for lifers and first termers after they reupped.

When I moved into the barracks I quickly learned that almost everyone hated their jobs and were fed up and ready to quit. At the time, the Air Force had a glut of E5s and above, there were almost no promotions above E4 and people were leaving in droves. I couldn't talk to anyone without getting and earful of how bad working conditions were and how big a pile of shit that I had just been plopped into.

My first "Team Chief" was a redneck good ole southern boy from Florida . He was on his third term and had been in for 11 years. Unfortunately, although an intended lifer at that point, his report of working conditions wasn't much different from the barracks rats. His story was that his first 8 years were great. He'd been assigned to Air Bases overseas (In Europe, I think) and loved it. When until he got to FE Warren, that all changed. A Staff Sergeant, he didn't want to give up his twelve years and was planning to reenlist as long as he could get an assignment out of SAC and to another real Air Base. Still, like I said, even with that mixed message, everything was new to me and not too bad yet so I sort of took it all with a grain of salt and hoped for the best.

The biggest problem for EMTs was the work hours. We either worked "Base React" or "Quick React". Base React was on call for 72 hours while sitting in the barracks for three days straight. Quick React was sitting out in the field at any of 20 Launch Control Facilities for three days straight.

Whether Base React or Quick React, once called to a missile site, we could be kept working for 16 hours and moved from silo to silo to fix problems before Job Control had to give us an 8 hour break. Of course, in never seemed like we were called at 8 in the morning. It was most often 8 at night or midnight or 3 in the morning.

At first, it wasn't too bad for me because I was single. It was much harder on guys like my Team Chief who was married and had a family. The barracks had two guys to a room but they were fairly big and not too un comfortable. Bathrooms and showers were public. The worst parts were when you got stuck with day room duty or bathroom, hall floor and recreation room cleaning. There was also only one pay phone in each barracks for dozens of inmates. Even though the barracks was sort of OK for me, a lot of guys, even without a quarters allowance, chose to move to apartments in Cheyenne in order to avoid getting dragged out of bed to do something just because it was easy for the powers that be to find you there. They still had to maintain a bed and com e back to the barracks for cleaning and other duties but it was apparently worth the price for many.

I even enjoyed going to the chow hall and having my meals fixed for me. Most of the time I thought the food was pretty good and even the box lunches that we had to take to the field weren't that bad.

And, like I said, as soon as I got a car my social life began to improve considerably. Except for my dates with Kerri, most of my social life consisted of runnin' around or drinkin' with the other barracks bums.

There seemed to be plenty to do although a lot of it left us up to no good. For more wholesome fair, there was a heated swimming pool in the building next to our barracks. When I could afford it, there was a riding stable with lots of wide open spaces to ride on without even leaving the base. I never played but there was an Airman's/NCO golf course and an Officer's golf course. And, of course, there was the Airman's Club, the NCO Club and the Officers Club. Drinks were cheap at the clubs so many of our fearless leaders and followers had their liquid lunches and dinners there.

Speaking of liquid lunches, due to our random calls to work at any time of the day or night, it wasn't unusual to have to pick up one or more of your team mates at the club with a good buzz on or with a hangover on your way out of town to a fix a broken missile or two.

As the year went on, Kerri and I began to spend more time together but I turned 21 in July so I still spent a lot of my spare time drinking and carousin' with my friends. And, as you probably know, if you wanted to (some didn't), it was easy to make friends in the military. Since everyone was in the same boat and misery loves company there were many good friends to share your misery with. And as I've implied, there was plenty of misery to go around though still for me, this early on in my intended career, things still weren't too bad. Having a girlfriend helped a lot.

But, having a girlfriend did have its consequences if a guy wasn't careful. Kerri and I got pregnant in December of ’67 and married in January of ‘68.  

As the oldest of a big family with 7 kids with committed parents, I didn't think that marriage with children would be all that big a deal. Unfortunately, I found out early on that responsibility as a brother and babysitter and responsibility husband and father are far different things. Being in the military didn't help much. I was lucky but many marriages like mine began and ended in a GIs first term...