I kicked and screamed and pulled a couple of hissy fits, but the United States Air Force decided, in their infinite wisdom, to cut the orders which would take me back to Francis E. Warren AFB in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Drat!
Drat wasn't what I was saying at the time, I'm sure you realize that. Looking back, I suppose it was for the best, I have a strong feeling that had I stayed at Biggs I would have found a way to get myself killed in Juarez some dark, dark night and would be found the next day floating face down in one of the canals which ran through that Sodom of the Enlightened Age. "They" say everything happens for a reason. Maybe. You can make the case either way. My transfer to FEW AFB set the wheels in motion for what would come next, that is for sure. At Cheyenne I began to make friends, something I hadn't got around to in my short career in the Air Force. In fact there was about four or five of us who formed sort of a clique. This was the year of the Little Rock, Arkansas segregation case and racial tension ran high on the base, as it did in the rest of the country.
Although my orders were to take over duties of teletype instructor, after I arrived at FEW they were changed and I began work in the Com Center as an operator, rather than instructor. And cold. Never had I been subjected to minus twenty degrees temperature. Still, life being what it is I settle down into my routine and began to have fun. Not the fun which I had left in Juarez, but for some reason it was more fulfilling. It seems that my addiction to Juarez and what was offered there was like the old story of eating Chinese food . . . It never satisfied and I needed to keep going back for more. Sound like a drug addict and I was becoming an addict . . . An addict of flesh and uppers, the little white truck driver bennies.
Still, as I adjusted myself to the less dramatic and learned to take life as it came more or less, there was still a nagging something inside of me which made me do stupid things. I just had to press my luck wherever I was, it seemed. Francis E. Warren AFB would be the place where when I pressed, it pressed back. I learned that there were just somethings I was unable to go up against, but my hard-headiness kept on pushing until something had to give. It would not be the United State Air Force. Beside all of my internal struggle there was a small matter of racial tension and downright kickass fights to deal with that Cheyenne and its wild and whooly Frontier Days (a western Mardi Gras) could not contain.
We are moving on . . . Lots more to go . . . Keep on chooglin' as Credence Clearwater would say . . .
My Novels:
Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621
Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842
My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742
No comments:
Post a Comment