Beausejour, Manitoba

 

Stories were going around that it was impossible to find a place to live in Beausejour or the surrounding area, and the limited base housing at the radar site was full. So I took a couple days leave and drove up alone to check out the situation. Somehow I discovered that Mr. Malinski, the owner of the hardware store, had built a house for a customer who'd backed out of the deal. He was willing to rent us the house, which wasn't quite finished but was useable. Turns out the house was next door to the senior Malinskis, who'd come to Canada from Ukraine some 35 years previously. Practically everybody in town was named Malinski.

We took a month's leave at Lewiston, and then went back to Great Falls, packed up and started for Beausejour in the middle of June, 1959. Unfortunately, Clint had what turned out to be red measles, and on the first night out his fever went way too high. We were close enough to Minot AFB that night that I could drive to the base and get a doctor to come to the motel. He gave us some medicine and had us put Clint into a moderately cold bath to bring down his fever. We stayed in the motel an extra day, but the next day I had to go on to Beausejour and sign in. I made the trip and explained the situation to the site commander, Major Al Israel, with whom I'd worked in Rapid City, and drove back late at night to the motel. On the way I nearly ran out of gas, but at the last minute I found a small town gas station that was in the process of closing, and filled up.

We weren't supposed to bring anybody with measles into Canada, but we had Clint bundled up tight in the back seat with his two brothers and the border guards didn't look too closely when they learned where we were headed. Once we'd arrived we got Beausejour's doctor, who had a contract with the military, to take over Clint's care. Clint was having repeated nose bleeds and a very bad cough that was coughing up spots of blood. If the red measles inoculation had been around in those days, none of that would have happened. For some reason neither Paul nor Bob caught the measles from Clint, and by the time we moved on to Kansas City the inoculation was available, so none of the other boys ever had that problem. It took a while, but Clint recovered.

Finally we got settled in the house and I started work at the base. As far as day-to-day work at Beausejour was concerned, I was back to being a grunt controller with a crew. We worked three days on day shift, three on swing shift, three on midnight shift, and then got three days off. With a schedule like that you never really got enough sleep. But there were breaks: temporary duty (TDY) trips to places like Central Air Defense Region headquarters at Richards Gebaur AFB outside Kansas City. I also was assigned a roster of additional duties: summary court officer, Air Force Aid Society custodian, information services officer, historical officer, casualty assistance officer, disaster control officer, quality control officer (whatever that was), mortuary officer, systems training officer, plus short-term assignments such as inventorying the NCO club and auditing the base exchange.

Clint started kindergarten and learned to sing "God Save the Queen." One day some guys came by to lay a sidewalk in front of the house. When they stopped for lunch and broke out their sandwiches, Clint came in, got Autumn to make him a sandwich, went back out, sat down and had lunch with the workers.

On November fourth, about five months after we arrived at Beausejour, Tom was born. Since he was the son of an American assigned to a military unit, at twenty-one Tom would be in the interesting position of being able to decide to be an American or a Canadian citizen.

The operations people were a mix of Americans and Canadians, and the Canadians were easy to get along with and fun to work with. There was a gruff, likeable Canadian captain named Wilf whom we used to tease a lot. Somebody would say, "Quick, Wilf, what's the second letter of the alphabet," and Wilf dependably would come back, "Eh?" When Christmas came round Wilf always was detailed to be Santa, and with his Santa costume, a glue-on beard, and a deep-voiced "ho, ho, ho," he could pass for the real thing.

I'd been building Heathkits (Google it) since Great Falls. At Beausejour we had a basement, so after I'd built a workbench I started building test equipment to help with kit construction. One day the Air Defense Command calibration outfit showed up at the site to calibrate. I took my Heathkit multimeter out and left it with them to test. It turned out that I had the most accurate multimeter on the site.

Four of us at the site were pilots, and we needed to keep up our flying proficiency. We were attached to Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota for flying, so periodically one of the two of us who were qualified in the L20 would drive down to Grand Forks and fly an L20 back to the radar site's dirt strip. We'd keep the airplane for a few days, usually fly over to Canadian Forces Base Winnipeg, which was about a fifteen minute flight and shoot landings, then come back to Beausejour. Finally, the guy who'd brought the airplane up from Grand Forks would fly back, recover his car, and drive home. Occasionally we'd fly with the Canadians out of Canadian Forces Base Winnipeg. I remember a gooney bird flight one night when we flew north for about two hours. It was a clear night and the moon was bright. We finally got to a point where no lights were visible on the ground, but about a half hour later we flew over an island where somebody, far, far off in the boonies, had built a campfire.

Since there were no runway lights for the dirt strip at the site, sometimes we'd move the L20 in to CFB Winnipeg for night flying. One night all four of us took off for what we'd planned as a two hour night flight. Before we took off the weatherman assured us that the weather for our flight in the local area would be CAVU (clear and visibility unlimited). I was in the left seat, flying the airplane. We weren't really going anywhere, so we just wandered up the west coast of Lake Winnipeg. After a while I noticed that the lights along the lake to the north seemed to be going out. I turned around and headed back toward Winnipeg, but about ten minutes after I made the turn we suddenly lost all visibility and were in weather. We tuned in the radio beacon at the base and headed for it. A couple minutes later we got a call from the tower: "The field is below minimums. Proceed to your alternate." I told the tower that we didn't have an alternate, and we'd need a GCA (ground controlled approach) from the outer marker (radio). We got our GCA, and on our landing roll after we touched down I could see just two runway lights at a time — one on each side.

Kansas City, Missouri

Finally my "overseas" tour was finished and I got orders to report to 33rd Air Division Headquarters, at Richards Gebaur AFB outside Kansas City, Missouri in August, 1961. I was to be a plans officer with additional duty as radiological and disaster control officer. We took a month's leave at Lewiston, and by the time we arrived at Dickie Goober the headquarters had become 29th NORAD Region. This time we were able to get into base quarters: a pleasant three-bedroom house.

I was assigned a desk in shack city, a wooden building across the street from the SAGE blockhouse (see Correspondence with Ben) where the staff work was done. The guy directly across from me with the back of his desk against the back of mine was Chief Warrant Officer William R. Dunn. Bill was American's first ace in WW II. At the outbreak of the war he'd joined the Canadian Army, and in 1940 he was transferred to the Royal Air Force (RAF): Eagle Squadron (Google it). He had six kills by the end of the war and, if I remember correctly, was shot down twice, one time being seriously injured. Bill always had a limp when I knew him.

You can see Bill's official story HERE. But the official story leaves out a few details. Bill was a lieutenant colonel in China when, during the Chinese civil war, General George Marshall was sent to lead the negotiations between the Chinese Communists and Chiang Kai-shek, whom Bill always called "Chancre Jack." Marshall made an offer, accepted by the Communists, to destroy the American aircraft still in China. Bill thought that was insane (me too) and told Marshall what he thought. Marshall put a reprimand in Bill's personnel files that said he was never to be promoted. Later on, Bill resigned his commission and re-joined the Air Force as an enlisted man. He rose quickly through the ranks and finally was appointed as a warrant officer, later promoted to chief warrant officer, which is what he was when I knew him.

Sitting across from each other we got to be pretty good friends. Sometimes we traveled together. But what we both spent a lot of time talking about was European trips to the American continent before Columbus. When I was a kid, one summer at Lewiston I'd read Emma-Lindsay Squier's The Bride of the Sacred Well. For a while I was into Mayan history in a big way, and I had found that one of their main gods had a red beard, and a ceremony that sounded a lot like the Catholic communion. Bill was fluent in archaic Spanish and had spent time in Spanish libraries doing research in ancient texts. According to him there were hundreds of pretty reliable stories of trips from Europe to America before Columbus, and he was writing a book on the subject. I don't think he finished the book.

During this period I wrote a rather fat manual on radiological evaluation that dealt with fallout distribution from a nuclear burst, contamination levels, and decay calculations. I also designed a circular radiological evaluation computer (slide rule) that calculated things like decay and dosage. The region produced copies of the computer along with a manual. I still have copies of both these manuals, and two copies of the computer.

As far as flying was concerned, at Dickie Goober I was a U-3A pilot. No L20's were on the line. I'd get a few hours in a goon from time to time, but I carried people and parts all over the region in the blue canoe. One day four of us were scheduled to go to Scott AFB, which is just outside St. Louis. I was detailed as the pilot, even though the other three guys were pilots with a lot more experience than I had. It was a short flight. The weatherman was sure we'd have CAVU weather all the way. About fifteen minutes out of Scott we ran into the soup. Since I'd planned to stay on airways I'd filed an IFR (instrument flight rules) flight plan, so at least I didn't have to file a flight plan in mid-air. Less than ten minutes west of Scott we started to pick up clear ice on the wings. The blue canoe had hot-wing deicers that were reasonably effective with rime ice, but clear ice is deadly, and the deicers couldn't handle it at all. If you get clear ice in the air it means there's water falling from above you, and it's warmer there. The guy in the right seat was handling the radio. I told him to tell air traffic control I was climbing off the airway, and I'd need a GCI to GCA. It was a tense ten minutes. I landed about ten knots fast because I couldn't be sure the airplane would keep flying at normal landing speed. When we got out of the airplane there was about an inch of ice on the leading edge of the wings.

Roughly a year later I was reassigned as the boss of the NORAD ALCOP (alternate command post) facility, which was a large room inside the SAGE blockhouse with extensive communications, and positions for most of the command deputies. Cheyenne Mountain didn't become operational until 1966, so the idea was that if NORAD headquarters, at shack city in Colorado Springs, which was at the junction of Boulder street and Union Blvd, now occupied by the US Olympics facility, was blown up, 29th Region would become NORAD's command center. I never could understand why 29th was expected to survive if NORAD at Colorado Springs didn't, but such are the vagaries of military politics.

My job in the ALCOP was to set up and maintain procedures for coordination between the various staff agencies: operations, maintenance, personnel, etc. I wrote a complete set of procedures and refined them as we went through exercises during which NORAD would pretend to be destroyed and transfer control to the ALCOP. Finally, once everything was humming along, the Air Force hired a defense consulting agency — I've forgotten which one — to tell us how to run the ALCOP. A consultant came by, picked up a copy of all our procedures, and a couple months later sent us a book with procedures that were exactly the ones we'd been using. I've always wondered what that cost the taxpayers.

At one point we were evaluated during a major exercise by NORAD Headquarters. During that eval I met two officers from Air Defense Command who were to be very important people in my life: Major Ray Blake and Major Del (Delphin) Pichon. They were impressed with the setup, and they were the reason I was assigned to Air Defense Command Headquarters in Colorado Springs after I came back from my first Southeast Asian tour.

It wasn't long after the evaluation that I got orders suspending me from flying status. I'd seen it coming a couple years earlier when it became obvious that the Air Force had produced too many pilots during the Korean war. Many times during my years at Beausejour the pilots at the site would be excused from meeting monthly flying time requirements, and flying opportunities at Dickie Goober were fading. I loved flying, and I was sorry I wasn't going to be able to keep doing it, but on the other hand I was now involved in things that occupied not only my time, but my mind. Though I loved it, flying always was a serious business to me. It required a kind of concentration that didn't allow your mind to drift to other things. A few years later I was offered a chance to come back on flying status and go to Southeast Asia to fly "Wild Weasel" F105's, the "Super Thuds" that let North Vietnamese rockets chase them so a follow-on flight could clobber the launch site. I told them I'd think about it if I could be paid all my back flight pay from the time I was grounded. They didn't take me up on my offer, and I'll admit the offer was more than a bit facetious. Not long after that I had a six month spell of on-and-off true vertigo. The problem disappeared for good, but I was never going to fly again.

The colonel who was deputy commander for personnel had managed to stay away from the ALCOP, and during the evaluation we ran into a couple problems we could have solved much quicker if he'd been in the room instead of across the street in shack city. I suggested to him that it would be a good idea if he'd relocate to the ALCOP during exercises. He basically told me to stuff it. Finally, I told him I was going to have to write a recommendation to the commander suggesting he be in the ALCOP during exercises. He said, "Lewis, if you do that, you're going to Southeast Asia." I did it, and I got him moved to the ALCOP. And, sure enough, I went to Southeast Asia. Actually, it was no surprise. At that time there was a saying everyone was familiar with: "There are two kinds of Air Force officers: those who've been to SEA, and those who are going to SEA."

Finally, in early October, 1964 I got reassignment orders to the 619th Tactical Control Squadron, detachment 2, at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand.