4 Years Teaching Nav School, Part IWell, we made it to Sacramento! Think singing: "California, here we come -- Right back where I started from!" Yes -- Richard's birthplace! Regular visits to Aunt Blanche & Uncle Ken who lived there. Occasional visits from Babe, MY mother, who lived in Ventura, down south -- she was the baby of her family of origin causing her nickname and a feeling of entitlement to self-indulgence that never helped her in the adult world. (Too bad -- That self-centeredness also alienated me. Very different than how I was raised after age 8 by my father and stepmother who probably should have indulged me a little, at least.) Reconnecting with my young-childhood "hometown" (a rare treat for a military "brat"), my new family of adulthood would go to Mass in the downtown Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament where I was baptized and confirmed. We toured through the Capitol building's detailed county window displays -- and seated Ivan on top of the lifesize California grizzlies that used to guard the western exterior steps to the Capitol. Whatever happened to those earthbound Ursa that inspired my later love-poem, "Zodiac Emigres"?Part I of this instructor assignment was the first two years after returning from Vietnam. Part II was the last two years. The first two years, I was a Nav Instructor in one of the 3 Nav Training Squadrons for brand new students commissioned into the Air Force. The "Undergraduate Navigator Training" (UNT) consisted of classroom lessons (mostly lecture-style), simulators and part-task trainers, and actual flight missions. Air Training Command instructor navs personally instructed & checked the work of 2-3 students on each of 40 separate flight missions in the syllabus. Most were practice missions perfecting new skills using different navigation techniques and equipment; a few were "check rides," inflight practical examinations to show proficiency with that phase of navigation. We also monitored and gave one-to-one instruction in the simulators/trainers. Flight mission days were longer days for the navs than for the pilots who were truly just airborn "bus drivers" for those missions. We all flew together on one plane with 2 pilots, 3 instructors, and up to 9 students tracing a giant, horizontal "L" in the sky known as "Overland South." The route went toward Los Angeles but turned east over the Tehachapi Mtns heading east over the desert to Kingman, Arizona; then, we turned the old T-29 twin-engine, prop-plane around to retrace the route back to Sacramento! Nav students took turns being "Lead Student" giving the new heading directions to the pilots once they figured out where the aircraft was and which direction they needed to have the plane turned to get back on the course's centerline. The first missions in the program emphasized DR (dead reckoning) and map reading from the air. Then they learned to "fix" (identify their aircraft's precise known location on a map) using other sources of navigation: radarscope interpretation, day celestial with the sun and moon, night celestial with the stars, combined low-level map reading and radar fixing, and finally out over the Pacific far, far away from the apparent security of being able to land if there were engine trouble. Overwater navigation combined multiple navigation aids & techniques to get precise fix positions: LORAN, pressure-pattern, day & night celestial, and even radar.Well, that was Part I for 2 years! I kept very, very busy with work trying to do an excellent job as one of the very few 1st-Lieutenant instructor navs on the UNT faculty! (Nav School officials seemed to want some of us assigned "hot from the war zone" so it turned out to be an involuntary assignment which set my life's attachment to teaching and academia!) I did notice after the first year that the squadron had started to schedule me to fly exclusively as a Night Celestial flight instructor -- like on the flying schedule 4 nights a week for 3 months in a row! (14 - 16 hour duty days.)I finally asked the scheduler and flight commander how come I was flying at night so much? The answer was that most of the other instructors were taking night courses on-base to earn their Master's degrees in management from Golden Gate College. Since AF supported officers' wishes to continue into higher degree education, the squadron had chosen that way to help, and scheduled those instructor navs seeking off-duty Master's degrees for only the day schedule flights! (That left their evenings open to take graduate degree courses in base classrooms available for that purpose.)I went to the Base Education Office the very next day I was not flying at night to see what was available. Turned out, Chapman College (now Chapman University) was just starting a Master's program in counseling psychology, and I had been a psych major at the University of Denver! There was no guarantee that their program would actually gain enough students at Mather AFB in Sacramento to ever graduate students, but there was a chance (and it would get me off the night-flying schedule able to develop myself in an area of academic studies I loved). Besides, Chapman was fully accredited, and I could always transfer any coursework elsewhere if the program didn't continue on-base. SIGN ME UP, PROFESSOR!In fact, that did get me off the night-flying schedule to accommodate taking my classes. I began to fly more overwater daytime or day-night flights, and I became the Course Director for the academic Overwater Navigation course. I worked well over 40 hours a week for the AF, you can be sure (more like 60+). But I still got straight A's in my off-duty courses until a TDY (temporary duty) interrupted 2 required courses I had been commuting to Beale AFB in Marysville, CA to complete (2 hours driving each way). A communication glitch led the civilian instructor to file B's for me instead of Incompletes as would have been proper. I finished the course requirements by mail from San Antonio during off-duty hours but was never able to make contact to get my B's turned back into the A's I had really earned. I'm still unhappy about that because I had really earned a 3.9 GPA instead of a 3.7 but was not given credit for it. Please pardon me for giving myself such credit here; having flunked 2 courses in one 25-semester-hour Spring term as a Cadet at the Air Force Academy led to my being academically dismissed & stills weighs heavy on me. My Chapman instructor was a civilian who was still finishing his doctoral degree somewhere else and I lost track of how to contact him because of the intense workload at Mather which was to increase in Part II of that tour of duty. (See the next post.)
Laredo to Yosemite in a jam-packed VW Bug!Well, I got 15 more days added to my 45-day leave! Everyone built up LOTS of extra leave time since we couldn't take 30 days' worth during our year's tour-of-duty. With Raquel in the front seat and Baby Ivan in the back seat bassinette surrounded by lots of "stuff," I hunkered down in my VW's cockpit for about the sixth of many married-to-the-military, cross-country drives. My six-year-old, German-import, 4-banger did not have the pickup of the occasional AF truck I drove for off-duty volunteer work in Vietnam. Later, this little VW was to slow waaay down into 2nd & 1st gears as we climbed the long, upgrades into the back door of California -- Mono Lake was still a cold, high, isolated entry into the Yosemite descent. No border checks, either! Granted, I might have been thinking a little like I was still in Southeast Asia.Why THAT route? Well, we didn't have the Internet in those days so I couldn't research the entry rules for the State of California like now. In addition to our first suitcases ever packed together & lots of 1970-era disposable diapers, we had the VW packed with many, unopened liter bottles (only $2.40 each) of Bacardi passed from Mexico into Texas over the previous 50 days! We needn't have worried -- California was not going to add CA tax onto the 50-cent Texas stamp already paid for. California, the land of fruit & nuts, only wanted to check their borders to prevent the smuggling of fresh fruit from without to within. Hell, we were only "rum-runners" to them. (Not really, but I had heard sheriffs in the "dry" counties of TX and GA used to arrest people driving through for "bootlegging" doing the same thing! I didn't know about California and I didn't want any bottles broken on the spot of an arrest!)
Church Wedding Day!Raquel's father was going to keep us from sleeping together (I found out later) until after our Church wedding. The church wedding was in less than a week after I returned to Laredo, but it was too silly to do that considering that we had been married (civil ceremony) for over a YEAR, by then! Even MORE silly when considering we had a 6-month-old son! I think Raquel's mother, Margo, straightened the old man out. But, there was always a strange protectiveness over her on her father's part -- even after the Church wedding, he never could adjust to the fact that she was my WIFE and not his DAUGHTER anymore. Her family of origin had a terrible amount of interpersonal boundary problems anyway. More on this later, but it seems highly immature and hypocritical of him considering that Raquel later confirmed he had a mistress (actually a whole second family) on the Mexican side of the river. I guess it was like the story of the older crab criticizing the younger crab for walking sideways down the beach. For that matter, Raquel confirmed Margo's having developed a later affair with our son's godfather! Anyway, the Church wedding was a traditional Mexican wedding Mass in the newer Blessed Sacrament Church in Laredo. Quite a number of people attended. Her father got Raquel to the church noticeably later than was supposed to happen. Raquel was in a pretty wedding dress and I was in my "Class A" blue AF uniform with my combat decorations. Father Ed had us kiss an unusual number of times during the nuptial mass which added the local Mexican custom of exchanging gold coins (arras) and the double-rosary (lasso) tying us together. The reception afterwards was at Raquel's parents' home in their party room and large outdoor patio. I found out later that some of the guests included a couple of Raquel's old boyfriends -- I don't know just how many OTHER old boyfriends were there, but that strikes me now as a thoughtless or insulting stab-in-my-back!After the reception, we took off to La Posada Resort Motor Hotel for an "overnight honeymoon" right next to the large San Agustin Church plaza on the northern bank of the Rio Grande. Unknown to us, Margo's boss who owned La Posada had given us their most expensive room at the inn for our new wedding night together. We went to La Posada's penthouse nightclub, danced for awhile and had drinks. Then we got the key to our room at the front desk saying we had been told it was "complimentary" from Mrs. Sardinia, the owner. They knew exactly what we were talking about and gave us a key to a room with a number on it. We went looking for that number on a room door. And we looked and looked. Raquel was acting silly-happy and occasionally losing-balance-inebriated as the booze from the nightclub seemed to hit her. As I think of it now, I wonder if she had been given something extra by some of her friends -- I had never seen her this tipsy before (even in Hawaii where we had all the booze available we might have wanted & no one was around to monitor us). Maybe someone had given her a tranquilizer or something to keep her calm during the wedding. For that matter, I still wonder why her father couldn't get her to the church on time. I had just accepted everything with her and her family at face value back then -- Lord only knows what REALLY had gone on. I later learned that things were often NOT as they seemed in that family and their group of friends.Anyway, we went up and down the correct halls but couldn't find the room with the number on our key. The corner room was where that number SHOULD have been -- but it had a fancy hand-carved wooden door with an archway ensconced with "Cinco de Mayo." We went back down to the front desk and explained our problem. THEY explained that the Cinco de Mayo Room WAS the room for that key! (On the way back, I'm sure I griped to Raquel about their poor ergonomic design by not having the room number posted on the room door, itself.) ANYWAY, when we got there again and tried the key, it worked! It opened the door to the best 4-room suite in the whole fancy hotel! WOW! We only stayed the one night because we only had one night to spend without our son, but it was certainly fancy! Other than a 2-week road trip to Mexico City a couple of years later, it was the only night we would ever have completely to ourselves again in 20 years of marriage to follow!
2-Months' "Leave" in LaredoIn case you don't know the military term, "leave" means "vacation." But if you're military, you first have to get OFFICIAL leave from your duty station approved in writing by your chain of command. If they cannot afford to let you go on vacation (for ANY reason), you don't GO! Your spouse is uncontrolled by the military if she (he) is not in the military, and spouses can do whatever they want without being subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (or most Federal law unless they are on-base at the time of an offense.) It is a highly ironic twist of politics that any ex-spouse of a non-political military person would ever benefit by a seditious action which changed the direction of the law protecting U.S. uniformed military people by 180 degrees! Before 1982, the US Supreme Court said it was un-Constitutional to divide military retired pay -- Federal military retired pay was not subject to the jurisdiction of STATE courts (of which civil divorce courts are the lowest level of competence as well as status). [See USSC case: McCarty v. McCarty, 1981.] In 1982, now-ex-Congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-CO) sneaked a little bit of her own PORK legislation into the "must-pass" Defense budget at the last minute so that it became law without ever being discussed on the floor of the House or, even known about, by US Representatives who were voting. This changed the law suddenly in a most vicious manner &, for the first time ever, gave State divorce courts jurisdiction over military retired pay! To add more sneakiness to it, Schroeder had her porky, self-serving amendment "backdated" to take effect one day BEFORE the US Supreme Court decision in 1981 had officially encoded the proper ABSENCE of State Court jurisdiction over Federal military retired pay!Pardon my digression from the original topic of this post -- which was a happy reunion time in Laredo! It is a relevant digression though -- if I had thought there would be anything like this Pat Schroeder anti-military law ever passed to destroy my incipient family without ANY grounds (from the latter-day lawyer invention of "no-fault divorce"), I would have sought a civil divorce instead of the Church wedding "legitimizing" our pre-Vietnam civil "shotgun wedding" elopement! [Refer to Post #1 of this entire Blog]. However, the Church wedding proceeded about 5 days after I arrived -- I'll post more on it next time. Although no Catholic priest ever found time to give us the required Church pre-Cana (premarital) counseling, not even the two from her home parish who married us. I wonder why not but I will never be able to ask -- both (even the young one) died just a few years after performing our Nuptial Mass.
Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-jig!A loud resounding cheer quickly traversed the inside of our Freedom Bird, the moment our wheels got off the ground! We were "Homeward Bound" like Simon & Garfunkel sang about in those days! We were scheduled to stop in Guam and refuel, and then we would have enough fuel to make it the rest of the way to Tacoma, Washington and McChord AFB. THIS time in Guam, I did not buy the 2 magnums of champagne that I did on the way to R&R when we stopped to refuel at Anderson AFB. Sometime before leaving for the States, I must have called my Dad in Seattle (still flying for Boeing as a 747 Instructor Pilot) to see if they could pick me up & let me visit a couple of days. Dad knew his way to McChord Base Ops since that's where he was stationed when I first went to live with him when I was 8 1/2. Dad & my sisters were there -- stepmother was not. Don't know why but that carried its own message, eh? Two days was about all Stepmother Sadie and I could stand of each other. It took me many years more to conclude she really had some mental or emotional problems causing her to treat me the way she had for years. I guess I got a clue when I saw her later in an anonymous photo as a younger woman in a therapy group in a psychology text I had in graduate school. Paradoxically, she was a lifelong motivator for me to want to learn the science of how come people act & think the way they do. I think I understand more than she realizes but there is much guesswork since she seems to have kept many big secrets. We are vulnerable to others' lies of omission as well as commission. But the missing info, itself, turned out to be the best clue about the big picture of what was really wrong. I believe Sadie had much more in common with my ex-to-be than I knew at the time. But I later became able to tell when my wife was hiding or lying about something -- of course, it was way too late by that time to change anything.After two days of visiting (more with my sisters who were probably more concerned about me than anyone else in that household), I continued on "my journey home." Denver was next, where I reunited with my Dad's brothers & sisters & cousins, got my Volkswagen "bug" which had been up on blocks in my grandmother's garage for the last year, drove to a cousin's to put my stash of textbooks in the back seat, and got ready to drive to Laredo and meet my new family of adulthood! Luckily, those hundreds of pounds of books in the back seat were heavy enough to keep me from rolling the Volkswagen when my brakes went out totally at 40 mph, and I had to yank the wheel sharply to the left and do a "ground loop" in the middle of a busy 5-lane street in Denver! The VW did "a counterclockwise 180" and stopped cold, only popping one tire off the rim! Luckily, it was the only 10-second period of the next 3 minutes with no cars in the approaching lanes. Wouldn't it have been ironic if I had made it through a whole year flying hot combat in Vietnam only to come home and be killed after 3 days in a car accident? This is one of those times, I think I had a guardian angel helping me. (There were others.) PS: Note to Self -- when a car sits for a year on blocks, BLEED the bloody brakes for air bubbles! Duuh on me!
