1972 SEAD January-April Part 2: Activities

Posted on November 14, 2020 by Mike

This will probably be the most boring blog entry of all. Life at SEAD in the winter, especially as contrasted with SBNM, was not very interesting. In the three months that I was there, snow covered the ground every day. Much time needed to be killed, and few good weapons were available

I do not recall watching any television. There might have been a television somewhere in the barracks, but I don’t remember it. I did not have a radio or stereo. I remember seeing no movies. I don’t think that the base had a theater, and I had no transportation.

I did not locate even one person who knew how to play bridge.

I worked days, but nearly everyone else worked shifts. I had nights and weekends off, but I never was too certain who else would be off. So, there was no one with whom I regularly hung around. I spent no evenings in my room unless my roommate was working the swing shift. I stayed out of his way, even on weekends.

I don’t think that our table had gutters on the sides. Thus, bank shots were possible.

On the base; The center of activity at SEAD was the USO club. I played some ping pong there and more than a little eight-ball at the pool table. My favorite game was table shuffleboard, which I had never even seen before. The playing area was a flat piece of wood about two feet wide and maybe fifteen feet long. The smooth surface was varnished. Playerswas sprinkled particles silicone that everyone called “wax” to eliminate sticky spots on the wood. The table was supposed to be flat, but SEAD’s had a slight warp at one end.

Four weighted pucks were provided for each of two players. One set was red, one blue. Two two-person teams also worked. Pucks were slid from one end to the other, with each side alternating. As in deck shuffleboard, the idea was to knock opponents’ pucks off and leave yours in the scoring area.

It was a mindless game, but I enjoyed it. I got to be pretty good at it after a while.

Just like this, except we were all guys in our twenties, they only let us have one card each, we used plastic markers, and the prizes all sucked.

The other big attraction at the USO was the bingo games. They were held in the evening once or twice per week. There was no charge, but you could only play one card. The winner of each game took home a small item from the PX. A typical prize was a pair of socks or a tube of toothpaste. I played as often as I could, which was probably every time.

The competition was fierce. I never won anything, until the last evening game in April before my ETS. We played at least five or six games that evening, and, to my surprise and delight, I won every game, a feat no one had even come close to accomplishing.

I retired undefeated. In the ensuing forty-nine and a half years I have never even considered playing bingo again.

SEAD had one unique attraction, a herd of white deer¹ that lived within the security fences. They were visible throughout the base, even in the busiest areas. Some would boldly walk right up to people. Since they tended to breed, there were no natural predators, and no other animals competed for their food supply, their population sometimes was deemed excessive.

I had heard that the military had tried to address this issue by rounding up a few dozen of them—don’t ask me how. The soldiers loaded the deer onto trucks for release outside of the base. Reportedly nearly all the captured deer somehow made their way back into the base. Either they leapt over the fences or they snuck through the gate or a hole in the fence. The Reds had never been able to penetrate the base’s security, but the whites evidently had little difficulty.

At some point the brass decided that the best approach was to allow soldiers who had volunteered to participate to hunt the deer for one day of the year. For obvious reasons, I hesitate to call this the “Final Solution”. The ~~massacre~~ for 1971 occurred while I was there. I did not participate, but I saw a few guys dressed like Elmer Fudd and armed with M16s that were accurate to 300 meters. They were allowed to shoot only a limited number; it might have been as few as one per soldier.

I did not participate. Most of these deer were as friendly as the animals at a petting zoo. I don’t understand how anyone could enjoy slaughtering them.

The official chaplain for all of SEAD was a Catholic monk based in Seneca Falls. This was a very peculiar arrangement. Most chaplains were career Army officers. This one had fairly long curly black hair and a beard. I visualize him in sandals. However, there was always snow on the ground, and so that must be wrong. He definitely wore a brown monk’s robe. I am not sure which order he belonged to. I also don’t remember his name, but it was Italian and ended in “o”. He claimed that the Italian names that ended in “i” were from northern Italy’s wealthy families.

He was not a bit like the other Army chaplains. He often circulated around tables at lunch or supper and talked with guys. He enlisted me to conduct weekly religion classes for the local eighth graders. They did not like me very much. Their previous teacher had taken them bowling, and they wanted me to do the same. I put the kibosh on that ideas. I only had four or five weeks with them and a syllabus. Besides, I did not have the wherewithal to take them anywhere.

Off of the base: The chaplain invited me up to his house once. We listened to a few of his albums, including Bernstein’s Mass. Then he drove me back to the base. Don’t read too much into this. It was an innocent evening.

This is a Yelp map of the ten best bars near Romulus. The closest, #3, is the Golden Buck Restaurant in Ovid, which has a small bar area.

I left the base one other time. A bunch of us went to a bar in Romulus. It might have been the bar in Romulus. It featured a coin-operated pool table. People—some locals, some soldiers—were playing nine-ball on it. I watched, but I had no intention of spending money to lose at nine-ball. I could do that for free at SEAD.

I sipped a beer and sat around talking to some of the MPs. It killed an evening, which was the objective of any activity on SEAD in the winter. It was not enjoyable enough to merit a return trip.

On a Friday or Saturday evening my roommate, the weightlifting champion from Texas, and a couple of buddies from his platoon made a road trip to Geneva. They attended a mixer at one of the colleges there. I did not join them. When my roommate returned to the room a little after midnight, he was extremely irate. I asked him what the problem was. He explained that he had gotten into a scuffle with a group of five college guys. He was upset that his friends walked away from the encounter. As a result, he ended up fighting all five guys by himself.

I sympathized and said, “Wow, fighting five guys! Those are not good odds.”

“Oh, I handled them all right. I’m just mad at those MPs. What a pair of pussies!”

1. This is the largest herd of white deer in the world. They are not albinos. In 2020 the white deer are still thriving on the abandoned depot.

1967-1969 Part 4: Summer Jobs

Posted on November 11, 2020 by Mike

My introduction to the insurance workplace. Continue reading →

During my undergraduate years I worked all three summers at life insurance companies. I wore a suit every day. My dad had given me some ties that he no longer wore. Thus attired, I never acquired the valuable and character-building experience of flipping burgers or waiting tables.

My dad worked at Business Men’s Assurance (BMA) in Kansas City throughout his entire career. The company had a policy of offering summer jobs to the offspring of its executives who were attending college. My dad certainly did not start at BMA as an executive, but by the time that I was in college, he had risen to the level of vice-president. So, for a couple of years I took advantage of that situation.

1967: I think that I rode to BMA with my dad and his car pool.

I was assigned to work as a clerk in the company’s Policyholder Service Department. The area that I worked in dealt with policies that for one reason or another had been terminated. In some cases the amount of premiums paid in exceeded the benefit paid to the customer. Our group calculated this difference and initiated the refund or whatever other steps were indicated.

Our group consisted of about twenty women sitting in rows of desk and one female supervisor who had an office. I seem to remember that her name was Dorothy, but I could be wrong. My recollection is that she was BMA’s first female officer. She talked with me the first day, but we had few dealings thereafter.

The above is a programmer’s coding sheet. Our data sheets were similar.

The other twenty or so ladies in the section each had two items on their desks—a gigantic Friden (the first syllable is pronounced like “free”) mechanical calculator and a pad of eighty-column computer coding sheets. The work came to them in the shape of a policy folder with a small piece of paper clipped¹ to indicate the current status. The ladies then calculated the amount of the monetary element using actuarial formulae and filled out a coding sheet. Someone else checked the work and then forwarded it to the keypunch area, where another group of ladies converted the sheets into IBM cards that represented transactions for the mainframe to process.

There were no available desks in our section. Therefore, I had the dubious distinction of sitting in a row of desks just outside of the offices. The other three people in this row were the officers’ secretaries. At night my desk was used by a young man who telephoned customers whose policy had either lapsed or was about to lapse. I never met this fellow, but we exchanged notes left on our common desk. He told me about the person who previously sat in our desk. I had seen her name plate. It was a Greek name that ended in “itis”. The night shift guy called her “Mrs. Disease”. I told him what my name was and added the appellation “Now a name…soon a legend”². My communication with him was probably the most enjoyable aspect of the entire summer.

My role in the process described above involved calculating square roots, which I had learned how to do in Ms. Jancey’s math class at QHRS, as described here. Using the Friden this was a multi-step process. At least one of these steps required division, which was something to see and hear. The machine calculated each digit one at a time as its top section, which displayed the answer, chugged back and forth.

I had my own coding sheets. When I had filled one out I gave it to one of the ladies to check. She disliked the way that I made my U’s. To her they looked too much like V’s. She asked me to add a line to the right side of each U. I eventually made a habit, which I have perpetuated, of doing so. Subsequently, unfortunately, people have through the years often mistaken my U’s for Y’s.

There was not much work for me. I seldom did as much as twenty hours of actual work per week. I was told in the first week that this would probably be the case. When I did not have any real work to do, I was enjoined to “look busy”. This was, it was emphasized, especially important because the big bosses often came down to see the department head, whose office was not far from my desk. I was not allowed to bring outside reading material. For a while I tried to pretend to read the insufferably boring manuals that were on or in my desk. When that became unbearable, I amused myself by marking twenty-six columns on a piece of paper and counting the distribution of the letters in an article or pamphlet. For each letter I placed a tick mark in the appropriate column and totaled each column at the end of the article. Computing the final results killed time, but seldom did it yield any surprises.

I must have eaten lunch in the company cafeteria. I did not know anyone. I am pretty sure that I did not eat with my coworkers. Maybe I ate alone. It would not have bothered me.

To make extra money I also stayed late one or two evenings per week. The summer students were put to work looking on desktops, countertops, and filing cabinets for missing policy folders. We worked in pairs. One of us would “read” policy numbers on the folders; the other would “check” against the list of the missing in numerical order. If we found one, the checker recorded on the list where the folder was.

A startling event occurred one evening. A girl who was working in my vicinity received a delivery of a bouquet of flowers from her boyfriend. She just broke down and cried. This startled me because she never struck me as the emotional type. She had once laughed at my pronunciation of “secreted”, meaning “hidden”. I accented the second syllable. I didn’t say anything at the time, but I looked it up and discovered that I was right. Check it out here.

1968: In my second year at BMA I think that I rode in to BMA with Peter Closius, who was a year older than I was.³ I had never met him before, but his parents were good friends of my parents, and I knew his younger brother Phil from Boy Scouts. Peter treated the drive to work, most of which was on the three lanes of Ward Parkway, as a race. He made liberal use of all the lanes. We had many close calls but no collisions; I was often terrified.

Because I had passed part 1 of the actuarial exams, I was assigned to work for Reuben Johnson, who was the #2 man in the Actuarial Department. He kept me pretty well occupied with projects, most of which were mostly pedestrian. The one that I enjoyed the most was when he asked me to write a summary of the recent sales history of one of the company’s products. I discovered that one of the salesmen had discovered a loophole and had been taking advantage of intricacies of the system. The result was that the product had become unprofitable for the company. I don’t remember the details, but Reuben liked my writing style.

Oscar Klein died in 2020. His obituary is here.

I ate lunch with some of the actuaries. We wolfed down our food so that we could play a few hands of bridge afterwards. Sid Peacock and Oscar Klein, VP and Actuary, also played. The fourth player rotated. They liked playing with me because I played as fast as they did.

Sid and Oscar also played golf in the morning before work. They teed off at the crack of dawn, shouldered their own clubs, and jogged between shots.

Sandy Finsilver, whom I had met in Detroit on the trip with my dad in 1966 (related here), also worked at BMA during that summer. I had seen him once or twice in Ann Arbor, where he was attending the University of Michigan.

Sandy invited me to come with him to a party at his apartment complex. I brought some of my albums, including I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die by Country Joe and the Fish. Quite a few of the guys there who were in the Army Reserve or National Guard did not appreciate the vocal stylings of Joe McDonald, an avowed communist.

In 1967 the A’s were still playing at Municipal Stadium in Kansas City. In 1969 the Kansas City Royals, an expansion team, were scheduled to play there. In the summer of 1968 the Kansas City Spurs of the North American Soccer League took advantage of the absence of sports entertainment in KC. They not only played their regular-season games in Municipal Stadium; they also scheduled three friendlies against international opponents. On July 4, 1968, the great Brazilian club team, Santos, came to KC and played against the Spurs. My dad and I were among the 19,296 people in attendance. I can therefore brag that I got to watch Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé, at the height of his career.

Pelé was named the Interational Player of the Century in 1999.

I do not remember much about the game, which Santos won 4-1. I don’t think that Pelé scored a goal. However, at one point he took a shot from near midfield. It took off like a bullet, went over the goalie’s outstretched arms, hit the crossbar so hard that it shook visibly, and rebounded back into the field of play. I could not believe that anyone could kick a ball that hard.

That was the only professional soccer game that I ever witnessed. Over the years I have watched portions of a few games on television, but I never sat all the way through one. I did attend several games played by my four nieces and my nephew. Soccer is a fun game to play, but football and basketball have so much more action. It is not surprising to me that it has never achieved the degree of popularity in North America that it has everywhere else.

The Spurs had moved to KC from Chicago. They played for three seasons, 1968-70. They won the league title in 1969, but they did not qualify for the playoffs in 1970. The attendance in 1970 was less that 2,400 per game, which meant that there were over 33,000 empty seats. The team folded after that season.

1969: I don’t remember exactly why, but I was not allowed to work at BMA for a third summer. I wrote to Kansas City Life to see if they had summer positions in the actuarial department, and they offered me one. I recall that my letter included a facetious remark about my secretary being on vacation, and the actuary with whom I communicated thought that I might be serious.

My work at KC Life also was mostly mundane, but a few interesting things happened. The actuarial department had purchased from Burroughs what I would call a semi-programmable calculator.⁴ It was enormous for a calculator—perhaps three feet on a side and at least six inches high. It had a keyboard similar to that of a calculator—digits plus arithmetic symbols and, I think, a few others. Its output section was similar to that of an adding machine—a roll of paper a few inches wide. It had a third section for input and output of a strip of magnetic tape about an inch wide and six inches long. The tape was for storing the program. There was no limit to how complicated the program could be, as long as you could fit it into 64 bytes. Not 64 gig or 64 meg or 64K; 64 bytes.

I don’t remember what the actuaries actually used this machine for. Some actuarial calculations might have been time-consuming on a Friden. If five or six steps could be combined using this beast, it might have been valuable.

Morley Safer quizzes George Finn On 60 Minutes.

I wrote a program that took as input a date in the form MMDDYY. It spat out something that indicated what day of the week it was. I don’t remember whether it took into account the ten dates that didn’t exist when countries adopted the standards specified by Pope Gregory XIII. Probably not.

I know; George Finn, Rain Man, and other savants can do this in their head, but I can’t.

I worked with and lunched with two actuarial students named Todd and Tom. Once while involved in some work project I lost track of time and almost missed an appointment for lunch with the two T’s. At the last minute I rushed to join them because I had read Chaucer and knew full well that “Tom and Todd wait for no man.” I hope that you laughed or at least groaned. I have related this incident many times over the years, and no one has appreciated it.

Tom had played quarterback at Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, KS. He had injured his knee, but in no way did it limit his subsequent athletic activities. He informed us that his doctor had provided documentation of the injury and coached him on how to take the draft physical. He flunked it and was classified 4F, just like Trump.

On Monday morning, July 21, everyone in the actuarial department gathered around a portable television set and watched Neil Armstrong climb out of the capsule and take the first steps on the moon.

My time at the two life insurance companies did not excite me about the prospect of my putative actuarial career. The work was not awful, but there were other things that I would rather do.

1. Post-it notes were invented in 1968.

2. The Steve McQueen movie Nevada Smith was heavily advertised with this catch-phrase. I have never actually seen this film, but I remember the ads.

3. It is quite possible that I rode with Peter in 1967, not in 1968. Peter later owned and operated several companies in Fairfield County, CT. He died in 2003. His obituary is here.

4. I searched carefully on the Internet, but I could not find an image of this device.

1972 SEAD January-April Part 1: The Stupidity Intelligence Office

Posted on November 9, 2020 by Mike

Working at SEAD. Continue reading →

I worked in the Intelligence Office at SEAD for a little less than three months. I worked with the same five people for almost that entire time. I find it puzzling and a little irksome that in 2020 I can remember none of my co-workers’ names, and I also can recall very little that I personally did there.

I attribute this failure to three things.

Almost nothing even slightly memorable—especially compared to SBNM—happened in those three months. There were no incidents whatever.
My work was totally routine. I remember nothing but typing and routine filing.
I had a bad attitude. My thoughts kept gravitating toward my ETS day.

Here are the four people who were already working in the Intelligence Office when I arrived:

The Chief Intelligence Officer (CIO) was a civilian. I had almost no dealings with him. I have only a vague idea of what he did. I had no idea whether he worked for the CIA, the DIA, or some other acronym. He had a private office and lived off-base.
The Assistant Intelligence Officer (AIO) was an Army lieutenant. He was not a lifer. I worked with him a little and even socialized with him once. Nevertheless, I would not hazard a guess as to his job description. He also had an office and lived off-base.
The chief clerk as a middle-aged woman who had worked with the CIO for several years. I thought of her as my boss. She with us at her desk in a rather large area with three desks surrounded by shelves and filing cabinets, but no walls or dividers. She lived off-base.
A PFC had been working in the same area as a clerk-typist for a few months when I arrived. I am not sure whether he was classified as an MP or a clerk-typist, but he lived in the barracks. He and I got along very well, and we socialized together a little. I was a SP4, and so I outranked him, but even at the end of my time at SEAD he knew the job better than I did. So, if he said something needed to be done, I did not question it.

When I arrived at the Intelligence Office there was a backlog of paperwork. The quantity of reports, letters, and what-not was a little more than the two people in the big work area could easily handle. On the other hand, there was not enough work for three people. After I was there for a couple of weeks, the backlog had disappeared, and my PFC friend and I had plenty of spare time.

Towards the end of January the three of us in the big work area were joined by another soldier, a sergeant who was TDY¹, which meant that his was a temporary assignment. He did not know how to type, and so we had very little work for him. We also did not have a desk for him. So, he just sat on a chair in our workspace and twiddled his thumbs. I would have found his situation very stressful. My brain needs to be occupied. When I try to relax my thinking, I generally fall asleep. In my first summer job I had little to do, but I was required to look busy. It was a difficult situation for me. The link for the blog describing that summer will be linked here.

I think that the sergeant on TDY was still there when I ETSed in April. I never did find out what his next assignment was.

The soldiers in the office wore the winter version of the “Class A” uniform. This consisted of:

A dark green suit coat that had space for all of the badges, insignias, and medals.
A light tan long-sleeve dress shirt.
A plain black tie.
Trousers that were, I think, the same color as the coat.
Black dress socks.
Plain black shoes, which were not ideal for walking through the snow that was on the ground from the day that I arrived until the day that I left.
An olive drab “garrison” or “envelope” cap. This was the most practical headgear. In 1972 soldiers ALWAYS wore headgear outdoors and NEVER wore headgear inside. The garrison cap could be folded once and kept on the belt when indoors.
We also had a government-issue overcoat and raincoat. I never used the latter.

I am pretty sure that we hung up the coats somewhere as soon as we got to the office. I only had one suit coat, and I worked Monday-Friday. I don’t remember how we managed to have clean uniforms every day, but I cannot remember any problems. There must have been really good laundry service.

The attention of the officers seemed to be primarily directed toward convoys. Every so often the people in charge of handling the materials stored at the depot would load up some trucks with the goods that were needed at another post in the eastern U.S. The Intelligence office would presumably designate the route and the timing of the delivery. MPs served as armed guards, which was considered by most as a much more interesting assignment than driving around in the snow at SEAD.

Nobody from the MP Company—or anywhere else—ever asked me what we did at the Intelligence Office. If anyone had asked, I would have replied that I had no idea what the officers did. My job was simply to type and file forms.

What they did ask me about was a civilian employed in the Personnel Office, which occupied the other half of the building in which we worked. She was considered—by far—the hottest female on the base and, I venture to say, the hottest in this area of the country. Several guys manufactured various excuses to walk down to our building to ogle her. The MP’s all worked shifts, which meant that everyone in the company had off-duty time available during business hours every day to devote to visits to the Personnel Office. Quite a few made a habit of it, but no one made any headway.

My co-workers and I had some mundane dealings with the Personnel Office. For example, we sometimes borrowed or lent some supplies. Our involvement with this lady, who was always personable, convinced us that she had no interest in the MPs.

This is a rough schematic of the Intelligence Office. The Personnel Office and the lobby would be below the drawing.

The first day that I arrived at my new workspace I noticed one peculiar thing, but I did not mention it until I was fully trained, and we had eliminated the backlog of paperwork. Appended to one of the walls near the doors to the two offices was a sign that read “Intelligence Office”. I proposed to the PFC that we erect by the door that everyone always used to get to our work area a similar sign that indicated that our area was the “Stupidity Office”. We designed, created, and posted a rather realistic sign. The CIO and AIO got a chuckle out of this, but, needless to say, they made us take it down.

The 201 files for all of the military personnel on the base were stored in our office. I don’t know why; we never consulted them. They contained everyone’s test scores, deployment history, and lots of other things. I was often bored, and I occasionally looked through them. I was more curious about the scores on the Language Aptitude Test, which I had taken at Fort Polk in October, as described here. I scored 73 points on that test. In all of the folders that we had I did not find any other score above 10.

I was also interested in the GT scores. I had heard that the minimum score for assignment to the MP MOS was 90. Only one person in the 295th MP Company had a score that low, and it was the the highest-ranking NCO on the base, Top, our First Sergeant. I was surprised to find that no one had a higher score than mine. At least one guy in E-10-4, our AIT company, scored higher.

The most interesting 201 file of all belonged to Capt. D’Aprix. It had page after page referring to an incident that happened a few years earlier at some other post. Evidently it was all worked out in the end; his assignment at SEAD had entailed a lot of responsibility at a top-secret installation. The exact disposition of the investigation was not detailed in the folder. I never mentioned a word about this to anyone.

The lieutenant in the Intelligence Office invited me to his (and his wife’s) house for supper once. I don’t know what the occasion was. He was an enthusiastic audiophile. He played some music on his reel-to-reel tape player. I asked if the sound quality was a good as on vinyl records. He said that it was “probably better”. It probably was better after the record had been played a large number of times. I never have been able to understand how analog recording works under any circumstance.

I don’t remember what kind of music he preferred.

I hung around some with my co-worker, the PC. He was the first classical music aficionado that I had encountered in the Army. He played some of his Peter Schickele records for me. I became a pretty big fan. I subsequently purchased a couple of PDQ Bach albums. While I was isolating during the pandemic in 2020, I listened to the opera The Abduction of Figaro on YouTube (available here) while walking on my treadmill on rainy days.

1. TDY stands for Temporary Duty. No one knows what the “Y’ designates.

1972 January: Transition to Seneca Army Depot

Posted on November 6, 2020 by Mike

Getting to and learning about SEAD. Continue reading →

My recollections of the period between my departure from SBNM and my arrival at SEAD are very sketchy. Someone on the base in Albuquerque must have helped with the travel arrangements. I am pretty certain that I did not bring my golf clubs, my stereo and speakers, my album collection, and other bulky items to SEAD. So, they must have been shipped to my parents in Leawood, KS. I assume that before I left I was also debriefed, which is the Army’s way of saying that I was warned me not to tell any communists about any of the mission-critical classified information and activities that I saw at SBNM.¹

I flew from the Sunport to KC, spent a few days with my family, and then on January 10 I flew to Rochester, NY, which is as close as you can get to SEAD using commercial aircraft. I don’t remember any of that.

The one thing that I clearly remember is that I was handed my own personnel file (called a 201) and told to hand it over when I arrived at my new post. This amazed me. If they let me do this, it seemed likely that each person who was relocated must have been entrusted with his own 201 file. I immediately looked through mine to find the letter of commendation from the base commander prainsing the heroic acts performed by me and my clipboard during the harrowing Siege of Sandia Base that is described here. I found it. What if there had been a letter of reprimand? I could conceivably have received one for my run-in with Capt. Creedon or my attire at the base EM committee meetings (both described here). Could I have just removed derogatory items at will? I don’t see why not. Computerized records were not yet ubiquitous. Paper still ruled.

The instructions on my orders indicated that after my plane landed I should board a bus for Canandaigua, NY. When I arrived at the bus station there, I was still thirty miles or so away from SEAD, which is located near Romulus, a bump in the road between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake. I have no clear recollection as to how I made the last leg of the journey. I remember that there was no snow on the ground as we approached the base, but it had started to snow before I exited from the bus, van, car, or truck that brought me. Soon it was coming down hard. Incidentally there was snow on the ground all the way to the day that I left, April 10.

You can just drive in now, but the barriers were always down when SEAD was still operational. At least two MPs with rifles manned the main gate.

I remember that the main gate seemed to have a much more serious security detail than at SBNM. The MPs were armed with M16s, and they stopped every vehicle. There were three sets of fences; one was topped by rows of barbed wire and one electrified. At SBNM we ordinarily just waved everyone in.

Someone showed me to my room. The barracks were not nearly as opulent as the ones at SBNM. Every room had two occupants. My roommate was from Texas. I don’t remember his name—in fact, I only remember the name of one person whom I encountered in my three months at SEAD. This failing astounds me. I usually remember names.

He was a little shorter (in height, not less time remaining) than I was, but he was powerfully built. I later learned that he was the high school state champion weightlifter in his weight class. He had a temper, too. I gave him a wide berth.

I asked him if they had regular room inspections. He said that there were inspections, but they were not very common. So, I just piled all my stuff in my locker and locked it. I didn’t make my bed every morning either. My lack of standards for orderliness became a sore point with him. He might have resented the fact that I was so short (in the Army sense), too.

The next morning I was interviewed by a female² civilian in the MP office. This was something of a surprise to me. SEAD had a lot of civilian employees. SBNM did too, but there they almost all worked for Sandia Labs doing God knows what. Civilians at SEAD were hired for jobs that I would have expected military personnel to do at SBNM.

I handed my personnel folder to the lady who was interviewing me. She was shocked and disgusted when she discovered that I only had eighty-eight days before I ETSed. “April 10! What are we supposed to do with you for less than three months?” I had no answer. They decided to assign me to help with paperwork at the Intelligence Office, which required a walk of a block or two from the barracks. I never worked even one day as an MP at SEAD, but I still stayed in the MP barracks.

The commanding officer of the 295th MP company was Capt. D’Aprix. He gave a security briefing to a handful of newbies. Some might have been civilians. Some might have come from SBNM.

The first sergeant of the company (always called “Top”) may also have been there. If he said anything, it did not impress me enough to stay in my memory.

What could graduates of this institution be working on at SEAD?

Capt. D’Aprix emphasized that security was everyone’s responsibility at SEAD. A “depot” in military terminology is a place to store something. He said that “special” weapons were stored there. The actual nature of the weapons was—and still is!—highly classified, and we were not allowed to disclose what kind they were. He did not mention it, but the units of the soldiers who worked on SEAD were not classified. All the MPs and all the technicians who maintained the weapons wore patches with mushroom clouds on their sleeves identifying them as belonging to the Defense Nuclear Agency. The technicians all came from SBNM, an open base. The building in which they were trained displayed the words “DEFENSE NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCHOOL” in letters that were more than a foot high. Anyone who could not figure out what kind of weapons were in the depot was too stupid to be dangerous.

We were also told to be on the lookout for card-carrying communists and other shady characters who were interested in what went on at SEAD. It was not feasible for all areas to be guarded all the time. Therefore, the MPs patrolled the entire base (or at least the part within the fences), and the ever-changing routes that they employed were TOP SECRET. So, if we were in a bar or other establishment in one of the neighboring towns, we needed to keep our guard up and our mouths shut.

I was there in the winter. Unless a relative has died, absolutely no one goes to this part of the Finger Lakes in the winter. I guarantee that if any unfamiliar people appeared in Romulus (population about 4,000), they would be noticed by everyone immediately. I suspected as much even on that first day, but I later became certain.

I found the following interesting write-up at https://www.senecawhitedeer.org/index.cfm?Page=Military%20History.

This is a recent satellite image of the entire SEAD complex, which has pretty much gone to SEED since the Army abandoned it in 2000.

In the mid 1950s the north end of the Depot property was transformed into a special weapons area. These special weapons areas (19 in total in the United States) were designated as “Qs”. Becoming a Q area represented the highest security levels known at that time because their mission was to house atomic weapons which indeed were very special weapons.

The Q was built over two years and consisted of about one square mile of area, eventually resulting in 64 igloos, some of them atomic bomb blast resistant. The Q had its own security force, specially trained Military Police who patrolled the Q 24 hours a day. The Q area had a triple wall fence surrounding it, with the middle fence being electrified at 4800 volts. No one was allowed inside the Q without a heavily armed MP escort.

Although the Army still does not acknowledge that storage of atomic weapons occurred within the Seneca Depot, other documents found by SWD suggest that the Seneca Army Depot was the US Army’s largest arsenal of atomic weapons and the second largest atomic stockpile in the entire United States. Besides atomic bombs, the Depot also housed atomic artillery shells for Atomic Annie, a long range artillery gun only fired once in Nevada.

Today, the Q is peaceful once again, this time being leased by Finger Lakes Technologies Group, as it recycles some of the igloos for secure document storage.

I never heard anyone talk about the Q area. I had no idea that there was anything else on the base besides the part that we patrolled.

After the base closed in 2000, a group of locals developed really ambitious plans to make it profitable, but very little came of it. The place is now a veritable wasteland.

Not in this man’s army.

1. In point of fact, the only thing that I did or saw that required a clearance was the night that I stood watch on Manzano Base. The irony is that at that time my clearance had not yet arrived. I described this incident here.

2. There were no female MPs in the Army in my day. This was the only part of the first half of the movie Stripes that I found outrageously discordant with my experience. Women were, in fact, allowed to become MPs in 1975, and the movie was made in 1981. So, I guess that inclusion of the MP babes was vaguely plausible. That they were attracted to two middle-aged (Bill Murray was 31 at the time, and Harold Ramis was 37) layabouts is questionable.

However, the entire second half of the film featuring the “Urban Assault Vehicle” was, of course, preposterous.

1971 KAFB July-December Part 2: Working with Zoomers

Posted on November 4, 2020 by Mike

The Air Force approach to policing. Continue reading →

The approach of the Air Force to policing was substantially different from what the MPs were accustomed to. The Army officers and sergeants interfered much less in the day-to-day operations of the police desk and the guys on patrol. In fact, in my experience they hardly wer involved at all. On the other hand, at four different levels the Air Force brass were much more hands-on. Sometimes they imposed discipline in important areas, but sometimes they were just disruptive.

Our flight leader, Tech Sergeant Budick sometimes drove around in the patrol supervisor’s car. On midnight shifts he often came in to talk with Dick Madden about all kinds of subjects, mostly unrelated to work. For example, we learned what a great chess player his son was. “He can see several moves in advance!”
Sgt. Hungate, the top NCO in the Law Enforcement office (or whatever the Zoomers called it), often visited the police desk. He made certain that we all knew where the SOPs, checklists of tasks to be accomplished in the event of unusual but important circumstances, were, and he encouraged us to familiarize ourselves with them. The SOPs were contained in a big binder behind the police desk. He also asked a lot of questions.
Sgt. Hungate’s boss, Capt. Creedon, was not around as often, but he was a stickler for details. I had one unpleasant run-in with him just before I departed.
The base commander, a colonel whose name escapes me, liked to drive around in his big Jeep. He always had the onboard radio set to the police band. If something sounded untoward, he would demand to know the details. He even made surprise visits to the police headquarters.

Most MPs found this extra attention annoying, but Russ Eakle seemed to like the new environment. His new partner, whose last name was Fowler, somehow had wangled a transfer into the MP Company. My recollection is that he was formerly a medic, but I may be wrong. I never heard if Fowler called Eakle “Duke” or not.

The Duke appeared in Big Jake in 1970. Maybe it inspired Russ Eakle.

The Duke appeared in Big Jake in 1970. Maybe this inspired Russ Eakle.

One day Russ really surprised me. He approached me in the barracks and told me that he wanted to purchase a motorcycle. Evidently he could not afford to pay cash for it. He said that a bank had told him that it would loan him the money, but he needed someone who was over 21 to co-sign the loan. I might have done this if (1) I did not already know that soon we both were going to be transferred to new posts; (2) I did not already know that I would ETS within a year, and Russ would not; and (3) Someone other than Russ Eakle was doing the asking. Russ was a little put out that I turned him down. Surely I was not the first person whom he asked, was I?

One night I was working the police desk. I am pretty sure that it was early in a midnight shift, but it might have been late in a swing shift. Sgt. Hungate walked up to the desk, which was about five feet high. Dick Madden, Dean Ahrendt, and I were sitting behind the desk. We were sitting on wheeled chairs on a platform raised a foot or so above where Sgt. Hungate was standing. So, we could only see his bald head. From there he could see all three of us, but if he took a step or two back we would be invisible to him.

“10-33, 10-33, 10-37.”

I was sitting nearest the microphone for the radio. Sgt. Hungate told me to issue the code that the station was under duress. At that time I knew the code well. I think that it was 10-37, but I might be wrong. I also knew the code for “all cars”, which I think was 10-33. So, I said, deliberately and loudly “10-33, 10-33, 10-37. I say again: 10-37.” Military personnel always say “say again” rather than “repeat”.

Sgt. Hungate critiqued my delivery. He had wanted me to issue the code in a nonchalant manner. I was aware of his intention, but he did not order me to announce it that way. I, of course, was worried that during such a dull period all the guys on patrol might be “cooping”, i.e., napping or goofing off. He would not be happy with them if no one responded.

What? No Snickers?

Hungate then told us to hide under our work table so that no one could see us without coming behind the police desk. He also ordered us not to make a sound. He also hid in a nearby office. Marshall Anderson, who was patrolling by himself¹, broke the radio silence. “Kirtland Police, Police 9, 10-7. I need a candy bar.” “Kirtland Police” was the police desk. Marshall’s vehicle was “Police 9”. “10-7” was a request for a break.

Sgt. Hungate indicate that we should not respond. The desk ALWAYS responded. Guys on patrol were not allowed to take a break without approval from the desk. So, Marshall should have stayed in his truck in the parking lot and asked for a break again.

Instead, Marshall moseyed into the station, came into the area surrounding the police desk. and put his chin over the top of the desk. He could not see us. Then he called out “Hello!” a few times, shrugged, went into the break room, bought his candy bar, and strolled back to his truck in the parking lot.

Another couple of minutes passed. Russ Eakle, who was on patrol with SP5 Fowler, could be heard on the radio. “Kirtland Police, Police 13, say again the last transmission.” We stayed hidden and silent.

Shortly thereafter, Eakle and Fowler entered the station with their weapons drawn. My heart skipped a beat. This was the first (and only) time that I was around any MP with his hand-cannon removed the holster. E&F looked over the top and saw that no one was visible, but they did not come behind the desk. They heard a noise from upstairs, where the captain was working late. We could hear the two of them rapidly ascending the stairs. Hungate called out to them before they got very far, but he was facing two .45’s pointed at him while he explained the exercise.

I could think of many ways that this episode could have ended really badly. I was very relieved when those pistols went back in the holsters. I imagine that someone got chewed out over it, but I don’t remember ever hearing about it again.

That SOP binder was very useful on a couple of occasions. The first time was when Dean or Dick took a call from the manager at the commissary, who reported that someone had phoned him to warn that a bomb had been planted somewhere in the store. We dutifully executed the prescribed steps in order. The most important assignment was to cordon off the area around the commissary and evacuate everyone from the area. I don’t remember precisely how we managed to do this. We usually only had three cars on patrol. Maybe guys from the traffic area were shanghaied from the Day Room to help out. They were free most of the day.

Meanwhile we called the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) Team. It was their job to find the devices, if any, to remove them, and to dispose of them safely. Our primary responsibility was to keep everyone out of the danger area until EOD declared the area safe.

The commissary was the size of a major supermarket. It took the EOD team more than an hour to search it thoroughly. They certainly did not want to hear a BOOM after they had declared the area clear. During that time traffic in one of the busiest parts of the base was seriously disrupted. Eventually, however, EOD told us that it was OK to let people back in, and we relayed the message to the guys on patrol.

A few minutes after the dust had settled, a red-faced Sgt. Hungate stormed up to the desk and demanded to know why we had failed to notify the base commander of this incident. Dick showed him the SOP for a bomb scare and pointed out that nowhere did it tell us to contact the base commander. Hungate examined the SOP for himself. We could see that his jaw was tightly clinched as he took the binder away and stomped up the stairs to his office. He returned it later with a revised list of steps for responding to a bomb scare.

As luck would have it, when, a few weeks later, a second threat was received, our flight was again on duty when it occurred. We followed all the revised procedures in our SOP binder. We sent the patrols to cordon off the BX, which was the size of a K-Mart. Once again the EOD team searched the store, found nothing, and issued the all-clear. This time nobody yelled at us.

Someone might have searched for the perpetrators of these threats, but it was not the patrols. This sort of thing was, as they say in the military, “above our pay-grade”. Either they caught whoever made the threat, or he/she/they was no longer entertained by the sight of us holding up traffic for several hours. There were no further threats while I was in Albuquerque.

The thought occurred to me that if I were planning a major crime on KAFB, I would have someone phone in a bomb threat first. We devoted 100 percent of available police resources to keeping people away from the threatened area. Nowhere in our SOPs did it say what we should do if a major crime was committed while the cops were all deployed to prevent angry motorists from entering thee threatened zone.

Air Force One was our imaginary guest.

Some time later, probably in November or December, we received word that an Inspector General was coming to the base for several days of inspections. Part of that effort would be an assessment of how security forces (us) would respond to unusual situations.

This time our flight was working the swing shift. The day shift had been required to deal with a make-believe landing of Air Force One at the Kirtland air strip. We figured that we were probably off-the-hook, but almost as soon as we sat down, the phone rang. I answered it. It was an unidentified guy claiming to have placed a bomb in the BX. I got as much information from him as I could before he hung up on me. We then executed our instructions as before. I think that we probably helped the base get good grades on the inspection. There was only one chance in sixteen that the same flight would handle all three situations, but it happened to us.

Two other memorable events occurred on our shift during the Air Force period. The first should have been routine. It was a very windy night. The alarms at the bank, the commissary, and the BX all sounded. Since no one was working at the time, they were presumably set off by detectors of sound or motion. It was unusual for all three alarms to sound simultaneously, but we had responded to a fairly large number of such incidents before the Air Force took charge. The MPs walked around the building to make sure that there were no intruders. Then we called someone to reset the alarms.

On this occasion we sent Sam Noce, a Zoomer with considerable experience, and his MP partner to check out the bank. Evidently his experience on the west side of the base did not include the wind setting off alarms. Maybe none of those buildings had sound/motion detectors. In any case, when they arrived at the bank, Sam drew his .38 and crept around the edge of the building with his pistol in the ready position. We had to tell him that although we always checked out the alarms, on windy nights the chance of false positives was close to 100 percent. So, the best strategy is to check thoroughly and, if anything is amiss, call for backup.

The other event occurred at the jail on the old Kirtland side. They had a prisoner, an AWOL I think. Somehow, the jailer, who was a good friend of both Dick and Dean, had made some mistake that allowed the guy to run away. After our shift was over we drove around the base looking for the fugitive, but we never spotted him. I don’t remember whether the jailer got in trouble or not.

There were also a few incidents that did not relate to work. The new base commander organized a committee of enlisted (i.e., ranking below an NCO) personnel. Each unit was represented at their meetings by one person. Somehow, I was chosen to represent the MPs at these gatherings.

It was a meaningless role; the committee had no power. I don’t know what the meetings were supposed to accomplish; I don’t even remember anything that we discussed. The committee met during normal work hours. I was off-duty, and I was not about to don my costume for one of these meetings. So, I showed up in a golf shirt, flared pants, and my cowboy boots. By then I also owned a cowboy hat that I might have also worn. Everybody else was wearing their “Class A’s”. The base commander scowled at me, but he did not say anything.

By December all of the MPs had been notified of their new duty assignments, and the draftees were told their new ETS dates. I was assigned to Seneca Army Depot, abbreviated SEAD, which was situated between two of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. I was ordered to arrive on January 10. My new ETS date was April 10. So, I would be spending the rest of the winter in one of the snowiest parts of the country.

Almost everyone else was assigned to either Sierra Army Depot (SIAD) in California or Savanna Army Depot (SAAD) in Illinois. Most of my close friends went to Savanna. Despite the fact that I lived closer to SAAD than any of them and farther from SEAD than any of them, I was chosen for SEAD. I might have been the only guy from SBNM who was assigned to SEAD.

One day in December after I had finished working the day shift Lt. Anderson invited me into my office and delivered an encomium on the life of an Air Force officer. I was very short and was eager to return to civilian life. He then asked me if I was a college graduate. I admitted as much. When asked me what I majored I told him “Math”, and he quickly said, “Oh, forget about it. They would make you work with computers.”

The Air Force (or maybe just my flight) had an interesting policy for the holiday season. We fielded only a skeleton crew for both Christmas and New Years. The married guys, one of whom one was Dick Madden, all got Christmas off, whereas the unmarried guys, including Dean and me, all got New Years off. Therefore, Dean and I had to work the day shift on Christmas. I missed perhaps the greatest NFL game of all time, the two-overtime victory by Miami over the Chiefs, who were the defending Super Bowl champions. In KC this was known as the “Ed Podolak game”. He contributed a playoff-record 350 total yards: 85 rushing, 110 receiving, and an incredible 155 on returns, but it was not enough.²

On New Years my flight was working mids. I celebrated my day off by sleeping. I don’t know what Dean did.

Yes, I know, but I only drove the danged thing ten yards!

One of my least pleasant memories of the ten months in Albuquerque occurred around this time. One of the guys had parked one of the trucks in the wrong place. I needed to move it to a different spot about ten yards away. There were a couple of other parked vehicles, but no one else was driving in the parking lot, which had space for at least twenty vehicles. Capt. Creedon saw me execute this fifteen-second maneuver and somehow noticed that I did not fasten the seatbelt before I did it.

He called me into his office and yelled at me for the better part of an hour. I suppose that he could tell from my body language that I did not take this situation seriously, but I don’t think he understood why. He probably thought that I was not lying or at least exaggerating when I claimed that I was always conscientious about wearing a seat belt when driving. In fact, that was absolutely the only time that I had EVER failed to wear a seat belt while driving. I had even persuaded both of my parents to buckle up.

I just knew that I only had to put up with this kind of Mickey Mouse stuff for only a few more months, and the knowledge revealed itself as a smug look on my face.

1. This certainly indicated that it was a midnight shift. Marshall was well known as a space cadet. We did not trust him to patrol by himself during business hours.

2. Thus ending the first of fifty years of frustration for fans of the KC Chiefs.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Monthly Archives: November 2020

1972 SEAD January-April Part 2: Activities

1967-1969 Part 4: Summer Jobs

1972 SEAD January-April Part 1: The Stupidity Intelligence Office

1972 January: Transition to Seneca Army Depot

1971 KAFB July-December Part 2: Working with Zoomers