Young Sergeant Huckins served a total of three years, ten months, and twenty-nine days, before being honorably discharged at 10:00 a.m. on the 14 of August, 1981, a day he recalls as having been cloudless and bright.
"Oh, you civilians make me gag," the recruiter told me. "Look,
do you want to be a fireman? A policeman? It says here that your test scores
qualify you to be a security policeman." His voice I should have remembered
as the one used-car dealers employed when they were trying to get my dad
to buy that '75 Valiant.
"Yes, a policeman. That sounds good, sure. What's a policeman do on
an Air Force base?" I asked with earnest curiosity.
"The same thing they do downtown," he said flatly.
So I signed. I would enter the military, on the delayed entry program during
September 1977, and after basic training I would train as a Law Enforcement
Specialist. As my pen left the paper a question came to mind that I didn't
have the courage to ask. What does a policeman do downtown?
It was too late. I had passed all my physical examinations. My background
was sufficiently innocent. It was done. I was given the enlistment contract
and sent on my way with instructions to report to my recruiting station
in September and to stay out of trouble. (I would later learn that the score
required to be a security policeman, 65, was the lowest score you could
get. I had a 95, the highest possible score.)
I went back to the hotel where they had put us up the night before and called
my parents. I was in, I told them, and while I was on the phone the recruiter
came by and told me it was snowing so hard that we would be held over another
night. We wouldn't be home until the next day.
The recruiter told us that dinner and drinks were on him. I told him I was
only seventeen.
"You're in the service, now, boy," he said. His smile was the
same smile that the used-car dealer had flashed when my father bought that
Valiant. "There's no drinking age in the service."
********************************************************
In the Air Force processing center, in the airport, and on the plane, I
began to see in the eyes of my fellow recruits a sense of fear, a sense
of "Uh-oh, what have I done?" It was around that fear where what
passed for friendships began. I met Anthony Anthony, and John Augustus (whose
father was career Air Force), Peter Tischler, and James Taylor, the first
black person I had ever spoken with. He was quite nice.
"You know Taylor," I said to him, "you're all right for a
black guy."
I now know that what I said was hopelessly stupid, and that if Taylor had
wanted to knock the snot out of me he would have been justified. Miraculously,
he didn't. He saw that I was being genuine I think, and that what I'd really
meant was, "You know, Taylor, all those rednecks in New Hampshire are
wrong." I don't know how he knew, but I have always been thankful that
he did.
************************************************
"Now I'm going to hand out a postcard," said Sergeant Fireman.
"On it you are going to write to whoever loves you most and tell them
you're fine and that you love it here and that you'll write again soon.
Any questions about that?"
There were none.
After all the briefings were over he let us go to bed. It was about 3:00
a.m. Fireman told us we could sleep until eleven in the morning, not because
he wanted to let us, but because he was forced to give us eight hours of
sleep. We went to bed and many prayed. Many prayed who had never done so
before. Many cried.
In the morning we were gently awakened by another man in uniform who said,
"You boys look tired. I'm sorry to have disturbed you. Why don't I
pull the shades down and you all can go back to sleep?" He pulled down
the shades and we hopped back into our bunks.
Five minutes later Fireman made his entrance. I was awake and I could see
his face catch fire as he looked into the bays and saw us in bed. He grabbed
a yardstick and a metal waste basket and used one to beat the other until
the yardstick broke, all the while yelling and running around tipping people
out of their bunks.
"Who said you could sleep this late? Get out of those beds. Now! Who
said you could sleep this late? Someone tell me." But no one was about
to say anything to this man.
We were confused. I later learned that the early days of basic training
are not unlike initiations into religious cults. Both nurture confusion.
Both want you to be searching for a leader. Both make you move around in
the dark. Both alter your schedule. Both take your clothes and cut your
hair. Then one person rises from the mayhem who consistently gives you instructions
that make sense. So it was. They used a few red herrings to disorient us,
and then Fireman rose up as the man we would follow.
***********************************************
There was Bill Kneeland. We were on the firing range, becoming familiar
with the M-16 rifle when Bill's gun jammed. Bill stood right up and whipped
the barrel of his weapon right into the face of the range master and was
about to explain something about a faulty ejector when the range master
shot him in the thigh with a .38. Seems the range master thought Bill had
gone berserk and, needing to ensure the safety of all those in his charge,
simply neutralized what he perceived to be a threat to that safety, or at
least that's what the report said. Some of us visited Bill in the hospital
and saw the report. It was part of the court martial initiated against him.
**********************************************************
I arrived at the Anchorage International Airport at about two in the
afternoon on the 6th of January, only two weeks after the winter solstice,
the point at which there is very little daylight. The closer you travel
to the Arctic circle, the less light there is. At two it was getting dark.
Dark. The street lights were on at two.
This did not bode well for a warm welcome. The cab driver took me through
the front gate, and it was a long time before we even saw the first buildings
on the base. This was a big place. You could jog the entire length of my
old base in about eight minutes. This place was about the size of Delaware.
I was escorted to the administrative offices of the 21st Security Police
Squadron. There they checked me in, took my orders, assigned me to a flight,
and told me to be at work at 3 p.m. on Wednesday. Since it was Monday, I
thought I'd explore. In two days all I was able to find were the post office,
the base exchange and the dining hall.
I woke up on what I thought was Wednesday morning at six. My watch couldn't
tell me a.m. or p.m., and I didn't see anybody around. I didn't want to
knock on anyone's door and ask, so I had to put on my clothes and walk to
the pay phone and call information and ask the operator if she could tell
me what time it was. I asked her if she meant a.m. or p.m., and just to
be sure, I went to the newspaper box and put in a quarter and checked out
the date. I had that frantic feeling that compels you forward, even when
you're not quite awake. I was stumbling in the snow. I was afraid I might
have missed my first day of work already. I hadn't. It was morning in Alaska.
I went to the dining hall for breakfast and than went back to my dorm and
sat to wait for my shift to begin. That afternoon I started work on "C"
flight.
*******************************************************
The most exciting thing that I did in the service was working with the Secret
Service protecting President Carter. Carter wanted to make most of Alaska
a national reserve, which would have meant that there could be no further
exploration for fuel or other non-renewable resources, and it also would
have prohibited the Native Americans from living on the land and using it
the way they had been for centuries. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted
the President's hide, and it was the responsibility of the Secret Service
to see that Carter got in and out of Alaska with all of that intact.
The agents in charge asked the squadron commander for about twenty people
whose backgrounds were beyond reproach. I don't know how it happened, but
as one of the twenty they chose me. They brought us into a briefing room,
posted an armed guard at the door, and told us all they thought we needed
to know about arrival and departure times, and what we needed to guard.
The agent in charge of the briefing ended with, "We'd much rather have
you shoot somebody who doesn't need to be shot, than to not shoot somebody
who does. Do you understand?"
We all understood and nodded stupidly, struck dumb with the license we had
just been issued. That order was my first clue that the Secret Service doesn't
operate by the same rules as everybody else. However, when you think about
the nature of presidential security, you begin to see why.
An agent's job is to either put himself in the path of an assailant's bullet
or to subdue that assailant. They aren't authorized to kill him or her,
the rationale being that if the suspect is dead, there is no way of finding
out if the assassination attempt is the work of a lone wolf, or if the assassin
is the operative of some massive plot. I think these policies came into
being after Ruby snuffed Oswald.
As a result, the Service spared no expense in insuring the President's safety.
When Carter arrived, the local papers carried the news that he had reserved
the entire top floor of the Anchorage Hilton for himself and his staff.
That was partly true. After the president landed on base we were told he
was hurriedly rushed to his car and swiftly taken to his hotel. Actually,
it was an impostor. The President spent the night on base under heavy guard,
including canine patrols.
*****************************************************************
When Carter's helicopter landed, the agents and those assigned to work with
them fell into place. The people in charge of security of the President
do nothing half-cocked. When the helicopter appeared on the horizon it was
surrounded by four Cobra gunships. The whole entourage landed as one unit,
and then the President jumped out of his helicopter and, just as we had
been told he would, he jumped right towards the crowd. I helped Jody Powell
and Ed Muskie with their luggage and fishing gear and then ran over to the
agent I had been assigned to assist.
The agent kept yelling to me, "Watch their hands, not their eyes. Nobody
ever killed anyone with their eyes." I watched their hands. I was petrified
but I did as I was told. Fortunately nobody tried anything, because, had
they, I'm sure I would have been smoked in the ensuing exchange. As the
President went through the crowd I was almost right next to him. There was
he, then a Secret Service agent, then I.
After he shook a few hands he went to a stand of microphones. I knew something
was up because I'd seen Sam Donaldson flitting around. Carter huddled with
Powell and Muskie and proceeded to the lectern that had been hastily assembled.
He said that he had good news about the hostage crisis in Iran. I was there
when he announced that Richard Queen was about to be released by his captors
as he'd been found to have multiple sclerosis. There was a wild round of
applause that I couldn't hear because I was listening to a flurry of activity
on my radio.
I learned the cause of that flurry after the President's plane had taken
off. An airman who had wanted to get a look at the President had taken his
telescopic sight up onto the roof of his barracks and was looking through
it when one of the agents spotted him. The unbelievable part was that this
man had neglected to take the sight off his hunting rifle before he had
gone on to the roof. Here was this idiot looking through his scope, down
the barrel of his rifle, not thinking about what he was doing, and suddenly
he was surrounded by probably fifty heavily armed men who wrestled him to
the ground and took him away, never to be seen again.
*************************************************************
Officers were not immune from the power of military justice. While I
was stationed at Elmendorf, a full colonel on the final approach to land
his F-4, saw a moose off in the distance. He executed a touch and go landing
and headed straight toward the moose. At about a thousand yards the colonel
began to fire away with the Phantom's .50 caliber machine guns. The colonel
had decided to make his last flight before retirement into a hunting trip
and to use his god-only-knows how many million dollar jet fighter as his
rifle. Unfortunately the colonel went down a little low and the top of some
trees took out his landing gear. He was forced to call an in-flight emergency.
The emergency crews had to coat the runway with foam and the colonel brought
in his damaged plane on its belly, sparks flying as he zoomed down the tarmac.
He did not retire immediately after that. The wing commander court martialled
and busted him. He was lucky he wasn't sent to Leavenworth.
***************************************************************
There were people I served with who must have thought that because they
were up in Alaska, in the wild, they had to act like Marshall Dillon. There
was one man, Chris DuPont, who really wanted all the bad guys out of the
service. This meant he was always on guard for people with expired licenses
or registrations or burned out headlights, or whatever.
One day DuPont was at the main gate, waving cars in, when he turned around
and saw a car leaving the base with a headlight burned out. DuPont stopped
the car and told the driver why he had been stopped, and asked him to turn
off the ignition and produce his driver's license. When the driver turned
off the ignition he told DuPont that he didn't have a driver's license.
DuPont, noticing that the car had no license plates, got suspicious and
called in the problem to the desk sergeant. DuPont's first mistake was letting
the driver hear what the desk sergeant said, that DuPont had stopped a stolen
car and the driver of the car fit the description of the man who had reportedly
stolen it. When the driver heard that he was a suspect, he started the engine
and tried to put the car in gear. Then DuPont made his second mistake. He
reached in the window and tried to grab the gear shift lever and jam it
into park. While doing this the driver rolled up the window, pinning DuPont's
arm, and then drove off, with DuPont dragging along beside. DuPont hung
from the door frame for almost a third of a mile. At that point the suspect
opened the window and DuPont went tumbling.
The suspect escaped, and miraculously DuPont wasn't seriously hurt, although
he banged up his head, arms and feet. He kept the boots he wore as a reminder
of the incident. The toes had been completely worn away.
*****************************************************************
Philip Huckins has held many positions at Salem State College,including
foreign student advisor, and visiting instructor in English. Currently a
Ph.D candidate
at Boston College, Huckins is researching 19th century education
of the Native American at boarding schools off the reservation.
He lives on the North Shore with his wife, Martha, and his daughter, Sarah.
Editor's note: The Sextant is grateful to Philip Huckins for allowing us
to excerpt these selections from his memoir-in-progress.