A Perilous Journey

by Darrell Maloney

  “What did you do in the Air Force? When you weren’t falling off of towers and breaking your leg, I mean.”

  “I was an F-16 mechanic.”

  “F-16, like an airplane?”

  “Yes. F as in fighter. The F-16 was the single seat one engine fighter when I was in. They still use it today. Most of them are older than I am now.”

  Their conversation came to a screeching halt as Hannah walked into the room, removed her parka and brushed snow off it.

  She was crying.

  -50-

  When she was in Captain Wright’s office, he had a fairly easy time convincing her she wasn’t responsible for Colonel Wilcox’s death.

  She believed him when he pointed out that suicide is a personal choice. The last real decision some people make, but a decision made strictly on one’s own.

  “No one but Colonel Wilcox himself placed that rolled bed sheet around his neck,” he told her. “Whatever the circumstances that led to that point, he’s the one who made that decision and took that step. You didn’t kill him any more than I did.

  “You cannot blame yourself for his death.”

  She listened to his words and believed them.

  They made good sense.

  Then she left the captain and began the twenty minute walk back to the hospital.

  And had time to think about it again.

  No matter how hard she fought the feeling, there was one incontrovertible truth.

  If she hadn’t told the colonels about Montgomery and the bunker they never would have assaulted it.

  If they’d never assaulted it they’d never have been arrested and thrown into the brig.

  And Colonel Tim Wilcox would never have been distraught enough to commit suicide.

  It’s funny how different people can look at the same set of circumstances and come up with completely different conclusions.

  As far as Hannah was concerned, she might not be guilty in the eyes of the law.

  But she was certainly culpable in the eyes of God.

  She sat with Debbie on the edge of the spare bed in the corner of Al’s room.

  Al, to give them some privacy, stepped into the hallway to take a few more laps around the ward.

  This time he was more careful, reaching behind him to make sure he wasn’t showing any more of his backside than was necessary.

  Al was a wonderful man, a better than average mayor, and a good friend.

  But he wasn’t the “touchy feely” kind of guy who could comfort a distraught woman and wipe away her tears. He was more the big burly guy who’d have one’s back in a bar fight.

  He saw this job as more suited to Debbie and got out of the way so she could work her magic.

  Left behind in the room, Hannah filled Debbie in.

  “I’ve got an appointment at four p.m. with the general. I’m to meet Captain Wright at the front of the hospital at three thirty and he’s going to take me to the bunker.”

  “What are you going to tell him, exactly?”

  “Exactly? I don’t know. I mean, before I found out Colonel Wilcox was dead I’d have read him the riot act. I’d have told him he was being childish and petty. That it was time he put a stop to this lunacy once and for all.”

  “Sounds good to me, Hannah. Tell him exactly that.”

  “I’m not so sure I can.”

  “Why not?”

  “Now I wonder if I’m just as guilty as he is. I mean, it needs to stop. Colonel Medley needs to be set free. The charges need to be dropped. But how can I place blame on the general when I’m the one who caused all this?”

  “Hannah, all you did was share some information. You blew the whistle on something which did not pass the smell test. Nothing more. You didn’t make anybody do anything. It seems to me that there’s plenty of blame to go around. But none of it goes back to you. Legally or morally.

  “Heck, I’d have done the same thing you did if I had the same information to share.

  “So would any of us. It just happened to fall in your lap. Don’t beat yourself up and don’t blame yourself.

  “Just go to the general and tell him the same thing you told me. Not about you being guilty, but about him being a butthead.”

  “I never said the general is a butthead.”

  “You’re right. You didn’t say that. I said that. Now, what’s important is that you go tell the general that. Tell him he’s a butthead and he needs to stop this stuff now.”

  The pair heard a ruckus out in the hallway.

  Someone at the nurse’s station had received a phone call, and she was shouting to the other nurses, “They’re going through with it. They’re blockading the base!”

  -51-

  They’d been talking about it for weeks.

  Rumors had become so widespread that base personnel were aware of the threats civic leaders were making, although most hadn’t taken them seriously.

  At the same time, many military personnel were secretly hoping the rumors were true.

  They were, by and large, convinced an injustice had been done. They were convinced from the beginning that the colonels sitting on their bunks in the brig were guilty of misjudgment at most. That they were victims of circumstance. That they’d made a decision on behalf of the base personnel, given flawed intelligence.

  Wars have been fought under similar circumstances. Military men and women have died under similar circumstances. In the case against Wilcox and Medley, it was generally felt by military and civilians alike that the only casualty was General Lester Mannix’s wounded pride.

  Military members are generally muzzled when it comes to controversial issues.

  They’re not allowed to voice their opinions when it comes to matters involving superior personnel or military policy.

  And one cannot get more superior to Air Force personnel than the Air Force Chief of Staff, for he’s in charge of it all.

  Prohibited from speaking out and voicing their concerns, the military people assigned to the base stayed silent and let community leaders make waves for them.

  They were friends and allies, of course.

  The military people and civilians, that is.

  In many military communities service members and civilians are like oil and water. Military members and their families tend to stick to themselves, and the civilians do likewise.

  Not so in San Antonio.

  In San Antonio the civilian and military communities are very close-knit. They are neighbors, brothers and friends.

  Many of the civilians who lived in San Antonio worked on the base as civil servants or contractors. They had ties to the base, and cared what was going on there.

  They knew Colonel Wilcox and Colonel Medley.

  In some cases they had interactions with them during their day to day duties.

  In some cases they were former patients of the two men, who were surgeons at the base hospital before being called upon to head up the base leadership.

  Those who didn’t know them directly knew of them.

  They knew both men to be good men and straight shooters.

  Sure, Colonel Wilcox had a reputation for being difficult at times, but that was just his nature. He wasn’t that way to be vindictive or spiteful. He was just a grumpy kind of guy.

  Captain Wright had told Hannah he’d been keeping his pulse on the local community, to gauge its feeling about the pending court-martial.

  He knew that more than ninety percent of locals who knew about the case thought Wilcox and Medley were being railroaded.

  The term he used: that the natives were restless… well, that was a line from an old book. But it applied more than any other could.

  There was trouble brewing in the city of San Antonio, and the rumors were flying.

  So much so the current base commander, Colonel Andrews, had tripled the guards at the base brig.

  He wasn’t as worried about the blockade as he was about the possibility the locals would assault the base and try to spring his prisoners.
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  To reduce the chance of that happening he’d ordered a clampdown on information regarding the court martial and any of its participants.

  His thinking was that if the civilians weren’t aware when the trial was scheduled, or the status of any of its key players, it could be completed before anyone outside the gates even knew it was going on.

  When Colonel Wilcox committed suicide he ordered a clamp-down on the news, fearing it would incite the locals even further.

  Word still got out, of course. A military order cannot keep something of that magnitude secret. Within hours of his death civilian activists were making their own secret plans to cut off the base and deprive it of things like oil and fuel deliveries.

  What they planned beyond that depended on which activist one talked to.

  Some thought that was far enough. That it would send a strong message to General Mannix he needed to back off on this one.

  Others had a different opinion.

  -52-

  Others wanted to storm the base, to cut down its fences and walk in, without weapons, and peacefully march to the bunker in a show of force for Colonel Medley.

  Colonel Medley didn’t know any of this was going on.

  Captain Wright intentionally didn’t tell him he had the support of tens of thousands of angry people on both sides of JB Lackland’s fences.

  He wanted to, for he felt it would raise his client’s spirits.

  But he couldn’t. He was expressly forbidden from doing so by order of the base commander.

  Captain Wright had gotten the word that the blockade had begun at about the same time the call came into the nurse’s station outside Mayor Al’s hospital room.

  Now he, like most of his staff, stood at the windows on the west side of the building, watching.

  A hundred yards or so from the building was West Military Drive, which split the sprawling base into two sections.

  The west section of the base, on the other side of the six lane thoroughfare, had been called the “training side” for decades. That was the side where new airmen went through basic training. Since basic training was suspended until after the thaw, that side of the base was in caretaker status and wasn’t being used.

  The operational side of the base was the side where Captain Wright watched from a second store window. In fact, the legal offices shared a building with the base command section.

  One floor beneath his feet, the base commander, Colonel Winston Andrews, stood at his own window, watching the same spectacle going on at JB Lackland’s main gate.

  He grabbed his two-way radio and headed for his staff car.

  Andrews was a man who was fiercely independent.

  When he was named base commander he knew the job came with a car and a driver.

  He told the motor pool a driver wasn’t necessary.

  “I don’t need a nurse to wipe my nose, a cook to make my food or a driver to get me from Point A to Point B. I’m a grown man, for crying out loud.”

  Most commanders view the car and driver a perk.

  Andrews considered it a nuisance.

  On his way out he told his secretary, “I don’t want to raise a ruckus by announcing over the radio I’m headed out there. Call the commander of security forces and the commander of transportation and tell them to meet me at the gate.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He was halfway to the car when he realized he’d left his overcoat in his office.

  That was okay, though. He didn’t expect to be out in the cold for long.

  Just long enough to get a feel for what was going on, so he’d know how to deal with it.

  The main gate was within a stone’s throw of the base headquarters building, as it is on most military bases. It was set up that way so that visiting dignitaries and local VIPs didn’t have to drive slowly through miles of base property to get to a scheduled appointment with the commander.

  In this case, it also meant the commander had quick and easy access to it.

  He was there in three minutes.

  Seeing the commander’s car approach, the three-man team of security forces policemen manning the gate came to attention and rendered crisp salutes.

  The staff sergeant in charge of the detail would have opened the car door for Colonel Andrews, but knew that was something the colonel preferred to do himself.

  “When did this foolishness start?” the colonel asked.

  “About twenty minutes ago,” the staff sergeant replied, his voice rich with obvious frustration.

  The “foolishness” Andrews was referring to was a line of ten automobiles in the right hand northbound lane on West Military Drive.

  It completely blocked all lanes of traffic going into the base.

  They watched as cars number eleven and twelve pulled up behind the first ten. Two men got out, raised the hoods, removed the batteries, and placed them in the back of a pickup truck which had pulled alongside them.

  They then put their cars in neutral and pushed both cars forward until their bumpers kissed the cars in front of them, preventing anyone from walking between the cars.

  Less than five minutes after they arrived they crawled into the back seat of the pickup and left the area.

  Presumably to get more cars.

  “Should we go arrest them?” the staff sergeant asked the colonel.

  “Nope. Stand down. We have no jurisdiction, either over them or the roadway. Just stand down and report in to the command post every half hour with an update.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If they approach you, treat them with the respect you’d want yourself. Remember they have first amendment rights to protest. Just because they’ve chosen a rather unorthodox means of protesting, it’s still within their right to do so.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At the same time, don’t take any abuse from them. As long as you’re on base property, you’re on a federal installation. If any of them are stupid enough to come past the property line and cause trouble, take them down and take them down hard. Maybe when they’re brought up on federal charges it’ll make the others play by the rules.”

  Andrews picked up his radio and called his command post.

  “Assemble all commanders and their deputies in my conference room at sixteen hundred.”

  Walking back to his car, he regretted that he’d stayed up long into the previous night trying to catch up on his paperwork.

  He was running on two hours of sleep, on a day that looked to be the longest of his career.

  -53-

  At three thirty p.m. sharp Hannah walked out of Wilford Hall’s main doors.

  Captain Wright was already there, leaning against the fender of a dark blue Air Force staff car.

  “Wow,” Hannah said. “On time and everything.”

  “One thing the military teaches you is how to be on time,” he said. “The Air Force has a saying: If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. And if you’re late, you’re in big trouble.”

  His smile faded.

  “But I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

  “Let me guess. The general cancelled our appointment because all hell’s breaking loose.”

  “Not cancelled, exactly. Just rescheduled for the day after tomorrow at the same time. But how did you...”

  “How did I know all hell was breaking loose? We’ve been watching from an upstairs window for the last half hour.

  “That’s actually pretty creative, lining up all those cars like that.”

  “Yes. Creative and pretty bad for us. It seems there’s nothing we can do to stop them. At least not without breaking the law.”

  “It’s nice of you to drive all the way over here just to tell me my appointment’s been rescheduled.”

  “Actually, I had no choice. You never gave me your sick friend’s name, so I didn’t know which ward to call to get hold of you.”

  “Well, I’m sure you didn’t have anything better to do,” she teased.


  “Oh, no, not much. I’m working the biggest case of my career and a man’s life is at stake. I don’t have much to do at all.”

  “I’m sorry, that was rather rude of me.”

  “That’s okay. I know you were kidding. And honestly, in light of what’s going on, it looks like the court martial is on hold anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “The panel president and the panel members… the military version of the jury… they’re all quartered off base. And it looks like they won’t be able to come onto the base. At least not until this is resolved, anyway.”

  “So,” she brightened and said. “If that’s the case, perhaps you can spare a few minutes to come upstairs and meet my friends?”

  He slipped his keys into his pocket and said, “Sure. But only for a few minutes. I’m double parked.”

  As they walked the main corridor of the hospital headed for the elevator, Captain Wright remarked, “You know, I was born in this hospital, back in 1969.”

  She teased, “Really? I didn’t know they had hospitals back then. I thought women just laid out a blanket on the open prairie and gave birth.”

  “Very funny. Actually, 1969 was a very interesting year. We landed on the moon, we had Woodstock, and I was born. Three amazing events in human history.”

  “Yeah,” Hannah responded. “If I remember my ancient history well, we also had the Manson murders that year.”

  “Ancient history. Ouch, that hurts. I think you and I are going to get along great.”

  The elevator opened and they stepped out, greeted by the sight of Mayor Al walking slowly down the corridor, pushing a rolling IV stand and with his derriere showing for the entire world to see.

  “Hey, Al… If you’re feeling a bit cooler than usual I know the reason why.”

  He paused and turned around, embarrassed, and waited for the pair to catch up to him.

  “I know too. But the darned thing keeps coming undone.”

  “Al, this is my friend Captain David Wright. David, Al is the mayor of Eden.”