Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  Dallas County Sheriff Carl Thomas was standing nearby in civilian clothes, but wearing his badge and a revolver stuffed in his belt.

  He watched the bus leave and said, “Judge Porter never should have let the Klan march”—a reference to U.S. Dist. Judge Robert Porter, who ended two weeks of controversy Friday by ruling that the Klan had a constitutional right to march after the city issued its representatives a permit.

  “In my opinion it was a very bad ruling and created the potential for a lot of trouble—although, of course, I’m not the judge,” Thomas said. “It’s getting so federal judges think they can run the country.”2

  Among the marchers was Addie Barlow Frazier, the seventy-three-year-old Dixie Leber herself. “You bet I’m mad at the police,” said the petite Mrs. Frazier, wearing a bright crimson robe and cross-shaped earrings, as she stomped her foot on the concrete floor. Then with a wide grin and twinkling eyes she said, “I guess they didn’t want to have a riot.”3

  FITTING IN

  Early in my freshman year at Skyline, an older boy recognized me from middle school and invited me to join the German Club and learn how to folk dance. Kevin Hunt was the only person I recognized in the school of four thousand students, so I agreed to attend a practice. The folk dancers reflected the diversity of the school, with whites, blacks, Hispanics, and foreign students represented. The troupe promised I would get to dance with girls and go on weekend trips to German festivals all over the state. The other kids seemed a lot like me, not too rich or popular, but not too geeky, either. I learned later that while they wore German costumes to dance, most of the kids liked to drink, have sex, and drive around in cars at night, and nothing in the world appealed to me more.

  My parents fought when they were both at home, which was usually only on Saturday mornings or Sunday and Monday evenings. To finance my new lifestyle, two friends in the German Club convinced their manager at Kip’s Big Boy restaurant to hire me as a dishwasher and busboy on the weekends. I spent as little time at home as possible.

  Bob had left his hourly wage job for self-employment, leasing a pro shop inside the bowling alley, where he sold and drilled balls and also sold accessories. He was happy with our small house and simple life as long as he was his own boss.4 Beth, on the other hand, was working at a company called Jet Fleet, which trained pilots and chartered executive jets and helicopters. She earned more money than Bob and had rubbed shoulders with rich people. Beth wanted more than a lower-middle-class existence, and after years of unhappiness, she asked for a divorce in early 1980.

  I found out on a Saturday morning, when I happened to have a day off. I was watching cartoons while my parents yelled at each other. The fight ended when my father left for work. Then my sobbing younger sister, Dana, ran into the room, looked at me, and cried, “Now you know why Mom and Dad are getting a divorce.”

  Shortly after Dana slammed the door to her room, Beth stepped out of the kitchen and asked, “You did know we’re getting a divorce, right?”

  “No, but I can’t say I’m surprised,” I replied.

  My mother finalized the divorce on June 19, 1980, their nineteenth wedding anniversary. My mother moved us into an apartment in a new neighborhood, but since Skyline was a magnet school, I had friends all over the city. I spent time in South Dallas with Jacky Donahue and Vernon Wesley, whose mother owned a beauty parlor in Exline. One afternoon, I sat in the salon, looking completely out of place as a blond, blue-eyed teen, and watched with fascination as the women used hot flatirons to straighten their hair. Wesley’s mom laughed and said, “You’ve never seen anything like this before, have you?”

  “No, ma’am, I haven’t,” I admitted.

  “Well, let me tell you about a black woman’s hair,” she began, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson.

  I dated both black and white girls, though at the time no couple in our group stuck together very long. We knew that interracial dating was taboo for many Texans, but no one made a big deal out of it at Skyline. Jacky’s father was white, but they lived in an African-American neighborhood.

  On one weekend trip, though, a German Club chaperone tried to convince us that dark skin was the mark of Cain and discouraged our interracial dating. We ignored her, but my father made me angry when I showed him a picture of a black girl named Vanessa, whom I had a crush on. He looked at the photo and said, “Oh, you like dark meat.” Bob liked to say provocative things to get a rise out of people, but I considered this a betrayal. He’d threatened to spank me if I said anything racist, and here he was making a vulgar comment. I’d always admired him for supporting civil rights and teaching me about race and bigotry, but at that moment I realized that some liberal whites still retained the right to make an off-color joke.

  In the parts of Dallas where we spent most of our time, no one gave our multiracial group a second look. But we did discuss race and how we could get into trouble on the road if we were not careful. The old German settlements in Central Texas held beer festivals from September through November, and we made four- to five-hour drives in borrowed church vans almost every weekend. Our chaperones were careful about where we stopped for bathroom breaks, because some of the truck stops didn’t like white teenagers with long hair, let alone African-Americans. I remember escorting my black friends into a couple of places and feeling the heat on the back of my neck from rednecks staring at us. This was probably the first time I’d felt how intimidating and frightening a nasty glare could feel. Those experiences, along with dancing and drinking the weekends away, pulled us into a tight clique.

  On the long drives, we shared stories and I told my friends about my family’s supposedly glorious history. I impressed my white friends, but if I offended my black ones, they never said anything. It never occurred to me that they would find it upsetting. We often joked how my ancestors must have been rolling in their graves because their worst nightmares had come to pass.

  I thought of everyone in the group as equal. But I was acutely aware that my family, which was just scraping by, was still better off than the families of most of my African-American friends. When I worked after school, I spent the money on going out. When they worked, most of the money went to their families. I also learned that Wesley and Jacky suffered from chronic health problems, which were exacerbated by a lack of health insurance or regular doctor visits. And while my parents fought and my sister cried, my friends dealt with family members who committed real violence and ended up in jail. We attended the same classes at the same school, and we spent a lot of time doing the same things, but that facade masked the differences that would influence our futures.

  None of us made very good grades—we were too caught up in the melodrama of adolescence. I believed that our little group proved that people from different backgrounds could love one another. Years later, though, Jacky and I talked about the round-robin dating in high school, and she told me that she and Vanessa figured that the white guys would always end up with white girls and never consider a serious relationship with them. When she told me that, my heart broke a little. I realized that I’d seen our group through rose-colored glasses and that there was so much I didn’t see because I was white. My privilege allowed me a blindness to the realities that my African-American friends faced every waking minute. I thought I was progressive; they thought I was dabbling.

  LEAVING TEXAS

  My mother was anxious for a clean slate after divorcing Bob and wanted to get out of Texas. In the fall of 1980, she accepted a job at Coors in Golden, Colorado. In the middle of my sophomore year at Skyline, she moved my sister and me to a middle-class suburb of Denver called Wheat Ridge. After my first day trudging through snow to high school, I wrote to my friends in Dallas, “Help! My Mom put me in a cracker school!”

  The job in Denver made one of my mother’s dreams come true, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found in the suburbs. My mother had balanced proximity to her job with what we could afford and the best schools she could find. Wheat Ridge High School, one of
the nation’s best public schools, was twenty minutes from her office, and she could afford a duplex on the poor side of town.

  About fifteen hundred students attended Wheat Ridge, and they called themselves “the Farmers.” My freshman class at Skyline had had that many students, and Skyline High School’s raider on horseback mascot could easily have kicked the ass of the happy farmer, clad in overalls, with a wheat stalk between his teeth. I remember only one African-American girl in the school and a handful of Asians and Hispanics, one of whom became my first friend. The football players called Daren Greening “Beaner,” and I told him I understood that to be racist. He said he knew it was, but that’s what they’d called him since elementary school.

  Coloradoans didn’t like Texans, either, and lots of the kids had NATIVE bumper stickers on their cars. They complained about rich Texans buying up the mountains and terrorizing the ski slopes. Many called me “Tex,” though not with affection.

  The vast majority of kids lived in upper-middle-class homes, and, as in most schools, they were obsessed with sports. I enrolled in photography and theater classes and even arranged independent study to spend more time as the school newspaper and yearbook photographer. I joined the lighting and sound crew for plays and gave up on my idea of attending the Coast Guard Academy, focusing instead on playwriting.

  Furiously writing letters, I remained in touch with my Dallas friends. I spent most of my time with my friends Mike, Charles, and Jacky when I visited Dallas, and I made sure not to miss my older friends’ graduations.

  My mother told me after my junior year that I needed to decide what to do after graduation. She couldn’t offer any financial help, and my father certainly didn’t have any money to help me go to college, even if one admitted me. Wheat Ridge was much more demanding, and my grades had dropped. I decided to join the U.S. Army.

  At the recruiter’s office, I asked for a three-year contract to become a military policeman, where I could learn about law and maybe become an attorney. A sergeant measured my height and said that was impossible, since army regulations in 1982 required all MPs to be at least five feet ten inches in height. With a generous rounding off, I measured five eight. The army also trained legal assistants, who worked for military lawyers, and I had scored high enough on the military’s IQ test to qualify me for any job, so I asked to do that. But they had already filled all of the legal assistant positions for the next two years.

  The next time I went to his office, the recruiter said he’d found a job where they could take me immediately after graduation. The army would add a big bonus to my college fund. The military occupational specialty was 05K, which stood for Electronic Warfare/Signals Intelligence Non-Morse interceptor. He had no idea what the job entailed, but I had to pass a Morse code aptitude test to qualify. I was a little confused about why I needed to take a Morse code test to become a non-Morse interceptor, but he said it was military intelligence and sometimes they did things in a funny way. While I was at it, he suggested I take the foreign language aptitude test. I went back to the processing station, took the tests, and discovered that I could copy Morse code but was unlikely ever to learn a foreign language. The recruiter put together a contract where I would attend basic training at Fort Jackson, in Columbia, South Carolina, and signals intelligence training in Pensacola, Florida. After that, the army would most likely station me in Germany. He still couldn’t explain exactly what the job entailed, but the contract promised twenty thousand dollars for college after only three years in the service.

  A week after my seventeenth birthday, my mother signed the paperwork allowing me to enlist, and I went to the processing station for the last time. By the end of the day, I had a start date of June 19, 1983. My father was angry because he opposed everything the military stood for, but I didn’t feel he’d given me much choice. My mother felt enlisting was probably the best of my limited options. I went back for my senior year at Wheat Ridge High, dropped every advanced course on my schedule, and took just enough courses to graduate. I enjoyed my senior year, drank a lot of beer, smoked pot, lettered in theater, and graduated in the bottom 40 percent of my class. I didn’t win any of the official “Senior Superlatives,” but an underground list named me “Most Likely to Date Outside My Species.” I took that as a badge of honor, coming from Wheat Ridge kids.

  ACTIVE DUTY

  The morning my recruiter arrived in the lime green staff car to drive me to the airport, I was scared, but not sad about leaving Colorado. My platoon included people from many races and all walks of life, including rich kids. While some of the white kids from the country seemed uncomfortable with our multicultural unit, I felt more at home than I had at Wheat Ridge.

  The army itself, however, scared me. I’d never dealt with such discipline, and the shock and awe of those early days set me back on my heels. My first reaction to the barking drill sergeants and exhausting exercise was to collapse and quit. I watched as a quarter of my fellow recruits dropped out and headed home. I was seriously considering asking my drill sergeant to let me drop out, when my girlfriend sent me a Dear John letter, explaining how she was dating a mutual friend.

  Staff Sergeant Hicks ordered me to toughen up and showed compassion by giving me additional training time to pass the physical-fitness test. Some of the older men in my platoon recognized the mind games Hicks was playing on us, but I fell for them, and that helped me succeed. I let Hicks tear me down, instill me with discipline, and build me back up with new self-esteem. I decided I could make the army work for me and looked forward to going overseas.

  At Pensacola, the navy taught me how to intercept foreign teletype signals. It turned out we needed to understand Morse code because that’s how our targets made initial contact, agreed on a frequency, and initiated the Teletype machines. I felt pity for the Morse code operators. They listened to dots and dashes and typed out five-digit encoded messages all day. The worst part of my job was listening to the racket of four Teletype machines running at once. I watched the students ahead of me graduate and go to Germany, and I was excited about going abroad. But when my class graduated, the army said it had recruited too many 05Ks and all the overseas posts were full. The army sent me back to Texas to join a combat intelligence brigade at Fort Hood.

  Missing out on Germany hurt, but returning to Texas was a consolation. The 163rd Military Intelligence Battalion was next to the airport at West Fort Hood, where the reconnaissance battalion kept their aircraft. Once I settled into the barracks, I learned that peacetime duty meant a lot of busywork for a combat unit assigned to keeping the base spotless. About once a month, we’d deploy to a training field, where we’d set up our equipment and pull guard duty. As an 05K, I drove a two-and-a-half-ton truck with a radio-intercept cabin at the back. We’d raise the antenna, but we had no signals to intercept in the middle of Texas. Our commander explained that our equipment was so old, we were driving a useless anachronism. We didn’t belong on the battlefield at all, he said; our job required us to sit in air-conditioned buildings in far-off countries.

  On the weekends, I drove to Dallas to see my friends, but they were moving on with their lives. Mike had moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas, Jacky had found a job as a bookkeeper, Wesley was a cook at Luby’s cafeteria, and Charles was installing air-conditioning units. Charles’s growing drug use made him more and more unreliable. Mike impregnated his sixteen-year-old girlfriend and was trying to care for her while a freshman in college. Jacky’s family relied on her more, and her ulcers grew worse. Wesley had problems with his pancreas and needed medical attention he couldn’t afford. Meanwhile, I was perpetually broke and had stopped my contributions to the army’s college fund, which was a matching program. I stopped going to Dallas so often, not only because of the gas money but also because my friends had less time for me.

  In November 1984, our first sergeant called all of the 05Ks together to discuss a special offer. A drug bust at Field Station Okinawa had forced the army to revoke the security clearance
s of half a dozen 05Ks and they needed replacements as quickly as possible. The station was scheduled to close in 1985, so we would barely get to spend a year there, but I really wanted to see the world. Within weeks I was on a plane headed for Japan.

  Okinawa is a tropical island in the Ryukyu chain, about halfway between the Japanese mainland and Taiwan. The listening post was in the middle of the island, on Torii Station, which we shared with a Special Forces brigade. The only time I’d left the country before was to go to the Cadillac Bar in Mexico, and Okinawa challenged all of my senses. The smell of the food, the look of the concrete homes, the tropical climate, and the sound of a completely foreign language all washed over me. The field station operated on a twenty-four-hour basis, and I worked a lot of nights and slept during the day. Whenever I had free time and some extra cash, I left the base to explore the archipelago. I learned a little about Japanese culture, discovered Buddhism, and realized how big the world truly is. When we shuttered the field station, I didn’t want to leave, but my orders sent me to Fort Meade, Maryland, home of the National Security Agency.

  I arrived in January 1986, with only six months left on my enlistment. The 504th Military Intelligence Brigade’s mission was to supply uniformed personnel to work at the NSA, just a few blocks from our headquarters. The NSA, though, had too many 05Ks, so I was assigned to the brigade commander’s staff and, inexplicably, was placed in charge of training the unit’s linguists and promoted to sergeant. I began to think about getting out, but I found myself in a quandary. I’d failed to put enough money in my college fund to get the full army match and I hadn’t applied to any colleges. Several of my superiors warned me not to leave the army unless I had a solid plan, since several of them had left, only to reenlist a few months later. I had to admit I wasn’t prepared for civilian life and decided to reenlist. On the morning I retook my oath, I privately promised myself that I would never do it again.