Monday, May 14, 2006
(Daughter - you already know this story. You can skip this.)
During high school, 1959-1962, I lived on an Air Force base (a SAGE base, for those who know) on top of a mountain in the middle of state game lands in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but forests and bears and vipers all around. My father was the base commander.
There was a strong fence around the base itself, like a prison fence, topped with razor wire. The family housing, baseball field, rifle range, and other support structures were outside that fence, and then there was another fence around the outer perimeter of the government property, sort of like a cattle fence. Just three strands of barbed wire.
Alerts were a frequent occurrence. Some were just exercises, but some were serious, when "something was going on" somewhere in the world. During an alert, airmen were stationed around the base and along both fences. Depending on the level of alert, they may or may not have had ammunition.
That summer was very tense. Some weirdo had tried to bust through the gate onto base, and the APs had shot out his tires to stop him. There had been several red alerts of two or three days duration, and then one day two men who claimed to be officers from Wright-Patterson had tried to get on base (to get the equipment for the sailboat the AF kept on a nearby lake), but their paperwork was suspicious. The APs at the gate detained them, searched their car, and found explosives in the trunk.
My father interrogated them, and finally found that they had their real ids taped to their stomachs. They were from headquarters and were going to plant bombs around the base near the radar towers, and then call and say "Go look at the north wall of the height-finder tower...". It was a test, and the base passed. It was the year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the international situation was already tense.
Shortly after that incident, another red alert was called. The men were deployed, and fully armed. This one was unusual in several ways. For one thing, it went on for something like two weeks. During other alerts, civilian family members had been allowed to drive in and out through the outer gate. The school bus, for example, was not allowed in, but we kids had been allowed to walk out to meet the bus on the highway. This time, not only was absolutely no one allowed on or off the base, but we in the family compound were told not to leave our houses.
After a week or so in a tiny house with four younger squabbling siblings, I was going crazy. I decided to go for a walk in the woods. I knew a spot in the swampy area below the houses where there were no guards on the outer fence. Nobody wanted to stand there (it was full of snakes - including rattlers and copperheads), so the guys assigned there tended to shift left and right, leaving an unguarded space. My German Shepherd, Sparky, and I could get through undetected. We'd walk in the woods around the base, and then come back through the same spot we went out.
We did just that.
The woods were old growth. There was very little undergrowth once you got past the edge of the cleared government property, so it was easy walking. I let Sparky off the leash, and he scouted ahead and around me, 300' or so out from me, but he always kept coming back to check on me. The day was still, and the woods were silent. We walked on a carpet of hundreds of years of fallen leaves and pine needles.
We had been out about 2 hours, and were about 3/4 the way around the base, when Sparky, who was walking next to me as we climbed a hill, suddenly stiffened and growled. I looked up to see what bothered him, and --- it was like a scene in a movie. Silhouetted against the sky, at the top of the hill, were men with guns, pointed at me. In the center was a lieutenant, standing with his legs spread, and his hands on his hips. He said, "Who the Hell are you?!"
They surrounded me. Sparky growled, he wasn't going to let anyone get near me. One of the airmen suggested shooting Sparky if he attacked, but another said, "Uh, I think that's [the commander]'s daughter. Don't shoot his dog." The lieutenant mulled that over, and said, "I don't care who she might be. We do this by the book."
They made me tie Sparky's leash around his muzzle and then hold him by the collar as they marched me back to the base. There were three or four guys on either side of me, and they kept the guns pointed at me.
What I didn't know until later was that sentries had seen had seen Sparky as he ranged close to the edge of the woods, and had thought they had seen glimpses of human movement. They had been shouting "Halt, who goes there" and all that happy hoopla, and getting no response. Reports had been coming in from sentries all along the perimeter of "man or men in the woods", and "police dog or dogs in the woods". The idea of dogs for some reason scared them more than human attackers. At least ten sentries reported activity of some kind, around the entire perimeter. Most reported having seen "police dogs" (plural). As the reports went back and forth, more men thought they saw and heard more activity.
Suddenly it sounded like the base was under attack by an army of men and dogs. Headquarters denied any knowledge of any such exercise. Patrols were sent out to locate and ... whatever. All I know is that they were fully armed and fully scared, and had been told to shoot anyone who didn't cooperate. This was serious. These were guys whose entire military careers had been spent greasing motor pool vehicles or tending SAGE computers, and it was freak-out time. The Russians were coming!
The lieutenant radioed in that he had captured the intruder, and that it appeared to be the commander's daughter and dog.
I wasn't scared at all until we broke out of the woods at the far end of the athletic field, and I could see my father's car tearing down the road toward the baseball field. Then I got scared. He was going to kill me. Literally. I had embarrassed him big time in front of all his men, and possibly jeopardized his career. He could quite possibly beat me to death for this.
When the call from the lieutenant came in, my father had freaked. When he left his office, one of the other men called our house to warn my mother. Another officer's wife, Mrs M., happened to be there, and Mrs M. ran up the road to intercept my father. She flagged him down, and said, "Oh, What a terrific idea you had! Wonderful! What a great way to make sure the men stayed on their toes! I'll bet nobody will be sleeping on duty tonight! How did you ever think of this?"
She saved my life.
When my father met up with us, he said "Good work" to the men, and "Good job. Go home now" to me (Huh? Good job?). He never said anything else to me about it. But the next day I was in the Provost Marshall's office pointing out on maps where the open spaces were, where it was easy to get in and out. I told them I'd never heard anyone yell Halt or any other challenge. And I noted that the way they had marched me through the woods, in two lines on either side of me, if it had been necessary to shoot me, they'd have shot each other, too.
After the alert was finally over, there were groups of men at either end of the main road practicing shouting "Halt, who goes there" at each other at the top of their lungs. The guys assigned to the swamp were issued snake leggings. And everybody got a lesson in how to safely escort a prisoner.
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