VI
TIME TRIALS
1
April, 1977
Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas
DAY PASS
FREEDOM!
Well, sorta’ freedom… a Day Pass, anyway.
Today—our last Sunday in Texas—is the only time out of Basic’s entire forty-two day prison term that is ours to do with as we please. Mostly. They’ve been dangling it before our eyes, teasing and tantalizing us with it practically since Day One, like a carrot on a stick or a ten-spot on a string. They’ve also snatched it away, repeatedly and fairly regularly, whenever our motivation needed a little jump-start. But now here it is.
We waited for it, we earned it, and today we finally get it.
Apparently the standard way to spend one’s only day off though, is to jump one of the buses going into town, and “do” San Antonio—the malls, the restaurants, the River Walk, and of course, the ever-popular Alamo. Me? All I’ve wanted to do from the beginning was stroll off in the exact opposite direction from everybody else. I just want to be alone with my thoughts. With my future. With this day.
I’ve spent 40 straight days, 24/7—morning, noon and night—with these same forty-six guys (not counting our various and transitory drop-outs and set-backs). Every hour, every frappin’ minute of these last forty cursing, sweating days, and forty snoring, farting nights, we’ve been within spitting range of each other. And if today’s my only chance to slip away from them all, to be responsible to no one but myself, then you know I’m going to take it just that way.
So, while the rest of the guys are waiting in their spiffy tailored blues for the bus to pull up, I wave toodle-oo and amble off down the sidewalk, headed for any place on this mammoth installation where I won’t recognize anyone. I have no deadlines, no appointments, no obligations, and no plans. And most importantly, I am blessedly alone. For once. Alone. Alone, alone, alone!
What bliss. What pure paradise.
Even without going off-base though, I too have to wear my blues, just like every other Basic Trainee on a Day Pass. But that’s just fine by me. A small price to pay for this unaccustomed independence. Besides, my blues are the only clothes in my entire locker (besides my underwear) that actually fit well—I’m actually capable of looking good in my blues—so they would have been my attire of choice anyway.
Truth be told though, I really have no idea what to do with myself or my time. So I figure I’ll just walk until inspiration—or a car—hits me. The weather is perfect, sunny, and early-Texas-Spring warm. I’ve got a handful of small bills in my pocket—no wallet though—and hours of almost unlimited potential stretching out before me.
My aimless roaming soon carries me far enough down the main drag that I come to the highway that bisects the base. I cross at the light—noting where, further down the road, the steel walkover bridge arches over the traffic—then press on toward where I can see several World War II vintage aircraft sitting on display along the edge of a huge field. As I near the field, a large set of bleachers appears along the far periphery, backed up against the fence. Beside them is a smaller, lower, covered grandstand of sorts—a “reviewing stand,” apparently. And passing before them both is a broad strip of asphalt, liberally slathered in strange painted markings. Maneuver cue lines, I’m guessing.
This is the Parade Ground. The day after tomorrow, it’s where I’m going to be—me, my fellow inmates from 260 and 261, and a few hundred other fresh-faced graduates, all gussied up in our best-pressed showcase finery. No one with any stripes yet, but all exalted in our achievement, and joyous with the approach of our last night at Lackland Air Force Base. I can’t wait.
For the moment, though, I am more interested in the vintage aircraft.
So I take a slow, leisurely stroll—a completely alien concept over the past six weeks—among the ancient warbirds and half-assed gardens. There’s a B-17 Flying Fortress, a B-24 Liberator, a couple of variants of the vaunted P-51 Mustang (including the bizarre F-82 twin-hulled mutation), and a lonely orange-painted P-39 Airecobra, all fading under the Texas sun. Guns and turrets are sealed, engine intakes capped, and all glass but their canopies and cockpit windows are painted over in black. And who repaints a classic fighter orange anyway?
In the end it proves to be more depressing than inspiring. They aren’t displayed or maintained with any sense of honor. Just abandonment. Uninspired aluminum taxidermy.
So I leave.
Eventually, my meanderings lead me to a bowling alley, and thence to lunch in its snack bar. And, as racy and delectable as all that is, still I linger, just watching—people, bowling scores, and the carefree passage of time. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s early afternoon then by the time I begin my ambling trek back to “my” side of the base.
Along the way, I concentrate on all the happy “normal” people I pass in the street—folks who’ve clearly been in the Air Force for a while—men and women wearing uniforms with multiple stripes, multiple tiers of ribbons, and Basic Training long gone in their rearview mirrors. I take some solace from the apparent ease of life that comes from having all this shit behind you. And that is, in its own not-entirely-unforeseen way, very comforting.
I check the marquee at the Thunderbird Theater as I pass, but see nothing that would be worth the cost of the popcorn. I mosey past the church where, every Sunday prior to this one, I’d been compelled to attend services, simply because it was what the rest of the flight was doing. And what the flight does, you do. Well, the flight didn’t go to church this Sunday, so for once neither did I. Thank God!
My little “walkabout” carries me past the Shoppette and its outdoor line-up of vending machines. I step inside only long enough to scan their paperback shelves before moving on. And then I’m back at the barracks again. My barracks.
Damn. “Home” again so soon.
It’s coming up on three in the afternoon now, and I’m still loitering outside the building. It just feels too good having this freedom to move at will again. I’ve already circled the building once, just a little while ago, just to “see it,” as if for the first time, from all its exterior angles. I felt kind of like a freed convict sauntering out the front gate of his prison, then hanging a left instead, and walking a long, slow orbit all the way around the building and the grounds where he’d been incarcerated for so long.
It’s actually a perverse sort of a “farewell,” I guess, but it felt good.
Damned good.
Right now though, I’m on the opposite side of the street, standing in the shade of yet another sun-blasted static display aircraft—I think this one is a Korean War vintage fighter called a “Thunderjet”—wondering what to do with these last dwindling hours of my Day Pass. I could go back upstairs to our barracks room, I suppose, and maybe just enjoy lying alone in that big empty bay for a while. But that just seems like an almost criminal waste of this coveted time. Besides, I’m enjoying strutting around base in my blues too much to want to give it up right away. Instead, I wander toward the parking lot on the far side of the other street, the lot for the Chaparral movie theater. I could tell, even from where I’d been standing next to that old stovepipe jet, that this marquee offered nothing of interest either. But just beyond the theater, I could see another sign, this one for the Chaparral Recreation Center.
I’ve never noticed this building before, despite all the mileage my flight has put on these streets. And now, as the last of the sand in my Day Pass hourglass runs out, I’m heading toward the Center’s front door, hoping to find… I don’t know… a piano, maybe?
Yeh. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to round off this day?
I can’t honestly claim that, during my tenure here at Lackland, I’ve had no access to a musical instrument before this moment. Every Sunday morning, for the last six weeks, I’ve been allowed to play the church’s little spinet during the post-service lulls, while waiting for our T.I.(s) to rejoin us and take us back to the barracks. It wasn’t much—rarely more than ten minutes—and it was hamstrung by the fact that the piano was at the front of that great echo chamber of a room, and came with its own captive audience. As a result, I never felt open to any wild flights of whimsy or experimentation on the keyboard. “Just the hits,” so to speak.
Well, standing in this tiny cubbyhole of a backroom now, in this seedy little Rec Center, staring at this battered old piano with its back against a painted concrete block wall, I feel as though I’ve been completely deprived of music for the entire eighth-of-a-year that I’ve been here, and that here, at last, is my salvation. Here is my first drink of water after all this time in the desert.
I know it’s overblown and melodramatic, but that’s really how I’m feeling at this moment. Cheated for so long, rewarded with so little, but rewarded now nonetheless.
I close the door behind me, snuffing out the distant clacking and laughing coming from the Pool Room, and muffling the Sunday afternoon sports squawking from the TV room. The rickety piano bench creaks and groans as I settle my weight onto it. The keyboard cover sticks when I try to slide it back out of the way, then it suddenly releases, disappearing into its recess with a BAM! Whew! Almost got some fingers!
But there they are—all eighty-eight of my little black-and-white buddies—some coffee- or coke-stained, a couple with melted cigarette burns (real ivory, huh?), but all ready to do my bidding. I start with a simple C-chord—just dipping my toe in the water. It sounds like an old Wild West saloon’s piano—out of tune, with spongy, sticky keys. But who cares?
I kick off with some classic Elton John (as it would have sounded had it been played on a banjo and kazoo, with a nasal deaf-person singing lead), and instantly, the looming deadweight of Basic Training just melts away. I am released into the ether of music, freed to drift wherever the currents take me. I am, at last, severed from my ties to my fellow flightmates, and from the domination of Sgt. Lawson. I am truly…
All right, so I’m actually just wailing away on the keys like a kid taking out his frustrations on a model airplane that just won’t build right! No, I’m not “working through any anger,” or venting a month-and-a-half’s worth of impotence and victimization, or anything like that. But this up-tempo, foot-stompin’, head-flingin’ assault on this poor old piano is cathartic in much the same vein. It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s busy, and it wrenches me out of the muck of Lackland by the roots.
For a little over half an hour then, it just plain FEELS GOOD.
Then, in the middle of a Billy Joel medley, the Piano Room door opens behind me, and in walks a shy, swarthy, Middle-Eastern-looking guy, wearing an oddly marked uniform, and clenching his cap—in a wad—in his hand. Instantly, my natural self-consciousness about my wretched singing voice swoops in and slaps me down to a much quieter, more timid volume. And the wide-open pitch of my free-flying afternoon downshifts into cautiousness and circumspection again.
In other words, he puckers me right up.
I finish with a soulless whimper, petering out politely, gutlessly, and dusting my hands off on my pant legs. Now, what to do until he leaves?
“You play veddy well,” he says with the polished diction of a Saudi prince, “I was hearing you out in the hallway.”
“Oh, well, thank-you.” I shrug, and go all shucky-dern modest on him.
Uncomfortable and uncertain about what to do next, I ratchet my spine into a gloriously exaggerated stretch, and cap it off with a big theatrical yawn. And in the process, I get my first whiff of a strange new odeur that’s seeped into the room. Sort of a moldering laundry kinda’ smell, with just a hint of flatulent locker room laced through it.
What the hell?
“Please, continue playing,” my one-man audience adds as he searches the small room for a chair that doesn’t exist.
“Well…”
Naturally, at times like this, I can never think of a single song ever done by anybody in the history of the world. I also sense that the “locker room” has just moved past me, in perfect conjunction with the passage of my guest. Is it possible that it’s him that smells that bad?
“Is it all right if I stay here and listen to you?” he asks.
Once again, my powerful lack of assertiveness takes charge of the situation.
“Oh… yeh, sure… I guess… if you want.”
“Thank-you.”
I kick in with the intro chords from Elton John’s Your Song—although it sounds more like the theme from Deliverance on this piano. But before I can reach the beginning of the lyrics, this walking talking human armpit—having apparently determined that this tiny unfurnished room has no furniture in it after all—sits down right beside me! Right on the end of the friggin’ piano bench! And that stench of his storms right up my nose on a hundred stinky feet.
Oh my Lord!
Not only is his pungency almost brutally distracting, but his close proximity is impeding the movement of my left hand. I can’t reach some of the bass notes. I shuffle over until one butt cheek is half-hanging off the end of the bench, but still it makes no difference. He taps his toe and nods his head with the beat, but, sitting right next to him, shoulder to shoulder, I feel like I’m about to lose consciousness. I’ve long since forgotten the words, forging ahead with the song as an instrumental now. But even that’s starting to derail. And after a few more disintegrating bars, I put the poor song out of its misery, and cut it off with an intentionally mangled chord.
“Oh! Damn,” I chuckle, ‘embarrassed’ by my clumsiness, “Guess I’m a little rusty on that one.” He chuckles along with me, flashing a perfect set of dazzling white teeth. We nod and grin for a few more seconds—I lace my fingers together, and try unsuccessfully to crack my knuckles—but, try as I might, my nose is just not adapting to that bouquet of his. I can’t decide if he’s a member of the crack Air Force Sewage Squad, or is just a couple of months delinquent on his bathing. But either way, if I don’t do something quick, my eyes are going to stop burning and go completely blind instead. I’ve already lost all my nose hairs as it is.
“So, where are you from?” I ask, with the last of the breath I’ve been holding all this time.
“Iran,” he answers. And my eyebrows pop up.
I’d heard that Uncle Sam was training prospective Iranian fighter pilots for the Shah’s newly upgraded Air Force. And the local rumors held that even their best and brightest had to first slog their way through Basic Training along with the rest of us low-lifes. And now… well… how do you like that? Here’s one now! And apparently that other rumor—the one about their infrequent bathing habits—is also true.
Well.
So…
Ummm…
Nothing to do but start playing again, I guess.
After one more “instrumental” though—since singing requires the inhalation of too much of this richly perfumed air, and besides, my voice was bad enough before I started choking—I tell him that I need to go get a cup of water, and would he like me to bring him anything. He says no, and thanks me. And I leave.
And, cowardly asshole that I am, I never go back.
2
LOOK OUT, CAPTAIN! SHE’S GONNA’ BLOW!
“On your mark! Get set! GO!”
And we’re off. Fifty guys in T-shirts, fatigue pants, and boots, stampeding toward the first bend in the quarter-mile oval track. Six laps to go—a mile and a half—in fourteen minutes or less.
It’s our first of what should be a careerful of annual fitness runs—theoretically—although this one has the added weight of being a prerequisite to graduating from Basic Training. Sure, each subsequent run we’ll do over the years ahead will come with the risk of being washed out of the Air Force altogether should we fail to achieve their absurdly generous maximum time limits (which vary depending on your age bracket). But this one is far worse, simply because the sword dangling over our heads here is the threat of being set back, and having to spend another week or two here at the Lackland Hilton.
Ugh. I think I’d rather donate my liver to the zoo.
I’ve been dreading this day almost since they first told us about it. And it’s only gotten worse as the days and weeks have crawled past without any improvement in my running stamina.
As we round the first turn, the pack thins and spreads out. The lunatics that are going for all-time land speed records power off ahead of the rest of us, on the first of what I’m sure will be many second-winds. The guys that are just working on a good showing without killing themselves settle into comfortable niches along the inside track, adjusting to pace themselves for the long haul. And the guys who just don’t give a damn—who know that fourteen minutes is enough time to stop and grab a hot dog along the way, and still have time to slug down a strawberry shake—fade away to the rear and assume a lazy jog.
I’m somewhere in the middle—and sputtering already—determined to run myself to death if that’s what it takes, going for the best time possible, yet trying to pace myself to last six laps, when I know I don’t have even half that many in me.
Fortunately, the Air Force, as if acknowledging that it is the least “physical” of all the branches of service—and therefore expects most of its recruits to have to finish this run in an ambulance—not only allows for a huge amount of time to complete the run, but also doesn’t care how you do it, as long as it’s on foot and unassisted. You can sprint, jog, walk, crawl, even stop for a smoke, just as long as you cross that finish line in less than fourteen minutes.
I lean into the second turn—not even one full lap into the run yet—already feeling like I’m plowing through thigh-deep water here. My boots are heavy, and my knees are already turning to rubber. With fierce concentration, however, my breathing is at least still on rhythm. By the time I pass Sgt. Renfro though—standing at the start/finish line, brandishing a stopwatch and calling off times as each man passes—the first of the middle-of-the-pack guys has started to pass me. Damn.
More power to the warp drives, Scotty!
I go churning into the next turn, already pumping way too much energy into my weakening legs, and starting to slip out of my shaky breathing rhythm. Oh yeh, this is definitely more fun than I deserve.
I manage to hold my own with the middle-of-the-pack frontrunners all the way down the backstretch of this second lap, foolishly pushing myself harder than I can possibly sustain, until, somewhere in the middle of the turn, my breathing slips out of control, and the gasping begins. My pace sputters, the sweat starts to run into my eyes, and by the time I pass Sgt. Renfro again, I can feel a stitch burrowing in under my ribcage.
Two laps down, four to go, and I’m already on the verge of collapse.
On the backstretch again, wheezing badly but forging ahead as if the finish line was just around the next bend, I catch up to the first of the stragglers—the guys who are already walking. Man, that does look a whole lot better than what I’m doing. Old Man Griggs is among them—his age bracket allows him even more time than the rest of us—along with stumpy-legged Airman Keyes (who is running, but at a walker’s pace), and Airman Lyden, the weasely set-back who came into our flight along with the late-great Airman Slokum. Lyden’s at a lazy stroll, just keeping up with the back of the pack, and constantly checking his watch. He’s probably going to make a point of ambling over the finish line at precisely thirteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds, just to show his contempt for the whole process.
I manage to eke out just a little more energy, so that I can lap them all with what looks like grace and elan. Inside though, I think my spleen has just caved in, and taken my colon with it.
That extra little push is, not too surprisingly, a big mistake. For, as I slog through the back-turn again, a whole new kind of pain starts to seep in where it really doesn’t belong—or help. Namely, in my lungs. A cramp, hot and sharp, has found its way under my right shoulder blade, and is now “lengthening,” deepening toward the center of my chest like a crowbar being shoved slowly through to my heart. I’ve gotten this kind of a cramp before, and it’s just about the worst thing that could develop at this juncture. I’m running on borrowed time now, and I know it.
Once the growing knot has reached the back of my lungs, the countdown is about over. The beginning of the end. Now every breath inflates my lungs “into contact” with that sharp “point,” like the tip of a bayonet embedded in my back, and those jabs make it impossible to breathe. Regardless of what my brain says it’s willing to endure, my body instinctively flinches away from the pain. And as a result, my inhalations get shorter and shorter and shorter, retreating further and further away from that knife blade. A reflexive grunt caps off each snort, then whatever small amount of air was drawn in is immediately expelled again in a burst.
So I’m snatching air in ever-shortening little hitches, and blowing it out again in grimacing little chuffs, with a grunt of pain in the middle. And that’s what I’m doing when I next limp past Sgt. Renfro and his stopwatch at the end of my fourth lap—hitch-grunt-chuff, hitch-grunt-chuff, hitch-grunt-chuff. I don’t even hear my time. And George Griggs, who I just passed not half a lap ago, trots past me now, looking rested and breathing through his nose. Show-off.
By the time I stagger into the first turn of my fifth lap, I’ve slowed to a flaccid hobble. My feet don’t even clear the ground any more. I’m just shuffling along, scuffing up a dust wake, with my elbows nearly touching behind my back, trying to accommodate the great roaring cramp that’s now throbbing between my shoulder blades. And my breathing has finally shallowed to the point of uselessness, a rapid-fire strain of little spits and hisses that sounds like “ishik, ishik, ishik, ishik!” I must look and sound ridiculous to the ranks of my fellow airmen that now stream past me.
Finally, halfway through the turn, I surrender to the inevitable, and slump into a stooped walk—because I just plain cannot breathe anymore! I can’t suck in enough air in any one breath to fend off this hysterical rhythm. And the charley horse in the middle of my back is now a deep and constant fist of pain.
This pisses me off! I could’ve lived with the stitch in my side. I could’ve kept running on rubbery knees and concrete feet. But I can’t do anything when I can’t even breathe! Damn it!
I wrench my shoulder blades apart, grabbing both elbows across my chest, trying to stretch out the knot. I yank in the deepest little breath of air I can, and force myself to hold it, while my brain orders my legs to pick up the pace again. And between all these efforts and the bowing I’m doing at the waist—trying to stretch out the cramp vertically—I must look absolutely deranged. But it’s working. By the time I’m halfway down the backstretch, that hot grip on my lungs has subsided enough to allow a more normal gasping, and I'm able to push myself back up to a faster marching stride again.
In the distance, across the parched grass infield, I can hear Sgt. Renfro calling off times in the upper ten-minute range. Damn. In a few more seconds, we’ll be into the eleventh minute. I’m not so much worried about making the maximum qualifying time—there is a growing number of walkers on the track now, including Airman Lyden, who still seems to be enjoying a leisurely stroll on the far side—but it does bother me to think of barely squeaking across that line, marginally ahead of a cut-off that should have been so easily achieved, and having killed myself to do it.
It would just be, well… embarrassing.
I’m still smearing sweat out of my eyes and panting ferociously as I tramp into the back-turn for the second-to-the-last time. But I make a promise to myself—I will not pass Sgt. Renfro walking, either now or at the grand finale. So I’ve got about fifty yards left in which to muster whatever wind, strength, and resolve I’m going to carry to the end, and then it’s back to running.
I suck in deep, DEEEEP stabbing lungfuls of air, then growl them slowly back out again. I spin my arms and swivel my shoulders, working out the knots. And I push my stride up, faster and faster, until I have to break into a run. Then I’m up on my toes and jogging towards Sgt. Renfro once more.
“Eleven fifteen!” he yells as I pass.
“Shit,” I mumble, and push towards the next turn.
Last lap. It’s okay to strain everything beyond repair now.
My breathing never stands a chance though. I cling desperately to a two-step rhythm for as long as I can—“breathe-IN-breathe-OUT-breathe-IN-breathe-OUT”—all synched to the heavy clomping of my boots. But before I’m even halfway out of turn one, an extra gasp slips into the count, then two more, then the floodgates burst open, and I’m heaving and wheezing and gulping in helpless paroxysms once more. The knot between my shoulder blades wakes right back up, and I can feel that damned bayonet jerking toward my lungs in tiny increments all over again.
No! It doesn’t matter! I will run anyway. I will not stop. I will run with my lungs dragging on the track behind me, if I have to. It’s all or nothing, do or die, now or never! All the best clichés.
I churn down the backstretch for the last time, disintegrating like an old jalopy, nothing working in harmony with anything else anymore. Nothing smooth, nothing coordinated. Just total limping, gasping chaos—sweat flying, legs tripping themselves up and weaving between lanes.
“Ishik, iskik, ishik, ishik!,” I huff, no longer even interested in trying to save face. I just gotta’ stay upright and plodding, at all costs.
As I flail my way into the last turn, last lap, head lolling, arms flopping, lungs seizing, Airman Keyes gradually catches up, and begins to pass me—on those stubby little legs of his!
No! No, no, no! That’s too much! It’s like being passed by a crawling infant. No!
With no reserves of any kind left anywhere in my body then, I still somehow coerce an extra erg or two of energy into my stomping legs, and lurch up to a matching pace with Keyes. He looks over at the beet-red rictus of my face, bobbing and grimacing and gushing sweat in sheets right beside him. And the little bastard speeds up. Probably nothing to do with “winning” or “besting me,” so much as just escaping from me. And I don’t blame him. I must look like an old steam engine, chuffing steam and glowing orange, its seams bulging and its hinges and joints all threatening to rattle and shake themselves to pieces.
Look out, Captain! She’s gonna’ blow!
I throw everything I’ve got into this one last titanic effort, anything to keep up with Airman Keyes. But there’s simply nothing left to give. Every log is on the fire, every flue is wide open.
I’m now whimpering aloud, and doing more thrashing than running. But the track is straightening out ahead of me. And there’s the Finish Line. Just a few dozen more yards to go. If my chest exploded right now, I could still lurch across that all-important stripe of paint on momentum alone, and that’s incentive enough to shut down everything but the legs for this one final push.
The world is rolling right and left before my eyes, as my head tugs and pulls and drags the rest of my convulsing body towards the end. Sgt. Renfro is standing off to the right, his gaze focused on his stopwatch, his mouth barking something in silent slow motion. Behind him, milling about the perimeter field in celebratory little circles, are all the guys who’ve already finished and are enjoying the end of a job well done. And just a few steps ahead of Airman Keyes and myself is none other than Airman Lyden again, actually running for the first time since this thing started.
And I’m gaining on him! For all my trials and tribulations and agonies here, I’m still going to lap somebody… TWICE!
It’s almost over! It’s almost over! It’s almost…
Then, as Sgt. Renfro yells out Lyden’s passing time, the little shit suddenly drops out of his run, throws his head back, parks his hands on his hips, and strolls off the track! He actually strolls off the fucking track! As if he’s finished! As if that passing time that Renfro just called out was actually his finish time!
I flog my way across the finish line mere seconds later, and topple off the side of the course in an avalanche of failing bodily functions. My legs turn liquid, and I have to clutch my knees with both hands just to keep from falling over. My lungs are in desperate spasm, a swarm of fireflies fills my vision, my blood is roaring in my ears…
But all I can think about is killing Airman Lyden!
The son-of-a-bitch! Not only did he walk most of the run—not only did he cheat, and get away with completing only five of the requisite six laps—but the weasely little shit wound up with a better time than me! It’s not that I’m in competition with the bastard, but I bloody well killed myself for that pathetic time! I think I blew out every organ in my body, just to wind up with a finish time that’s five seconds slower than the one his sorry ass received at a stroll!
I’m gonna’ kill him!
As soon as they’re done giving me CPR.
Gawd, I cannot pry the bayonet out of my back this time. It feels like it’s gone all the way through, and is sticking out of my chest. It’s preventing me from standing up straight, and is keeping my breathing hopelessly out of control. Yet, right now, most of my concentration is still on Airman Lyden, watching his smug, arrogant, cheatin’ ass work the crowd, as he ambles from group to clique to cluster like he owns the place.
Oh, oh, OOOHHH! I just have to go beat him to death! I have to! I can’t stand it!
Yet I’m forced to sway and totter over here for a while longer, gasping and grunting around this massive harpoon sticking out of my back. I’m teetering on boneless legs, and stooped like a pitcher that’s just taken a line drive to the nuts. This is killing me.
Airman Mutterman, a funny guy from my squad that I like to call “Skippy”—an intense kid with strange aspirations for an officer’s commission—saunters over and claps me on the back, driving the bayonet even deeper. He congratulates me on my Herculean effort. I have to ask him if he heard what my final time was, because I missed it. I guess I was a little distracted.
“Twelve fifty-eight,” he replies, and strolls away.
Twelve fifty-eight. I made it in less than thirteen minutes! A time to be proud of. Woo-hoo!
Except that fucking Lyden walked the whole damned thing, and came away with a twelve fifty-three! I am going to KILL him!
With the cramp still deeply entrenched under my shoulder blade, and my breathing only barely under control, I force myself to stand erect, propping myself up with my hands on my hips, and angle drunkenly towards him. He’s still circulating between groups, and is currently orbiting back toward trackside, where the last stragglers are now chugging down the home stretch.
I intercept him just before he reaches another coalescing cluster of people.
“Hey, Lyden!” I shout, making sure I’m loud enough for the T.I.s get in on this too, “You better hurry up and get back on the track if you want to finish in time!”
He looks mildly bemused, and answers with a wary smile still on his face. “What are you talking about, man?”
I close the distance between us, still breathing like a Clydesdale, hands still on my hips. I’ve got no rank on this punk, but I am a Squad Leader, which will hopefully be enough to compel him to at least listen to me. “It’s a six lap run, ‘man.’ And you only walked five! You’ve still got one more to go.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Renfro straighten and turn to watch us.
“No I don’t,” Lyden replies, his smile suddenly gone, his tone conspiratorial, “I ran six…”
“Bullshit! You did five! And I know, because I lapped you! TWICE!”
He rears back, genuinely defensive now. “No you didn’t. You only passed me once. And that was…”
Sure enough; he was counting the other runners’ laps.
“I was right behind you when you crossed the finish line, asshole! For the second time! You finished five seconds ahead of me, after walking five laps! The only times you ran at all were at the very beginning and the very end, while…!”
“Look, I counted six laps. So if I somehow miscounted…”
Outrage washes over me again in a physical rocking wave, and my last vestige of self-control slips away. I lunge right up to him, still puffing and panting, and scream into his face.
“You lyin’ sack of shit! You cheatin’ lazy-assed son of a bitch! Who the hell do you think you’re bullshitting here?! You fuckin’ moseyed around the track for four laps, staring at your watch and counting the heads running past you, until you figured the timing was right! Then you kicked it up to a light trot, did a little heavy breathing just for show, and called it a day at five laps! Well, you’re not getting away with it! I busted my ass out there, and you just…!”
Oh God, it’s all coming out now. Every frustration I’ve ever had in my life, I think. Every minute of bottled emotion from walking on eggshells here at Lackland, every one of my squad’s demerits that I had to eat as well… all of it! My volume—and my octave—are both rising into the shrill and shrieking. Peripherally, I sense all eyes zeroing in on the two of us, just like I’d hoped. But for some reason, none of the T.I.s are making a move toward us. I’d imagined that once my tirade had broken wide open on the little turd, at least one of the damned T.I.s would charge over and break it up, allowing me to end it proudly—with my chin still out and my fightin’ feathers still ruffled. Then, theoretically, one of the “professionals” would take up where I left off, and ream the bastard a new asshole. Maybe even fail him on the run, and set him back to yet another flight, a couple more weeks behind us. That might almost be a sufficient balm for my scandalized soul.
But… nothing.
In the distance, Sgt. Renfro has gone back to calling out times to the last of the runners. Surrounding the two of us, a gathering circle of my fellow flightmates is just staring at us—at me, I now realize—stunned more by my hysterical outburst than by Lyden’s shameless cheating. And Airman Lyden, having apparently been down this road before—and perhaps having sensed the shift in the crowd’s sentiment—is no longer bothering to say anything. He’s just looking bored and, worst of all, patiently sane. Because, compared to me, he is.
If anybody ever gave a shit about my little cause here, they’ve forgotten about it by now. Now the spectacle is all about Airman Stipp standing in the middle of a crowd of tired runners, screaming like a little girl that really doesn’t want to wear that pinafore to church today.
Shit.
Nobody is backing me up on this. Nobody. Is no one else here bothered by this guy? By the kind of cheesy scamming crap he’s always pulling? Lyden’s the kind of weasel you’d pay to get the answers to your midterm test. Hell, he probably paid someone to take his military Qualification Test for him, just to get into the Air Force. And now he’s cheated on this.
Granted, I’m probably the most offended here, first of all because this pathetic little mile-and-a-half run almost stroked me out, and secondly, because this dipshit had to pull off his little scheme right in front of me. But still, he’s ripped everybody off by letting everyone else do the work for him. You’d think just one voice in the crowd would sound off with a righteous “Yeh!” or a “You go girl!” Something that would at least give me a way to end this with some dignity. But no. Nothing. I am the lone voice of moral outrage here, and I am shrieking my guts out.
Now what? How do I wrap this up without making it obvious to everyone that even I know what a dork I look like now?
“Son of a bitch!” I spit one last time, a clear indication that I still mean business, even though my voice has dropped and lost all conviction. I take a quick look around at all my rubbernecking “friends,” then swing back into Lyden’s face. “Just stay the hell away from me! You got that?” Then I wheel away, and start my dramatic storming departure for the barracks.
“Sir, yes sir,” he mutters behind my back.
I whip back around, and march right back toward him. “What did you just say?”
He’s all wide-eyed and baby-faced as I approach. Just a picture of no-chinned innocence. “Not a damned thing,” he replies with almost breathtaking sincerity.
God, I just want to strangle this weasely little shitheel. Instead, I squint my eyes, shake my head, and growl at him. “Jesus, you are such a screamin’ asshole, Lyden.”
Guess I told him!
TIME TRIALS
1
April, 1977
Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas
DAY PASS
FREEDOM!
Well, sorta’ freedom… a Day Pass, anyway.
Today—our last Sunday in Texas—is the only time out of Basic’s entire forty-two day prison term that is ours to do with as we please. Mostly. They’ve been dangling it before our eyes, teasing and tantalizing us with it practically since Day One, like a carrot on a stick or a ten-spot on a string. They’ve also snatched it away, repeatedly and fairly regularly, whenever our motivation needed a little jump-start. But now here it is.
We waited for it, we earned it, and today we finally get it.
Apparently the standard way to spend one’s only day off though, is to jump one of the buses going into town, and “do” San Antonio—the malls, the restaurants, the River Walk, and of course, the ever-popular Alamo. Me? All I’ve wanted to do from the beginning was stroll off in the exact opposite direction from everybody else. I just want to be alone with my thoughts. With my future. With this day.
I’ve spent 40 straight days, 24/7—morning, noon and night—with these same forty-six guys (not counting our various and transitory drop-outs and set-backs). Every hour, every frappin’ minute of these last forty cursing, sweating days, and forty snoring, farting nights, we’ve been within spitting range of each other. And if today’s my only chance to slip away from them all, to be responsible to no one but myself, then you know I’m going to take it just that way.
So, while the rest of the guys are waiting in their spiffy tailored blues for the bus to pull up, I wave toodle-oo and amble off down the sidewalk, headed for any place on this mammoth installation where I won’t recognize anyone. I have no deadlines, no appointments, no obligations, and no plans. And most importantly, I am blessedly alone. For once. Alone. Alone, alone, alone!
What bliss. What pure paradise.
Even without going off-base though, I too have to wear my blues, just like every other Basic Trainee on a Day Pass. But that’s just fine by me. A small price to pay for this unaccustomed independence. Besides, my blues are the only clothes in my entire locker (besides my underwear) that actually fit well—I’m actually capable of looking good in my blues—so they would have been my attire of choice anyway.
Truth be told though, I really have no idea what to do with myself or my time. So I figure I’ll just walk until inspiration—or a car—hits me. The weather is perfect, sunny, and early-Texas-Spring warm. I’ve got a handful of small bills in my pocket—no wallet though—and hours of almost unlimited potential stretching out before me.
My aimless roaming soon carries me far enough down the main drag that I come to the highway that bisects the base. I cross at the light—noting where, further down the road, the steel walkover bridge arches over the traffic—then press on toward where I can see several World War II vintage aircraft sitting on display along the edge of a huge field. As I near the field, a large set of bleachers appears along the far periphery, backed up against the fence. Beside them is a smaller, lower, covered grandstand of sorts—a “reviewing stand,” apparently. And passing before them both is a broad strip of asphalt, liberally slathered in strange painted markings. Maneuver cue lines, I’m guessing.
This is the Parade Ground. The day after tomorrow, it’s where I’m going to be—me, my fellow inmates from 260 and 261, and a few hundred other fresh-faced graduates, all gussied up in our best-pressed showcase finery. No one with any stripes yet, but all exalted in our achievement, and joyous with the approach of our last night at Lackland Air Force Base. I can’t wait.
For the moment, though, I am more interested in the vintage aircraft.
So I take a slow, leisurely stroll—a completely alien concept over the past six weeks—among the ancient warbirds and half-assed gardens. There’s a B-17 Flying Fortress, a B-24 Liberator, a couple of variants of the vaunted P-51 Mustang (including the bizarre F-82 twin-hulled mutation), and a lonely orange-painted P-39 Airecobra, all fading under the Texas sun. Guns and turrets are sealed, engine intakes capped, and all glass but their canopies and cockpit windows are painted over in black. And who repaints a classic fighter orange anyway?
In the end it proves to be more depressing than inspiring. They aren’t displayed or maintained with any sense of honor. Just abandonment. Uninspired aluminum taxidermy.
So I leave.
Eventually, my meanderings lead me to a bowling alley, and thence to lunch in its snack bar. And, as racy and delectable as all that is, still I linger, just watching—people, bowling scores, and the carefree passage of time. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s early afternoon then by the time I begin my ambling trek back to “my” side of the base.
Along the way, I concentrate on all the happy “normal” people I pass in the street—folks who’ve clearly been in the Air Force for a while—men and women wearing uniforms with multiple stripes, multiple tiers of ribbons, and Basic Training long gone in their rearview mirrors. I take some solace from the apparent ease of life that comes from having all this shit behind you. And that is, in its own not-entirely-unforeseen way, very comforting.
I check the marquee at the Thunderbird Theater as I pass, but see nothing that would be worth the cost of the popcorn. I mosey past the church where, every Sunday prior to this one, I’d been compelled to attend services, simply because it was what the rest of the flight was doing. And what the flight does, you do. Well, the flight didn’t go to church this Sunday, so for once neither did I. Thank God!
My little “walkabout” carries me past the Shoppette and its outdoor line-up of vending machines. I step inside only long enough to scan their paperback shelves before moving on. And then I’m back at the barracks again. My barracks.
Damn. “Home” again so soon.
It’s coming up on three in the afternoon now, and I’m still loitering outside the building. It just feels too good having this freedom to move at will again. I’ve already circled the building once, just a little while ago, just to “see it,” as if for the first time, from all its exterior angles. I felt kind of like a freed convict sauntering out the front gate of his prison, then hanging a left instead, and walking a long, slow orbit all the way around the building and the grounds where he’d been incarcerated for so long.
It’s actually a perverse sort of a “farewell,” I guess, but it felt good.
Damned good.
Right now though, I’m on the opposite side of the street, standing in the shade of yet another sun-blasted static display aircraft—I think this one is a Korean War vintage fighter called a “Thunderjet”—wondering what to do with these last dwindling hours of my Day Pass. I could go back upstairs to our barracks room, I suppose, and maybe just enjoy lying alone in that big empty bay for a while. But that just seems like an almost criminal waste of this coveted time. Besides, I’m enjoying strutting around base in my blues too much to want to give it up right away. Instead, I wander toward the parking lot on the far side of the other street, the lot for the Chaparral movie theater. I could tell, even from where I’d been standing next to that old stovepipe jet, that this marquee offered nothing of interest either. But just beyond the theater, I could see another sign, this one for the Chaparral Recreation Center.
I’ve never noticed this building before, despite all the mileage my flight has put on these streets. And now, as the last of the sand in my Day Pass hourglass runs out, I’m heading toward the Center’s front door, hoping to find… I don’t know… a piano, maybe?
Yeh. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to round off this day?
I can’t honestly claim that, during my tenure here at Lackland, I’ve had no access to a musical instrument before this moment. Every Sunday morning, for the last six weeks, I’ve been allowed to play the church’s little spinet during the post-service lulls, while waiting for our T.I.(s) to rejoin us and take us back to the barracks. It wasn’t much—rarely more than ten minutes—and it was hamstrung by the fact that the piano was at the front of that great echo chamber of a room, and came with its own captive audience. As a result, I never felt open to any wild flights of whimsy or experimentation on the keyboard. “Just the hits,” so to speak.
Well, standing in this tiny cubbyhole of a backroom now, in this seedy little Rec Center, staring at this battered old piano with its back against a painted concrete block wall, I feel as though I’ve been completely deprived of music for the entire eighth-of-a-year that I’ve been here, and that here, at last, is my salvation. Here is my first drink of water after all this time in the desert.
I know it’s overblown and melodramatic, but that’s really how I’m feeling at this moment. Cheated for so long, rewarded with so little, but rewarded now nonetheless.
I close the door behind me, snuffing out the distant clacking and laughing coming from the Pool Room, and muffling the Sunday afternoon sports squawking from the TV room. The rickety piano bench creaks and groans as I settle my weight onto it. The keyboard cover sticks when I try to slide it back out of the way, then it suddenly releases, disappearing into its recess with a BAM! Whew! Almost got some fingers!
But there they are—all eighty-eight of my little black-and-white buddies—some coffee- or coke-stained, a couple with melted cigarette burns (real ivory, huh?), but all ready to do my bidding. I start with a simple C-chord—just dipping my toe in the water. It sounds like an old Wild West saloon’s piano—out of tune, with spongy, sticky keys. But who cares?
I kick off with some classic Elton John (as it would have sounded had it been played on a banjo and kazoo, with a nasal deaf-person singing lead), and instantly, the looming deadweight of Basic Training just melts away. I am released into the ether of music, freed to drift wherever the currents take me. I am, at last, severed from my ties to my fellow flightmates, and from the domination of Sgt. Lawson. I am truly…
All right, so I’m actually just wailing away on the keys like a kid taking out his frustrations on a model airplane that just won’t build right! No, I’m not “working through any anger,” or venting a month-and-a-half’s worth of impotence and victimization, or anything like that. But this up-tempo, foot-stompin’, head-flingin’ assault on this poor old piano is cathartic in much the same vein. It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s busy, and it wrenches me out of the muck of Lackland by the roots.
For a little over half an hour then, it just plain FEELS GOOD.
Then, in the middle of a Billy Joel medley, the Piano Room door opens behind me, and in walks a shy, swarthy, Middle-Eastern-looking guy, wearing an oddly marked uniform, and clenching his cap—in a wad—in his hand. Instantly, my natural self-consciousness about my wretched singing voice swoops in and slaps me down to a much quieter, more timid volume. And the wide-open pitch of my free-flying afternoon downshifts into cautiousness and circumspection again.
In other words, he puckers me right up.
I finish with a soulless whimper, petering out politely, gutlessly, and dusting my hands off on my pant legs. Now, what to do until he leaves?
“You play veddy well,” he says with the polished diction of a Saudi prince, “I was hearing you out in the hallway.”
“Oh, well, thank-you.” I shrug, and go all shucky-dern modest on him.
Uncomfortable and uncertain about what to do next, I ratchet my spine into a gloriously exaggerated stretch, and cap it off with a big theatrical yawn. And in the process, I get my first whiff of a strange new odeur that’s seeped into the room. Sort of a moldering laundry kinda’ smell, with just a hint of flatulent locker room laced through it.
What the hell?
“Please, continue playing,” my one-man audience adds as he searches the small room for a chair that doesn’t exist.
“Well…”
Naturally, at times like this, I can never think of a single song ever done by anybody in the history of the world. I also sense that the “locker room” has just moved past me, in perfect conjunction with the passage of my guest. Is it possible that it’s him that smells that bad?
“Is it all right if I stay here and listen to you?” he asks.
Once again, my powerful lack of assertiveness takes charge of the situation.
“Oh… yeh, sure… I guess… if you want.”
“Thank-you.”
I kick in with the intro chords from Elton John’s Your Song—although it sounds more like the theme from Deliverance on this piano. But before I can reach the beginning of the lyrics, this walking talking human armpit—having apparently determined that this tiny unfurnished room has no furniture in it after all—sits down right beside me! Right on the end of the friggin’ piano bench! And that stench of his storms right up my nose on a hundred stinky feet.
Oh my Lord!
Not only is his pungency almost brutally distracting, but his close proximity is impeding the movement of my left hand. I can’t reach some of the bass notes. I shuffle over until one butt cheek is half-hanging off the end of the bench, but still it makes no difference. He taps his toe and nods his head with the beat, but, sitting right next to him, shoulder to shoulder, I feel like I’m about to lose consciousness. I’ve long since forgotten the words, forging ahead with the song as an instrumental now. But even that’s starting to derail. And after a few more disintegrating bars, I put the poor song out of its misery, and cut it off with an intentionally mangled chord.
“Oh! Damn,” I chuckle, ‘embarrassed’ by my clumsiness, “Guess I’m a little rusty on that one.” He chuckles along with me, flashing a perfect set of dazzling white teeth. We nod and grin for a few more seconds—I lace my fingers together, and try unsuccessfully to crack my knuckles—but, try as I might, my nose is just not adapting to that bouquet of his. I can’t decide if he’s a member of the crack Air Force Sewage Squad, or is just a couple of months delinquent on his bathing. But either way, if I don’t do something quick, my eyes are going to stop burning and go completely blind instead. I’ve already lost all my nose hairs as it is.
“So, where are you from?” I ask, with the last of the breath I’ve been holding all this time.
“Iran,” he answers. And my eyebrows pop up.
I’d heard that Uncle Sam was training prospective Iranian fighter pilots for the Shah’s newly upgraded Air Force. And the local rumors held that even their best and brightest had to first slog their way through Basic Training along with the rest of us low-lifes. And now… well… how do you like that? Here’s one now! And apparently that other rumor—the one about their infrequent bathing habits—is also true.
Well.
So…
Ummm…
Nothing to do but start playing again, I guess.
After one more “instrumental” though—since singing requires the inhalation of too much of this richly perfumed air, and besides, my voice was bad enough before I started choking—I tell him that I need to go get a cup of water, and would he like me to bring him anything. He says no, and thanks me. And I leave.
And, cowardly asshole that I am, I never go back.
2
LOOK OUT, CAPTAIN! SHE’S GONNA’ BLOW!
“On your mark! Get set! GO!”
And we’re off. Fifty guys in T-shirts, fatigue pants, and boots, stampeding toward the first bend in the quarter-mile oval track. Six laps to go—a mile and a half—in fourteen minutes or less.
It’s our first of what should be a careerful of annual fitness runs—theoretically—although this one has the added weight of being a prerequisite to graduating from Basic Training. Sure, each subsequent run we’ll do over the years ahead will come with the risk of being washed out of the Air Force altogether should we fail to achieve their absurdly generous maximum time limits (which vary depending on your age bracket). But this one is far worse, simply because the sword dangling over our heads here is the threat of being set back, and having to spend another week or two here at the Lackland Hilton.
Ugh. I think I’d rather donate my liver to the zoo.
I’ve been dreading this day almost since they first told us about it. And it’s only gotten worse as the days and weeks have crawled past without any improvement in my running stamina.
As we round the first turn, the pack thins and spreads out. The lunatics that are going for all-time land speed records power off ahead of the rest of us, on the first of what I’m sure will be many second-winds. The guys that are just working on a good showing without killing themselves settle into comfortable niches along the inside track, adjusting to pace themselves for the long haul. And the guys who just don’t give a damn—who know that fourteen minutes is enough time to stop and grab a hot dog along the way, and still have time to slug down a strawberry shake—fade away to the rear and assume a lazy jog.
I’m somewhere in the middle—and sputtering already—determined to run myself to death if that’s what it takes, going for the best time possible, yet trying to pace myself to last six laps, when I know I don’t have even half that many in me.
Fortunately, the Air Force, as if acknowledging that it is the least “physical” of all the branches of service—and therefore expects most of its recruits to have to finish this run in an ambulance—not only allows for a huge amount of time to complete the run, but also doesn’t care how you do it, as long as it’s on foot and unassisted. You can sprint, jog, walk, crawl, even stop for a smoke, just as long as you cross that finish line in less than fourteen minutes.
I lean into the second turn—not even one full lap into the run yet—already feeling like I’m plowing through thigh-deep water here. My boots are heavy, and my knees are already turning to rubber. With fierce concentration, however, my breathing is at least still on rhythm. By the time I pass Sgt. Renfro though—standing at the start/finish line, brandishing a stopwatch and calling off times as each man passes—the first of the middle-of-the-pack guys has started to pass me. Damn.
More power to the warp drives, Scotty!
I go churning into the next turn, already pumping way too much energy into my weakening legs, and starting to slip out of my shaky breathing rhythm. Oh yeh, this is definitely more fun than I deserve.
I manage to hold my own with the middle-of-the-pack frontrunners all the way down the backstretch of this second lap, foolishly pushing myself harder than I can possibly sustain, until, somewhere in the middle of the turn, my breathing slips out of control, and the gasping begins. My pace sputters, the sweat starts to run into my eyes, and by the time I pass Sgt. Renfro again, I can feel a stitch burrowing in under my ribcage.
Two laps down, four to go, and I’m already on the verge of collapse.
On the backstretch again, wheezing badly but forging ahead as if the finish line was just around the next bend, I catch up to the first of the stragglers—the guys who are already walking. Man, that does look a whole lot better than what I’m doing. Old Man Griggs is among them—his age bracket allows him even more time than the rest of us—along with stumpy-legged Airman Keyes (who is running, but at a walker’s pace), and Airman Lyden, the weasely set-back who came into our flight along with the late-great Airman Slokum. Lyden’s at a lazy stroll, just keeping up with the back of the pack, and constantly checking his watch. He’s probably going to make a point of ambling over the finish line at precisely thirteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds, just to show his contempt for the whole process.
I manage to eke out just a little more energy, so that I can lap them all with what looks like grace and elan. Inside though, I think my spleen has just caved in, and taken my colon with it.
That extra little push is, not too surprisingly, a big mistake. For, as I slog through the back-turn again, a whole new kind of pain starts to seep in where it really doesn’t belong—or help. Namely, in my lungs. A cramp, hot and sharp, has found its way under my right shoulder blade, and is now “lengthening,” deepening toward the center of my chest like a crowbar being shoved slowly through to my heart. I’ve gotten this kind of a cramp before, and it’s just about the worst thing that could develop at this juncture. I’m running on borrowed time now, and I know it.
Once the growing knot has reached the back of my lungs, the countdown is about over. The beginning of the end. Now every breath inflates my lungs “into contact” with that sharp “point,” like the tip of a bayonet embedded in my back, and those jabs make it impossible to breathe. Regardless of what my brain says it’s willing to endure, my body instinctively flinches away from the pain. And as a result, my inhalations get shorter and shorter and shorter, retreating further and further away from that knife blade. A reflexive grunt caps off each snort, then whatever small amount of air was drawn in is immediately expelled again in a burst.
So I’m snatching air in ever-shortening little hitches, and blowing it out again in grimacing little chuffs, with a grunt of pain in the middle. And that’s what I’m doing when I next limp past Sgt. Renfro and his stopwatch at the end of my fourth lap—hitch-grunt-chuff, hitch-grunt-chuff, hitch-grunt-chuff. I don’t even hear my time. And George Griggs, who I just passed not half a lap ago, trots past me now, looking rested and breathing through his nose. Show-off.
By the time I stagger into the first turn of my fifth lap, I’ve slowed to a flaccid hobble. My feet don’t even clear the ground any more. I’m just shuffling along, scuffing up a dust wake, with my elbows nearly touching behind my back, trying to accommodate the great roaring cramp that’s now throbbing between my shoulder blades. And my breathing has finally shallowed to the point of uselessness, a rapid-fire strain of little spits and hisses that sounds like “ishik, ishik, ishik, ishik!” I must look and sound ridiculous to the ranks of my fellow airmen that now stream past me.
Finally, halfway through the turn, I surrender to the inevitable, and slump into a stooped walk—because I just plain cannot breathe anymore! I can’t suck in enough air in any one breath to fend off this hysterical rhythm. And the charley horse in the middle of my back is now a deep and constant fist of pain.
This pisses me off! I could’ve lived with the stitch in my side. I could’ve kept running on rubbery knees and concrete feet. But I can’t do anything when I can’t even breathe! Damn it!
I wrench my shoulder blades apart, grabbing both elbows across my chest, trying to stretch out the knot. I yank in the deepest little breath of air I can, and force myself to hold it, while my brain orders my legs to pick up the pace again. And between all these efforts and the bowing I’m doing at the waist—trying to stretch out the cramp vertically—I must look absolutely deranged. But it’s working. By the time I’m halfway down the backstretch, that hot grip on my lungs has subsided enough to allow a more normal gasping, and I'm able to push myself back up to a faster marching stride again.
In the distance, across the parched grass infield, I can hear Sgt. Renfro calling off times in the upper ten-minute range. Damn. In a few more seconds, we’ll be into the eleventh minute. I’m not so much worried about making the maximum qualifying time—there is a growing number of walkers on the track now, including Airman Lyden, who still seems to be enjoying a leisurely stroll on the far side—but it does bother me to think of barely squeaking across that line, marginally ahead of a cut-off that should have been so easily achieved, and having killed myself to do it.
It would just be, well… embarrassing.
I’m still smearing sweat out of my eyes and panting ferociously as I tramp into the back-turn for the second-to-the-last time. But I make a promise to myself—I will not pass Sgt. Renfro walking, either now or at the grand finale. So I’ve got about fifty yards left in which to muster whatever wind, strength, and resolve I’m going to carry to the end, and then it’s back to running.
I suck in deep, DEEEEP stabbing lungfuls of air, then growl them slowly back out again. I spin my arms and swivel my shoulders, working out the knots. And I push my stride up, faster and faster, until I have to break into a run. Then I’m up on my toes and jogging towards Sgt. Renfro once more.
“Eleven fifteen!” he yells as I pass.
“Shit,” I mumble, and push towards the next turn.
Last lap. It’s okay to strain everything beyond repair now.
My breathing never stands a chance though. I cling desperately to a two-step rhythm for as long as I can—“breathe-IN-breathe-OUT-breathe-IN-breathe-OUT”—all synched to the heavy clomping of my boots. But before I’m even halfway out of turn one, an extra gasp slips into the count, then two more, then the floodgates burst open, and I’m heaving and wheezing and gulping in helpless paroxysms once more. The knot between my shoulder blades wakes right back up, and I can feel that damned bayonet jerking toward my lungs in tiny increments all over again.
No! It doesn’t matter! I will run anyway. I will not stop. I will run with my lungs dragging on the track behind me, if I have to. It’s all or nothing, do or die, now or never! All the best clichés.
I churn down the backstretch for the last time, disintegrating like an old jalopy, nothing working in harmony with anything else anymore. Nothing smooth, nothing coordinated. Just total limping, gasping chaos—sweat flying, legs tripping themselves up and weaving between lanes.
“Ishik, iskik, ishik, ishik!,” I huff, no longer even interested in trying to save face. I just gotta’ stay upright and plodding, at all costs.
As I flail my way into the last turn, last lap, head lolling, arms flopping, lungs seizing, Airman Keyes gradually catches up, and begins to pass me—on those stubby little legs of his!
No! No, no, no! That’s too much! It’s like being passed by a crawling infant. No!
With no reserves of any kind left anywhere in my body then, I still somehow coerce an extra erg or two of energy into my stomping legs, and lurch up to a matching pace with Keyes. He looks over at the beet-red rictus of my face, bobbing and grimacing and gushing sweat in sheets right beside him. And the little bastard speeds up. Probably nothing to do with “winning” or “besting me,” so much as just escaping from me. And I don’t blame him. I must look like an old steam engine, chuffing steam and glowing orange, its seams bulging and its hinges and joints all threatening to rattle and shake themselves to pieces.
Look out, Captain! She’s gonna’ blow!
I throw everything I’ve got into this one last titanic effort, anything to keep up with Airman Keyes. But there’s simply nothing left to give. Every log is on the fire, every flue is wide open.
I’m now whimpering aloud, and doing more thrashing than running. But the track is straightening out ahead of me. And there’s the Finish Line. Just a few dozen more yards to go. If my chest exploded right now, I could still lurch across that all-important stripe of paint on momentum alone, and that’s incentive enough to shut down everything but the legs for this one final push.
The world is rolling right and left before my eyes, as my head tugs and pulls and drags the rest of my convulsing body towards the end. Sgt. Renfro is standing off to the right, his gaze focused on his stopwatch, his mouth barking something in silent slow motion. Behind him, milling about the perimeter field in celebratory little circles, are all the guys who’ve already finished and are enjoying the end of a job well done. And just a few steps ahead of Airman Keyes and myself is none other than Airman Lyden again, actually running for the first time since this thing started.
And I’m gaining on him! For all my trials and tribulations and agonies here, I’m still going to lap somebody… TWICE!
It’s almost over! It’s almost over! It’s almost…
Then, as Sgt. Renfro yells out Lyden’s passing time, the little shit suddenly drops out of his run, throws his head back, parks his hands on his hips, and strolls off the track! He actually strolls off the fucking track! As if he’s finished! As if that passing time that Renfro just called out was actually his finish time!
I flog my way across the finish line mere seconds later, and topple off the side of the course in an avalanche of failing bodily functions. My legs turn liquid, and I have to clutch my knees with both hands just to keep from falling over. My lungs are in desperate spasm, a swarm of fireflies fills my vision, my blood is roaring in my ears…
But all I can think about is killing Airman Lyden!
The son-of-a-bitch! Not only did he walk most of the run—not only did he cheat, and get away with completing only five of the requisite six laps—but the weasely little shit wound up with a better time than me! It’s not that I’m in competition with the bastard, but I bloody well killed myself for that pathetic time! I think I blew out every organ in my body, just to wind up with a finish time that’s five seconds slower than the one his sorry ass received at a stroll!
I’m gonna’ kill him!
As soon as they’re done giving me CPR.
Gawd, I cannot pry the bayonet out of my back this time. It feels like it’s gone all the way through, and is sticking out of my chest. It’s preventing me from standing up straight, and is keeping my breathing hopelessly out of control. Yet, right now, most of my concentration is still on Airman Lyden, watching his smug, arrogant, cheatin’ ass work the crowd, as he ambles from group to clique to cluster like he owns the place.
Oh, oh, OOOHHH! I just have to go beat him to death! I have to! I can’t stand it!
Yet I’m forced to sway and totter over here for a while longer, gasping and grunting around this massive harpoon sticking out of my back. I’m teetering on boneless legs, and stooped like a pitcher that’s just taken a line drive to the nuts. This is killing me.
Airman Mutterman, a funny guy from my squad that I like to call “Skippy”—an intense kid with strange aspirations for an officer’s commission—saunters over and claps me on the back, driving the bayonet even deeper. He congratulates me on my Herculean effort. I have to ask him if he heard what my final time was, because I missed it. I guess I was a little distracted.
“Twelve fifty-eight,” he replies, and strolls away.
Twelve fifty-eight. I made it in less than thirteen minutes! A time to be proud of. Woo-hoo!
Except that fucking Lyden walked the whole damned thing, and came away with a twelve fifty-three! I am going to KILL him!
With the cramp still deeply entrenched under my shoulder blade, and my breathing only barely under control, I force myself to stand erect, propping myself up with my hands on my hips, and angle drunkenly towards him. He’s still circulating between groups, and is currently orbiting back toward trackside, where the last stragglers are now chugging down the home stretch.
I intercept him just before he reaches another coalescing cluster of people.
“Hey, Lyden!” I shout, making sure I’m loud enough for the T.I.s get in on this too, “You better hurry up and get back on the track if you want to finish in time!”
He looks mildly bemused, and answers with a wary smile still on his face. “What are you talking about, man?”
I close the distance between us, still breathing like a Clydesdale, hands still on my hips. I’ve got no rank on this punk, but I am a Squad Leader, which will hopefully be enough to compel him to at least listen to me. “It’s a six lap run, ‘man.’ And you only walked five! You’ve still got one more to go.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Renfro straighten and turn to watch us.
“No I don’t,” Lyden replies, his smile suddenly gone, his tone conspiratorial, “I ran six…”
“Bullshit! You did five! And I know, because I lapped you! TWICE!”
He rears back, genuinely defensive now. “No you didn’t. You only passed me once. And that was…”
Sure enough; he was counting the other runners’ laps.
“I was right behind you when you crossed the finish line, asshole! For the second time! You finished five seconds ahead of me, after walking five laps! The only times you ran at all were at the very beginning and the very end, while…!”
“Look, I counted six laps. So if I somehow miscounted…”
Outrage washes over me again in a physical rocking wave, and my last vestige of self-control slips away. I lunge right up to him, still puffing and panting, and scream into his face.
“You lyin’ sack of shit! You cheatin’ lazy-assed son of a bitch! Who the hell do you think you’re bullshitting here?! You fuckin’ moseyed around the track for four laps, staring at your watch and counting the heads running past you, until you figured the timing was right! Then you kicked it up to a light trot, did a little heavy breathing just for show, and called it a day at five laps! Well, you’re not getting away with it! I busted my ass out there, and you just…!”
Oh God, it’s all coming out now. Every frustration I’ve ever had in my life, I think. Every minute of bottled emotion from walking on eggshells here at Lackland, every one of my squad’s demerits that I had to eat as well… all of it! My volume—and my octave—are both rising into the shrill and shrieking. Peripherally, I sense all eyes zeroing in on the two of us, just like I’d hoped. But for some reason, none of the T.I.s are making a move toward us. I’d imagined that once my tirade had broken wide open on the little turd, at least one of the damned T.I.s would charge over and break it up, allowing me to end it proudly—with my chin still out and my fightin’ feathers still ruffled. Then, theoretically, one of the “professionals” would take up where I left off, and ream the bastard a new asshole. Maybe even fail him on the run, and set him back to yet another flight, a couple more weeks behind us. That might almost be a sufficient balm for my scandalized soul.
But… nothing.
In the distance, Sgt. Renfro has gone back to calling out times to the last of the runners. Surrounding the two of us, a gathering circle of my fellow flightmates is just staring at us—at me, I now realize—stunned more by my hysterical outburst than by Lyden’s shameless cheating. And Airman Lyden, having apparently been down this road before—and perhaps having sensed the shift in the crowd’s sentiment—is no longer bothering to say anything. He’s just looking bored and, worst of all, patiently sane. Because, compared to me, he is.
If anybody ever gave a shit about my little cause here, they’ve forgotten about it by now. Now the spectacle is all about Airman Stipp standing in the middle of a crowd of tired runners, screaming like a little girl that really doesn’t want to wear that pinafore to church today.
Shit.
Nobody is backing me up on this. Nobody. Is no one else here bothered by this guy? By the kind of cheesy scamming crap he’s always pulling? Lyden’s the kind of weasel you’d pay to get the answers to your midterm test. Hell, he probably paid someone to take his military Qualification Test for him, just to get into the Air Force. And now he’s cheated on this.
Granted, I’m probably the most offended here, first of all because this pathetic little mile-and-a-half run almost stroked me out, and secondly, because this dipshit had to pull off his little scheme right in front of me. But still, he’s ripped everybody off by letting everyone else do the work for him. You’d think just one voice in the crowd would sound off with a righteous “Yeh!” or a “You go girl!” Something that would at least give me a way to end this with some dignity. But no. Nothing. I am the lone voice of moral outrage here, and I am shrieking my guts out.
Now what? How do I wrap this up without making it obvious to everyone that even I know what a dork I look like now?
“Son of a bitch!” I spit one last time, a clear indication that I still mean business, even though my voice has dropped and lost all conviction. I take a quick look around at all my rubbernecking “friends,” then swing back into Lyden’s face. “Just stay the hell away from me! You got that?” Then I wheel away, and start my dramatic storming departure for the barracks.
“Sir, yes sir,” he mutters behind my back.
I whip back around, and march right back toward him. “What did you just say?”
He’s all wide-eyed and baby-faced as I approach. Just a picture of no-chinned innocence. “Not a damned thing,” he replies with almost breathtaking sincerity.
God, I just want to strangle this weasely little shitheel. Instead, I squint my eyes, shake my head, and growl at him. “Jesus, you are such a screamin’ asshole, Lyden.”
Guess I told him!
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