Prologue

 

A few days ago, my wife was at one of her charity meetings and I decided to finally make the effort to clean out the attic. It's amazing how much can accumulate in forty or so years. I climbed the narrow stairs and turned on the lights. Dust lay on every box and covered the sheet over that old recliner which I had never gotten around to throwing out. Then I saw something that felt like an old friend, sitting there on the floor by that comfortable old chair. Though it was dust laden I could still see the color of my old Air Force footlocker. It was secured with the same lock I had bought for it in 1958 when I was in boot camp. Brushing some of the dust from its lid I looked at the name stencilled on its lid. The foot locker chronicled my career through the Air Force. It started with AB which means Airman Basic and I saw the ranks I held crossed through as I was promoted all the way to Lt. Colonel over twenty five years.

Should I open it? I was struck with a strong aversion to opening the lid and turning back time. I pulled the keys I carried from my pocket and stared at them. My eye went unerringly to the Master Lock Key which was worn and smooth. I doubted if it would even open the lock but it did. I raised the lid and the musty smell of old material and old papers hit me in the face.

There in the top tray, neatly folded, lay my dress blue uniform. It's six rows of ribbons, still in place. I thought, "Look at all that fruit salad" which is what decorations were called back when I was in the Air Force. The silver wings sat atop the rows of ribbons. Alone in the seventh row of my decorations, in its place of honor, sat the blue ribbon with the white stars. The Medal of Honor.

I removed the uniform and there beneath it lay a number of small booklets. My journals! I had forgotten them completely. I pulled them out noting that they were stacked according to date. I opened the first one, dated 1958 and began to read.

Closing the last one, I felt a tear trail its way down my face. I brushed it away, not wanting it to get on my shirt. I looked down and saw the whole front of my dark blue shirt was soaking wet. I pulled the material away from my skin and looked back into the footlocker. There was the sterling silver frame of an eight by ten photograph.

I turned it over and her face leaped out at me. I was actually startled for a moment. I gazed at Ellen's face as she had looked in 1960 and I felt something inside me convulse once again. I quickly placed the picture face down on the uniform and reached for the small packet of letters. They too were organized by dates. There were almost daily letters in her handwriting from mid-May until mid-July, 1960 and one typewritten letter dated in October 1961. I didn't bother to read them. I knew them practically word for word, so I slowly put them on top of the journals. Then, looking back into the foot-locker I saw the white, heart shaped box which had yellowed with age. I opened it and looked at the wedding rings which I had bought for her. I felt a tremble go through me and I closed it with a sharp snap. A thought went through my mind then. I decided that I would give the rings, separately of course, to my daughter. She needn't know where they had come from or what they had represented. The rest of the paperwork had to do with my retirement. And I thought that it was good to be past it all, but I certainly missed those days.

Something came over me then, a feeling of having missed something, something left out. I placed the memories back into the blue footlocker, keeping the journals out. I locked it and went back down stairs, leaving my old friend to begin to gather a new layer of fine dust. I took the journals into my office. There I sat at my computer to write this story.

It is a story of betrayal, of pain, of terror and horror in war and finally, after a long time, love. I knew all those emotions and feelings because I was the man that I was writing about. Not all of the story was true, in fact a lot of it I made up myself, but I do know the emotions and in the following book, I try to pass it on to the reader of this narrative. I remembered with regret, the kind of man I was at age nineteen. The great zeal I had for life then. The hopes and dreams which made me so happy. I had faith in life then. But I learned the hard way, that when you fall deeply in love...especially the first love, and lose it, a man holds on to the illusion of it. He finds other loves, other paths to follow, but a man's heart always stays true to the one he lost. Philosophical?

Perhaps, but I did know one thing, if this story was ever published and some young woman reads it and decides not to betray her man, who was far away and unable to defend himself, then I would be satisfied. If that doesn't happen then my labor of many hours will be in vain.

I know I can never go "Home". I knew that well. There is nothing in the state of Mississippi for me anymore. But I plan to take my character home in the end and let him find.......A Life Lost.

 

PART ONE - 1960-1966

Chapter 1

 

A very predictable, warm rain slowly drifted down on a cloudy May morning in 1960. I kissed Ellen goodbye that morning as we stood by the train, holding each other tightly. The train, the famous City of New Orleans, would take me as far as Chicago, on the way to New Jersey and overseas. We had spent our last night in each other's arms and I dreaded the thought of letting her go for a whole year. I kissed her tenderly, then hard as I told her,

"I will write you every day and you will be in my heart forever." I didn't know then that love could hurt so much, that it would be forty years before I kissed her hello again, or even saw her and I certainly never thought the love I felt for her would turn to hate, or that she would cause me to totally distrust women, even the woman I would eventually marry.

I was born in the state of Mississippi and my name was Charlie Glenmore. I went to high school there. As the fates would have it, I fell in love with Ellen when I was only a Junior in high school. She was a freshman and I felt a strong desire for her the first time I saw her. She was a City Girl though and I was scared to death of City Girls. I had been happy in the little country school but the priest had talked my old man into sending me and my sister to St. Joe's, in Jackson. I never fit in because I was such a damned country boy. But suddenly I was much happier in the big city school because Ellen was there. We dated steady for the two years I had left at St. Joe's and got laughed at by the In Crowd a lot because they all played the field and would not commit to any one person. I acted like a jerk several times and even broke up with her once and went out with another girl. I always came back to her though, hating myself for hurting her. I graduated in 1958 and I asked my father, "Dad, are you going to send me to college?

"If you want to go to a university, you should get a job and earn the money to pay for it, I sure as hell ain't going to." Was my father's blunt reply. I sure wasn't going out on the road liked my father did, so I decided to go into the Military. Ellen begged me, "Please Charlie, don't enlist in the military. You'll be gone so much and I'll be so lonely."

But I had always felt a strong desire to serve my country so I joined the Air Force when I graduated from high school. In just over two years, I was being transferred to my first overseas assignment to a base in the Arctic called Thule, Greenland.

The Arctic is a desolate wasteland of ice and snow in the best of times but with all that went wrong with my life that year, it got even worse and then some. My career in the Air force was definitely on track and I had already decided to spend my life in the Military, especially if I could get a commission. I'd gotten a commercial pilots license just before I left my last duty station and was rated as a multi-engine pilot with endorsements in the Cessna 310, 336 and 337, 421 and the venerable old DC-3, or C-47 as they call it in the USAF. I had earned an Associate of Science degree from a junior college in Texas and combined that with over twenty courses from the Armed Forces Institute, plus my Commercial pilot's license, I submitted it all to the University of Chicago.

The Military has an agreement with that institution to help Service men and women attain academic degrees. The University of Chicago issued a B. Sc. in aviation management. My former commander had told me, "Charlie, I think you might be eligible for a commission with that degree. Why don't you apply for one?"

I applied just before I got my overseas assignment and got to Greenland before the paperwork came through. When the Commission was offered I accepted it quickly. I knew Ellen would be proud of me with bars on my shoulders instead of chevrons on my sleeves. What I didn't know was, when you accept a commission, the Air Force closes your enlisted records and prepare new ones that are held in a different location. If nobody knows you have been commissioned, you simply disappear. That little detail would cause me a lot of problems later on down the road.

I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant USAF and assigned to a position as a weapons controller at the 931st AC&W Squadron, (Aircraft Control and Warning) located on a mountain top about fifteen miles off the main base at Thule, (pronounced Tooly). The name of that delightful promontory was Pea-Mountain. It was the last peak before the edge of the massive Ice Cap that covered almost the entire island of Greenland. I didn't tell Ellen that I'd been commissioned. Instead I had an 8 X 10 photograph made of me in my new uniform and was going to send it to her as a surprise, along with a copy of my degree. The photo would take a month to be ready as it had to go back to New York for finishing and coloring.