Doors and Hinges Part II

As the new year opened, Brett, Patti and I treated ourselves to the engrossing film, "The Boys in the Boat," an adaptation of Daniel James Brown's 2013 best selling book.  I left the theater with a memory that took me back 66 years to the same era that prompted me to write the blog entitled, "Doors and Hinges Part I." I added Part I to the title thinking that there might be more such blog episodes to come and, sure enough, Part II, another heart-stopping moment that occurred during my first year at the Air Force Academy, popped into my brain, triggered by my own experience as a "boy in the boat."  That's a confusing segue I know, so spare me a moment to explain.

You may recall that I chose the title, "Doors and Hinges," to depict crucial interventions in my life by people or events that changed its course.  The example in Part I captured the moment in January, 1957, in a doctor's office where I was being examined to see if I met the minimum physical qualifications for the Air Force Academy where I desperately wanted to be accepted. My hopes were crushed when the doctor informed me that I was two pounds shy of the required weight.  Then a young man working in the office whom I had never met took pity; he gave me a quarter to buy a quart of chocolate milk which, after I chugged it, exactly made up my weight deficit. 

However, although greatly relieved for having passed all of the medical requirements, I would not know for months how my academic and physical aptitude scores would rank me among the 10,000 applicants competing for the 300 slots available. By mid-April I still had not received word of my fate.  

OK, stage set; now, back to the movie.  One of my enduring memories from high school is a little pocket-Door and Hinges moment all its own.  In the Fall of my junior year at the enormous high school in northern Virginia that I was attending after an abrupt move from a tiny Mississippi school, I was scurrying down a long hallway when a man about my stature who was passing me in the opposite direction reached out and abruptly stopped me. He introduced himself as Charlie Butt and asked me if I knew anything about crew.  My blank look must have given him my answer, so he said, "Never mind; I think you are cut out to be a coxswain, so consider yourself recruited. I am the coach of our team.  See you at the Potomac Boat Club under Key Bridge Monday after class. Bring a T-shirt, Bermuda shorts and tennis shoes. 

The long and short of this puzzling intervention was that a year later I was the coxswain of the varsity 8-oared boat of the Washington Lee High School crew team. After going undefeated in our first six races, we were in Philadelphia for one of the defining races of the season called the Stokesbury Cup Regatta. We triumphed in a tight race, but for me, the greater drama was reserved for the traditional post-race ceremony which entailed the winning coxswain being tossed into the water by his crew. As I arced into the air above the Schuylkill River, I saw my father, who I thought was back in Virginia, running toward the dock waving a piece of paper--it was a telegram from the Air Force with news of my acceptance to the Academy.  I was in...now all I had to do was stay in.  And that brings me back to another do-or-die moment in the series I call Doors and Hinges.  

To my dismay, on my arrival at the Academy, just making it from one day to the next proved far more difficult than the friendly acceptance letter had portrayed; indeed, my prospects for a four-year tenure were dimming  rapidly with every passing day. Within two months, the Door to an Air Force career that hard work and good fortune had opened was once more about to be slammed shut.  

The gist of this story begins with an uncanny parallel to my first week at Washington Lee High School.  At the outset of the Academy academic year, after an extremely demanding summer of basic training which tested me to my limits, I confronted a full slate of mandatory classes heavily weighted toward math and sciences.  Moreover, I was summarily informed that I would be assigned to the varsity gymnastics team, an arbitrary process driven by the fact that the new Academy was putting together varsity athletic teams from scratch. The officer who served as our coach summarily informed me that I would in a trampoline specialist despite the fact that I had never set foot on this dangerous apparatus.  That assignment proved to be a mixed blessing: within weeks a serious mishap had put me in the hospital; the fact that I did not let it faze me kept me from being bounced from the Academy (terrible pun, I know).

This is how it unfolded.  On the military training side of my life, matters went from from bad to worse from the get-go. A cabal of three sophomores in my squadron of 100 cadets decided for whatever reason that I was not Academy material and set about creating circumstances that would be cause for my dismissal.  For example, every day when I returned from class my side of the two-man room to which I was assigned had been torn apart, clothes dumped from drawers and pulled from the closet, highly polished boots maliciously scuffed and my bed stripped. I would then be written up for improper care of my belongings and given several demerits.  Within a few weeks, these black marks had accumulated to the point where only one more meant I would be sent home. Now, back to the gym.

I had become sufficiently proficient on the trampoline at this crucial juncture that for the first time I was about to attempt a full twisting back somersault without the safety harness.  But I failed to fully commit to the maneuver. I stalled out halfway through and fell face first onto the bed of the tramp. As I rebounded, my right knee struck the middle of my forehead with tremendous force knocking me nearly unconscious.

Over my objections, an ambulance was called and I was carted off to the hospital for observation overnight. I was returned in early afternoon the following day, at which point I went straight to the gym and got back on the tramp even though my face was swathed in bandages. This time I completed the maneuver properly to the relief of my coach and the applause of my teammates.

After practice, I went directly from the gym to the dining hall rather than marching, as per usual, because I could not wear the full uniform, i.e., my bandages precluded a cap. During dinner, I was surprised to be spared the usual hazing and to my greater surprise, when I return to my room I found it still intact, just as I had left it the previous day before going to practice.

Miraculously, the uncalled for harassment stopped for the rest of the semester and with it the demerits. Only then did I learn what had transpired. The commander of my squadron had taken note of the fact that I had gotten back on the tramp despite my injury.  Apparently impressed, he told the three cadets who were my nemesis to back off: I was now off-limits.

And so, the Door that was so near to being closed and locked was halted literally in the nick of time and over time it swung fully open.  My cadet performance steadily improved and at graduation I was near the top of my class in every parameter of training.

So what to make of all that--the question that Brett and Patti asked me to think on as I wrap up my blogs. Well, you have probably already figured this one out: it was a  painful yet powerful affirmation of a lesson that I had seen at close range as a coxswain driving my eight oarsmen to their limit when every muscle in their body was screaming in agony. I saw them continue to row through the pain time after time in order to win, including our final test: the 1957 National Schoolboy Rowing Championship.  

So, there was never any doubt about getting back on that trampoline and doing a proper full twisting back somersault. I already understood the payoff of persevering under stress no matter how extreme it might seem. Perseverance, I learned, builds determination; it instills confidence, and it can makes champions of the most unlikely candidates.  However, the most important lesson that I learned was that perseverance can also save your life... but those are stories for another day.

A Moral Question?

While scrolling through the New York Times Entertainment Critic's column a couple of weeks back, I was struck by the reviewer's high praise of the Christopher Nolan film, "Oppenheimer."  As I shall shortly explain, I have a more than passing connection with his history, so I watched the trailer which concluded with an engaging interview with the cast and director.  During the discussion, Nolan offered the comment that Oppenheimer may have been the greatest person who ever lived.

Well, I and several billion others might suggest a different name for this accolade, but I got his point despite the hyperbole. Oppie, as this conflicted soul of immense intellect was known to his miniscule circle of friends, is the father of the atom bomb. That alone, you'll have to admit, is quite a resume.  It is also one hell of a story.  In 1943, he was charged with creating and directing a  laboratory, which he cobbled together on a barren scrap of land a few miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to try and build such a device.  Money was no object, as it was virtually certain that Hitler already had a parallel effort underway.

 The work grew rapidly and soon several thousand scientists, engineers, their families and a large complement of Army support personnel poured through the gate.  The small town of Los Alamos just north swelled in tandem, eventually giving its name to its voracious neighbor.

Despite its importance, the lab was only a small cog in a nationwide effort titled the Manhattan Project, under the leadership of Army Colonel Leslie Groves, who drove the work with a relentless determination that quickly earned him two stars. The Project was cloaked in utmost secrecy; other than Oppenheimer and select visitors, no one, including family members, was allowed to leave the facility for any reason for the next two years (excluding the spouses of native Americans living nearby who served in many of the bare bones houses as domestics). 

The world bore witness to Oppie's success when, in August of 1945, two Japanese cities--and 200,000 of their citizens--were vaporized in the blink of an eye. Knowledge of such an astounding weapon could not be contained; spies for Russia's Stalin managed to penetrate the wall of secrecy and within four years the Soviet Union tested its first weapon, followed in a decade by Great Britain, France, and China. 

Predictably, as is the hallmark of every arms race, technology hungry scientists, urged on by powerful economic and political interests, pressed for the development of increasingly powerful weapons of more disparate types in ever larger arsenals.  By 1954, the atom bomb had been relegated to the role of a trigger for the "Super" as the hydrogen bomb was initially dubbed.  Yes, you read that correctly:  the conditions necessary to initiate the explosion of a hydrogen bomb can only be achieved through the otherworldly power of  an atom bomb, very much akin to the manner in which the crushing power of gravity creates a star. Indeed, our sun is just one cosmic hydrogen bomb which in its death throes will destroy our planet...unless we manage to do it ourselves first.

That very real prospect came to plague Oppenheimer.  Even as he was working night and day to build an atom bomb, he began to express his concerns about proliferation privately to his fellow scientists.  His fear became so consuming that he decided to take his case directly to President Truman.  The blunt-spoken Missourian had just replaced FDR who died without telling his vice president about the Manhattan Project. Though Germany surrendered within weeks after Truman took office, he chose to continue the development program in the event that it might shorten the war against Japan.  Hence, Oppenheimer's plea for caution fell on deaf ears.  Truman cut their conversation short, snapped at him for meddling in a political matter and had him unceremoniously tossed from the Oval Office--a forerunner of worst treatment to come at the hands of his government.  

Although I knew this history quite well, I decided to see the movie in order to judge how faithfully Nolan had portrayed his subject. At the risk of sounding like a film critic, I found Cillian Murphy's resurrection of a tortured Oppenheimer trying to square his zeal for his scientific mission with his profound misgivings regarding proliferation extraordinary.  In truth, it hit very close to home.  The scene in the Oval Office rekindled a turmoil that, 30 years ago, roiled my own sense of humanity and compelled me to make a highly visible disavowal of my government that sent shock waves through the corridors of power.  

Although akin to nuclear proliferation, my angst cut much deeper and its public expression cost me dearly. To do it justice, I must hit pause and turn the clock back 66 years, in order to set a bookend for the narrative that will follow.  

That trip back in time lands us on the porch where I dropped you off at the conclusion of my previous blog, "Doors and Hinges."  As I dig the rhetorical footing for this first bookend, let me give you a brief recap of what got us this far:

"In January of 1957, an Undersized Child of the Deep South from an Army Family miraculously passes Entrance Examination for the Air Force Academy."  

There, done.  Now, I'm going to fast forward through 40 of those 66 years we just rewound and plant the other bookend.  We are no longer at the threshold of the Air Force Academy, but rather in the 4,500 square-foot ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the nation's most historic and prestigious forum for public affairs.  A lunch had just concluded and the host had begun his introduction of the guest speaker to an overflow audience comprising a cross section of experts in the nuclear weapons enterprise. The speaker would be me and the responses to my remarks will be varied, ranging from strongly supportive to vehemently opposed. 

The date is Friday, December the 6th, 1996.  My appearance had been hyped by a cover story article in the previous Sunday's Washington Post magazine, which is read widely in the capital area. From my seat adjacent to the podium, I can readily see the impact of the coverage as my gaze sweeps across the vast chamber and gradually finds the back of the room.  There, packed shoulder-to-shoulder, is a throng of television and radio journalists from around the world poised to broadcast my remarks.  As seasoned D.C. professionals, they know how to read the tea leaves:  this would be a front page story.  

Now, dear reader, I must pause to catch my breath and consider how best to explain this, how shall I say, unlikely circumstance.  I must also gird my loins because I know that just recalling it here will, as it always does, slice me like a piece of broken  glass...just as it did while sitting with a friend in a darkened theater watching Oppenheimer, the movie.

Let's begin in an Air Force Academy classroom in July of 1957 where I was also viewing a film that was part and parcel of the education/socialization for new cadets.  It dramatized the threat posed by the Russians, most prominently their thermonuclear weapons as portrayed in towering pillars of radioactive earth thrown miles into the sky, gradually taking the familiar shape of a blossoming mushroom cloud.  The film had its desired effect; at graduation, four years later, I was wearing the golden bars of a second lieutenant, poised for a career as a pilot ready at a moment's notice to defend his nation against an insidious Soviet threat.

That threat never became more real than a year later, during 13 days in October of 1962.  By chance, this was a seminal moment in my life. I had just married the woman with whom I had fallen madly in love (literally fallen--I was on a trampoline during a gymnastics competition when I first saw her); I had just completed a year-long pilot training program shortly after we said our wedding vows (" shortly after" meant our first home for three weeks was a motel in Chandler, Arizona...I told her things would get better...they did not); I had just been selected as an instructor pilot (stationed at a base just outside of...wait for it...Selma, Alabama); and I had just trekked through a freezing blizzard at the end of a winter survival course, ravenous for a hot meal (here comes the big finish).  After being trucked to a nearby air base, I was racing toward the kitchen of the officers club when the unmistakable voice of President Kennedy from a nearby TV stopped me dead in my tracks.  I stood frozen (quite literally) in place and watched JFK put the Soviet Union on notice that an attack on the U.S. by a missile fired from Cuba would be considered an act of war by the Soviet Union and he would respond accordingly.

I pause to insist on this moment for two reasons. First, because it brought the world within a coin flip of annihilation in the boiling cauldron of a thermonuclear holocaust.  Second, it's aftershocks influenced every point of my career in the military and subsequent walks of life either by design or by chance.  I may well come back to some of those decisive points in future blogs, but for the purpose of this one I need to move on quickly in order reach the era of my life that changed everything.

The years that followed are a kaleidoscope of events that in retrospect seem to range from the improbable to the unimaginable:  the birth of two children in widely disparate locations--son Brett, in Selma, Alabama, and daughter, Lisa, in Paris, France; ejecting during takeoff in a single engine T-33 jet trainer in April, 1963 (I was an instructor with a terrified student in the rear cockpit)...and from a twin engine F-4 jet fighter in April, 1968 (with a veteran pilot in the rear cockpit who narrowly escaped death after ejecting); moving 34 times in the first 40 years of our marriage while being promoted nine times, flying 15 different types of aircraft, and serving three times in the Pentagon (the earthly equivalent of Purgatory)..  

Along the way, I completed a master's degree at the University of Paris; taught political science at the Air Force. Academy; served a stint in the White House; had command of two B-52 units, one in California the other in Texas; served as the Inspector General for the Strategic Air Command; served in 15 different roles during my Pentagon assignments, to include responsibilities for nuclear arms control, military planning for the armed forces, global U.S. military alliances, negotiating a major agreement with the Soviet Union military, and drafting a new national security strategy for a post-Cold War world at the behest of my boss, Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

All the while, the two superpowers were relentlessly expanding and enhancing their arsenals of thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems. The United States alone would spend six trillion (yes, trillion) dollars on this enterprise, from the Manhattan Project until the first day of June, 1992.  That stupendous sum was expended in creating an astounding array of  strategic nuclear forces: successive fleets of bomber aircraft, ground-based missiles and missile bearing submarines, comprising a triad of disparate delivery systems which by the early '90s could be married to 10,000 warheads of myriad types and destructive power.  The largest fraction of these warheads were poised for launch on a moments notice, many literally within seconds.  While the bombers could be recalled in the event of an accidental or unintentional launch, the torrent of missiles pouring from land-based silos and submarine tubes were irretrievable. They could neither be called back nor destroyed in flight; once launched, their flight and their consequences were inevitable.

These operational forces were only the tip of an enormous iceberg. They were supported by laboratories for the design of successive families of nuclear devices; an enormous infrastructure for their manufacture, as well as for the production of fissile material; a phalanx of theorists and strategists; over a dozen intelligence organizations, of which just one commanded a budget of over ten billion dollars; a massive military-industrial complex, with tentacles reaching into every aspect of American society; globe circling, redundant command, control and communication networks, in the skies, the ground and under the seas; and scores of survivable options for essential "continuity of government" activities, many deeply buried, one of the most important being wedged into a mountain range in Colorado and another, for the most senior US government officials, built beneath a well known golfing resort within hailing distance of the nation's capital.  

Perhaps this brief overview gives you some idea of how quickly, over a span of 50 years, six trillion dollars from the national treasury can be expended pursuing, ahem, mutual assured destruction, or MAD, as the U.S. nuclear national security strategy has been known known since the advent of its forebearer:  the theory of Deterrence.

Since my retirement from the military, I have often given a lecture of sorts to a variety of interlocutors-- authors, journalists, academics, politicians and even movie directors--to put all this into a context that I called The Nuclear Weapons Enterprise.  Marshalling the expertise for such a presentation required all of my experience from those first days as a cadet to my last day in uniform as a four-star general.  I had mastered every aspect this Enterprise entailed and had been directly responsible for much of it during my career.  And now, it will urge me up the last few steps to the podium I mounted some 27 years ago.  Each of those steps recalls a moment, or event, or procedure or practice that I found most disturbing, distressing, devastating and to my mind unforgivable along the way.  

The most significant of these biographical IEDs came in the latter three years of my time on active duty.  Those years began with no small measure of professional satisfaction at having reached a position for which I had been groomed by a half dozen senior Air Force mentors.  Thanks to the opportunities they provided me, and yes, a lot of sacrifices along the way on my part--and most assuredly on the part of my family--in January of 1991 I was promoted to a fourth star and took command of the Air Force's bombers and land-base missiles. One year later, the President of the United States accepted my proposal to consolidate all of the strategic nuclear forces in one set  of hands, which is to say I would also be given command of the Navy's 18 Trident submarines, each laden with a 24 missiles,  each missile armed with eight thermonuclear warheads...you can do the math.  Together, these three sets of forces were capable of delivering the 10,000 warheads in our strategic arsenal and their operation was now my responsibility.

There were two additional tasks in my portfolio that I need to spend a bit of time addressing with you. The first was to design the nuclear war plan, that is to say, decide where those warheads should be targeted.  It was then known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, and was mind-boggling in it's complexity. Three floors of my headquarters were filled with the computers required to pull the delivery of all those weapons together in such a way that their routes and explosive consequences were deconflicted, that their capability was suited to their target, and that their destructiveness did not encroach beyond the limits designated in presidential guidance.

My third responsibility was by far the most challenging and consequential: I was the principal advisor to the president in the event of nuclear war. The long and short of it was this: should our warning systems detect an attack on the United States, presumably  by the Soviet Union, my role was to advise the President that we were under attack; to characterize it in terms of the type and number of weapons and their targets; to advise him of his options as portrayed in the nuclear war plan; to elicit an execution order; and promptly transmit it to the operational forces to ensure their timely launch, survival and delivery of their weapons.

The thrust of that conference is that by the time a typical attack had been detected and validated; I had been advised; the President had been brought on line; and I had taken him through the essence of the attack, in the best case there may have been 12 minutes for me to elicit a decision from the President. 

This scenario was practiced once a month on a no-notice basis, as follows:  I would receive a call out of the blue from the National Command Center in the Pentagon anytime day or night informing me the land- and space-based arrays of warning sensors had just provided unmistakable detection of an attack, it's size, and the likely targets; and that the President was being brought online. Until I heard the voice at the other end, which was typically not the president but a stand-in, I did not know whether this was a drill or an actual attack.  But in any event, I treated it as real. What will stay with me forever about the conversation which followed is this. In every single case, no matter who was playing the president, after I confirmed the attack and it's nature, it's likely consequences, and walked through the available response options, when I asked the momentous question, "Mr. President, what is your decision?" the response came: "General Butler, what is your recommendation?"

What that obviously implied is that I, an unelected government servant, was put in the position of deciding the fate of likely half the living things on the planet (I'll explain that in a moment).  I went through this scenario every month for three years while commander of the strategic nuclear forces, and behaved every minute day and night as if I  might find myself in that circumstance.

You can imagine the toll that this responsibility might take over that course of time:  the unique position, held by a relative few officers; the surreal scenario that required the utmost calm while discussing with the utmost urgency the prospect of putting hundreds of millions of lives at risk, utterly destroying their nation, their history, their hopes, their dreams; the terrible reality of knowing that this discussion would be taking place in the midst of the utter devastation of this country, America, from sea to shining sea, reduced to a pile of radioactive rubble where the living would surely envy the dead.  

Now, to give you some idea of the decision-making scenario I am sketching in the quiet of my blog- cave, imagine for a moment that you are the President of the United States, weighing the options which I have presented for a retaliatory response to an all out, bolt from the blue attack on our country by the Soviet Union.  Setting aside whatever reasons might have prompted such a nuclear Pearl Harbor, you have already given thought to the fact that whatever response you choose will have no military significance for obvious reasons:  we would not have survived a massive first strike from a Russian arsenal that was a mirror image of our own...10,000 thermonuclear warheads launched by a similar array of delivery systems.  Having war gamed their likely strike plan many times, there is no doubt in my mind that this represented the capacity to destroy our nation several times over.  Indeed, you can run a simplistic version of the apocalyptic math in your head:  dividing those 10,000 warheads by our 50 states would allocate 200 to whichever of our cultural packets in which you may reside.  Next, subtract from that 200 whatever number of typical Russian five megaton devices (one megaton is equivalent to one million tons of TNT--the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima equated to 15,000 tons of TNT) you might imagine it would take to render your home state unlivable--or perhaps non-existent (as an example, three should do nicely to eradicate the city proper of Los Angeles).  Now you should have a pretty good picture of what the word "overkill" portends.

This then, is your perspective as you consider the array of options I have presented, ranging from quite limited to an all out launch that nearly empties our nuclear arsenal. Such a response in kind would without question completely destroy the Soviet Union and whichever of their allies in the Warsaw Pact you decide not to exempt from our retaliation (I must name individually for you each of the six nations).  In round numbers you will be choosing who among some 400 million of your fellow humans will be issued a death warrant, from both the strike itself (the blast, flames and short term radiation, and the longer arriving fallout (an agonizing way to leave this earth). Nor would that be the end of it.  Within a matter of a few days, globe-circling winds will have showered that radiation over every square kilometer of the planet.  The earth would remain shrouded by a noxious, poisonous cloud long enough to ensure that there would be no recovery, not for several lifetimes if at all.

Think on this now for a moment. Ask yourself if you would have the equanimity to select some lesser response to such an attack if only to spare hundreds of millions of people who had no part in the decision to strike our country.  Or would the impulse of an eye for an eye retaliation be overwhelming, if only to ensure that the Soviet leaders emerging from their deeply buried survival shelters would have no one to govern?   If this harrowing outcome is the cost of Deterrence failing, one would have to ask if the six trillion dollar premium was worth it.

By the time my retirement from military service relieved me of these responsibilities, I was deeply troubled by what I perceived as the insanity of an ideological confrontation that had deepened into such a visceral enmity that it accepted mutual annihilation as the best solution to our mutual security fears.  Having witnessed innumerable crises, accidents and false alarm over the years I had long since understood that this was not a game nor a low probability outcome.  I knew, for example, from histories by participants on both sides of the Cuban missile crisis, that we had escaped a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention.

I was spared two more years of these baleful responsibilities by my decision to retire before my mandatory separation date.  I took off my uniform for the last time on the 14th of February 1994, comforted by the prospect that with the end of the Cold War, we might also be seeing the end of the nuclear nightmare. I had been uniquely privileged to participate in helping to pull back the veil of distrust and to form genuine friendships with former enemies. Hence, I was profoundly dismayed by the subsequent loss of political will as key officials left office, ushering in an era when too many of  their successors were uninterested, inept or unwilling; and nuclear weapons policy retreated to darkly suspicious Cold War thinking.  Relations between the U.S. and Russia gradually deteriorated and over time the stage was perfectly set for the advent of Vladimir Putin, a murderous thug who had long harbored visceral enmity for America. The door to a more hopeful future slowly swung closed, leaving the world once more at the mercy of superpower antagonism. The invoices for mutual assured destruction are again piling up at the door to the nation's Treasury as bills come due for a ten-year, trillion dollar modernization of the nuclear triad.

 As I watched these events unfold, my dismay slowly turned to distress and then a smoldering anger over the loss of priceless opportunities to draw mankind back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. That is why I accepted an invitation from the president of the National Press Club to speak to my experience and concerns before the kind of prestigious, expert audience that his organization assembled.

How that invitation came about is a story for another time. For a moment though, it serves the important purpose of bringing me to my present destination: the second bookend of this blog. Hopefully, during our journey I have related enough of my personal history for you to understand why my speech created a global sensation.  I was the first commander of his nation's strategic nuclear forces to declare them militarily irrelevant, politically useless and utterly immoral; that they neither provide for the common defense nor promote the general welfare; and that the only certainty they do provide, beyond measure, is the promise of nuclear deterrence:  

   Mutual Assured Destruction.

Doors and Hinges: Part One

 I have just finished reading the last of Thomas Cahill's six volume work entitled, "The Hinges of History."  He describes his purpose as "...a recounting of those essential moments when everything was at stake, when the mighty stream that became Western history was in ultimate danger and might have divided into a hundred useless tributaries or frozen in death or evaporated altogether. But the great gift-givers, arriving at the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found."

That set me to thinking about the great gift-givers in my life, and serendipitous little moments, that changed its course, that time and again set my feet on a path I would never have imagined, one that ultimately led to a destination beyond imagining given the point from which my journey began.  So, if you are of a mind, set out with me.  Along the way I will recount events that in retrospect seemed either fated or even miraculous; and introduce the remarkable people who bet on me, took pity on me, rescued me and pushed me up ladders whose first rungs I could hardly reach.

The first act in this drama--well, blog, but hey, it's my life so humor me–is set in a little red brick building that housed the post office of Oakland, Mississippi, population 1,500 (the number on the incorporation sign marking the city limits announced the number of its citizens as 500, but in 1954 the 1,000 black folks weren't considered citizens).  This deeply segregated community was home to me, my mother, my year-older sister and six-year younger brother whenever my Army father was away on a non-accompanied assignment.  We lived in a, how shall I say, very modest wood house about a mile from town, which brings me to the point of this stage-setting: somebody had to walk that mile and back to the post office every day to check on the mail and that somebody was me. 

A summer morning in 1954 found me waiting for the mail to be put up, spending time checking for any new posters on the walls, especially the eagerly awaited FBI 10 Most Wanted List. Then my eye caught a new posting, depicting a stalwart young lad clad in a blue uniform saluting the American flag as an airplane flew overhead.  Blazoned across the bottom were the words, "Come to the Air Force Academy".  Some unknown Air Force public information officer had done his work; if I had looked at that poster a bit harder for a bit longer I might have seen it for what it was: the door to the rest of my life.  Peering closer,  I might have seen that it lacked hinges.  But for the moment, this brief encounter receded into the deep recesses of my memory.

Come the fall of 1956, I was starting my senior year in high school in Arlington, Virginia, home to the Pentagon where my father had been assigned after his return from Korea a year earlier.  Hearing my classmates chatter excitedly about their college applications, I asked my dad about my prospects.  He said, "Son, let me explain the economic facts of life in this family. Your sister's college tuition is eating up every dime of our extra income. Sorry, but you will have to find a scholarship or join the Army like I had to when the depression hit."

Memory of that poster came flooding back like a tsunami.  Without thinking, I blurted out, "I want to go to the Air Force Academy."  My father thought I meant West Point but I stammered about the poster.  After confirming that such an Academy did exist and had admitted its first class in the fall of 1955, he reached out to our Senator who agreed to nominate me for the third class. Shortly thereafter, I received a letter scheduling me for an entrance examination in early 1957.  For the first time, I began to imagine myself as that young lad in the poster, saluting the flag and picturing himself flying the airplane overhead.

Taking the entrance examination turned out to be a mouthful (hang on to that last word).  For the first several class years, qualification testing took an entire week, covering a vast array of Air Force concerns: intelligence (my gene pool served me well here); several academic disciplines (my two years of Agriculture in Mississippi were no help); vocabulary (I had never heard the word, "tutu"); a battery of psychological tests (I found them pretty puzzling); and finally, physical prowess (here is where today's story begins).

I reported to Bolling Air Force Base, just south of Washington, D.C., at eight o'clock on a Monday morning in mid-January, 1957.  I was, how should I say, very slight at 5 feet 6 inches and just north of 110 pounds in a rain storm.  I had worked hard to improve my physique, including a lot of running and three workouts a week with a set of Charles Atlas weights.  However, as I surveyed the other three hundred or so candidates gathered in the waiting area, they all kind of looked like Charles Atlas.  My spirits sagged as we lined up for an initial battery of tests to ensure we met the rigorous physical standards we had to meet in order to become Air Force pilots.

We were lined up alphabetically, so my name was called early on.  When I stepped on the scale, the young airman taking the height and weight measurements said, "Height within standards, weight five pounds under standard". The doctor recording his comments closed my application folder and unceremoniously dropped it in the trash can. I had not even made it out of the starting blocks.

As my short life flashed before my eyes, I did the only thing I could think of:  I got down on one knee and pleaded with the doctor for another opportunity at the end of the week.  He smiled and said, "Young man, I'll bet that you have never gained five pounds in a week in your life."  I said, "Sir, if you give me a chance, I'll bet that I can make this the first time." 

He must have gotten a wink from the angel sitting on my shoulder because he dipped into the trash can for my file and set it on the corner of his desk.  He told me to come back after my last test on Friday morning and he would weigh me again.  A first small hinge on the very large door to my future was put in place--at least temporarily.

I asked the young airman where I could find a phone and he told me to use the one on his desk in the outer office. I called my father and told him my predicament.  He had an immediate answer: "Go to the mess hall, tell the Mess Sergeant that you are Sergeant Butler's son and you need to put on five pounds by Friday noon." I don't know why he called himself a sergeant.  Although he wore that rank for many years, that was long since and my dad had retired as a colonel.  I guess he had his reasons, but no matter now, although I did have to ask, "How will I know who is the Mess Sergeant if there are a lot of people?" "Don't worry," he said, "you'll know when you see him."

The minute I saw the well fed NCO in a well worn apron I understood what my father had told me.  After listening to my plight, he went to his kitchen and returned bearing a plate piled high with mashed potatoes he was making for the lunch hour (now you see why I flagged the word "mouthful"). He told me to eat my fill and come back every minute I could spare from my testing so he could fatten me up.  Another gift-giver had appeared with another crucial hinge.

But the portal to my future was not to be so easily swung: this would be the best of weeks and the worst of weeks.  As the days crawled by, my weight crept higher.  I took one test after another, ate voluminously, slept fitfully and weighed myself at every opportunity, as if just stepping on the scale would help me gain weight.  

The numbers did inch higher.  After a huge breakfast on Friday morning, the needle hovered exactly over what I would require...in two hours.  In the meantime, I had one last hurdle to clear: the physical tests I had worked so hard to prepare for.

For an hour, in a sweltering gym with several hundred other sweating bodies, I did calisthenics, push-ups, situps, medicine ball throws and a 600-yard shuttle run.  After a quick shower, I was back in the doctor's office promptly at ten o'clock and stepped on the scale.  The same young airman who had weighed me on Monday intoned, "He is still two pounds light."  The doctor complimented me for having gained three pounds but reaffirmed that he could not sign my application.  Back into the trash it went.

The assistant and I went back into the outer office where he took a seat at his desk and I pretty much collapsed onto a nearby couch, tears coming down my cheek.  Seeing my distress, he asked why failing the physical was such a big deal to me. After all, many other candidates had not passed.  I choked out something about no money for college and having to join the Army which I desperately did not want to do.

Without explanation, he reached into his desk drawer, pulled out a quarter, gave it to me and told me to go down the hall to the clinic food outlet and buy a quart of chocolate milk.  I was completely unaware of what he was getting at but in my dazed condition I just did what he asked. When I got back I gave him the milk, but he gave it back to me.  Realizing I was absolutely clueless, he said, "It's not for me. It's for you. Drink it. It weighs two pounds."

He was right. When the puzzled doctor agreed to his assistant's firm request that he weigh again, not 15 minutes later, I was spot on. Out of the trash came the well traveled application folder, the doctor signed his name and four months later I received a letter informing me the Air Force liked what they saw.  A third hinge was now securely in place, the door with my name on it swung wide open and I began a very long journey, one that would bring me to, well, the end of this blog.

This is the point where Brett and Patti would ask what I make of all this.  I answered that question for myself many years ago when I became mature enough to ask it.  Why would these three people, a learned doctor, a rumpled sergeant, and an airman about my age respond to my plea for help?  It was certainly not my charm or charisma, which I would peg at absolute zero.  Mine was a plea from a stranger, someone they would likely never see again. None of them needed to help.  All of them could have been forgiven had they not. They were busy people who had no need to take heed of me. And yet they did.

What a simple but powerful. prescription: they listened, they  cared, and they responded.  Is there any better guide to how we might live our lives?  Sounds like something that might be stamped in gold.

Until next time.  Perhaps we shall  talk about more Doors...and Hinges in the weeks to come.

Grief...and Death

My daughter-in-love recently eased open the door to my room and, with her knowing smile, informed me that she had an exceptional idea. Over the 20 years I have known her, I knew her ideas were unfailingly exceptional so she had my undivided attention. "You," she said, "need to do a blog."  Pretending to understand, I nodded. Still with the smile, she told me she would let me know when it was up and running and gently closed the door.  

And so, at the age of 84, I am now a "blogger," as Google so informs me, having never even read a blog.  When I asked Patti what I might write about, once more with the smile she said, "Whatever comes to your mind, Granddaddy," the title by which I am known amongst family and close friends.

Well, dear reader, she casts a very wide net.  After three careers, encompassing such diverse worlds as national security, the energy business and a number of public policy issues, I can still speak to a wide array of questions with some authority.  I have also long devoted as much time as I could muster to studying an eclectic mix of disciplines that ignite my passion for learning.

Much of this history is recorded in my two-volume memoir, "Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention," upon which I shall draw from time to time.  However, since it's publication in 2016, a recurring theme in its pages has increasingly consumed me: Grief, too often inseparable from its devoted companion, Death.  So, however painful for me and likely for some of you, dear readers, here is where I shall begin my blogging...if there is such a word.

After 84 years of well, life, I carry a lot of baggage here. I have cared too much about too many people and too many things to expect otherwise.  That said, unlike for so many young people, through my early years Grief and Death left me largely untouched.  We were not introduced until an bright April morning in 1963.  I was a freshly minted instructor pilot on my first mission with a student.  We had just lifted off the runway when the engine of our single engine jet trainer seized and caught fire.  After spending precious seconds commanding the terrified student to eject, I was certain I was too low to survive my own ejection.  But, Death rolled the dice and literally left me hanging; after one swing of my chute I slammed into the ground.  My student and I both eluded Death, and Dorene was spared the Grief visited upon every military wife who opens her door to the unexpected arrival of a chaplain.

Five years later to the day, that brush with Death played out again.  I had just arrived at my base in South Vietnam as a freshly minted F-4 pilot.  I left this war torn country a year later having felt the sudden jolt of Grief after seeing the rolled-up mattress of a squadron mate who had not returned from his evening mission; stared Death in the face once more while dangling in a parachute at 14,000 feet above the South China Sea after ejecting from my crippled aircraft; delivered Death to untold numbers of Vietnamese in the form of bombs, cluster munitions and flaming tanks of napalm; and, in the latter half of my tour as a general's aide in Saigon, watched the Grief on my four-star boss's face as he signed letter after letter of condolence.  By the age of 30, I was already a Grief- and Death-scarred veteran.

Grief receded for the next 13 years, supplanted I suppose by profound regret after becoming a stranger to my family during the three years of my first Pentagon tour.  But it was waiting and watching quietly before returning with a vengeance.

After two rapid promotions and four succeeding tours, in 1982 I realized my dream assignment: command of a B-52 unit.  That happiness was short-lived. A week before Christmas, one of these eight-engine machines crashed on takeoff, leaving ten lives snuffed out in a blacken field of burning wreckage just off the end of the runway.  Dorene and I were pummeled by Grief as we endured eulogy after eulogy and whispered inadequate words of condolence to ten distraught families.

By now, I had learned to take happiness with a grain or two of unease.  That lesson proved well founded when, a year later, I was given command of a second, much larger B-52 wing.  Again, the weight of responsibility for the mission and the lives of now 6,000 people bore down, even more heavily.  Several of my young airmen found ways to severely injure or kill themselves, whether on motorcycles, drowning or drug overdose, deaths that could have been avoided had proper training and disciplinary programs been in place.  I was filled with sorrow, anger and dismay at this senseless loss of life and the Grief it entailed for the families.  I was also deeply embarrassed that these incidents were occurring on my watch and took actions that put an immediate end to them.  

After a year, the success of my unit brought me another tinge of happiness when I was promoted to my first star.  I had delighted in calling my father, a retired army colonel, with the news (the operator relayed to him, per my request, the words, "Colonel Butler you have a collect call from General Butler").  Within a month, Death called for him instead, as it did in the following month for Dorene's two older brothers.  Grief just piled on.

Forward with me now as I pass rapidly over the Grief I felt, as have so many other grandparents, when the ravages of autism began to present in our daughter's first child three years after his birth.  And again, when my son's marriage failed after 10 years and two children.

I am happy to say that our resiliency as a family brought us through these challenges to very fortunate outcomes.  However, Grief and it's devoted companion were making a journal of what my life would hold, to be slowly revealed over the decade beginning in 2011 when a virus eased into my right plural cavity and began nibbling away at the lining of first my right lung and then the left.

That was the beginning of a long saga filled with puzzled medical specialists, unrelenting pain, and a pharmacy's worth of medications. After two agonizing surgeries, I fell from peak physical health into a medical no man's land where an idiopathic condition robbed me of my vitality, compromised my autoimmune system, and is destroying my central nervous system. It will also shorten my life presuming that some other eventuality does not intrude.

I must say, in all candor, that Grief visited me with a pretty sharp pang of regret for the loss of my hopes for this period of my life.  And while I am grateful that Death dealt with me kindly, the fact that I was spared the worst again proved cold comfort.  In early 2020, just as Covid was settling in, wreaking global Death and sorrow, I lost my brilliant younger brother to cancer, contracted when he was exposed to Agent Orange during his own tour in Vietnam.

I come finally to two cups of Grief that Death set before me and my family to end one decade and begin another. The first was filled with a long and bitter draught of a dreaded disease: dementia. 

Brett, Patti, Lisa and I did not understand the unsettling signs of Dorene's s affliction until a brain scan in the spring of 2020 revealed the frightening hole in her brain.  At some point she had suffered a stroke which in turn triggered what soon proved a severe form of dementia.  She was gone in 18 months.

No, better said, she left every day for a year and a half. Every day a new mystery to unravel as her persona slipped back toward childhood; every day a struggle to put on a forced smile and play children's games with her or say childhood prayers; every day not wanting to accept that this was really happening.

But it did, at two o'clock in the morning of October twenty-fourth, two thousand and twenty.  Yes, that's the way I will always remember it, written out the long way, not abbreviated, because it was not abbreviated--it was painful every hour of every day of every month.

Brett, Patti and Lisa enveloped me with compassion as each of us dealt with sorrow in our own way.  We soon discovered, though, that Grief had no intention of abating.  Just over 2 months later, Brett and Patti's son--my oldest grandson, still in his early 20s, died from an inadvertent drug overdose.

I was sitting near Patti when Brett told her that Jake was dead. He just spoke the words straight out with no embellishment; there was no way to soften them. Her anguished wail rose and rose until it seemed the room could not contain it. She fell to the floor, disbelieving, cursing Death, screaming as if she might drive it away.  But Death, of course, does not yield not even to distraught mothers. It's simply ushers in Grief at its most profound.  Grief that burrows deeply, that turns back every page of motherhood, back to the first sign of life in the womb.  My compassion for Patti cannot be measured; her painful cries will be in my head until the day I leave this earth.

We carry on, the four of us, knit by common bonds of suffering.  Lisa still has more than her share of Grief to deal with, while Brett, Patti and I moved to Kentucky where Patti has extended family and happy memories to lean on.  We acquired an inviting house that Patti's touch has transformed into a beautiful Kentucky home, sitting amidst seven acres of bucolic countryside.

I now spend my days helping with the chores, reading deeply into subjects that fascinate me, enjoying family gatherings and deepening my faith after it has been sorely tested (I should say this pursuit is greatly facilitated when one's son is a minister).

After reading through this in draft form, at my behest, Brett and Patti did pose one important question: what was my takeaway? That is a fair question, and after some reflection, my answer would be simply this. Death and misfortune happen.  Grief follows.  But that is so because Life happens.  And I would not trade mine for any price.

And so, I have blogged.  I don't really know if this will be just a one-off little excursion or if it will capture my fancy.  Or I suppose I could be hounded back into my more insular life by an army of insult hurling trolls.  But in any event here it is, a blog, general-ly speaking (the title I really wanted but someone beat me to it).  In closing, I will readily admit that this may not have been the best topic for my first outing.  It's just that I have thought about Grief and Death for a very long time and finally decided to talk about them...while I can.