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By Bonnie Bartel Latino

Columnist

“Hello,” I said as I answered the phone in our temporary apartment in Mira Loma.

“I just wanted to say how much… how much I love you.” Tom rushed the last few words. He didn’t sound like himself. “Tom, what’s wrong? Are you OK?”

“The Weather Underground just called in a bomb threat.”

My mind raced with a jillion questions, which I rapidly asked. “Weather? Who? Where? Are you OK?”

Tom explained the threat came into 15th Air Force’s command post, where he had been working for a couple of months. I interrupted to ask if they had evacuated the building. “Bomb threat or not,” he said, “no one will evacuate our building. Our job is to monitor communications of all B-52 and missile bases under 15th Air Force’s command.” He didn’t have to tell me his life could be in peril in the building in which communications controllers rotated shifts. This week it was six days on swing shifts 4 p.m. to midnight, then four days off.

Early the next day when Tom finally arrived home, he found Lamb Chop and me asleep in our living room, cuddled near the only phone in our apartment. We were both beyond grateful that nothing ever came of the bomb threat that so rudely interrupted our idyllic life. That night had been the longest of my life, at least up until late fall of 1970.

Just because the radical group apparently gave up on bombing the command post, it didn’t mean they stopped targeting organizations they deemed part of the establishment. According to politico.com, “… Members of the Weather Underground, a radical leftist group, had since 1969, already bombed several police targets, banks, and courthouses around America in hopes of overthrowing the United States government …” Only months after that bomb threat was phoned into Tom’s workplace, a bomb did go off elsewhere “… at 1:32 a.m. on March 1, 1971, at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.” The bomb had been placed in “… an unmarked marble-lined men’s bathroom one floor below the Senate chamber.” The man who phoned in that bomb also advised the switchboard to “evacuate the building.” No lives were lost, but the bomb created $300,000 worth of damage according to history.com.

Eventually Tom and I moved on base at March. Our three-bedroom shotgun house was “base housing” even though it was several miles off the main base and was likely built during World War II, if not before. It had poop-brown acrylic tile floors throughout. The yellow wooden house’s two saving graces were the affordable rental price and fenced back yard for Lamb Chop.

When we first drove into the double carport, which we shared with a lovely family, Major Dick and Laurie Drury. Their five children ranged in age from infant to rebellious young teenage son, Rich. The Drury’s home was identical to ours.

Laurie came out to meet us and tell us a bit about our neighborhood. Five of the officers in nearby homes were in communications like Tom. Four were lieutenants like Tom. They all had wives, but also like us, had no children yet. The fifth, a married major, was Tom’s boss.

As we walked around the front of the house to go inside, I asked Laurie why the flower beds were in such sad shape. The petite and blonde Laurie literally blushed as if she were personally responsible. “I’ve never before seen this happen on a base. The previous tenants created beautiful front beds of orange California Poppies on either side of the front door. As soon as the previous tenants were packed and the moving van left, one of the neighbors from a few streets over, came that very night and dug up the flowers, put them in buckets, and disappeared into the night.”

I laughed half-heartedly. “One doesn’t expect to live among thieves on base,” I muttered. Laurie agreed before going back to her house to check on her little ones. Her husband, a B-52 navigator, was TDY to Guam, serving on ARC LIGHT. (From Andersen AFB, Guam and U-Tapao Royal Thai Navy, the B-52s on three-month temporary duty from the states provided battlefield air interception and prevention during the Vietnam War.)

When Laurie had told Tom and me that many of our neighbors were deployed to Guam, the anger I had felt a month or so previously about the Weather Underground bubbled inside me again. With Vietnam raging, all Air Force crews flying and fighting in Southeast Asia didn’t need to learn about any radical leftist group calling themselves the Weather Underground and making their own war on America, where the crews’ families lived.

I didn’t yet know what I was going to do help our aircrews and others like them. Nor did I know that I would grow into a bona fide adult at March Air Force Base, or that much of my early growth would take root in the plight of all American air crews serving in Southeast Asia.

(To be continued.)