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By Bonnie Bartel Latino

Columnist

Readers who may have missed one or both of my last two weeks columns, brief explanations are in order. On November 13, I wrote about my close friend at March Air Force Base in California, Pat Phillips, and her brief visit to tell me she had just been diagnosed with leukemia.
Pat’s update is a happy one. While Leukemia is never a diagnosis anyone wants to hear, today’s medicine has taught us that there are numerous types of the blood disease. I believe now that Pat must have had Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). We now know it develops slowly, often without symptoms. The best news is that with proper monitoring like regular blood tests, patients can live for decades after CLL is diagnosed. Pat enjoyed 40 more years of life. Tom was twice stationed at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, not far from where the Phillips retired. Our friendship continued to evolve. They became more like family than friends. We absolutely adored them. * * *
Last week, I wrote about my harrowing experience as a Red Cross volunteer, also at March AFB. I was assigned to the emergency room at the base hospital, a regional medical facility. It was 1972. Tom was still a first lieutenant. I was a naïve 23-year-old. The only work experience I’d had was as a teenager writing a weekly column for five years for the Atmore Advance.
My column on November 20 told the story of the day I was assigned to answer the phone line used only for incoming emergencies. I was given no instruction except to stay by the phone until my shift ended. The phone rang only once. The base commissary needed an ambulance for a 45-year-old man who’d had a heart-attack.
Because I was not told, nor did I ask the caller’s name and number, the head nurse said no ambulance could be sent. She told me to keep calling. The primary line at that facility was constantly busy. By the time I reached someone, whom I assumed was the manager’s secretary, told me the man “was dead.” I was in shock as I quickly located and told the head nurse the bad news. She just shrugged and walked off. I felt like an imbecile.
The follow up is that there was no follow up. No one from the hospital, the Air Force or Red Cross ever contacted me. Within a week I told one of Tom’s commanders, a full colonel. He acted and appeared livid and said he would look into it. Total silence still reigned.
Even today I ask myself a few things about that horrific situation. For instance, why was there no index card taped above the phone cautioning: “YOU MUST GET THE CALLER’S NAME AND PHONE NUMBER BEFORE AN AMBULANCE CAN BE SENT? Also, if an ambulance was so urgently needed, why didn’t someone call back when an ambulance didn’t arrive? True, I was repeatedly calling the commissary’s main number, but I did go to speak a second time to the nurse about the commissary’s line still being busy. And why was there no rule already in place so that under certain circumstances, an ambulance could be sent without the caller’s name and number? Wouldn’t it be better to send an ambulance, even if it turned out to be a prank caller than to let someone die? Lastly, could the man have already been dead when the ER received the initial call? These are things I will never know, and they will continue to haunt me. I am aware that I was partially culpable, but having written these two columns maybe I can begin to forgive myself for the part I may have played in a man’s death. * * *
I don’t recall ever volunteering for the Red Cross again. I remained active in Officers Wives Club, even being elected by the membership to serve as corresponding secretary. I also continued to write for the March Lady magazine, and to give talks at schools for Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge. Most of my Saturdays (and often Tom’s) were still spent in front of the base exchange and at my nemesis, the commissary, as I/we solicited customers for their treasured signatures for more petitions to bring home America’s Prisoners of War and Missing in Action in Southeast Asia. Our neighbor, who was a B-52 pilot and a major, mailed new pages of signed signatures to Washington D.C.
We never protested the war in Vietnam. We just didn’t want our own people to forget our Prisoners of War and those Missing in Action in Southeast Asia. However, most military wives seemed intimidated to fulfil this volunteer work, fearing it might reflect negatively on their husbands’ careers. Never once did Tom Latino ask me to rethink this particular volunteer work.
I grew up a tremendous amount at March Air Force Base in the early 1970s. One of the two things I most regret about our 30 years in the Air Force had yet to happen to me there. However, to fully understand that, readers first need to learn about another mind-boggling episode with the Red Cross at March.
More on that next week.