This was written in 2002 a few years after I was extracted from Lawrence and had recovered enough from the most dangerous days of my life. How and why I wasn't killed in that town I will never know. I certainly did things that would have deserved a violent end but it wasn't in the cards.

A GRADUAL WALK

Lawrence is gritty and real

pretense has no place,

facades all fail to stand

in a city of primal needs.

Work brought me there

a good good job and a good wage.

I knew who I was

but not what I was to be.

The streets were there of course

they always had been,

at first I didn't notice

the subtle way they called.

Each morning I drove Broadway

to greet the day and its events.

Nights found me driving

on a northward journey home.

As time moved on it's schedule

I found the streets in my eye.

Dirty and nasty as they were

the attraction would not be denied.

From the loading dock could I see

all there was that interested.

Young girls displaying their wares

and plying their trade.

The call slowly came to notice

as the light of the street

began to glow more brightly

in the recesses of my mind.

Slowly my resistance waned

and I began the gradual walk

into the warm and total embrace

of a life I had never known.

Here is what I presume to be a poem. I wrote this in 1982 while working as a USAF Security Police (now Security Forces) crew chief in the missile field of Montana. We were responsible for 10 Minuteman III ICBM's located under the prairie around the town of Conrad. Working out of a Launch Control Facility (LCF) designated Papa-Zero we would spend three days responding to maintenance calls, exercise alerts and actual alarm activations. Our team at various times included SSgt Bell, Sgt Reed, SrA Sellner, A1C Morales, A1C Greene, Amn Standish, SrA McRae and a few others. I was never comfortable guarding those missiles, the whole concept of MAD (mutually assured destruction bothered me).

DEATH OUR MOTHER

Here we are the boys in green

our aims are high our goals are clean.

The bombs we guard sit in the Earth

to death our Mother will give birth.

We sit and wait for her to come

the clock is slow beats as a drum.

When she does her spirit will sing

of the death we her children can bring.

In the ground the legends sit

the time will come their keys will fit.

At that time from the lair they'll rise

death, her son will dance for your eyes.

Now is the time our hell has come due

our sky has lost it's comforting blue.

The worst is not over now is the time

for the specter of death and its terrible mime.

When it is over will man really learn

that playing with fire will result in a burn?

Will he continue to play the game of the damned

so death can again envelop the land?