Crisis of Character

2.

THE AIR FORCE SECURITY POLICE

I'm from Delco, a.k.a. Delaware County, Pennsylvania, born of Irish and Lebanese ancestry, but American through and through. O'Byrne even became Byrne so as to not sound too Irish. The concept of "America first" is in my blood.

My ancestors traveled here for a better life and succeeded in no small part thanks to my father's ability to shake off the bad times and be the strongest survivor of them all. He was a great soul. He aimed to do right and act morally, to have his children live better than he did. That's my idea of the American dream.

My father served as an Air Force mechanic in Japan during Korea. He could fix a rock if it was broken. My brother John was born in 1956, then Lynn, then lil' Gary, and finally Anita. Those were the days! We played, teased, biked, fought, and ran up and down the neighborhood with the rest of the kids playing sports in the streets—never indoors. If you were indoors, you were interrupting Mom, being antisocial, or just plain up to no good. Outside, a whole neighborhood of families looked after each another.

Following the post-Vietnam reduction of forces, we set out for Newport News, Virginia, where the Navy was creating a new class of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. My father received a fully paid education in nuclear engineering.

The South was a big change for us, yet in typically southern fashion the neighborhood was welcoming and full of all-round good people.

My siblings and I feared that if we did wrong, we'd send a message that we took my parents for granted. When I repeated first grade, I felt as if I was letting my parents down. Most people, my father included, thought I was lazy, though I worked hard at sports and in the garage. In seventh grade I was diagnosed with significant attention deficit disorder and dyslexia. For me, sports were a no-brainer, but academics were a lost cause. Still, my parents set an example of hard work and decent behavior that never left me. A hotshot life never impressed them. They never let anyone look down their noses at us.

There's something more important, though, than academics or sports. Character is everything. Down the street from us lived an airman. Whenever he came home, his wife and kids ran to him. Confidence, purpose, and respect emanated from his blue uniform.

When high school ended my friends marched off to college, but I knew higher education wasn't my move. I signed with the Air Force, hoping to see the world and feed my adventurous spirit with girls, guns, and things that go BOOM! I was full of piss and vinegar.

I thought I was immortal.

The Air Force recruiter's questions got to me. I deeply hated terrorism—it boiled my blood. Air Force Security Police (AFSP) seemed the right fit; I hadn't been west of Pittsburgh. I wanted to protect others and see the world. If America was going to prioritize air superiority, our airpower needed superior security.

In January 1982 I enlisted for less than $12,000 a year, but I was itching to go. A decade earlier Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces had targeted America's air supremacy via brazen sapper missions, assassinations, and bombings. Terrorists kidnapped NATO general James Dozier, torturing him for weeks before Italian SWAT teams rescued him. The Munich Olympic massacre in 1972 proved it was best to stop an attack rather than react to it.

I had an awful habit of laughing and smiling under pressure. When conflict arises, it's healthy to keep a level head and a light mood, but not during training at Lackland Air Force Base: You get smoked. Laughing equals pain.

Air Force basic training wasn't like the Army's or the other branches. Our style was sit-ups, push-ups, and calisthenics so rigorous we couldn't stand it. We learned that a respect for the chain of command builds confidence. It creates a cohesive unit, like a marriage. That's what Basic was designed to do. How much it sucked depended on how fast a person adjusted.

I adjusted quickly but called my parents every chance I could. I didn't mind the physicality or the stress, but the homesickness was awful. I never imagined what loneliness and isolation from my family would bring. My parents sensed it. Every recruit suffers a devastating epiphany: Enlist to fight for the freedom of others and you forfeit your own. You feel a strange guilt, a mourning for your former self.

My father, in his usual blunt style, shaped me up: "Gary, you wanted this, and I told you it was going to be like this."

He was right. I needed to take his advice to "rub some dirt on it" and move on.

Our technical instructors (TIs—the Air Force's version of drill instructors) explained that even as untested "slick-sleeve" airmen, we were all leaders. When leaders did their duty, the potential for pain was less. I absorbed the lesson into my soul. If I didn't ensure my weapon was clear of any rounds or if I neglected its proper handling, a good guy could eat a bullet. Hence the military wisdom: There's nothing friendly about friendly fire. If rigging wasn't rigged correctly, it failed and people died. If we didn't eat correctly, people died. Didn't drink correctly—people died. Didn't wear our uniform correctly—people died. That was the military mentality: Don't make your bed correctly, and pain ensues. Why? Because! If you thought any duty could be shirked, you didn't see the big or even the little picture, and people were going to die.

It wasn't our job to understand the big picture. We weren't drafted; we chose this. When my TI showed us videos of planes falling off aircraft carriers and giant buck-ups that took lives, I absorbed the truth. In this life, small actions had severe consequences. A lightbulb flickered on inside me; the TI sounded word-for-word like my father.

I always reminded myself of my oath:

The Air Force's act-first mentality turned me on. You couldn't go wrong as long as you acted. Do nothing, and you were f—ed. No matter the question, the answer was act, take initiative! If under fire, the answer was to take cover or fire back, but never hesitate or stand still. We were always encouraged to do first, ask questions later.

But before and afterward, asking questions and thinking were the name of the game. This was a fighting man's game. A good fighting man is a thinking man, but when he faces conflict, training kicks in and thinking comes second. Everyone who has experienced violence personally knows the military truism, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Conviction and character do.

Education was very different in the military, and I responded to it like a sponge. Many of my grade and high school teachers were gems who really tried to help me, but I never grasped what schoolroom education could lead to. Military teaching wasn't just about lecturing and grading; it was about ensuring lessons were learned. Success was defined not by letter grades but by results: Mess up and someone dies.

I learned that I had incredible muscle memory, spatial orientation, and hand-eye coordination. While most people's IQs nosedive during fight-or-flight scenarios, I kept my cool. My fingers never got fudgy under pressure; I kept both my gross and fine motor skills, never got tunnel vision, or lost situational awareness. I couldn't do calculus, but thankfully I wasn't calling in air strikes. My new mission was to enforce the law and protect myself doing it via a variety of weapons, the most important my brain.

Following Basic and Technical School, I eagerly awaited my first deployment to Murtad Air Base, just outside Ankara, Turkey. Our mission included securing our equipment from the host country. Murtad was a nuclear-capable base. During the Cold War, America had placed nukes in Turkey as a first-strike capability against Russia. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy withdrew them as part of a joint deescalation. Arriving at Murtad, I learned that AFSP there had caught rogue Turkish officers trying to push an American F-104 Starfighter with a loaded nuke onto the flight line so they could steal a nuke and bomb Greece. Many Turks bitter about the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22 wanted a flash point to ignite a new war. I believe this was secretly why JFK took the nukes out of Turkey in 1962. Turks simply hate Greeks. We joked to each other, "Hey, if you're not careful, I'll tell the Turks you're Greek!"

In central Turkey I expected a scene from Lawrence of Arabia with large open desert, but it was moonlike. I often thought of Neil Armstrong's "One small step for man…" Terrain featured sharp mountain ranges dotted with shrunken trees. The heat was unbearable. Turkey felt particularly eerie on several bus rides with the mountains literally on fire in the distance. The Turks were just clearing brush after their harvest, but it looked like a vision of hell.

Turks lived up to my expectations as hardened warriors, but I hated their methods. Often I was ordered, "Officer, stand down!" as Turkish superior officers brutally pummeled and beat subordinates. My anxiousness for action paled beside their desire for full-blown war.

International tensions escalated when in September 1983 a Russian fighter mistook a commercial plane for a U.S. AWACS probing Russian airspace. When the Soviet Su-15 interceptor intentionally downed Korean Air Lines flight 007, killing the 269 souls on board, we scrambled into high alert.

We once received "don't drink the water" orders. Supposedly someone put arsenic in our water. I was glad someone in the military checked these things. Every bit of protocol is built on trial and error. We showered with well water for a while but that seemed dicey. We got all our fluids from bottled Diet Coke—the only safe drink.

In my thirteen months in Turkey, I grasped we were allies only because we shared a common enemy. Allies are not friends, nor are they ever to be trusted farther than can be verified. From the Turks I learned to take nothing for granted in terms of security; the enemy could just as well be within our gates as on the horizon.

Next stop: Langley, Virginia, and the Elite Gate Section. Military bases are like cities complete with every aspect of urban crime, such as bank robberies, shady characters, sexual assaults, DUIs, prostitution, drugs, smuggling, contraband, trafficking, career criminals, disgruntled troublemakers, murder, suicide, and so much more. But military crime was "camouflaged." Military style, hierarchy, and outright ego entered every aspect of life, especially crime and corruption. Beyond that, we had an occasional spy, aircraft collision, crash, mechanical failure; we guarded President Ronald Reagan's Air Force One when it touched down, experienced international incidents, and identified potential flash points. I saw NASA aircraft fly into lightning storms to test how new aircraft handled extreme natural occurrences. Those pilots had balls of steel—or whatever else is nonconductive.

As police we took arrests very seriously. They were dangerous. An arrest can destroy a person's constitutional rights. So I knew I'd better have a good reason every time. We worried about being overly cautious and ruining a life unnecessarily, but we also worried that playing it cool could ruin an innocent life. It was a thin line, and we did our best to read people.

Many career criminals have the ability to cry on demand. Some are convincing, some are pathetic, but no cop can predict the future. Most of the time we were dealing with an honestly good person merely reaching for his wallet, but other times… There was wide room for discretion. We were human, too. We did our best to keep our own character in check while reading someone else's, balancing constitutional freedoms with the sanctity of life.

The first time I got physical on the job followed a base bank robbery—yes, on a military base! We shut down every exit. Some guy freaked out about traffic exited his car and threatened me. I went with my gut, put my gun back in my booth, and punched him right in the chest, knocking him to the ground. I was racked with doubt. Had I used enough force? Or too little? Oh, shit, I thought, I'm in for it now. But a written commendation backed my play. It meant the world that my superiors trusted my instincts and discretion. Cops fight two battles: the actual one and one against a desk jockey's second-guessing—no one likes the latter. Second-guessing someone else's split-second decisions in hindsight is coward's work.

During this time of "peace," Russian bombers and U.S. bombers routinely patrolled each other's coasts fully loaded with nuclear ordnance. Each side border-checked the other by dispatching fighters to keep the bomber in international airspace. Military police monitored runways to ensure they were clear for the fighters to border-check the Russian bombers as they flew by.

On May 30, 1983, while I served at Langley, President Reagan convened an economic summit at nearby Williamsburg, Virginia, meeting with such world leaders as Britain's Margaret Thatcher, West Germany's Helmut Kohl, and France's François Mitterrand. It was my first chance to see the Secret Service in action, and it was a great thrill. The Klaxon sirens blared, the threat alarms signaling everyone to get the fighters in the air.

But today something was different. The aircrews and pilots were spooked. We turned up our radios.

"Russian bombers five miles off the coast!"

At the same time Reagan's economic summit remained too close for comfort at Williamsburg.

Our fighters took off, full afterburners pushing them so hard and fast that my buddy Levi was catapulted off the ground and trapped in an irrigation ditch next to the taxiway. Jets took off like rockets. We anxiously awaited their safe return but also wanted word that the Russian bombers had been checked and that we were all safe. We held our breath and asked: Was this war?

We cheered our jets' return. Our pilots uncorked their helmets and climbed down.

"Holy shit, the freaking gun port is open and it's all charred. He fired his cannons!" someone said.

"No, I didn't! You didn't see shit!" the frazzled pilot shouted.

I knew better. I knew when a silver hull had its gun port closed and clear and when it returned open and covered in scorched soot.

"He's fired a missile!" I said, noticing that this returning fighter had only three of the four he had departed with. Yes, a U.S. Air Force pilot had launched a missile directly at a Soviet bomber—an act that could have triggered World War III!

"No, it didn't! I took off that way," the airman retorted as he climbed down the ladder.

"Yeah, sure," I mumbled nervously. "Why take four air-to-airs when you can take three?"