Maxwell Afb, Alabama: Fill & Download for Free

I flew some of the characters in the Watergate saga including Nixon and so—after being an eye witness to that era in real life—I have some ideas about what to do now.Let’s follow the Constitution, but do it like the Agnew-Ford-Nixon play that led to Ford becoming POTUS.Indict Pence: He was in on some illegal stuff. He knew. They need to go after him first, just as they did with Agnew, and make Pence resign.Appoint John Kasich as VP: Step Two of the Nixon saga appointed a reasonable human being as VP, Gerald Ford. I’m not a fan of Kasich’s conservative policies, but he’s willing to listen and work with Dems and he’s a good person.Impeach Trump: He goes! As of course he needs to go. Kasich then becomes #46 and we can all rest easy.Appoint Hillary as VP: Kasich would appoint Hillary. The Senate, even if still a GOP majority, would confirm her. Kasich would work closely with her to heal the deep wounds of this country.Not run for election: The Kasich-Clinton White House would simply serve out the remainder of the term. They would not spend one second campaigning. They would both put the good of the American reputation, its people, and its Constitution over their own politics. They could go down in history books as true American heroes.But not the pardons: I think Ford’s pardon of Nixon was the right thing to do. It cost him his political career, but he did it for the good of the country. We didn’t need to spend years further punishing Nixon, who had already been destroyed. And I know because I flew Nixon on his first venture back into the public after his two-year exile. He was a broken man. On top of that, in the end, Nixon did throw himself under the bus for the good of the country. But NOT the Trump crew. They haven’t even a shred of the honor that Nixon showed in the end. And they are deeply into criminal territory. The total charges filed are already above 200 and they haven’t even started charging Cohen, Don Junior, and the orange one himself. No pardons.Real prison and NOT Federal country clubs like Maxwell AFB: Put these people in prison—and not 18 months at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, where Air Force pilots like me fly Senators and Congressional Reps down there with their golf clubs to get them out on a day pass and play golf with them. Real prison for the Trumps. They need to wear orange and live in cells.Congressional Golf with Watergate prisoners. Yes. It’s true.I did that. I flew missions in Air Force jets in which three members of Congress (Senators, Reps, different combinations) arrived in the morning on the ramp at Andrews with nothing but three sets of golf clubs and I’d fly them to Maxwell. I’d sit around all day while they checked John Mitchell out on a day pass to play golf and have lunch at the Officer’s Club. Actually, that’s not even true—John Mitchell had already been checked out for the day and somebody drove him to the ramp with a couple of staff cars to pick up the members of Congress and their golf clubs. Yes, John Mitchell met us on the ramp one time. The convicted criminal was supposed to be in prison!!After their play date, they’d take him back to prison—as if that’s prison—and I’d fly them home. And YOU paid for it all.AND YOU’LL LOVE THIS EVEN MOREOh, and the five actual Watergate burglars? Those boys served out their terms together at the similar federal prison facility at an auxiliary field that belongs to Eglin AFB in Florida. An auxiliary field is a runway that’s still on a base, but is far away from the field that everyone thinks is the Air Force base—planes can come and go from there and if you were watching the main field you’d never know.I dropped in there a couple of times, too, with mysterious passengers. I wasn’t told their names.I didn’t even know the destination until after we took off and then one of the anonymous passengers came up and handed me a slip of paper with the destination written on it. I refiled in the air, landed, let them off still not knowing who they were, then flew over to the main Eglin field to refuel and go back to Washington.The Trump team gets nothing like Maxwell or Eglin.Real cells. Real prison.ADDENDUMI added this the day after my OP to address some comments that said this could never happen. I agree. It won’t.But if the Republicans were smart—anyone taking bets on that?—they’d get started on this rather than spending their last precious months confirming Kavanaugh. By waiting, they could end up watching both Trump and Pence get impeached in 2019 and removed from office. And if the Democrats win the majority in the House, well boys, have you thought about who would be next in line?If the Republicans are not careful, they could end up elevating the Democrat they hate the most to become the first woman to be President: Nancy Pelosi as #46.If I were a Republican leader, I’d be in full panic mode, jettisoning Trump and Pence. But then there’s no way I’d be a Republican leader, and I’m glad they haven’t thought this through.

I can’t go back 50 years, but it seems like few other answers go back that far, either, so I’ll go with what I have, which is in the range of 40–48 years ago. And this one is really going to piss you off.As a pilot in the Presidential Wing at Andrews, we flew missions that would never be allowed today.BURNING UP FUELEvery Air Force unit was allotted a certain amount of fuel every quarter and if they didn’t use it then future allotments could not exceed the amount they actually used.What a stupid policy! It meant that the fuel allotment was going to be used!I knew B-52 pilots who would be sent out on the last one or two days of a quarter to fly around down low with the gear down and the speed brakes up to burn maximum fuel.But since we flew cool executive jets, we had more fun with our fuel waste operations.TWO 20-SOMETHINGS AND A FREE JETI went on many missions when my squadron commander would give me and another guy an executive jet on something like March 29 and say, “bring it back by midnight on the 31st with at least 15 (or maybe 20) hours on it.We were typically 23–26 years old and this is one of the actual planes I did this with:This sweet jet is at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson and it was one of ours. I’ve flown this actual jet many times. Tail number 62-4449 is in my logbook.Of course I normally carried people like the Secretary of State or the First Lady, or Senators or Reps—but sometimes we just needed to burn through our allotment.Try to imagine being 24 and the Air Force ordering you and one of your best friends to take this pretty bird out for 15–20 hours over the course of three days. Do not bring it back with less than 15 hours on it! And that’s at 500 mph!Overnight expenses, rental car, and all meals were covered, too. They did not care—nor did they even want to know—where we went. My squadron commander was a lieutenant colonel and his basic command philosophy was “As long as you don’t do anything that gets me chewed out by someone who outranks me, I don’t care what you do. And I don’t want to know.”We’d chat about it the day before and ask each other where we had relatives, or girlfriends, or friends. My hometown was Tulsa, so I often flew from Andrews to Tulsa and had lunch with my father and sister. Then we’d fly to the other guy’s hometown for dinner with his family.Or, because we were young and hadn’t been many places, we’d decide if one of us hadn’t been to Reno or Las Vegas, we’d go spend the night there and catch a show and hit the slots. Or we’d go to L.A. or Seattle, or San Fran. Anywhere in the CONUS that our hearts desired!TAKING PASSENGERSThe first couple of times I did this, it was just me and one other pilot.But how long do you think it took for some crafty, clever 20-somethings to start taking friends along?Our method was to have our wives/girlfriends/friends go to the executive terminal at Dulles on the other side of Washington, D.C. We’d have them show up dressed really nicely: dresses for the ladies and suits for the guys. No witnesses would think twice about an Andrews jet dropping in to pick up some sharply-dressed folks with luggage.Then we’d fly to the West Coast, or wherever. Then drop them off at Dulles on the way back to Andrews.WE DIDN’T FEEL GUILTYI’ve posted enough on Quora (43.3 millions views) to anticipate some really irate comments about how f___ing irresponsible I was to do this.I have two counters to this:First, give me a break. If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have. Legally and technically, I had orders to do it. And I was a good officer who knew how to obey orders! LOL!It wasn’t my fault that Congress had this policy that made us use ALL of our quarterly allotment.Second, and speaking of Congress, let me tell you how THEY used the Andrews fuel allotment.A REAL F____ING WASTE OF TAXPAYER DOLLARSRemember Watergate?Remember those who were convicted and served time in Federal prisons?Remember John Mitchell?He “served time” in a Federal prison at Maxwell AFB in Alabama for his crimes during the Watergate scandal.I had trips in which I would fly three U. S. Senators down to Maxwell in the morning with no bags except for their golf clubs. I did this particular run three times, just myself. We had a whole squadron, so I do not presume I was the only one who flew this “mission.”On the ramp, a couple of cars would pull up. Nationally disgraced, convicted felon John Mitchell would hop out of one of them and they’d all greet each other warmly, transfer the golf clubs to the cars and disappear.Our job was to wait all day—including after dinner at the Officer’s Club—and then fly home with the Senators. I supposed Mitchell went back to his “cell.” LOL!I’ve got so many stories like that it would make your blood boil. I once flew a single two-star general out to Elvis Presley’s funeral and back. Just him.So, if you’d flown missions like that and then your squadron commander told you that even with all those stupid shit missions that your squadron had not used up its allotment of fuel and he wanted you to take one of the jets out for three days and fly it wherever the hell you wanted to go, would you have told him no?Of course not.

When my husband, in civil service, secured a job on Maxwell AFB in Alabama, I was reluctant. Knowing the reputation of Alabama as being racially intolerant and also somewhat behind the times, and coming from a DC suburb, I wasn’t looking forward to being in a place where black people were mistreated. Also, I anticipated home-schooling my two sons to improve on what they’d be learning (or not learning) in school. He preceded me by a couple of months, so he could obtain housing and get himself settled in before our two sons and I joined him.The first thing I learned was that the cost of living here is lower than that in DC. The move here took me from an 1,800 sq ft rambler on a small plot of land to another rambler, this one close to 2,400 feet on half an acre, in a great location close to fields where baseball and football fields, and a swimming pool were located. The mortgage payment on this larger house was less than we’d paid in DC, and property taxes, of course, were substantially lower.The boys’ schools were not great, and my older son, in 5th grade, was in a positively decrepit building, with apparently an open sewer that emptied into the “quad” between trailers that were added on to the school when the local population grew. However, he tested out as “gifted and talented” and once a week went by bus to a nearby school where they had computers and means for letting young minds grow beyond what was taught in the classroom.My parents (living in Palo Alto, CA), came to visit us. My dad had driven across the States after retirement from USAF, and they stayed in the BOQ on Maxwell for the visit. Both my husband and I smoked, which they no longer did, plus they were very independent and didn’t want to be tied to our schedules. They wanted to spend their nights in a place where they were comfortable. My mom, born of Russian immigrants, and having experienced her share of prejudice—they were Jewish—wanted to see what she referred to as “a ghetto.”I was astonished, because I didn’t know the city of Montgomery at all, and the suburb where we lived didn’t have such a thing, I thought. I directed my dad to an area of town where black people lived, and to which I’d never been. To my surprise, their buildings were a bit on the ramshackle side, there was trash in the yards, and what cars were parked on the street had seen better days. I don’t know whether she was happily surprised or not, but it was the best I could do.In the years since, I’ve learned to navigate Montgomery, where one part of the city follows the curves of the Alabama River, and where there are, indeed, run-down homes and much crime. But there are also mansions and areas with beautiful homes with large yards. It all depends on where in the city one goes.I’ll close with one experience I’ll never forget: I had a 9–5 job, and my husband worked on Maxwell, arriving home at about 4PM. During the summer, I would drive to get our babysitter and take her to the house in the morning, and my husband would drive her to her home after work.One day, I walked into the house to find it in a bit of an uproar. Our babysitter had come across our two boys (ages 11 and 9), who’d dug into a footlocker in the rec room. It was my husband’s footlocker from his time in USAF, and I used it to store old magazines. Although National Geographics ended up there, it also housed the Playboy and Penthouse magazines we had. You see, our excellent friend, Larry, was with the CIA, and had subscriptions to both magazines.Larry’s current assignment was to a country where such publications weren’t allowed. Therefore, he had the mailing address diverted to ours, and we were going to hold them for him.Living in Northern Virginia as we did at the time, he always stayed with us when he was in-country and worked at Langley. Thinking he was going to be overseas for just a short time, he’d bought subscriptions to the latter two and given our address. We were to hold them at our house until he came back from wherever he’d been sent. Of course, we read them (for the articles, you understand), but we stored them in what we thought was a safe place, away from young boys.When we moved to Alabama, the footlocker came with us, and we never thought to clean it out before it went into the rec room and served as a table for the boys’ games, etc.Upon seeing, with her own eyes, these works of the devil, the teen-aged babysitter promptly had the boys carry all the magazines out back. We had a refuse barrel, a place where we could burn newspapers, etc. She put some in, lit a fire, and managed to burn all our saved magazines. We were really angry, of course, but it was actually very funny when we sat down later to talk to the boys.She apparently talked it over with her parents, and they decided that ours was not a good environment, so she had to quit working for us.