Member-only story
Life and Death in a Smaller Pond
Memoir Excerpt ©2019 Steve Russell
My birth certificate said Stephen Teehee — Ginatiyun Tihi in Cherokee, but real birth certificates are in English. So are death certificates.
In 1966, still traveling under my birth name, I was over half-finished with my Air Force hitch. The Vietnam War was raging, but I had what was probably the safest assignment the military had to offer.
Headquarters, United States Air Force Security Service was in a windowless box surrounded by razor wire and motion detectors, a gloomy fortress on a hill between Lackland AFB and above the flight line on adjacent Kelly AFB. Inside the building were endless halls that all looked alike under the fluorescent lighting, lined with identical doors protected by cypher locks. I could open only the one that contained a UNIVAC 494 computer and another that contained peripheral gear. While I had a top-secret clearance with cryptographic access, those were the only two doors that I had need to enter.
My work hours changed weekly among days, swings, and mids, causing a perpetually disrupted sleep cycle. Randomly, I would show up to work and find the combinations changed on the cypher locks, requiring that I ring the buzzer next to the number pad and wait for somebody to let me in and tell me the new combination for my sleep-deprived brain to memorize.
