Chapter 2

I found I liked the new job and it had a great number of cross-connections with traditional law enforcement. Crisis and suicide intervention, emergency stress management, domestic disputes, hostage situations, plane crashes and normal deaths were a common part of the job and I became very good at it. The job was really a whole lot more than being a glorified church secretary, and I probably spent a dozen hours helping handle problems over the telephone or in person for every hour I'd spend typing up reports or anything remotely related to a sermon. Besides, by the time I made Staff Sergeant and later Tech Sergeant, I had secretaries that worked for me to do that sort of thing.

Not being terribly religious wasn't actually much of a drawback. In fact nowhere in my job description did it say that I even had to attend any services ever at all ... but I had to know what was going on at all of them to better coordinate their after church activities. As my new career progressed at most bases I soon became the senior NOIC and managing a staff that supported numerous different chaplains of all different faiths, Christian, Jewish and Muslim. Some days it would be the Baptist minister on call at 3 a.m when a plane crashed, or Airman Smith came home drunk and angry enough to start beating his/her spouse. Or it could be the Methodist, or the Catholic priest, or even sometimes the Rabbi that would be called at home — and then I'd be the next person called. It didn't much matter; they all had the same call to duty and did the job equally well. I never had the slightest problem with any of them.

The crisis work was important and extremely fulfilling to me, but as I worked my way into the final half of my twenty year military career I started to take more pleasure in the more mundane aspects. Handling youth groups and various out-reach programs especially.

I didn't drink much anymore (I do still enjoy an occasional glass of red wine) but it suddenly became more important to me to help co-host the base AA meetings with the Social Actions folks and even worked a bit on the side with off-base NarcAnon programs that always seemed to have a few below the radar military members attending. The military has always been a bit hypocritical about this. Being a drunk is almost 'expected' and not punished too terribly severely, but if a young Airman gets caught with a joint, things can get a bit hysterical. Folks seeking help for heavier dependences (the smart ones anyway) try to take their troubles off-base for help to avoid having their career destroyed.

I finished up my last tour of duty back in San Antonio again, this time at Lackland AFB, where the Air Force does its basic training and has quite a few technical schools and its largest hospital Wilford Hall. I was the senior enlisted person managing a staff that numbered in the hundreds and handled tens of thousands of people every day. I had younger NCO's to handle the 3 a.m. phone calls these days but I tried hard to keep my fingers on the pulse of things and handled my share of the personal tragedies. I had made Senior Master Sergeant some time back and had the offer of making Chief Master Sergeant dangling in front of me, but I had decided that I'd done my twenty and it was getting near time to move on and do something else in life.

Plus once you make Chief (E-9 the top enlisted rank) everything starts to become military politics. Sooner or later my widening ass would end up sitting somewhere in the Pentagon advising senior officers about what policies we should be enacting for the future and that didn't even sound remotely like fun to me.

I had never married. Frankly I hadn't even been much tempted.

The people I tended to meet every day were all the ones with 'issues' of some kind or another and that's certainly not conducive to finding a mate. The women I'd meet off base were usually from other church groups or organizations with which I would coordinate various activities. Very often these tended to be 'church ladies' of the zealot variety or 'professional organizer' types that like to run everyone else lives that I never got along with very well.

I loved my job but I certainly didn't go to church two to three days a week (once a month I'd do a rotation of one of the different offered services just so I'd know the faces and names a bit better). The vast majority of the military women close to my own age were either already married or divorced with children from multiple fathers and I just didn't have the ambition to deal with that sort of life drama on a long term basis. The never married women tended to either have serious issues or were closeted lesbians.

I most definitely didn't have the time or the inclination to start going back to the local C&W bars! Frankly nearly every military divorce I helped council seemed to start with "well I met her at a bar". I wanted to meet a woman and start a life-long relationship, but I didn't want another 'Beth'. I wasn't quite living like a monk but I certainly wasn't getting anything resembling regular sex either.

With less than a month to go before my retirement I was single and without any plans for my life after retirement. I would get along alright on my retirement pay and thought I'd stay in the area for awhile and gently shop around to find a big church that I thought I could tolerate that needed a Community Affairs or Youth Group Manager. I didn't get my hopes too high, most of the churches in the region seemed to be either Southern Baptist or Catholic and I was unlikely to be enough of a 'true believer' to be hired and accepted. The remaining churches seemed to be of a nearly similar conservative bent that would probably require more quality time on my knees praying than I was used to spending ... especially in 'retirement'.

A Bexar County social services office had some interest in my experience, but as their civil service worked strictly on seniority for promotion and not merit (with no exceptions) I would be starting fairly low, near the bottom of their career ladder. I'd be spending my days handling crack babies and mothers. I didn't think I could manage much enthusiasm for doing that non-stop for very long, so I turned them down. Another job with the local United Way office wasn't much more promising (long hours/bad pay/insane office politics) but until I got a strange letter from a church in nearby Lovett, Texas that appeared to be my best opportunity.

The church had provided me with some basic details and they had a rudimentary web site that gleaned a few more nuggets of information. For starters, this church (usually just called 'The Church' locally) was built exactly on the border of a large nudist colony! Well technically half of the church isles were 'clothing optional' and the other half fell on the 'prude' side but to 98% of the folks in the county it didn't much matter. It was, by far, the largest church in the county and handled a great number of county civic projects more or less by default.

I was inclined to dismiss them out of hand as kooks but the more I read the more fascinated I was with the extent of their duties. They managed the County Food Pantry for the poor; built homes for low income families and repaired the homes of seniors; provided free breakfasts for children during the school year and lunches for low income children during the summer months; they provided nearly all of the County Crisis Management services; hosted monthly job fairs, and weekly AA/NarcAnon/Anger Management sessions. That they provided the usual church youth and scouting groups goes without saying. I was intrigued and really wanted to meet the head pastor (Alexander or just "Al" around town) who had the balls and the ambition to put all of that together.

Lovett was indeed an odd place, so having a very odd church pastor didn't seem to be at all out of place. "Father Al" was a very jovial man with a fat belly and a heart apparently even three sizes bigger. His age seemed to be indeterminate. He had first come to Lovett in the late 1960's but he didn't seem to be any older in appearance than I was. Except for his dark eyes; they bore deep into your soul and if you looked long and hard enough you could probably see eternity. The only eyes I ever saw that came close to his were on a old retired veteran of World War Two who had been one of the early liberators of a death camp and had seem terrible things that would/could never be forgotten.

He was looking for a top Director of Church Services that would be responsible for everything the Church handled outside of Sunday morning services. It was a huge job that could keep five people running non-stop from dawn until bedtime (assuming that the phone didn't ring at 3 a.m.). If I were to be offered the position I would have a staff of two; a part-time motorcycle mechanic named 'Tiny' who handled most of the children's programs and a long-time church secretary.

The compensation offered for the position was beyond pitiful and bordered upon appalling, Al admitted right from the very start of our interview. Money going to pay me couldn't be used to repair Widow Murphy's house next week, or provide the eight Wallace children with lunch and something to take to their sick mother for their dinner. Frankly, the person they were ideally looking for wouldn't even have pay in their top ten want items for the position. Job satisfaction had always been at least #1 through #5 for me anyway and I could honestly agree with his viewpoint. They didn't want someone who viewed this as a 'job' but wanted someone that would probably do the work if asked, even for free, simply because it was important and needed to be done. Frankly the job description kept changing weekly as they found more things that needed to be done that the poor County government didn't have the money to handle.

It was very clear that my first initial impression of Church + nudist colony + youth groups = big bunch of pervs, was completely and utterly wrong. In fact, now I think I wouldn't even like to be in the same area of the poor sap around here that gets caught even attempting to molest a child. I don't think they ever turn the mangled remains over to be prosecuted.