Chapter 1

At first I couldn't believe it was her. I knew that she looked familiar somehow, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. But when I was finally ready to leave the restaurant after lunch, I got a better look at her face and definitely recognized her as my old friend from tech school.

"Toots!" I called out as I walked over to her table where she was sitting with a slightly older guy.

She recognized me at once. "Larry!" She squealed, with a good bit of genuine enthusiasm.

We hugged, exchanged several loud 'Well how are you's?' and sat down together to do some serious catching up. Her old wedding rings were still on her finger, and her lunch date also had a wedding band so that I assumed I was finally going to meet her long elusive husband.

But no. Her husband Dennis was still stationed at some other Air Force base apart from her. Her dining companion was just her happily married boss. He needed to be getting back for a meeting fairly quickly (and he had the car) so I offered to drive her back to work in mine. He paid his lunch bill and left with a wink and an admonition for her to 'take a long lunch'.

We did have a good bit of catching up to do.

I first met 'Toots', or rather Tanya Tatiana Taylor back in Air Force Technical School at Keesler AFB, MS, near Biloxi. We didn't share any classes together, but we shared the same training building and regularly met outside during lunch and smoke breaks. I was in the Mainframe Computer Maintenance school on the 2^nd floor and she was doing the exhaustive Air Traffic Control (ATC) program upstairs. She had already finished the first six months of the course by the time I arrived on-base and would still have about another six full months to go before graduation. My course was far easier, just barely twelve weeks.

She was already engaged to be married — a typical 'tech school romance' relationship with a guy she had just barely met. He had already finished his course (Avionics, I think) and was now at some other Air Force Base taking another more advanced training class. He had proposed after they had dated for only about three weeks but they wouldn't be able to get married until her class was done and she received her regular orders. Then he planned on filing a 'Join Spouse' request to get his duty orders changed to her base.

The base mess hall was too far of a walk for us to get lunch (especially in the blazing heat of late August). Instead they provided a 'Roach Coach', meals on wheels sort of thing. Ghastly stuff, but we had to eat something. Sitting outside together eating our appalling lunch out in the impossibly muggy Southern Mississippi sun and baking in the heat with nothing but concrete around us as far as the eye could see certainly helped bind us together. Sort of.

As the weeks went by we became quite friendly and even started to spend parts of the weekend together. She made it clear however that we were not dating — she was engaged to be married and determined (albeit with some obvious reluctance) to behave and remain 'faithful'. We went to the movies together Friday nights and spend Saturday afternoons in Biloxi, usually at the big shopping mall there. Neither one of us had much money to spend, but we could window shop until we dropped.

Now most guys wouldn't be content just to play escort to a rather attractive young female without even trying to get to first base with her. I admit at times it was very, very hard to settle for just a peck on the cheek at the end of a long evening or day together. Still, I was very much a short-timer here — my class would be over in just another month or so and then I would be gone. It really wasn't fair to either one of us to try and 'start something'. Plus she was already engaged to be married to someone else. Besides, I really liked her and was well content to be satisfied with her as just my friend ... for now.

Nearly everyone knew somebody that was involved in a serious tech school romance ... and most of us knew that the odds of these sorts of marriages surviving for any reasonable length of time weren't good. In theory, married Air Force couples filed their 'Join Spouse' request to get assigned to the same base (or city) together. In practice, I would personally put the odds at less than 50% that the request would be granted. "Needs of the Service", etc. Not many young kids of either sex, mostly not even 20 years old yet, are going to even try and stay faithful to a spouse that they barely know and isn't even in the same state (or county) with them. Making a marriage work is hard even for older folks that hardly ever spend a moment apart.

I admit that I had a couple of real dates on the side during my remaining weeks there and had several lengthy trips to first base and even a pleasant (but too brief) visit to second base. That helped keep my spirits up. The man to female ratio among the transient students on the base wasn't very good, maybe six or even eight guys to every available female. I didn't mind having some occasional fun but I was certainly not inclined to start thinking about marriage yet at my own young age of 21.

I tried to keep these thoughts well in mind when I was going out with 'Toots' ... it helped keep my thoughts off of seizing her and ravishing her with the death of a thousand kisses (or two thousand).

Tanya was an impressively built young lady with a more than attractive figure. Her bra cup size was already at least a size C cup and held the promise of upgrading into D's someday (with the help of lots of coarse male handling). She was quite tall and had a near perfect hourglass figure that when all dolled up for the evening could (and did) stop traffic. Her hips were made for babies and just one look at her ass was more than enough to make me want start an aggressive breeding program right on the spot. Her hair was fairly long for a service gal and it fell to near mid-shoulder so she had to keep it in a tight bun when she was in uniform. I would describe it as being a delightful honey-blond color but she referred to it herself as being 'dirty dishcloth blond'.

With three Ta's in her name and a more than ample chest, it was no surprise that her old high school nickname had been "Ta-Ta's". Her fiancée called her usually by this nickname too, but I knew that she really didn't like it very much. She wasn't at all self conscious about her large breasts and didn't mind at all showing them off to their best advantage, but she didn't want to be thought of as a brainless bimbo. She was a very smart young woman and near the top of her class of the single hardest technical school in the entire Air Force. I always called her instead "Toots", usually using my very best James Cagney imitation.

Saying goodbye to her after graduating all too soon from my class was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. We stayed up most of our last night together talking and she saw me away on my bus to the airport at 6 a.m. that next morning (I was booked on a civilian flight out of Biloxi to Oakland, CA where I could be flying military charter to my next assignment in Japan).

She didn't want me to see that she was crying, but I could easily tell that she was. She held me as if she never wanted to let me go and gave me a real proper goodbye kiss on the mouth that would have melted granite. This was my one last moment to tell her how I felt about her but somehow, stupidly I let the moment pass. And then I was on the bus, and she was gone.

By the time I was on my plane flight I knew that I was going to miss her badly. By the time I was on my nearly twenty-four flight across the Pacific I also began to realize that I had made a dreadful mistake by not actively courting her myself. Loyalty to an absent fiancée be damned ... I loved that girl myself — and I'd never told her!

I didn't mind my two years in Japan ... much. I had a good job, a decent boss and the once in a lifetime chance to travel and see the world on someone else's nickel. Still, I admit to missing Toots pretty badly that entire tour of duty. If anything, the male to female on base was much worse here than at Keesler and the chances of getting any sort of date were remote. The few young ladies willing to play the dating game had us hordes of guys at an extreme disadvantage and they expected serious wining and dining for even the hope of a peck on the cheek at the end of the night. Toots was well worth it, and more... 99% of these young ladies were not.

I received the odd letter and a few cards from her and tried to punctually reply back, but we both had admitted to each before we parted that neither of us were particularly good letter writers. The gaps between our correspondences grew. I eventually got the dreaded notice that she had finally married her fiancée and that they had had a brief honeymoon. She was working as an Air Traffic Control Operator at Dover AFB in Delaware now and her husband Dennis had filed the JS paperwork to transfer and join her there, but it hadn't been approved.

Looking back and rereading her old letters now I realize that they were full of things hinted at but mostly left unsaid. Longing, self-doubt, and regret in near equal proportions in a sub-current beneath the surface pleasantness. Her enthusiasm for her approaching wedding day appeared minimal as if now she was just going through the motions and longing to be 'done with it' - to just get it over with. She had given her promise of marriage, but was well past the point of having second thoughts by now. Only a sense of misplaced duty was keeping her on that last stretch of the final track to matrimony. The one card I received after her marriage showed that she still remained in a bit of a funk. Separation (likely to be long term) was quickly fading off any remaining bloom of the speculative rose of having a happily married life.

That is the last thing I heard from her until I saw her again for lunch that day off-base.

How I ended up for my next assignment in the wilds of Idaho, I'll never quite figure out. Technically, I was assigned to Mountain Home AFB, but in reality my duty assignment was about an hours drive away, high up in the mountains in the middle of nearly nowhere. Technically the base was a small Army Camp doing Elint work (electronics intelligence) but they relied upon a small Air Force mainframe computer that connected to bigger and better computers further up the line. Our little detachment of Air Force guys numbered only three, two Operators and one maintenance tech/repair guy (me).

Our theoretical boss who signed our annual Reviews was an Army 1^st Lt, who wasn't a bad Joe — despite the fact that he wore a West Point ring. He wasn't a computer guy and didn't know a thing about what we did for a living. His job was just to make sure that we kept doing it ... mostly by wisely staying well out of our hair.

If there was a softer job in the entire US Military, I don't know what it would be. We had our own tiny building off in a corner behind two locked chain linked fences to keep all of the riff-raff out (sorry Army folks wink). An Operator worked (or rather was required to be present) for a twelve hour shift from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays only (occasional weekends by rare special request only). The two Operators usually worked this out by alternating duty shifts of one week 'on' then one week 'off'. Our work area consisted of the big mainframe computer, a decent sofa and a very nice Laz-E-Boy recliner. There was a tiny office with a desk and chair for doing our weekly paperwork (which took 5 minutes at most). The 'job' consisted of being on-hand to restart the mainframe whenever it hung-up or crashed (4-5 times a day, every day). The clever folks at UniSys had installed a loud buzzer that would go off whenever the system crashed, thus waking up the Operator from their nap. Rebooting took maybe 3 minutes ... then content with the virtue of a task well done the Operator usually went right back to their nap. A hard job!

Technically, I was required to be around from 9-5 M-F, but in practice as long as I could be contacted by my pager or a phone and could be back on-site within 59 minutes, I was free to be just about anywhere I pleased. There was just one problem with this ... there was absolutely nothing to do in the Camp. No BX (Base Exchange) shops, no theater, a pitiful excuse of a library and a mess hall that set entirely new bottom bedrock standards for inedible food.

In the military scale of things, Navy chow is by far the best and often equal to good quality civilian restaurant fare. The Air Force doesn't do too badly overall but the quality can really vary from base to base (they outsource locally usually). Unfortunately, I've yet to eat a good meal in any Army mess hall. Now I had to eat nearly all of my meals in one. Uck. Most of the smart folks laid in a stock of C-Ration boxes for the times that they couldn't stand to face the mess hall. MRE's were still relatively new and our little forgotten outpost tended to get the stuff left over from either Vietnam or even Korea! I lost at least ten pounds my first year there.

You get bored much sooner than you'd think having a job that actually didn't require any work at all. Our UniSys system had a legendary reputation for being a 'maintenance queen', and crashing numerous times a day. It didn't take long to discover the secret... 'operator error'. The Operators enjoyed their cushy job (it allowed them to nap most of the day and then work a second off-base civilian job at night). If the system was too reliable (which it actually could have been) then there would be no need for them and the system could be left unattended and managed remotely. Or worse, they could have trained the Army monkeys how to reboot the system! To ensure their job security, the previous maintenance tech whom I had just replaced had removed about half of the system memory and intentionally tweaked the system, making it far more delicate than it really was. In the interest of excellent coworker relations I helped maintain the 'status quo'.