CHAPTER FOUR - TURKEY

 

I knew from the start that we wouldn't be Flight Chiefs very long. because we were only filling in until the new SSgt's arrived. About one month after we arrived at Erhac the two new E-5's arrived and I was bumped down to assistant Flight Chief. I became assistant to a Flight Chief who happened to be black. He wasn't very talkative and I just reasoned that this was just his normal disposition. He was one of the two E-5's that were already there when we arrived. I tried to establish a rapport with him but he would not talk to me unless it had to do with work and it was short and to the point. Ours was a very chilly relationship from the start. He would post me in the alert area every night and I was never posted at the storage area, which was a better post. Then I began to notice that my name was last on the duty roster and as assistant I should have been listed second behind the flight chiefs name. Everyone else was listed by their rank but my name was just Segroves. It didn't take me long to realize that I was being disrespected but I was clueless as to why. I had never mistreated this guy in any way because before I became his assistant I barely knew him. Confrontation is not my thing but I don't appreciate being bullied either. Everyday I endured this mistreatment my anger was building to the point that there had to be a day of reckoning and soon.

On one midnight shift I decided that I would confront him as we were being posted in the alert area. I waited until everyone left the truck, except him and me. He was driving and I was in the passenger seat. I looked over at him and said that I didn't know why he didn't like me but if he didn't start treating me with the respect that I was due I was going over his head. As I stepped out of the truck with my rifle and alert bag I told him that when he posted the duty roster the next night my position on the duty roster and my rank better be corrected. He became unglued and started screaming at me using every curse word he could think of. As I walked toward the gate house he jumped out of the truck and was screaming at me every step of the way out to my post. The Turkish guards were looking at him like he was crazy but I never said another word to him.

I sat down in my gate shack with him hovering over me while he was telling me that he had better not come out on a post check and catch me doing anything wrong. He was so mad I was scared that he might try to shoot me. The Sgt stormed off and before he was even out of the area I was on the phone to the CSC dispatcher and I had him connect me with MSgt Wright. It was late and I woke Wright up. To that point I never cared much for TSgt Wright because he seemed arrogant to me and I thought that he would be upset because I woke him up. Instead he was very sympathetic and heard me out when I told him how I was being treated. The next day he sent word to me that I was being transferred to another Flight. My new Flight chief was also Black but we got along very well.

For a while after this experience I couldn't understand why I had been mistreated by this guy and I was venting to a friend one day when he stopped me. He said Greg, think about it, you have a Confederate flag on your wall. Until that moment I was pretty naive about the Confederate flag and how controversial that it was. I never really connected it to slavery or racism because I was just proud of being a Southerner and because I was proud I wanted people to know where I was from. On our honeymoon I had bought a 3x5 Confederate battle flag at Six Flags Over Georgia. That flag went everywhere that I went while I was in the Air Force. I suddenly remembered the first day that I had met a black Airman from Memphis whose last name was Rogers. He had walked into my room after I hung the flag on my wall and asked me if I was a Rebel. I said no just proud to be from the South. The word got around among the Black Airman that I had a Confederate flag. This made perfect sense and I now understood why the Sergeant didn't like me.

In 1970 the Martin Luther King message of non violence was wearing pretty thin with many black people. Especially Northern blacks. There was the Black Power movement and the rise of Black militancy across America. It was common to see young black Airmen greet each other black airmen with the black power clenched fist salute. There was an irritating defensiveness among many blacks that whites had to deal with. Being from the South I always addressed men my own age as boy but I never called an older white man or black man boy. Whenever I would see a friend I might say hey boy how are you doing. or hey boy what's up. Many young blacks would respond with you must have said Lee Roy, there ain't no boy around here. Their defensiveness was irritating because I meant nothing by it.

When blacks accuse me of racism it is both irritating and funny at the same time for me. I was never raised to be prejudiced and when many of my friends were I resisted the peer group pressure to be like them. I can't tell you how many times I was called an N lover because I defended Martin Luther King and I was pro civil rights. The issue that really got me into trouble was interracial dating and marriage. I have always been in favor of it and there have been several times in my life that I thought that I was going to get my butt whipped for defending it. The first time that I ever witnessed a mixed race couple was at Incirlik AFB. I must admit that it took a little getting used to because I had never seen that before but I had no objections to it. My father-in-law was never crazy about me and I think that it was mainly over my racial views.

All racism and bigotry is bad, regardless of the race that espouses it. This Black sergeant treated me in the same way that he had probably been treated many times in his life. He judged me before he came to know me. I was judged because of the color of my skin, the region that I was from, and on the basis of a piece of cloth rather than the content of my character. The irony of the whole thing was that this same sergeant, although we never became what I would call close friends, warmed up to me and actually became friendly toward me before he left to go back to (The World) which was GI terminology for the United States. I had many Black friends in Turkey and after a while they began to realize that I wasn't what they had judged me to be. This experience taught me to stand my ground on principle and after deep introspection about the matter I felt that my heart had been in the right place and I had done nothing to apologize for. Therefore the flag remained on my wall the whole time I was at Erhac.

Over the years I have put much study into the issue of race in America, the true causes of the Civil War, the history of the Confederate flag, and I have learned a great deal just by observing human behavior. Today, I don't see history as a Northern and Southern thing. I see history as a Democrat Party and Republican Party thing. Although I am a Constitutional Conservative and not a Republican it was the Democrat party that was the party of slavery, the party that forced the Five Civilized tribes to leave the South on the Trail of Tears, the party that issued the Dred Scot supreme court decision, the party that started the Civil War, the party that created the Ku Klux Klan, the party that lynched blacks and white Republicans, the party that instituted Jim Crow segregation, the party that interned loyal patriotic American's of Japanese descent during WW2, the party that fought against the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.

It is also the party that fought against the passage of the 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts. Even though Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, was instrumental in getting these latter civil rights acts passed, it could not have happened without the unified support of the Republican party. Too many Democrats opposed those bills. Democrat social welfare programs have virtually destroyed the black family in America and are also destroying white families in the process. Democrat run cities are cesspools of crime and corruption where blacks are killing other blacks at alarming rates. Yet the Democrat run media focuses on the myth of white police officers shooting down unarmed blacks in droves and they are constantly exploiting the issue of race in order to keep and maintain power.

America would be able to heal our racial problems if we were only allowed to heal without interference from the Democrat party. Since the Communists have taken over the Democrat party they are pushing the Marxist and racist Critical Race Theory down our throats and spreading this poison in our schools. If you want to end racism in America then I suggest ending the Democrat party in America. It stands to reason that the Marxists are racists and have taken over the most racist political party in America because Karl Marx was a virulent racist and an anti-semite. Although he was Jewish himself, like many on the left he was a self hating Jew. Over the last few years I have lost my zeal for defending the Confederate flag because now I feel like I am defending the Democrat party when I do. I have come a long way since my days as a young and naive Airman. I still defend the fact that we should remember all of our history, the good, along with the bad. And I am not for tearing down statues, renaming buildings, and changing the names of army posts. I would remind everyone that it was the Democrat party that erected those statues, named those buildings and named the army posts in the first place.