1961-1965 Art Revel, Part 1: On Casey
y first thought upon learning of Casey Peterson’s death was M that someone must have killed him.
It was late August 1965. I was at a small Air Force radar site on top of a small mountain on the North Slope of Alaska. I held the letter that told me Casey had crashed while taking off from a place called Quang Tri Province, Vietnam.
To understand why I would think such a thing, with no evidence, you would have to have been around back then and heard things I’d been hearing about Vietnam. And you would have to have known Casey.
Casey was good. He couldn’t help it. It’s just the way he was.
He couldn’t lie, or cheat, or hate. I never saw him angry; never saw him without that half grin he’d probably been born with. There were no grey areas for Casey. If a thing wasn’t right, then it was wrong.
He was just a little too good to last long in a place like Vietnam. It was the last place on Earth they should have sent him. I even told him that, that last time we got together, a few months before he went over. He ignored me, of course, so what could I do?
I’ll tell you what I would do, if I could do it over again, knowing what I know. I’d shoot him in the foot or something, even though my turning on him like that would hurt more than the hole in his foot, even though I’d be arrested. You’d do the same for your friend, if you knew the future, knew the greater harm you saved him from. But I can’t see the future, not now, and not then. So, I let him go.
We’d been born six days apart, in November 1943. We didn’t meet, however, until after we’d graduated high school. We were pumping gas in Marshfield, Wisconsin, waiting for our futures to unfold before us. I was waiting for an entry slot in the Air Force 181
electronics career field. Casey, he just wanted to fly.
He was hard not to like, and we became friends easily. When the gas-pumping business was slow, we talked about this and that, and it didn’t take long for Casey’s rigid sense of right and wrong to show through. His principals would allow no rule bending. He was the kind of person who would be unwelcomed around people who saw life, and ethics, in subtler shades of grey.
That being said, I don’t want to give you the idea Casey was some sort of milquetoast. He had a bit of the daredevil in him, and he was almost cocky, at times, in his self-assurance. I don’t think he thought he could ever die.
December 1962, I got my AF slot, and went off to a four-year enlistment. Casey was gonna continue learning to fly at the small airport there in Marshfield. In December of 62, that’s all I knew of his plans. Boy, you think you know someone…
October 1964. I’m assigned to an AF Radar Squadron in Baudette, MN, on the Canadian border. (I’d be reassigned to Alaska soon, but I didn’t know it yet.) We got a three- or four-day weekend, for a reason I don’t recall. I didn’t have a car, hadn’t planned to go anywhere, but I learned two guys I knew were driving to the Minneapolis airport, so I hitched a ride, last minute. My parents and younger brother, Rocky, still lived on the farm, near Marshfield.
Figured I’d spend a few days back home.
My friends left Baudette at night to catch an early flight. I had planned to call home when we arrived at the airport, around 06:30
AM. Thought I might talk Rocky into skipping school, drive up and get me. It’s a three-hour drive. If that didn’t work, I could always hop on a bus.
I was about to dial home from the pay phone at the airport, when I thought of Casey. Maybe he’s still living at home, got the day off, wants to take a drive. What the hell, I still knew his home number, so I called him. What luck! He was home and looking to take a drive somewhere. He must have left in about five minutes, because only three hours later he pulled up at the curb.
He’d filled out some in two years, but it was all muscle. The 182
grin was still there, but not quite the same. It was his eyes, I decided.
His eyes were different. I couldn’t say how, but I noticed it.
On the drive back to the farm he got me to do most of the talking at first, always handy with a question to keep me going. I mentioned that during the first year, while in electronics training in Biloxi, Mississippi, I had learned to fly at an AF sponsored aero club. Took the test and got my private pilot’s license. Had a whop-ping forty-three hours in my logbook. Casey thought that was great.
Then I asked him if he was still flying. I figured he’d have his own license by now too, if he’d kept up with the lessons.
He said he was still flying. I asked how many hours he had logged, and he said he lost count, somewhere past a thousand, which I thought was a joke at first. When I realized he was serious, I thought he must have gone into commercial training to amass that much time in only two years. So, I told him to spill it, tell me where and what he was flying, and at what level.
“Where?” he said. “Virginia, Alabama, mostly.”
I tried to connect that statement up with things I thought I knew, and it made so little sense, I didn’t even know what question to ask next, so I said nothing. There had to be more. I started thinking maybe that’s why he agreed to pick me up in Minneapolis and make the long drive to the farm together. I waited for him to start up again.
After a minute, he did.
“What am I flying? Fixed wing spotters, small twins, and chop-pers, cargo class. Level? Intense, I’d say.” I just looked at him, waiting for him to tire of keeping a straight face and burst out laughing, before I committed myself to believing any of this. But he stayed serious.
“Is any of that true?” I asked. Give him one more chance to say it was all just a tall tale.
“True as it gets, Art.”
“Sweet Jesus!” I turned back to face the windshield, and leaned back in my seat, thinking, trying to imagine a scenario less dire than the obvious one. “You… you’re saying you… you’re in the Army, training to fly, so you can wade into that mess brewing in Vietnam?
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He made a fake little laugh and said, “Well, you make it sound bad, Artie.”
“It is bad. Real bad.”
“Ya dwell too much on negative, Artie. This training, experience, I’ll be a shoo-in for the airlines. I’ll be flyin, Art. All my life.
All over the world. I’ll get ya ride-along seats free. I can see it all now. It’s gonna be a blast. Stop worrying.”
“Casey, before all that good stuff can happen, you have to get out of Nam alive! With all the parts you were born with! Christ, Casey!” I was kinda shouting now. “You shouldn’t be going there.
You just… You, of all people, should not go there. I mean it. You can’t go there.”
“You sound like somebody’s mother. You want I should buy you a dress?”
“Ah jeez, Casey. You don’t know what it’s like. I’ve talked to guys who’ve been there. They say there’s no… ah… Right and wrong are all twisted up and confused. There’s… There’s stuff goin’ on that… stuff that’ll make it real hard for you to keep your mouth shut, and real easy to make enemies.” He kind of shrugged his shoulders, said nothing.
“Listen,” I said, after I’d stewed for a minute. “I know you’re going, you can’t back out, and wouldn’t even if you could. But you have to dial it back, you hear? You have to put on blinders, and just do your job, and stick to yourself, and don’t talk to anyone about anything you see that you don’t like, you hear me? Just put in your time and stay out of everything. Are you listening?
“Yes, Mommy Sir,” Casey said, still trying to sound amused.
That kind of pissed me off, and I said, kinda loud like, “Do I have to stop this car and give you a spanking?”
Casey turned his head to look at me and burst out laughing. I caught it, and there we were, both laughing so hard we couldn’t stop. He tried to say, “But Daddy, I’m driving the car!” but it took him three times to get it all out. That was probably the best thing that could have happened right then, and I’ll never forget it.
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After that, we lightened up a bit. He told me about some cool flying stuff he’d been doing. Made me jealous, and I told him so.
He was one of seventeen who had graduated from a Warrant Officer Candidate training class of thirty, one of two pilots selected for fixed wing training, and he would become dual qualified in chop-pers soon as he returned from the thirty-day leave he was enjoying.
Then on to Nam. He left that part out, but we both knew it was there. If you were an Army pilot back then, you went to Nam.
So, we talked about other things. We laughed and had a good time, and then Casey accidentally let something slip he hadn’t intended to say. I don’t remember the context, only that in an unguarded moment Casey said the word Dallas, only not quite all the word. He left the “S” sound off, like he decided at the last instant that he didn’t want to say that.
But me, I was sure he’d said Dallas, so I said, “Did you say Dallas? What were you doing in Dallas?” He stuttered for a couple of seconds, then tried to change the subject, but I wouldn’t let it go.
“C’mon, I heard you say Dallas. When did you go there?”
Remember, I knew nothing about Casey and the DPD. The incident, his resignation from the department, all of that was a local Dallas story that ended when he left the department. I didn’t find out about that until decades later, when I met this woman named Bell. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Casey said it was nothing, and he couldn’t talk about it. I figured the way he clammed up; it was about a girl. So naturally, I had to know more.
“What, she dumped ya, and ya can’t even tell your best friend?”
I said.
Casey said nothing, and I looked at him, staring straight ahead past his steering wheel.
“Well,” I said, “at least ONE of your best friends? Back then, anyway… maybe not now, but…”
“Best is accurate,” he said real quick, “then and now.” Then he angled his head to his left toward the driver’s side window, like he didn’t want me to see his face. He kept looking that way for a long 185
time. When he turned back, he’d decided what he would tell me.
“I… tried something, that didn’t work out,” he said, after a brief hesitation that made me think he’d considered saying more.
“Ok,” I said, not sure anymore how far I should push. “You went there, like, before you enlisted?”
“I went…,” he said, and then he clammed up. I heard a small crack in his voice, just at the end of the word ‘went.’ Such a little thing to notice, but it spoke volumes. I had broached a subject difficult for him, for a reason or reasons I couldn’t fathom.
“Look, Art,” Casey said, his voice strong and steady now. “It didn’t work out, ok? Let’s leave it at that for now. I’ll fill you in some day. We’ll fill a cooler with ice and beer and sit on a back porch and I’ll tell you all about it. It’s just… I can’t get into it right now, ok?”
“Ok, ok. Sounds like quite a story. But I consider this to be a solemn promise, so just memorize what I said about Nam, and get your ass back stateside in one piece, you hear me boy?”
“Sir, Yes Sir!”
I expected him to say that. So, things were ok again.
Wasn’t much later, we approached the outskirts of Marshfield.
Had to drive through the town to get to the farm. When we passed the turnoff to the little airport, Casey pointed it out. Then a mile or so past it, he said, “Hey, you wanna go up for a bit? I’m still checked out there.”
Are you kidding?
Casey made a quick U-turn and fifteen minutes later we lifted off in a Cessna 150. Two-seater with a tiny jump seat behind. Casey in the right seat.
“Ok, where should we go,” Casey said, after we’d taken off.
“Too bad there isn’t a grass strip on the farm. You could just drop me off.”
“Um. We could run out there though. See it from the air?”
Casey gave me the controls for the short run to the farm where, lacking anything resembling a plan, we each made a bombing run 186
at the barn. Casey showed me an example of low-level navigation, hopping over lane fences behind the barn, after I assured him that the tallest structure out there was, in fact, a six-foot fence.
“We should move on before your folks get nervous and call it in,” Casey said, after we’d been there five or six minutes. I agreed.
I learned later that two neighbors had conferred with my folks over the phone, wondering what on earth that pilot was up to. Ma was on to us right from the start. Even though they weren’t expecting me,
“It’s Art and Casey, you wait and see,” she told them.
We left the area and climbed to four thousand. That’s when the show began.
“You cool if I do some maneuvers?” Casey asked.
I knew it was coming. You can’t expect a pilot of Casey’s caliber to pass up a chance to show a friend what he’s made of. To be a pilot, a good pilot, one must possess certain inner ear qualities that determine a person’s ability to focus and function while spinning. I didn’t learn just how deficient I was in that area until I started taking lessons. Straight and level was fine. I could even accommodate one or two power-off stalls, but anything even resembling aerobatics reduced me to fifty percent capacity in no time. I wasn’t about to tell Casey that though. We both knew the 150 isn’t rated for aerobatics.
Even if Casey pushed the 150’s limits, I’d just grit my teeth for a few minutes and pretend I’m having fun.
“Sure, why not?” I said. How bad could it be?
He lowered the nose, gained a little air speed, then pulled the yolk back into a steep climb, and he pulled the power back to idle.
The stall warning buzzer sounded, and a few seconds later the plane’s forward momentum had played out. It started to slide backwards, tail first, and then the nose came down, just as it was designed to, and the valiant little craft tried to start flying again. Casey held the elevator in a dive, however, and kicked in enough left rudder to make the plane spin to the left as it fell.
I lost count of the spins. Too many for me. I glanced at the airspeed dial a couple times. He maintained just enough control to stay below VNE, the maximum safe velocity. Just. By the time he 187
arrested the spin I was a wet dishrag. The ground was getting close, but I didn’t care. He pulled about three g coming out of the dive, and he used the high air speed to gain back some of the lost altitude.
Then he added power and went into a series of chandelles—
max climb and bank while flipping course one-eighty. He continued for three or four minutes—felt like an eternity to me—effortlessly connecting recovery from one maneuver with the beginning of the next. I think he might have forgotten I was there, and for a couple of minutes it was just a man and his machine, both in their element.
When he came out of the last spin, and I realized it was over, I held my head with both hands to see if I could stop the spinning. Didn’t work. Casey could never appreciate the enormous effort it had taken to hold the contents of my stomach in place.
Casey, thankfully, didn’t say anything, so I didn’t need to make the effort it would have taken to respond. After a few minutes we approached the Marshfield runway, and slid nicely into the downwind leg of the approach pattern, at the perfect altitude. Casey’s landing may have been the best I’ve ever seen. Then we got in his car and headed for the farm. “Wake me when we get there, and no spins in the car,” I said, and closed my eyes.
The gravel driveway on the farm is an oval between the house and barn, similar in shape to an airport landing pattern. Casey dropped me on the upwind leg, nearest the house. The spinning in my head had subsided enough that I could speak. I told him he was one hell of a flyer, headed for great things, I was glad we had the chance to fly together, and maybe we could do it again sometime.
He told me I was a good pilot too, first lie I’d ever caught him in, and I got out of the car.
I leaned in the passenger window, meaning to shake his hand and wish him luck, but I just couldn’t resist taking this one last opportunity to warn him to walk softly where he was headed. He was having none of it, repeated my words back to me in the best falsetto he could muster. I backed out of the car window and gave him a dismissal wave as I turned my back and walked away.
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Casey drove away. I turned back toward him as he came out of the crosswind leg of the oval. I felt guilty, thought I should hail him down or something, and not let the day end like this. Then, on impulse, I came to attention, and as his car entered the downwind leg, and I saw him turn his head toward me, I snapped him a salute. With no hesitation, he squared his shoulders, well as he could, given the confines of his car, and returned the salute. He dropped his hand, and I mine. Then he was gone. That was the last time I saw him.
But it was a good image he left me with, framed by the open car window, ducking his head in attempting to execute the salute.
And that grin, always that grin. I carry that with me.
The last time we see someone, we rarely know it’s the last time.
Too bad, I sometimes think. But then, maybe it’s better that way.
That’s about all there is to this half of the story. They posted me to a mountaintop in Alaska, and that’s where I heard of Casey’s death. The following March of 1966, I filled out Form 932, known as the Dream Sheet, listing my top three choices for my next duty station. If the AF could match its manpower needs with any of those choices, I’d get to live my dream.
I hadn’t gone voluntarily to my mountain in Alaska, and I didn’t like it much. I had seven months left on my enlistment. I wanted warm weather and to be as far away from Alaska as possible. I chose Home AFB, near Miami. The AF did me one better, sent me one hundred sixty-two road miles further away from Alaska, to Key West, the end of the road. Gotta love ‘em.
Before reporting to Key West, I went home for two weeks.
When I got there, Ma told me Casey’s brother had stopped by a few months ago to leave something for me. It was in my room.
A Jeppsen Flight Computer is a circular slide rule used to calculate several aviation parameters, like true heading correction to account for wind. It has a thin aluminum section, about five by six inches, with rotating dials on the front and back, and a four by nine plastic piece that slides up or down through the aluminum part. It has a vinyl case, open on one end. Casey knew I didn’t have one.
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There it was, sitting on the dresser in the bedroom. Taped to the outside case was a scrap of paper, with the words ‘Mom, give to Art,’ printed in pencil. I held it in my hands, stared at the note, and tried to imagine how it came to be here.
He must have wanted me to have it, if he didn’t come back. It was hard to imagine him, thinking in those terms, but that had to be it. He probably did the same with a few other items he had with him in Nam. Or, it occurred to me, perhaps he didn’t even have the computer with him in Nam. He could have written the note and taped it to the case before he went over, and then left it there for his family to find if, you know… I took it out of the case, turned it over, pulled the plastic slide out, looked in the case, but found nothing else.
I could have called his home in Marshfield to ask about it, but since I was planning to go see them anyway, I didn’t call. Then I kept putting off going to see them. I was still young and immature, I’ll admit. I didn’t know what to say to them. Thought I had to make something up. I didn’t know that all I had to do was be honest.
I put Casey’s computer in a shoebox of my treasured things. I put in my six months at Key West and left the Air Force. I found a good job, the perfect girl, we bought a house and filled it with kids.
I had a life, in other words. Casey’s flight computer would not leave the shoebox again, not for many decades, because I never flew again. It was expensive. I could afford it while the taxpayers provided my food, shelter, medical, travel and such. When I became responsible for those things myself, however, recreational flying was first on the list of things I could do without.
I’d think of Casey. I’d wonder again why he left me his computer, and how he really died. I supposed his family knew. The Army had to have told his family. All I had to do, all those years I lived my life, was pick up the phone. I just didn’t feel like I had the right any more. I felt guilty, lacking, because I didn’t stop by to see them when I got home from Alaska. Calling them after that, just to ease my mind about how Casey died, wasn’t right. It was a small enough penance to pay for what I had failed to do, so I paid, and life went on. Mine, that is.
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