George Butkus Air Force Radio Operator – served January 1962 to January 1966, in Kirknewton, Scotland; Bremerhaven, Germany and Formosa (Taiwan).

His story:

While in Bremerhaven we went into town, it was Christmas Eve. The German I studied in high school helped me navigate the city with my roommate, a couple of his friends and a few of my friends. They were drinking like GIs do in the service during the 1960s. They were Catholic, so they wanted to go to mass. They went into a church, but because they were drinking they did not realize they were not in a Catholic church. When they got up to leave, the ushers would not open the doors to let them out, they had to stay until the service was over. It was some type of Protestant church.

I’m guessing it was 2007 when a friend I made in Bremerhaven, Richard Kozak, called me. He’s living in California now and organizing a reunion of the guys I was stationed with. All the radio operators had top-secret cryptographic clearances. He married a German girl. When you marry a German national the military revokes your security clearance. So he ended up doing other jobs on the base.  Some men who lost their clearance became military policemen, others were made to work in the motor pool. Kozak was able to finish college while serving in the Air Force. He and his wife had a family. He attended officers candidate school and went was able to retire as a full bird colonel. I don’t know if he ever worked again in a position which required security clearance.

Racism

We were reassigned from Lackland Air Force Base to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi,  Mississippi, to train for different radio operator positions and other positions in military intelligence. After traveling on the bus for several hours, we stopped in the late afternoon someplace in Louisiana. A lot of the guys were from the New Jersey area or the five boroughs of New York. For the first time, we were faced with discrimination because some of the men in our unit were black. We got off the bus to go to the men’s room, and as we walked in together, there were guys at the door telling the black airmen that they could not use this restroom. They had to go into the black restroom, even though we were all in Air Force uniforms.

One night in, Biloxi, a few of us (white airmen) were walking around downtown in our uniforms and wandered into a black neighborhood. A car came up alongside us, they opened the windows and swung baseball bats at us. They told us to “Get your white asses out of our part of town.” They didn’t hurt us, it was just a warning. We immediately there because we didn’t want any trouble. We especially didn’t want to get busted and lose a stripe or anything like that. There wasn’t any racism on base or in Texas, in basic training. By 1962 in the military racism wasn’t allowed. We all showered together, lived in the same barracks together, ate in the same chow hall together and went to the same technical schools together.

Listen to George Butkus as he recalls the racism in Louisiana and Mississippi in the mid 1960s.

Can serve – can’t drink

I volunteered for the Air Force when I was 18 years old. At that time you could be drafted at 18, but could not vote. You could drink on a base at age 18, but once you got into most towns you could not legally drink, except in New York State, at that time the drinking age was 18, but in New Jersey it was 21. So if you came home on leave you couldn’t drink except on base. You could go to the Navy Yard or something like that for a drink if you were in that neck of the woods. That was the way it was. Guys could be drafted and they couldn’t even have a vote for the president until they were 21.