Cleared to Climb

© 2012 by Charles Roy McConnell. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   10/30/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7431-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7430-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7429-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012917923

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements And Author’s Notes

Prologue

Off I Go Into The Wild Blue Yonder

All Things Work Together For The Good… .

Fun And Games

Join The Airforce And See Texas

Enter Colonel Jake

Trouble On The Home Front

Pax Per Roborem

Boy, What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

When One Door Closes, Another Opens

The Legend Of Tammy Sue

The Customer Is Always Right

Crashing And Burning

Sitting Up With The Dead

Getting Hitched

U.S. Airforce, Chapter Two

Set For Life

The Douglas Rocket

Thank God For Pork And Beans

I’m Going To Be A What?

Moving Out, Moving On, Moving Up

Drinking And Driving

Love, Lust, And Other Illusions

Hail To The Captain

Today Is So Boring. Let’s Do Something Stupid And See If We Can’t Ruin Our Careers.

Trw+A

Fog, St. Elmo’s, Green Flashes, And Other Weird Stuff

Workers Of The World, Arise

D.B. Cooper, This Is All Your Fault

If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Burns Flat

Nuts, Bolts, And Duct Tape

West Texas Red

The Twilight Zone

Back To The Future

The Art Of Getting Accepted

Ode To Mom

Fitting In

Captain Eddie

The Changing Of The Guard

The Near-Jet

Works Of Art

Becoming One Of The Elite

Gone To Texas, Again

South America Redux

Nothing About Customs Is Customary

Rubbing Elbows With The Rich And Famous

A Man Must Know His Limitations

Enter The Dickster

His Heart Belongs To Politics

Mr. Cheney Goes To Washington

Cleared To Descend

Cleared To Land

To my wife, Peggy, who spent thirty-seven years of our marriage watching me walk out the door, sometimes for weeks at a time, and never complained about it, To my son, Steven, who had no idea what his father actually did in his airborne office, and, To my grandsons, Brycen and Jarret, whose questions about flying inspired me to write of my experiences, I dedicate this book.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND

AUTHOR’S NOTES

My thanks to Bill Loughridge, who examined my manuscript and corrected many errors of punctuation and grammar. I especially thank my wife, Peggy, for her suggestions for making the book better.

I have not used the real names of the men and women I flew with, both as students of mine and as crew members with Trans-Texas/Texas International Airlines and the Halliburton Company. Though many of them have made earth’s last flight, they still deserve their privacy. With the exception of the individuals I identify as Harry Rivers and Paul Gleason, I have used everyone else’s real name. Each of them contributed to my career in a positive way and I owe them a great debt.

PROLOGUE

A pilot who once worked for me when I was aviation manager for the Halliburton Company told me a story about an incident that occurred when he was flying for a company that provided aircraft for charter.

He and his co-pilot had delivered their customer to his destination, where he was presumably conducting business. When he had finished what he came for, they would return him home. After several hours of waiting, their passenger returned, but in an obvious state of inebriation. After becoming airborne in the small Lear Jet they were flying, the passenger came up to the cockpit and asked if there was a trick to using the tiny toilet that was provided in the airplane. After delicately questioning his exigency, it was discovered that he merely needed to urinate. The pilot informed him that there was a relief tube which had a funnel attached that he could use. After doing so, he could press a trigger-like switch at the side so that what he had done would be vented overboard. (Don’t worry folks, it evaporates before it reaches ground).

After carefully listening, or as carefully as his booze-befogged brain could comprehend, the man moved to the designated area to do his business. In a couple of minutes, the crew was startled by a loud WHOOSH followed by a scream. The co-pilot sprang to the aft of the Lear to see what in the world had happened. What the man had done was to grab hold of what he thought was the relief tube, but instead had urinated into the funnel of the fire extinguisher. When he finished, he pulled the trigger as instructed only to find himself covered in a slightly yellow tinted foam.

Upon arrival at the home airport, the man exited the airplane with as much dignity as a drunk, foul-smelling buffoon can muster. I wonder how he explained his condition to his wife, if he had one.

Such incidents are one of a kind, but the fact is that anytime a pilot is strapped into a cockpit, he or she will never know what will happen during the course of the flight. Most of the time it is boring and mundane, but it can only take a few seconds for disaster to intrude and change lives forever. The pilots flying the fateful airliners on September 11, 2001, a beautifully clear morning that held every promise of being just another routine day at their airborne office, could not possibly have imagined that within minutes after takeoff, they would be dead, murdered by misguided, hate-filled terrorists. Nor could the crew who had just taken off from a New York City airport have anticipated that within seconds after leaving the ground, a flock of birds would disable their machine and require them to ditch in the Hudson River.

My career, which spanned more than forty years, including time as an Air Force flight instructor, an airline pilot, and a pilot for a Fortune 500 company, never reached the danger level faced by the two examples cited above. However, that is not to say that it wasn’t without its fair share of peril and terror. It was indeed an adventure and one which provided a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

These pages chronicle some of the things that happened to me during the course of that career. It tells about the improbable way that I arrived there. The genesis of this book is to perhaps answer some of the questions asked by my grandsons. It is also to finally tell my son what I did, since I didn’t talk much about it when it was happening. I felt growing up was enough for any child to deal with, so why add the anxiety of what might be happening to his dad. Also, it is for my wife, to whom I certainly kept mum about certain things, so that she wouldn’t have to fret.

To all who read these words, I hope you enjoy.

OFF I GO INTO

THE WILD BLUE YONDER

Ignorance is not always a bad thing. To be ignorant of the problems that might occur whenever you attempt an endeavor can help focus your attention on the possibilities. That’s the advantage of being young. The young see what could be; the old fear what might happen.

It was with such youthful ignorance that I came to the end of my high school days and faced the prospect of adventures yet to be realized. In 1960, your adventures were limited until a certain obligation was fulfilled. That obligation was known as the military draft. Once you turned eighteen, military service was, for most, inevitable. There were ways to have it deferred, commonly by going to college. That was out of the question for me. I didn’t have the money, didn’t have the grades to qualify for a scholarship, and I was sick of school anyway. If I got a job, I knew it would only be a matter of time before that letter would arrive bidding me greetings and requiring that I report somewhere for induction into a branch of the armed forces of the United States. The problem with getting a job and waiting for that inevitable summons was that any employer who would hire you knew you were draft bait, and they would never spend money training someone they knew could be gone any day. Thus, for the foreseeable future, you were doomed to low wages and menial labor. The only other option was to choose the branch of service that appealed to you, enlist in it, and get it over with. And that’s what I did.

On my eighteenth birthday, I dutifully registered for the draft, as required by law. Soon thereafter, I visited the Air Force recruiter and signed papers which, upon my graduation from high school ten weeks later, stated that for the next four years I belonged to the United States Air Force.

Ever since I was ten years old, I had wanted to fly. At that age I began hanging around the airport on the south side of the small southwest Oklahoma town in which I lived. Our house was only two blocks from the airport. One day I heard some of the men who owned airplanes talking about having a penny a pound day. That meant that anyone who wanted to take an airplane ride would step on a scale and the cost of the ride would be one cent times their weight. What a deal! It wouldn’t even cost me a dollar. That night I opened my piggy bank in which I had some change from doing household chores and discovered I had plenty of coins to take a ride. On the appointed day, I went to the airport, stepped on the scale, paid for my ride in nickels and pennies, and braced myself for the thrill of a lifetime. I didn’t tell my parents what I was going to do for fear they would say no. In those days, before everyone was paralyzed by fear of lawsuits, I didn’t have to have anyone sign a waiver. I just paid the money and got on board. The flight was wonderful. The pilot simultaneously scared me to death and thrilled me to ecstasy, but from that time forward I was hooked. I read everything I could about airplanes and, for the next few years, I spent any extra money I had buying and building model airplanes. Of course, I imagined myself as the pilot of them.

Obsessed as I was, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone when I joined the Air Force. Shouldn’t have been, but it was to my parents. Since I was eighteen, I didn’t need their permission to enlist, and I really didn’t think they cared anyway. I found out later I was wrong about that. Children are often wrong about how their parents feel, because they don’t have any experience being parents. I did my parents an injustice by thinking they were indifferent about the things I did. They were having marital problems at the time, exacerbated by my dad’s drinking problem, and all their emotional energy was spent in trying to maintain their sanity, leaving nothing left over to convince their children that they mattered. I was the oldest of my two siblings and was able to escape to the Air Force and not have to deal with their dysfunction. My sister, five years my junior, was affected the most and a brother, born when I was fifteen, was too young to know what was going on. By the time he was old enough to know, Daddy no longer drank, and he and Mom had finally gotten their act together. I now know they loved us, but the demons they were battling earlier just didn’t allow them to show it.

The day after walking across a crudely constructed platform at the football stadium and receiving my diploma from Duncan High School, I boarded a bus for the ninety mile trip to Oklahoma City, where I would take my military induction physical. My parents took me to the bus station. We had a few awkward minutes wanting to say a lot to each other but in the end saying nothing of significance. I would learn many years later that, at my mother’s insistence, they followed the bus well outside of town. When I was told that story, I wondered why they had such a hard time expressing how they felt. I then made a silent determination that if I should ever have a family, I would always let them know how much I valued them.

Arriving in Oklahoma City that afternoon, I made my way to the hotel that had been contracted by the government to billet future warriors on what was likely to be their last night as a civilian for a number of years. I ate the meal that evening that was provided for us and turned in for a restful night of sleep. That was not to be. The hotel was full of other young men, some draftees, some volunteers, all going into one of the four major services, nearly all touting the superiority of the branch they had chosen, and to a man determined to make the night a memorable one by testing their capacity for alcoholic beverages. I didn’t participate in their shenanigans, but because of the constant celebratory noise ricocheting through the halls, I slept no better than they. The one considerable advantage I had over them was that I wasn’t hung over the next day.

After breakfast, we assembled in the hotel lobby for the bus ride to the induction center. The party animals of the night before were a pitiful looking crew exhibiting pallid faces, blood shot eyes, and a general zombie-like persona. Most took advantage of the fifteen minute bus ride by trying to capture some of the sleep they had ignored the night before.

Upon arrival, we were told to strip naked, and then we made our way from first one doctor and then another as we were poked, prodded, and examined from our hair roots to our toe nails with several intermediate stops in between. I can only remember one guy not passing the physical. He was the only person I ever saw who had no neck. When he wanted to look in another direction, he had to turn his entire body, because it was impossible for him to swivel his head. He was also covered with hair and his arms were so long his fingers nearly reached his knees. He was the best argument to prove the theory of evolution that I had ever seen.

By early afternoon, the physical was over. We were herded en masse to a room where the oath was administered, and I was officially a member of the United States Air Force with the rank of airman basic. Amazingly, out of the fifty young men who took the physical, only two of us were going into the Air Force. I can barely remember what the other guy looked like, and I can’t remember at all where he was from or anything about what we said to each other on the way to our destination of San Antonio, Texas.

What I do remember is the flight down. At Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City, we boarded a Central Airlines DC-3. I could never have guessed that in six years I would be flying a DC-3 myself for another airline. Central Airlines no longer exists, but it was then one of several local service air carriers that, aided by a government subsidy, provided air service to medium sized cities all across the country.The DC-3, though now almost extinct, was the workhorse of those airlines until the late 1960’s.

Our flight left Oklahoma City, landed ten minutes later in Norman, proceeded on for twenty more minutes to Ada, fifteen minutes to Ardmore, and then one final hop of thirty minutes to Dallas. There we changed to a Braniff Airlines (another airline that no longer exists) DC-7 for the one hour flight to San Antonio. Upon arrival we noticed signs directing incoming Air Force personnel to a common location. Spotting an airman in a khaki, short-sleeved uniform with many impressive stripes, I approached him and identified myself and my traveling companion. My innocent introduction seemed to elicit a reaction of rage as he began a harangue the likes of which I had never heard in my life. To summarize it, he let me know that when a miserable amoeba such as myself addressed someone of superior rank as he happened to be ( and at that time everyone was of superior rank to me), I was to stand at attention and call him sir. In the meantime, I was to sit down, shut up, and not move until ordered to do so. He also punctuated his lecture with numerous adjectives I had never heard before, and I was certain did not appear in any dictionary.

As time passed, small groups of clueless young men arrived, obviously rendezvousing from various parts of the country. They became recipients of the same colorful greeting that I had received, and, like a dog who has been kicked by his master, they skulked into the area where I was, all of us anxious to see what might be next. Of course, none of us had a clue as to what that might be.

Finally, at nearly midnight, the bellicose sergeant bellowed at us to get our lazy posteriors outside and get on the bus that was waiting at the curb. We were all too happy to leave his arena of fear. The only problem was that awaiting us on the bus was another sergeant with just as many stripes and even more eloquently foul language. His purpose in life seemed to be to remind us of what miserable examples of American youth we were, just in case we needed to be reminded.

As the bus made its way through the dark night to Lackland Air Force Base, the Air Force’s training center, the sergeant profanely explained that the first stop would be the chow hall. One thing about the Air Force, they always made sure you were well fed. But, as we were to quickly learn, just sitting down and eating wasn’t that simple in the Air Force. There would be rules even for something as ordinary as taking nourishment.

You will, the sergeant explained, stand at attention as you go through the chow line. You will side step as you move along. You will hold your tray out to the server, look straight ahead, and accept whatever he puts on your tray. You will eat everything on your plate. Actually, his speech consisted of three times as many words as I have quoted, all of a profane nature, but since nothing is gained by repeating them, you can use your imagination.

After the rules of the Air Force way of dining were enumerated to us, he asked if we understood them. We replied in a manner that we had heard soldiers reply in the war movies we had grown up with by shouting in unison with what I thought was a very satisfactory, Yes sir. Apparently it wasn’t satisfactory as far as the sarge was concerned because he profanely admonished us by saying a group of female adolescent cheerleaders sounded more manly than we did. Our second attempt was several decibels louder and seemed to satisfy him.

We arrived at the chow hall and did our best to obey the sarge’s dictum as to how to proceed down the line, but he didn’t seem to think we understood. He deemed it necessary to follow us down the line and continually remind us that our IQ’s had to be doubled in order to reach the level of an idiot. He also picked out the biggest guys and seemed to delight in questioning their parenthood. Even the food servers got in the act by continually shouting at us to hurry up and move it on. After loading our trays with what passed for food and finding our way to a table, the sarge, just to help our digestion along, told us we had five minutes to finish, and every crumb had better be gone.

After our leisurely breakfast, we were herded back aboard the bus and taken to what would be our home for the next five weeks, our barracks. The barracks building had likely been constructed at about the time the Air Force had become a separate service in 1947. Before that, it had been attached to the Army, and it was known as the Army Air Corps. So in 1960 the Air Force as its own entity was even younger than I was.

The barrack’s interior consisted of double rows of bunk beds. There was enough sleeping room for sixty men. Foot lockers were at the end of each bed with ample room for all the clothing and personal possessions the Air Force deemed necessary for you to have. Underfoot was a green, highly polished, and amazingly clean linoleum floor which, we were told, was going to be forever highly polished and amazingly clean, or else there would be some very unpleasant consequences. There was a narrow foyer just off the front door. At one side of the foyer was a staircase which led to an office that was the domain of the sergeant who would be our training instructor, or as the anachronism crazy Air Force referred to it, the TI. I think most of us were curious about what the office looked like, but we would learn that if we ever did get summoned up to that sanctum, it would not be to congratulate us for what a fine job we were doing, but rather to have our hind quarters roasted.

We were told to choose a bunk. I was lucky enough to get a lower one and, after peeling off my clothes, I collapsed into bed. The last thing I remember doing was looking at my watch. It was 1:30 A.M. In what seemed like milliseconds, someone was shaking me awake. It was an airman in uniform who I had noticed at the door when we had entered the barracks, but I was already beginning to learn the less said the less likely to get into trouble, so I didn’t ask who he was. Now he was telling me that it was time to pull barracks guard duty. I had no inkling what barracks guard duty was, but I had also learned in the fourteen hours I had spent in the Air Force to never question anything you were told by anyone who seemed to know what they were doing.

I crawled out of my bunk, got back into my clothes, which were starting to emanate a most unpleasant odor, and along with four other poor souls, I made my way to the foyer. Since none of us had any inkling as to what a barracks guard was supposed to do, we were given a thin manual that explained it to us. I spent the next hour reading and rereading the manual and watched the real barracks guard, who had been in the Air Force about a week longer than I had, demonstrate how it was done.

At some point in that hour, as my sleep deprived brain tried to make sense of the manual, the guard leapt to his feet as though electrocuted and shouted, Ten-hut. Not knowing exactly what ten-hut meant, I chose the wise course of doing what the guard was doing, which was to stand ramrod straight with eyes fastened straight ahead. The reason for the ten-hut walked through the door. He was a second lieutenant with a black armband with white letters proclaiming him to be the OD, military lingo for Officer of the Day. He didn’t look any happier than I did having to perform questionable duty in the middle of the night, and, after signing the barracks log sheet to prove he had actually been there, the OD asked if everything was O.K. After being assured that it was, he stuck his head in where the bunks were, and seemingly satisfied that nothing illegal or immoral was taking place, he went back out into the dark night.

At four a.m., I was allowed to return to my bunk as five more brain-benumbed men were awakened to take our place. One hour after returning to the sheets, I heard a scratchy sound coming from somewhere followed in just a few seconds by a bugle call. The scratchy sound was someone preparing to play a record on a turntable. The bugle call was not the reveille that you expected to hear but was instead like a trumpet call one might hear at a horse race to summon the horses to the track. When the bugle sounded, you had fifteen minutes to shave, get dressed, make your bunk according to the TI’s specifications and fall in outside in formation. Within a few days, I was able to train myself to awaken at the first scratch of that record and be halfway to the latrine before the call to the gate even sounded.

I stood outside at attention, and, as the first hint of dawn began to chase away the darkness, I tried to absorb what had happened to me that week. Three days before, I had just graduated from high school. Only eighteen hours before, I had taken my oath to defend and protect my country. I had slept four hours in the last two days. And now as I laid eyes for the first time on the stern looking TI that stood before us, I felt I had made the biggest mistake of my life, and I would have to pay for it for the next four years.

"ALL THINGS WORK TOGETHER

FOR THE GOOD… ."

It would be the second day of basic training before we felt like we were actually in the Air Force. I had worn the same sweat-caked clothes for three days, and I could just stand them up in the corner at night instead of folding them. Mercifully, that was about to change.

The largest building at Lackland was a one story building with corridors sprawling off in different directions as additions were hastily constructed to accommodate need. To walk through it looking for a specific room was a bigger challenge than for a mouse to find its way out of a maze. The building was known as The Green Monster, so called because of the pale green asbestos siding that covered it.

We were taken to a huge room deep in the inner sanctum of the place and told to strip off every article of clothing right down to our shoes. Then we were given a shipping box, ordered to stuff the odoriferous garments into it, and address it to the folks back home. I was always too embarrassed to ask my mother what her reaction was to that smelly package, but it had to have been quite a shock.

Having sealed and addressed our cartons, we proceeded to a window where a bored airman asked our waist size, and, upon being told that, slid several pairs of white boxer shorts to us and an equal count of tee shirts at us. Actually, throwing them at us would be a more apt description. Immediately upon receiving our underwear, we slipped on a pair to at least recover a modicum of modesty. At the first of several windows, we were first issued a duffel bag in which to carry our new uniforms. Then we received several pairs of olive drab fatigues, one pair of which I put on immediately. Next came brogans (boots), socks and a fatigue cap. In rapid succession we were given dress blue uniforms, khakis, a hat, shoes, and more socks. As part of my blue uniform I was given a standard blue coat and then another waist-length blue coat known as an Ike jacket. It was so named because it was patterned after the one that General Eisenhower wore during World War II. My group was one of the last to be issued one. In later years, I was considered an old-timer because I had one. One piece of uniform that I wore maybe six times was an odd khaki jacket known as a bush jacket. It actually looked like something you might wear on an African safari, and it was so comical looking most guys would never put it on. We were also the recipients of some khaki Bermuda shorts and tan, knee high socks. Not once in my four years did I ever put those ridiculous looking things on.

Next on the agenda, we were herded to another place where we were issued our pay. My rank entitled me to seventy-eight dollars a month and even though I had been in the Air Force only three days I was paid one-half of one month’s pay, which after taxes still came to about thirty-five dollars. That was as much cash as I had ever had in my pocket at one time. However, we then were required to spend some of it. We were taken to another place where we were told to purchase shaving equipment, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, and deodorant. By all means we needed deodorant. One genius just had to ask the sarge where the hair cream was. The question prompted a profane response, the gist of which was that hair cream was the last thing he would need. The reason why became obvious minutes later as we were taken to get our first official Air Force haircut. I was in the barber’s chair for about forty-five seconds and, when I was through, my head looked like a coconut.

Since we looked like airmen, we began training like airmen. We fell into a routine that consisted of falling out for inspection at five a.m. and marching to the chow hall. Then it was march, march, march all day with breaks for the required meals. Marching was a snap for me since I had been in a very good marching band since the seventh grade. I also thought I was in pretty good physical shape, and I was beginning to get over the shock of a new environment and settle into a familiar routine. I never had much confidence in myself, but I was starting to gain some as I continued with my training. But then, the heat of San Antonio in June slapped me right up the side of the head.

The procedure at Lackland Air Force Base was that whenever the temperature reached ninety degrees, all outdoor training activities were to cease. A red flag would be hoisted at strategic locations to indicate that the ninety degree mark had been attained, and the troops must return to a location out of the heat. However, the temperature was only taken on the hour, and another hour might pass before someone decided that, yes, the temperature was actually ninety degrees and maybe the red flag should be raised. Add to that the TI, knowing full well that the temperature was going to get to that magic number at some point in the day, might have you two miles away from your non-air conditioned barracks. It would thus take you yet another half hour to march back.

Being from Oklahoma and living in a house that had no air conditioning, I knew what heat felt like, but I had never experienced the humidity that seemed thick enough to chew. Additionally, our heavy fatigue uniforms seemed even heavier when soaked with our perspiration. At day’s end, our fatigue shirts would have streaks of white where we had sweated out the salt in our bodies. There would be a salt tablet dispenser in the barracks, and we would be ordered to take them liberally during the day. Plus, what we know now about keeping the body hydrated by drinking liquids was either unknown or ignored. Whatever the reason, after I had been in basic training for about two weeks, and, after returning to the barracks after a red flag march, I became delirious and collapsed. I was taken to the hospital by ambulance. I do remember the ambulance ride but not much else after that.

The next day, I finally regained my senses. I wanted out of that hospital, but my temperature must have been something of concern, because every time the nurse took it, she frowned. The reason I was so anxious to get out was that I was afraid of getting set back in basic training and having to spend an extra week at Lackland. So I devised a plan. I knew what time the nurse would come by to check my temperature, and, for about fifteen minutes before her scheduled appearance, I would chew on the ice chips that were always provided for me. It worked. After three days in the hospital, I was released.

The hospital was about three miles from my barracks, but I made the walk back and felt in pretty good shape by the time I reported in late that afternoon. Any elation I might have felt was shattered, because my possessions had been removed from the foot of my bunk. The TI told me that because I had missed three days of training, I was being assigned to another barracks and would have to spend another week in basic training. I went to the supply shed to collect my gear, and I had to endure the taunts of the sergeant in charge as he called me a weak, sorry excuse for an airman for having to spend time in the hospital.

By the time I had lugged my heavy load to my new barracks, it was nearly dark. I dreaded what was ahead. I would have a whole new group of guys to get to know, guys who might hold me in contempt for being a set-back, as those who had been forced to repeat a week of training were called. To my relief, they didn’t. I would also have to get used to a new TI, and it was to him that I reported. He was a black man, completely different in temperament from my old TI. My old TI was always screaming at us, belittling us, or humiliating us. I once saw him strike an airman who was obviously slow mentally, but the fear of him was such that none of us would report him. The new one was quiet, but firm. He led us by earning our respect rather than by intimidating us. The TI told me that because of the late hour there wouldn’t be an available bunk until the next day. But rather than make me sleep on the floor, he said I could sleep on the bunk upstairs in his office. He wasn’t going to be staying there that night, and I could use