KAFB has really changed in the last 40 years; but, then, there were three separate bases. Now there is only one huge one. There has never been very many aircraft on Kirtland. During the war, it trained a few air crews for the Pacific theater and trained the crews that delivered the atomic bomb, but it has always been essentially an R&D base full of waste, waste, waste. The main commodity wasted was money: good ole Federal tax dollars. That is the nature of research. For every successful research project that creates and produces new knowledge and equipment, there are at least nine that don’t make it and are abandoned. Take the Goat Farm, for incidence. It began with a very noble goal: the development of a biological radiation dosimeter that could easily and quickly measure the amount and kind of radiation to which a troop was exposed in the field with the use of a simple blood or other clinical test. Of course, such a simple test for radiation exposure is impossible. Many millions of dollars were required to establish that fact, but we had to know. The process of learning it was a lot of fun. In the process, the only thing I ever saw fly at KAFB was sheep. Their little rear hoofs can fly fast.

KAFB today to me is what I knew then as Sandia/Monsanto Base. When I look at the Google picture of KAFB-West that I knew then as KAFB, all I see is vacant property that has been cleared for development. The Capehart Housing Area is gone. My ole barracks and 4900th Air Base Orderly Room buildings are all gone. The Zia Park base housing is all gone. The two base chapels of which I was familiar are all gone. The KAFB Infirmary on the west side is all gone. The Mecca Service Club is all gone. The base theater is all gone: the site which now is occupied by aircraft which appears to be set up as a museum. The post office, where I use to get all my valuable, little paychecks and letters from home, is all gone. The mess hall where I ate all that great AF chow is all gone. What’s left on the westward side: only the hangers, base operations, laboratories, and all that empty, former housing, space that the AF is now trying to develop into a fantastically new research center. By the way, either Google has them overly magnified or the streets (Aberdeen, Carlisle, and Truman) have been fourlaned. If so, it would be dangerous to ride my bike on all those fourlane streets now. I’m glad I was there in the Sixties. It appears that my tennis courts have multiplied from three to six. The softball fields have multiplied from one to at least three. Change! Change! Change! Is this the change that Barack Obama brought? I doubt it.

The people of Albuquerque must be patient for a clean up of their aquifer. It takes time to get a huge bureaucracy to moving especially when most of the members of that bureaucracy cycle through in six month to four year tours of duty; but it will be cleaned up; and greater diligence will be excercised in the future to prevent it from happening again. I would still love to retire to the Mesa del Sol area of Albuquerque in spite of the aquifer problem, in spite of the slowness of the bureaucracy, in spite of the population explosion that is rapidly exceeding the capacity of the environment to sustain, in spite of the fact that the development is sitting atop old city and county landfields, not to mention the Sandia Lab hazardous waste landfield where the remains of our sheep are likely entombed forever, and in spite of the expanded traffic, blowing enchantment, dry conditions, and dry weather gardening to which, I’m sure, I’d have to re-acclimate all over again. At least, tornados and earthquakes are unheard of. Now, if only I can convince my better half. So far, about the only argument I have to advance for her is that it will cut the distance to her family in California by half and put us to within one flight of San Jose.