Back in 1969, when I was just twenty six years old, I lived in a small village on the Alaskan Aleutian Chain. The village was aptly named Cold Bay. There were less than two hundred souls sharing our lonely outpost on that barren, windswept location between the Bering Sea and Northern Pacific Ocean. There was little to do, no movies, no television, sometimes Armed Forces Radio signals would reach us and we would catch up on week old news from the "Lower 48." The most popular recreational activity was drinking at our one bar ran by Flying Tiger Airlines. Cold bay was an important link in the airways system linking America to the Far East, particularly Vietnam and Japan. The Vietnam war was hot, and Cold bay had an instrument landing system and a ten thousand foot runway where transport and troop carrier aircraft could land and refuel on their way to and from Japan and/or Vietnam. Flying Tiger had several valuable contracts with the military so they had about forty maintenance and other technical personnel on site. I was there to do my part in the air traffic operation, although I think I believed my primary role to be to reduce any surplus of beer thereby preventing my fellow workers from drinking too much.
My most poignant memory of Cold bay began one evening in the Flying Tiger Bar. We had been having a going away party from someone who was returning to "The World" (anyplace not on the Aleutians) and leaving our happy band of misfits, refugees and never-do-wells. If I remember correctly it was mid March and as such the temperature would have been around zero with about a forty knot wind, I clearly remember everything being covered in snow. That doesn't mean it was snowing, in Cold Bay the wind was fierce and constant and continually moved the snow from place to place. We often awoke to find clear sky's but have eight foot drifts burying every vehicle on the station. This was one of those typical nights, wind squalls and a bone chilling wet cold.
Inside the bar all was well with the world. The young man leaving us was Jim Chivonney, a really good guy. He was a communications tech in his mid-twenties. Back in Ohio he had a young wife and a six month old child he had never seen. The next day he was to board the "Freedom Bird" and fly back to his family and to civilization. The bar tender was a Filipino fellow named Agrapino Lopez, we called him "A.G." A.G. was also a good guy, friendly, out going and with a smile for everyone, but more importantly, he served a hell of a drink. A.G. was a jet mechanic by day, but moonlighted for his employer, Flying Tiger, as our village bartender. As the celebration went on, Jim and A.G. begin to argue about something, I have no idea what, but I seem to think it was boxing. Each was ridiculing the other about their choice of who would win a hypothetical match between two fighters from different eras. In other words, it was a typical, nonsensical bar room argument that could never be settled. The two guys had been drinking together for over a year, fished together and had never had any animosity between them so everyone assumed it was just another drunken disagreement between friends.
Sometime around nine o'clock in the evening my wife and I decided to leave the party. We had came with another couple and they drove a Volkswagen Beetle. I had opened the door of the car and pushed the front seat back when I heard the deafening roar of a gunshot from about six feet behind me. A.G. had came out of the bar with a Ruger 357 magnum pistol, in a Crown Royal Whiskey bag, and shot Jim Chivonney in the chest. Jim was dead when his body hit the snow.
Last night, January 11, 2009, a young girl that worked at a bar I frequent, "Gator Tales," was shot dead. Her name was Stacey Brown, she was twenty years old and would have started to college the next day. Stacey had went to visit a friend, apparently a couple of animals posing as human beings, tried a home invasion robbery. Their take? sixty two dollars. And for that amount of money a young girl was murdered. Hell, She had never even had enough time to start to live. In a micro-second her life ended and for everyone that knew her, their life has also changed in ways they do not yet realize. Senseless, sudden death is incomprehensible. There is no answer to why? There is no way to change what happened. No amount of if's, could haves, or should haves, can alter or change the finality of a gun shot.
I hardly knew Stacy, she was a waitress, and sometimes a bartender in my favorite pub. In truth, I did not know Jim Chivonney that well. Although he worked in Cold Bay as I did, it was an insular world. Even in that smallest of small towns, Air Traffic folks lived in their own world and Flying Tiger personnel in another. These two tragedies are separated by almost forty years and I am far from the person I was then but the finality of it all is the same. Last night I saw the same looks of incomprehension that we all had in Cold Bay four decades ago. If I have learned one thing from these and other life lessons it it this; We control almost nothing, we have the present and not one micro-second more.
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