Reclaiming History (132 page)

The same day the course ended, May 3, 1957, he was sent by train, along with five other marines, to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, to learn to be a ground radar operator responsible for locating and guiding aircraft aloft.
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One of the six marines who traveled to Keesler with Oswald and served with him there, Daniel Powers, thought that Lee might have been striving for a relationship with the others, but that his personality alienated the group, some of whom called him “Ozzie Rabbit,” undoubtedly because of the Walt Disney cartoon “Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit.” Powers even suspected Oswald of having homosexual tendencies, although he had little evidence for this other than saying “a lot of his mannerisms were closely related to other homosexuals that I had seen in my life up to that period of time.” Oswald kept to himself and didn’t play cards, work out in the gym, or go on liberty with the others.
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They had most of their weekends free, and Oswald usually spent them alone in nearby New Orleans, which he always considered his home more than Fort Worth, and where he still had the Murrets to visit.
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Lee did well in his six-week school, finishing seventh in a class of thirty—and those thirty had already been selected for their aptitude.
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He also earned a 4.2 for conduct and a 4.5 for proficiency.
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On June 20 he went on ten days’ leave, again visiting his mother and Robert in Fort Worth.
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Robert remembered very little about that visit, except that it was “too hot to do anything we didn’t have to do.” One incident did stand out. Robert ran a red light to avoid getting rear-ended by a driver tailgating him and was promptly stopped by a police officer. Robert explained that he would have been hit had he stopped, and the policeman said, “But the other guy would have been at fault”—as he handed Robert the ticket. As they drove off, Lee looked back over his shoulder and said, “That dumb cop!” Robert forgot about it until November 1963, when witnesses reported that the man who gunned down Officer J. D. Tippit had muttered, “Dumb cop” or “Damn cop.”
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On July 9, he reported to the Marine Air Corps Station at El Toro, California (close to Santa Ana), a base located between San Diego and Los Angeles, where he was classified as a “replacement trainee” and attached to the Fourth Replacement Battalion—in effect, he and his mates were simply waiting for their first real assignment in the fleet, although it was not until August 22 that they embarked on the USS
Bexar
for transport to Yokosuka, Japan, and eventual duty at nearby Atsugi Naval Air Station. On the ship Oswald taught Powers how to play chess, and they sometimes wiled away up to four hours a day. Powers got good enough to beat Oswald occasionally, and he noticed how much that irritated his mentor. Oswald was always very happy to win, “like,” Powers remembered, “he was accomplishing something in life.”
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Powers was three years older than Oswald, had completed a year at the University of Minnesota, and was determined to finish his education when he mustered out of the Marines—he eventually became a teacher in Wisconsin. He was also married and had been promoted to corporal while they were still at Keesler. He felt “somewhat above” the boys like Lee, who he thought had enlisted largely because “there wasn’t anything better for him to do at [the] time…He was somewhat of a rolling stone.” Powers was nonetheless impressed by the quality of Oswald’s reading. There isn’t a lot to do on a troopship, and many of the men read a lot, but Oswald showed some taste. Powers thought Oswald might have read
The Age of Reason
and
The Age of Enlightenment
(from Will and Ariel Durant’s popular history of philosophy, then published in several paperback volumes), as well as some books about American presidents and democracy. The one book Powers was sure that Oswald read was Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
.
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The
Bexar
docked at Yokosuka, a seaport on Tokyo Bay, on September 12, 1957, and Oswald, Powers, and their fellow marines were sent on to Marine Air Control Squadron No. 1 (MACS-1), then attached to Marine Air Group 11 of the First Marine Air Craft Wing based at Atsugi Naval Air Base, about thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo.
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Atsugi had been the main training base for Japanese kamikaze pilots (pilots on a suicide mission who flew planes laden with explosives into American ships) during World War II, and the hills were riddled with caves where the Japanese air force had stowed fighter planes to keep them safe from American strafing raids. Beyond the barbed wire lay rice fields. Hangars on the west side of the long main runway housed Marine fighter squadrons, while on the east were the facilities for the navy patrol and antisubmarine squadrons. One huge hangar in the northwest housed the U-2 spy planes, and there was a complex of about twenty buildings housing a “joint technical advisory group”—one of the CIA’s main bases in Asia. Everyone who worked at or visited the base had to have at least a minimum security clearance. It was even rumored that nuclear weapons were stored there, in violation of U.S. treaties with Japan.
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The still-mysterious U-2 plane was operated under conditions of the utmost secrecy—even its name, U-2, was a common navy designation for a “utility” aircraft, a sort of catchall for general-purpose planes with no distinct military role. The single seater had been conceived in 1954, built by Lockheed, and first flown in prototype in 1955. The U-2A production version was powered by a Pratt and Whitney J57-P-37A Turbojet engine with 11,200 pounds of static thrust. It had a range of 2,600 miles and an astounding initial climb rate of 7,500 feet—well over a mile—per minute. Called by the Soviets “the black lady of espionage,” it was capable of soaring to an altitude of about 75,000 feet, an altitude never before reached by a human, and remaining there for over nine hours at a time. The U-2 entered service with the U.S. Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1956, and it must have appeared in Atsugi not long after. It represented a dramatic advance in the capabilities of aerial reconnaissance. More a powered glider than a conventional jet plane, the U-2’s wingspan, at 80 feet, was more than twice the length of its slender body. It was fitted with an array of cameras and sensitive electronic equipment designed to record and monitor radio and radar transmissions, and before being shot down in 1960, “for four years [it] provided the United States with invaluable intelligence data on Russia’s nuclear testing, missile and space launches, and other war-making potentials.”
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While the enlisted marines at Atsugi knew nothing about the U-2’s capabilities or mission, and were in fact ordered not to discuss it, it was impossible to ignore. The long silver or—after 1957—matte blue-black craft was hauled out to the strip by a tractor, its fragile, drooping wings supported by tiny wheels on the wingtips—pogos, the pilots called them.
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The pilot, in a rubber uniform, arrived by ambulance and climbed into the cockpit of the plane, whose ground crew had removed all identifying markings from the plane. The high whine of the Pratt and Whitney Turbojet engine was so distinctive that the marines often rushed outside to watch it take off. They were dazzled by its short take-off run and incredibly steep rate of climb. Landings were equally spectacular. The plane could not be flown into a landing. It had to be stalled just off the ground, and it landed not on the conventional tricycle landing gear, but on a nose and a tail wheel, more like a bicycle. It could be kept upright as long as it was moving, but as it slowed, it tipped over on one wingtip, the wingtip with its small wheels beneath often giving off a shower of sparks as it scraped the tarmac. Two jeeps covered with canvas held the wings up as the tractor towed the U-2 back to its hangar, which was guarded by men armed with submachine guns.
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The radar operators at Atsugi were also intrigued. The planes simply vanished from their radar screens when they exceeded 45,000 feet, the altitude limit on their MPS-11 antennae, and the U-2 pilots would sometimes request information on winds at 90,000 feet, well above the known world altitude record of 65,889 feet.
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While anyone might easily have surmised that the plane was flying aerial reconnaissance missions over China and the Soviet Union—other patrol planes had been doing that for a long time—it’s doubtful whether anyone could have guessed just how deep their penetration of enemy airspace might be.

Although conspiracy theorists have made much of Oswald’s brief proximity to the U-2, suggesting he traded his knowledge of the U-2 to the KGB in exchange for special treatment when he later defected to Russia, there is no evidence that his particular unit actually dealt with the spy plane’s operations, nor is there any evidence that Oswald displayed more than a normal curiosity about the plane.

Oswald’s unit at Atsugi, MACS-1, code-named “Coffee Mill,” had just under a hundred men
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whose duty was to man a semicircular radar room called “the Bubble,” usually in groups of three officers and about seven men. The room was kept dark to improve the visibility of the hooded UPA-25 radar scopes, and the noise and temperature levels were very high owing to the many pieces of heavy electrical equipment. The grease pencils the men used to plot positions and courses would sometimes melt on the translucent plotting board. The men worked in their skivvy shirts and mopped the perspiration from their faces as they shouted over the din of the machinery.
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The crew members worked four-hour shifts staggered in such a way that over the course of time they worked at all hours of the day or night—not that it made much difference in the Bubble, where it was always so dark that they couldn’t recognize their coworkers more than a few feet away. They monitored a quadrant of airspace stretching from due west to due north, tracking all aircraft movements and radio communications with the pilots. They directed friendly planes to their destinations and detected incoming foreign aircraft, notifying their presence to the Tactical Air Control Center at Iwakuni as well as plotting fighter intercepts of the intruder. They also served as communication liaisons with Japanese air defense forces.
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The new men arriving for duty at Atsugi were appropriately hazed by the veterans, and most of them laughed it off or responded with good-natured insults. One marine in Oswald’s barracks, Jerry E. Pitts, thought Oswald took it too personally. Once the men discovered that Lee reacted badly to being called “Harve” or “Harvey,” they called him that relentlessly, infuriating him. It was, of course, his middle name, but it was also the name of the famous invisible rabbit in a popular Broadway play. “We all had to go through the same thing,” Pitts recalled, “but Oswald never understood that…He just never knew how to read the system. If he could have just taken the initial insults, he would have become one of the boys.”
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Daniel Powers thought Lee became more aggressive and outgoing at Atsugi. “He took on a new personality, and now he was Oswald the man, rather than Oswald the rabbit.
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Other marines reported, though, that Oswald would mimic Bugs Bunny by wiggling his ears, squinting, and pushing his teeth out over his lower lip, which earned him another nickname—“Bugs.”
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And other marines who served with Oswald at Atsugi remembered him in diverse ways. Zack Stout was quite impressed with Oswald, finding him to be “honest and blunt…and that’s what usually got him into trouble…He was absolutely truthful, the kind of guy I’d trust completely.” Stout said that Oswald “would read deep stuff like
Mein Kampf
or the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
” and was one of the few men in his unit whom he could hold an intelligent conversation with. Another friend at Atsugi was George Wilkins, who thought Oswald’s resentment of young officers fresh out of college entirely natural. “Hell,” Wilkins told author Edward Epstein, who did some valuable investigative work on Oswald’s entire military period, “we all thought we were smarter and better than any of the officers, and Ozzie was just like the rest of us. We all resented authority.” Wilkins taught Oswald how to use a 35-millimeter camera, and Oswald bought a camera for himself—the famous Imperial Reflex that Marina eventually used to take the backyard shots of him holding his rifle, pistol, and left-wing publications.
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Another marine, David Christie Murray, said that Oswald had a “chip on his shoulder” and “did not often associate with his fellow marines.” And Murray said he had his own reasons for staying away from Oswald. “I had heard a rumor to the effect that he was homosexual. I personally observed nothing to support this rumor, and am not sure that I heard it from more than one person.”
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Yet another marine, John Rene Heindel, told the Warren Commission that Oswald was frequently in trouble for failing to adhere to rules and regulations and for his express and open dislike of authority exercised by his superiors in the Marines. Heindel also said he, Heindel, was often called, as a nickname, “Hidell”—pronounced “to rhyme with ‘Rydell’ rather than ‘Fidel’”—by other marines, although he could not specifically recall Oswald doing so.
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After a few weeks at Atsugi, Lee seemed to be coming out of his shell, and he occasionally went with other marines to carouse in local bars that doubled as cheap brothels for the troops. As author Epstein noted, “Oswald had found a camaraderie with a group of men that he had never experienced before,” and in one of the bars he found a Japanese bar girl he lost his virginity with. He started to drink for the first time that anyone knows of, sometimes drinking to excess. He watched the other guys’ late-night poker games—watch standers kept very odd hours—but never played himself. Occasionally, when the weekly rotation of watchers brought him two days’ liberty, he took off for Tokyo. He apparently scored with a striking Japanese woman he seemed to be crazy about and who he told a friend was a hostess at the expensive Queen Bee nightclub in Tokyo. His mates, seeing Oswald with the woman when he brought her on base, wondered how the rabbity Oswald rated such a classy and expensive woman. They never got an answer.
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