There exist a certain sort of human who ought to be marked with a special tattoo, or a ring of chemically sensitive tape, all around them, for they are toxic. Oh, there are a fair number of bitter, burnout cases in the military, which bad luck, bad experience, or a bad marriage have transformed into a sort of walking Chernobyl. (There are even those who insist that I am among that sad number.) Once they were young, and easy-going, remembered fondly by those who were their peers early in their career, but had the milk of human kindness curdled within them, and those who had to work with them later on tiptoed carefully in their presence, and heaved a sigh of relief when they PCSed or retired.

Some of them, being excellent and talented technicians, had no skill for people management and administration--- qualities necessary for higher ranks---- and settled for being petty martinets. Others were just scorched to a crisp by too many PCS moves, too many years of accumulated beaurocratic stupidities, and a too-heavy burden of responsibility without control--- which will chew up and spit out the even the most dedicated and competent. I felt sorry for the burnout cases, but nothing much for the martinets: once or twice I even volunteered to work a shift on the occasion of their farewell party. Going and having to say “It has been great working with you, and you’re going to be missed, very much,” was a hypocrisy I was just not equal to committing, not with a straight face.

One of the unsung, and unofficial purposes of basic training is to identify and separate out those sociopaths who might have been able to hold it together long enough to fool a recruiter, and the personnel at the military inprocessing center. The mask of being a normal, well-adjusted human being usually falls, under the pressure of gang latrines, dormitories shared with fifty other people, and eight to thirteen weeks of mind games perpetrated by those Smokey-the-Bear hatted experts known as the training cadre. But every once in a while, one manages to slip under the radar, and when they get out into their first unit, it isn’t pretty.

If course, there are always those who are just dislikable people: as the unit production librarian on one assignment, I was usually assigned an assistant--- almost always one of the young airmen who was temporarily on light duties, either recovering from an injury or pregnant, and thus unable to go on TDY and carry large quantities of heavy video equipment. It was a pretty essential job, for all of that. We kept accounts of all the video stock, indexed, stored and retrieved the various stock footage (which when used as directed, could save thousands of TDY dollars and man-hours for an essential video production) and kept the files on all video productions--- scripts, production notes, contacts, shot lists.

I inherited this particular assistant because she was so cold, and contemptuously hostile to everyone except attractive young men, that none of the producers wanted to have her on their crew. She couldn’t even bring herself to be civil to her peers, the other female junior airmen. I overheard two of them discussing this fact, with one of them lamenting
“What do I have to do to make Airman Repton be nice to me?” and the other advising,
“Mmm… grow a dick.”

I managed to work with her for four months. She was competent enough, but uncommunicative to the point where the only thing we said to each other was in reference to telephone calls; “It’s for you” We communicated otherwise by osmosis, or discussing things with a third party, while the other was listening. I eventually tagged her with the satirical nickname of “Airman Sunshine”, which everyone else took up joyously, and diagnosed a case of the Queen Bee syndrome. Yes, she was one of those unhappy, jealous women who want to be the one and only woman in the room --- and considered myself lucky at that. Airman Repton was only a small lump in the happy oatmeal of life, compared to the hell that had been unleashed by Airman Leeds. Airman Repton only made herself notoriously dislikable among her peers and NCOs--- it takes a real gift to piss off an entire air base group.

Airman Leeds came to EBS-Zaragoza fresh out of broadcaster tech school sometime in the early part of 1990, and perennially short-staffed as AFRTS field outlets were, we were touchingly glad to see her. I bounced around between several managerial positions during my time there--- NCOIC/Radio, NCOIC/TV, but it is in my mind when I think on her, that I was working out of an entire small office of my own, next to the Station Managers’, so I must have been the Program Director. In any case, I was the senior woman out of four or five, on a staff of about fifteen, broadcasters and engineers included, and had long gotten used to being seen as the expert on female issues. I had never forgotten the second or third day I was in the unit, and the only other female member at that time, a very newly-married troop had asked for a personal conference, and as soon as I had closed the door, and put on my professional, detached-yet-interested professional NCO face, she gob-smacked me with the question, “How long after being married, can you expect to be pregnant?” I guarantee, male NCOs do not get asked that question. (For the record, given generally good health on the part of both participants, a year of energetic intercourse unencumbered by birth control, was the figure generally given by informed experts. I checked out the library copy of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” on permanent loan, since I was afterwards so generally mistaken for one.)

Airman Leeds seemed at first to be a typical baby airman broadcast type--- early twenties, rather more educated than usual, attractive and earnest, with a nice voice, charming in the superficial way that broadcasters generally were. (Some of us are actually charming, underneath, as well.) She trained on the TV board, since that was what we had most need of--- someone to pull an 8 hour shift, punching buttons and running tapes in the TV control room, a renovated Navy SITE system installed in the Quonset hut given over to TV ops. I may have taken a part in training her, since I had worked out a program of having trainees do a course of TV board changeovers between a couple of spot reels and the computer character generator that had replaced the film chain slide projector of my time in TV board ops--- I can’t remember at this point. I definitely ran her through my patented trouble-shooting exercise in the SATNET room, where I timed them on how long it took them to troubleshoot the system which brought the satellite TV signal into the TV control board. She seemed to be intelligent and hard-working, and we put her to work on a regular TV shift, once the training was complete, and when another baby airman reported in, she moved on to radio--- a plum job doing our  the afternoon drive time show, but were short-staffed and after all we were all supposed to be good at all the broadcasting jobs.

My daughter, then ten years old, liked her; she was the right age to be looked up to by a kid, and she told us that she had been raised by her mother, which was another reason for my daughter to feel a bit of kinship. A place like EBS-Zaragoza was where the baby troops were supposed to get their exposure to all the experiences that the broadcast field offers, to discover what they are good at and where their talents lie.

I thought afterwards that the first indication should have been when she lost the books I loaned her, when she was hospitalized, very shortly after her arrival, and she told me that the maid in billeting had taken them away when she came to clean her room. Well, they were only paperback editions, but still… some of them were books I liked, and getting copies again would be very hard. And then there was a bit of a dispute between Airman Leeds and Airman Patowski over a loan of $75 dollars, which Airman Leeds insisted she had repaid, and which Airman Patowski vowed to the contrary. The First Sergeant tried to sort it out, but there was no receipt, just a case of she said/she said, so all he could do was tell them to drop it. There was a distinct coolness between the two of them after that, but we wrote it off, as they worked in different sections, and at different hours.

The next matter of contention among airmen was much more serious, since it involved security of the facilities. Access to the radio studios and the TV control rooms were strictly limited after daytime working hours--- even during those times, visitors had to be escorted by a staff member, with the permission of the ops supervisor or station manager, and a darned good reason for being there anyway. Visitors after 5:00 PM had to have permission in writing, and the evening TV board op was responsible for doing a security check of the buildings every two hours, and annotating this on the log. On this fateful evening, the duty op had noted the presence of a non-staff visitor in the radio section, where Airman Leeds had been finishing up her drive-time radio show around 6:00PM. I sought out the board op, Airman Cates, after reviewing the log the next day, because this was a serious breach.
“She had a guy with her, in the studio,” Airman Cates confirmed. “Waiting for her to finish the show, I guess. Boyfriend, I think. He’s an SP.”
And Airman Leeds flatly denied having had a visitor--- even when MSgt. Peters, the Station Manager called the Security Police First Sergeant, with the name of the boyfriend, and got a confirmation that yes, he had been in the studio that evening, waiting for her to finish the show.

“Tell him to put down that in writing,” MSgt Peters said into the receiver, and then he set it down and looked at me. “She lied. Why the hell would she do something so stupid, didn’t she even think how easy it would be to check?”
“LOR time,” I said, “She can’t plead ignorance, she was on the TV board shift for long enough.”
“Still…” MSgt Peters said thoughtfully, as I got up. “It might be a good idea to have a third person present when you administer it.” He hesitated a bit, and admitted, “Tell you what, I don’t ever want to be alone with her. I’d want you or the First Sergeant to be there… and write up a memo for record afterwards.”
“What for?” I said.
“Insurance. She could say anything at all, afterwards, as long as there wasn’t a third party as witness.”

Wise and wily in the ways of the world, MSgt. Peters had the right instincts, but not even he guessed how bad it was going to get, for it became more and more clear that Airman Leeds was a relentless liar, a completely convincing pathological liar--- and worse, an extraordinarily vengeful one. She already had the Security Police First Sergeant on her case, since it turned out she had been dating two of the Security Police troops, setting them against each other with all sorts of incendiary accusations. Their First Sergeant was frankly tired of dealing with the jealousies she had encouraged. She had alienated Airman Patowski over the unpaid loan, and I suspected other unreported incidents had earned her the distrust of the other airmen. And she got back at our First Sergeant and I, for the LOR, with a spiteful accusation that our kids had also been in the secure area after duty hours, and Blondie had even burst into the radio studio when the mike was on. There was just enough truth to it to make it stick--- the kids had been in the building many times with their parents, frequently in the secure area, since that was were the bathroom was. Blondie had once been into the studio when Airman Leeds was there--- on Halloween, to show off her costume--- but she had been in and out of radio stations since she was in diapers, and knew very well what the red “on-air” light meant. Both the First Shirt and I were counseled, and our kids forbidden to use the bathroom at the unit after 5:00. How very cruel that accusation was, using a child to strike at the parent, especially considering that Blondie may have been about the last person connected with the station to have any affection for Airman Leeds at all.

And then it really got worse. The television section, which produced a nightly local news segment without the aid of a TV studio at all, depended entirely on the efforts of Airman Patowski and one or two others, under the direction of the NCOIC/TV. They would go out with the ENG camera, and a set of lights, and shoot local news footage, come back and cobble together some stories. The NCOIC/TV, who was a piece of work himself, but not anywhere near the headache as Airman Leeds was becoming, experienced a massive failure in judgement one weekend. As a joke, he and Airman Patowski shot and edited a joke news feature a sort of parody of a porno/superhero movie and left the tape laying around where anyone could find it. Where Airman Leeds could find it.

Which she did… and was across the street in the Social Actions office with it, in the space of about fifteen minutes. And with that, the feline had exited the containment field, and all bloody hell broke out. The tape itself was a crude joke, of the sort that used to be made for the unit Christmas party in my days at Misawa, and using the station resources and personnel for it was indefensible. Even as it was, the rumor mills had it that long afterwards that EBS-Zaragoza was producing porn movies. Left to himself, MSgt. Peters would have dealt swiftly and mercilessly with the guilty, but with Social Actions in play, they were lucky to escape with a suspended bust in grade. It didn’t end for us until Airman Leeds brought even more accusations against the unit and the people in it. She was detached entirely, to our relief and we were enjoined from any communications with her,an order we were only too happy to obey.

I would remember more about it, but frankly, we had enough on our plates, with Desert Storm ramping up. One of our engineers was detached to the Big Sandbox to help set up operating locations there, we began working sixteen hour days, and the entire base was ringed with triple-concertina. Oh, she did institute a FOIA request, for all the documents relevant to her, which meant some more additional work--- not a patch on what other offices were having to do. The Social Actions office, the IG, everyone who found her completely convincing, eventually began back-checking, and coming to the conclusion that generally every word she said was a lie, including “and” and “the”. She was processed for a discharge--- not the top-of the line honorable discharge, either--- and was escorted by the Security Police to the flight that took her out of there, having pissed off everyone on base from the Colonel commanding on down. It’s a real gift for someone that junior to be despised by so many people outside their own unit.

I got a letter from her, a year or so later, forwarded when I had PCSed. She wanted me to file an affidavit for her, as she was trying to get the discharge upgraded to the honorable version. I thought about it, and tore her letter into little, tiny bits, and threw it away.