By Jim Belshaw
Of the Journal
I sent Nathan the Journal story on the young airman in jail, charged in the deaths of two people in what police say is yet another DWI tragedy.
As I read it, I thought of Nathan sitting in my backyard 20 years ago, talking about luck and circumstance.
When Albuquerque police tested Micah Henry, 23, a military policeman at Kirtland, he had a blood alcohol content of more than 0.16 percent, twice the legal limit.
Two people died when he allegedly ran a red light and slammed into their pickup.
So I sent Nathan the story. He lives in California and he is the oldest friend I have on the planet. We were roommates in an Air Force barracks for two years at a fighter base in England about 90 miles north of London.
We were military policemen.
We drank prodigious amounts of alcohol.
What we didn't do was drive.
But not because we were blessed with good sense. We didn't drive because we couldn't drive.
On the day he came through town, we sat on my back porch, telling war stories the way old barracks mates do.
We agreed the best eight weeks of our lives were spent at a Royal Air Force K-9 school, young Americans free from the clutches of their own colonels and captains, spending two months learning about German shepherds and young women in the RAF.
We agreed we were lucky to be alive, too, our survival coming down to economics.
We were enlisted men. We couldn't afford to buy a car. We were in England, too, a place with trains and buses and the "Tube." So we didn't need a car.
I was 19. He was 24. We consumed alcohol the way young men often do in the military.
But we drove nowhere.
"It's probably the only reason we all survived it, and didn't hurt anyone, either," he said that day in my backyard.
It is not news that DWI haunts us. We all know it. What I don't understand is the sort of thing that showed up in my e-mail inbox the other day.
A reader and her husband went to a liquor store. She saw an odd gift package on display in the store.
"I noticed that Bailey's Irish Cream was marketing a gift package which contained a large bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream and a TRAVEL MUG!" she wrote. "It was the sort of mug that you use to take your coffee in the car with you. It struck me as grossly inappropriate."
Well, as long as we've arrived at the grossly inappropriate part of today's program, let's also note that we sell booze at places that sell gasoline, too.
I've never quite gotten how we manage to balance all the boilerplate about solving the DWI problem while at the same time selling booze where people buy their gas.
Does not one work at cross-purposes to the other?
But then, I was an enlisted man. It's possible the question is above my pay grade.
My friend Nathan is within shouting distance of 70 now, a successful businessman still married to the English woman he met "in town" in 1965.
One day in my backyard, I think he got it exactly right when he said, "We were lucky."
We were. We didn't know it at the time, but we were.
Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone— 823-3930; e-mail— jbelshaw@abqjournal.com.
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