It was a moment Tommy Baxter had waited a long time to experience.
The ceremony was brief and quiet but at last the Air Medal was pinned over his heart.
The day was special for Baxter. A 1964 graduate of Rider High School, he was the first Rider basketball player to get a college scholarship. After two years at Midwestern State University, he joined the Navy in 1967.
"It was an unconventional assignment. Everybody thinks it's all ships," said Baxter taking a break from a camping trip. "When I in they gave me a battery of test and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. They sent me to language school."
After mastering Portuguese and time spent at security school Baxter found out he was going to be "an eavesdropper, a spook," an intelligence agent. What followed was return to language school for Vietnamese, readiness school and survival school.
Trained as a foreign language specialists attached to the Naval Security Group, Baxter arrived in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive. The mission was to work ahead of the U.S. fighter groups, gather intelligence about the North Vietnamese Air Force and pass it on.
"We'd get up with the tactics the North Vietnamese were using day to day," said Baxter. "There was no radar. We had a VHS radio to tune in on frequencies NVAF used for communication and give the U.S. pilots a heads up."
Temporary orders were changed every 30 days depending on where the next mission was. There was no permanent base, just three different aircraft used for reconnaissance over Laos and Cambodia. After 491 flight hours over 12 months, Baxter was ready to go home.
Having been approved for the Air Medal, in 1971, Baxter returned to civilian life.
He worked six years for the Times Record News, first on the sports desk then on the news editor's desk "during Watergate." He returned to MSU and graduated in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in education. He became a teacher taking on history, economics, sociology and psychology. He also coached boys and girls sports at Floydada, Archer City and Fairfield school districts. An avid fly fisherman, after retirement in 2004 he now owns Grouse Creek Flies, making custom flies for other enthusiasts.
"I thought the medal would catch up with me but it never did," said Baxter. "I wanted my record to be accurate and made inquiries in the '70s, '80s and '90s. Five years ago I decided it was time to check into it and went to a spooks website. I was going to have to go back through all the records, the National Archives, the Naval Personnel archives. It was a big record including the flight records. There was lots of bureaucratic bounce around for two years."
Records lost, the discovery of an approval of the Air Medal by commander of the Second Fleet in 1988 followed by an math mistake to that led to an "unqualified" was frustrating. Baxter gathered what records he had in a packet, wrote a letter highlighting the missing National Archives records and sent it to the Congressional liaison. It landed on the desk of Rep. Louie Gohmert.
Three weeks later the Air Medal was approved. Gohmert presented it to Baxter.
"It's not so much about the medal. More about a victory over bureaucracy," said Baxter. "We found out some of the flight records were destroyed years ago. The Naval Air Force has poor record keeping."
