Demise of a demi-god's domain

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Inside hangar one at Whenuapai airbase the sound bounces up the walls, soars into the high, vaulted ceilings and bounces down across the other side.

It is one of the base myths that if you stand in one corner and whisper to your mate something rude about the guy working on the Hercules across the other side of the space, he will hear you as clearly as if you were shouting into a megaphone.

Certainly something strange happens when you tape the commander of Royal New Zealand Air Force Base Auckland, Wing Commander Peter Port, speaking in this hangar. There is a strange echo: the sound of the maintenance guys chatting as they work, picked up on the tape but unheard inside the vast space.

In five years these hangars - full of the sound of tools on metal, of someone tossing a hackysack about, of those strange echoes - will be silent.

Then it is possible you will be able to hear the big sheds shifting over the kauri swamp on which they are built (the distance between the top of the doors and the lintels moves by about 5cm with the tide). And good luck to anyone who decides to rip the hangars up: the foundations run 18m into the swamp.

This is the sort of thing the base commander is happy to tell you. As for the other things, the six years' worth of memories from this tour of duty (although he first set foot on Whenuapai in 1975) "some of them I can't repeat".

Some are the minutiae of daily life. Some are the big, hard-to-talk-about emotions. Private Leonard Manning's body came home to Whenuapai in July 2000.

Defence Minister Mark Burton announced on Tuesday that the base would close - eventually. When it comes to packing up a sprawling 320ha site, 470 staff houses, the barracks inhabited by 170 officers in training, and the history of an institution that includes a wall crammed with photographs of past base Commanders, "eventually" means within the next five years. Even when you do things armed forces style.

Inside the base commander's office suite is a room with a gleaming table and a big leather-bound book. This is the Manual of Armed Forces Law, in which is laid out every conceivable offence of which you might stand accused should you happen to be a member of the New Zealand Air Force. This is how they do things armed forces style.

Despite the intimidating book - if you threw this book at somebody you would knock them out - Port says, "We're actually very reasonable, very nice people".

He is. He lets me sit in his chair, the one he sits in when he's dealing with "naughtiness", as he did this morning.

We're trying to figure out the job in the real world a base commander's job comes closest to. It all seems very casual - when we arrive a big screen is showing the Louis Vuitton Cup racing and a couple of blokes stand around watching. They salute when Port enters the room but they do it as casually as a wave to a mate.

Still, on base Port must be God.

Once the job was best likened to that of "the captain of an aircraft carrier. You could lock up the gangplank and carry on."

Now, he says, the Air Force, as a result of budget cuts, redundancies and a turn-around in the way it does business, has much more to do with surrounding communities. Gone are the catering corps and the clothing stores with "enormous racks of clothes and people who ran the inventory".

These days, he says, "I'm only demi-god".

He is talking about how the Air Force has changed since he joined in 1975 as a 20-year-old, and how the civilian view of the of the Air Force has remained pretty much the same.

Partly that view has to do with how places like Whenuapai are regarded as enclosed communities, separate from the outside world.

"You could cut around the edge of a base and pick it up and put it anywhere. Perhaps not anywhere in the world, but in any part of the country, or in any western country, certainly."

When Whenuapai is closed and the entire Air Force moves to Ohakea in the Manawatu it will have to export its sense of community while leaving the physical nature of its identity behind. The land could be worth as much as $75 million, but at what cost to the force?

There are mutterings about the irresponsibility of having our entire Air Force on one site. If, says Port, "this was World War II and the Luftwaffe was just across the English Channel then it would be really dumb to have all your assets sitting on one air field.

"But that's not the strategic environment we're in. Really, no one's going to pop across here with their bombers and bomb our air field."

It sounds a politically correct response. "That's the reality," he says. "In Europe you would never do that. But that's because of proximity and the fact that someone can be on your doorstep in the twinkling of an eye."

The move makes good business sense and the modern-day Air Force, of which Port is the very modern model of modern Wing Commander, is about efficiency "in the production of your output. Which for us is things to do with aeroplanes."

PORT does a pretty good twinkling of the eye himself. I thought he might be terrifically stern with a handlebar moustache: a real RAF man. Because he did do nine years in the RAF in a pilots' training programme, after signing up for RNZAF officer training at Wigram. .

He joined up because "it was a very exciting thing for a kid to fly an aeroplane". He was also "very comfortable with the military ordered way of life. That's not to say I have no imagination. It's not a dull thing, it's not 'go into the organisation and it'll take care of my life'."

For six years he spent three months of the year in a tent north of the Arctic circle which was amazing and "bloody frightening".

He fell in love with helicopters. He spent months in Belize on the Caribbean coast, which sounds lovely except "it's a pestilent sort of place" with lots of bugs and people with little money.

He's got a swag of medals: "The NZ Order of Merit, the NZ Operational Service Medal, the General Service Medal Post-1963 for Northern Ireland, the East Timor Medal, the Armed Forces Award for 15 Years Undetected Crime."

He is trying to convince me that the air force is "very New Age", that it is "in touch with our feminist side". Good try.

I wonder how easy it is to sell the military life to 20-year-olds now when the Air Force looks like the incredible shrinking industry, as a letter from a schoolboy in Northland shows: "Dear Base Commander, Thank you very much for sending your Iroquois helicopter. It was very exciting and we had a wonderful day and we think it's such a shame that you're closing the Air Force."

"Well," says Port, "we're not. But that's the perception. I get asked [this] quite often at Rotary Clubs and I say: 'No, the message I'll give you is this: we are not closed. We've changed. That's all'."

Outside hangar one an Orion rumbles past. A helicopter splutters above. The man who no longer flies looks up. It's not quite a last look. Port leaves on January 6 for Canberra for a year-long defence and strategic studies course. After that, he'll be based in Wellington.

So he won't be the one to turn out the lights. But he will be back, for the final event in Whenuapai's life as an Air Force base. There will be a parade and a ball. The Air Force - for all of its big books and multiple titles and service jargon for the way it lives its life - has no formal name for the closing-down of a base.

Just this, from Port gazing into gloomy afternoon skies: "Oh, it's very sad. All your memories are woven around the location."

Herald feature: Defence