Opinion: Memories: Magic and flying

Capt. Alan Trent

They met in 1968, singing in a church choir in Big Spring, Texas.

Portales native Gail Cantrell was teaching school there. Air Force Capt. Alan Trent was stationed at the city’s Webb Air Force Base.

They dated, they planned to marry, and he went to Vietnam in December 1969.

He never came home.

Military officials reported Capt. Trent’s F-4 fighter jet crashed in hostile territory on May 13, 1970. His official status was Missing in Action. His body was never recovered. He was nine days shy of his 30th birthday.

For years, Cantrell “kept hanging on. Just hoping.” She can’t pinpoint a time when she stopped hoping.

“I guess you’d say it was a gradual acceptance,” she said.

“I didn’t even know if I wanted him to be alive. He was shot down in Cambodia and that was one of the worst places . ... ”

Cantrell, now Gail Bond, 69, of Clovis, doesn’t mind talking about those awful memories. After all, they are intertwined with many happy times.

“He was extremely intelligent. He was multi-talented, and he was funny. He was a graduate of the Air Force Academy. He was a really good pilot,” she said.

Trent had his own private plane when they first met.

“So we used to go flying,” she said.

“I’d been taught to fly by my dad when I was 12, so I loved flying, too, and it was fun to go flying together.”

Trent had multiple interests, many of them tied to a deep Christian faith they both shared.

“His goal in life was to become the first graduate of the Air Force Academy that was a pilot but also a chaplain,” she said.

“He was also a professional magician. When he was at the academy, he used to give magic shows for free to the children’s hospital in Colorado Springs.

“He tried to bring the idea that what seems to be magic, is not exactly what it seems. He was able to bring a message about God into his magic.”

Bond, Cantrell at the time, returned to eastern New Mexico soon after her fiancee went to Vietnam. She has warm memories of support she received from Cannon Air Force Base during the early 1970s.

“(Trent) had never been stationed there, and yet they kept things going for me. I was welcome at the Officer’s Club and things like that. They made me feel welcome,” she said.

She spent hundreds of hours at the base chapel — “They put me in charge of a lot of the music” — and soon base personnel began to feel like they knew Capt. Trent as well.

They placed a giant memorial bracelet around a boulder, then planted a tree outside the chapel and created plaques for those listed as MIA.

POW/MIA Memorial Park remains on base today and a “Freedom Tree” still honors Trent.

“With the vision of universal freedom for all mankind this tree is dedicated to Capt. Alan R. Trent and for all Prisoners of War and Missing in Action 1973,” his plaque reads.

Thank you for your service, Capt. Trent.

Thank you for keeping his memory alive, Gail Bond.

David Stevens is editor for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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