A Long Way From Home A Maine man looks for the truth about his son’s homicide in Texas

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The sun had a baking-bright glare and a dry wind blew incessantly across the flight line at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas. Heat radiated from the squat wings of the C-130 transport planes and the gentler sloping curves of the B-1B bombers arrayed on the tarmac.

It’s nowhere to be on a hot June day. Even the jumpsuited airmen who maintained the huge machines scampered out of the sun to the climate-controlled offices and looming hangars along the runways, but Leslie Severance didn’t care.

A slightly stooped, balding figure with large, mournful eyes and a shy, taciturn manner, Les Severance, 47, of Lee, Maine, knows something of military life, but his Air Force days are decades past.

He had been in Texas for about a week, trying to gain custody of his 11-month-old grandson and to refute what he calls the lies told about his son by the family of his son’s wife, Wendi Mae Davidson, 27, accused of murdering the young man from Maine.

Les kept hearing from the Davidsons and San Angelo media that Staff Sgt. Michael Leslie Severance, 24, was lazy, rude, disrespectful, drunken, worthless, and the father knew that it was all lies.

Les’ journey already had cost him 20 pounds from stress and sadness. He had an almost overwhelming need to absorb everything he could about the young man he had lost, to find something of his son to touch and keep alive.

His dead son had been stationed at Dyess for almost all of his six-year career. For Michael, Dyess was home, perhaps even more than Lee.

“I stood on a similar tarmac, did a similar job as Mike, had similar patriotic feelings, and just knowing that he was there means a lot,” Les said later. “We don’t know what he would have done, so we have to concentrate on what he did do.

“Just to know that he walked across that tarmac was good. I could see him walking across there. I could have walked across there like he did.”

Les and his son, Frank Severance, Michael’s younger brother, met with about 25 members of his son’s unit, the 317th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, and toured the hangars and storage facilities that Michael Severance helped keep running when he wasn’t in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Thailand, South America or Oman.

A C-130 crew chief, Michael had to ensure that the giant cargo carrier to which he was assigned ran efficiently and had everything it needed. His commanding officer, Maj. William Walker, called Michael’s work a giant jigsaw puzzle of continually changing material and supplies.

Michael had two or three assistants he directed and several more officers he answered to. He flew in the plane, slept in it and, perhaps, dodged enemy fire in it.

As part of his job in flight, Michael used night-vision goggles, an intercom and a “pickle” – a hand-held switch that released radar-fogging chaff or infrared-confusing flares – to help the plane evade enemy fire.

He would spend seven or eight hours during flights strapped to a door along the plane’s aft quarter peering out a 10-inch porthole searching for missiles or tracers, said Master Sgt. Ray Presley, one of Michael’s supervisors.

“Many times we did see ground fire,” Presley told Les Severance as the latter stood against the same kind of door his son had manned.

The straps, Presley said, are painfully uncomfortable, particularly when the C-130 makes 20- to 60-degree evasive pitches and turns, and the goggles lack helmet straps, so crew members hold them between their eyes and the vibrating, bouncing fuselage.

“Mike did this many, many times, so if somebody says he wasn’t a hard worker, they’re lying,” Technical Sgt. Denny Crawford said.

“Mike sure loved flying in this aircraft,” Crawford said.

Les knew. Later, he would say his son told him that he took his re-enlistment oath in Kuwait on the wing of a C-130. Michael Severance loved the idea, and that was the only place they had an American flag or flag logo, which enlistment oaths require, Les said.

Talking to a father about his murdered son is awkward under any circumstances, especially with media and brass present, but the sergeants, airmen and officers who met with the Severances lightened the air with servicemen stories.

They told Les how, during a three-hour stopover in Afghanistan, they retired to a tent for a few beers. With the heavy work and long hours, they were exhausted, but knew that sleep would come at a price.

“Well, good ol’ Mike fell asleep first,” Crawford said. “When he woke up, we got about half of one of his eyebrows shaved off. Oh, he was pissed, too.”

Michael complained the way all GIs gripe about the military – “We all hate the Air Force,” Master Sgt. Mike Mitchum said wryly – but from the start, no one believed Wendi Davidson’s claims that Michael went AWOL, Walker said.

“That would have been very, very out of character for him,” Walker said.

“The Air Force runs on the quiet guys, and Mike was a quiet guy,” Lt. Daniel Dittrich said. “You could give him a project and you didn’t have to check up on it. The next thing you heard about it, it was done, and Mike didn’t expect any accolades or fanfare. He just got it done.”

When leaving his San Angelo home at 3:30 a.m. each weekday and traveling about 100 miles one-way to make morning physical training sessions at Dyess proved too draining, Michael asked to do PT at the end of his workday. He could have begged off the workouts, but refused, Mitchum said.

Later, standing on the tarmac next to his son’s buddies, weary with sweat gluing his shirt to his back, Les understood his son’s dedication.

It’s a military tradition that military men and womenwho hear the national anthem turn toward the flag, or the direction of the music, and salute.

When the anthem played somewhere east of the flight line, the airmen around Les hesitated. They didn’t want to do something that would exclude Michael’s father, but Les stopped them.

“No,” he said firmly. “I want to do this.”

The music played.

Les stood at attention with the other airmen.