Thirty-six years ago today, I was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. As Wellington might have put it, it was a bit of a close-run thing.
Not particularly athletic or assertive or neat (don’t think I’ve made a hospital corner since), I managed to make it through officer training. My abilities as a communicator came in handy. And, most important, the members of my flight were pulling for me, too.
We played the games (literally and figuratively), polished the floors and shined our shoes. We ran and marched and fought to stay awake in classes held in the auditorium dubbed “The Big Blue Bedroom” until the day on June 22 when we became officers. Afterwards, we scattered to our respective training schools before our first duty assignments. The year was 1989, the Cold War was on, there was work to do.
But right before we got released to the real Air Force, our dorm was discovered to be in urgent need of a thorough cleaning — even though regular cleaning was part of the drill. And wouldn’t you know, this deep scrub required dedicated effort into the wee hours. This was the final chance to show us who was in charge as long as we were trainees, I guess. Even though logic had to be suspended at various times to stay with the program, this exercise struck me as especially gratuitous and silly.
At breakfast the next day, I wondered aloud to my companions if the powers that be would station people at the gate to give us a swift kick in the you know what on the way out. A member of my team I particularly admired — prior-enlisted, squared-away, intelligent, nice fellow — said, “You’re going to make a good officer.” Thinking back, I’m not sure why my sarcasm elicited his vote of confidence. But it meant the world then and remains among my treasured memories.
I retired quite a few years back — and hope I lived up to my classmate’s prediction. In the “real Air Force,” I discovered many others like him.
Over the past couple days, airmen have moved into the national consciousness, front and center, with seemingly all eyes on Iran.
I wasn’t a pilot, but I was fortunate to meet quite a few of them. And so I’ve thought a lot about the young pilots who would have occupied the various aircraft — in the B-2s’ case, departing, remarkably, from America’s heartland bound for a potentially hostile target a world away. Of course, it took more than bomber pilots. Sailors were part of the action, along with pilots in refueling tankers and high-tech fighters, along with an array of support folks who are critical to such complex missions. What a mission it was — ensuring nukes can’t rain down on us, our allies or anyone else.
While a lot has probably changed since I left the service, I have no doubt the people responsible for the campaign’s success resemble the superbly competent and reassuringly confident person I admired so much from my training days. They remain the biggest reason why, as has been rightly observed, only America could have carried out the mission we saw executed in recent days.
In your profession’s beginning days, was there someone you look back upon as a source of inspiration?
Revelation Reports 