About 'if you go to the air force academy'|...Would you publish a threat to bomb the library ,” one of the Koala... said, “Would you rather not know ” Margie Palmer...only do an interview if someone bought ...
When I visited the Air Force recruiter, it was after a tumultuous time in my life. I had a college degree and a year of graduate school. My employer was planning to move me upward into management and I simply felt that my life and work experience was not enough to fuel a rapid and successful move up the corporate ladder. My female cousin had enlisted in the Army National Guard, showing a lot of us young women that we could have a military career without being nurses or off the wall people. This brave young woman was a few years older than I was, and she went into a non traditional career field for a woman, leading the way for many more of us to follow. The recruiter and the Air Force had other ideas. I was told that I was going to be a commissioned officer. When I asked why I could not just enlist as my cousin did, I learned my first lesson about being in the military: you go where you are told to go. A few weeks later, I had gotten rid of my apartment, left my job and dumped my car in order to go out into a new world of life, service, travel and adventure. The process for Air Force Officer Candidates is to enlist as Staff Sergeants for the purposes of pay, benefits and "stop loss". Other candidates came from active duty service. The "stop loss" was an ominous business. If the Air Force determined that we were not officer material, there was the option of making us complete a four year service contract, starting at the rank of Staff Sergeant. By then, I had realized that I would be the first commissioned officer in the entire history of my extended family. My grandparents began life as slaves and ended life as prosperous California pioneers. My parents were outstanding people with incredible accomplishments to speak for them. With such ancestors, I had no options for failure. After twelve hours of lifting 50 pounds, getting blood tests and shots, filling out a ream of paperwork, learning how to wait like a good soldier, and swearing an oath, we were hustled onto a jet and flown into the dark toward some place in Texas. We landed, boarded a bus and rode for a while in the black of night. We arrived in the middle of the night at some large facility, dazed and confused, and were treated ever so kindly. We made our beds, took showers and fell out, two female or male officer trainees to a room, and dead to the world. The next morning, a nicely uniformed man was in our room and he was screaming at the top of his lungs, furious at something. I wondered what happened to the friendly, kind people from the night before! This was beginning to look like a bad prison movie. For the next three months, I learned to save other people's bacon, to have my bacon saved, to save my own bacon, and to burn off every ounce of the greasy, delicious Texas bacon that was served at the chow hall. I learned that I could climb a 20 foot tall vertical steel beam, crawl across a 20 foot long horizontal steel beam and get down the other side, fighting through the panic that had me frozen for a while. I learned that I could get the top score in the tests and trials. I learned that I could drive a flight of soldiers like it was a bus. I learned that I could shoot a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver and hit that target 98 out of 100 times. I received my first medal before I was a commissioned officer for that shooting episode and became a "Small Arms Expert". Born and raised in California, I learned about deep south overt racism, what a person does when he has heat stroke, how other people try to hide drug abuse, mental illness and severe alcoholism. I learned how the world of international diplomacy, strategic imperative, global hegemony, and global cold war functioned. I learned how to work on a person for three solid hours if that is what it takes to get that person to tell me what is really going on in his or her life. At the time, the Air Force was making up for a serious mistake. Far too many junior officers had been booted out after the Vietnam War. By the late 1970s, it became apparent that there would be no candidates for Major if the Air Force did not make a whole lot of brand new Second Lieutenants. The problem is that for every 2,000 people who applied, only 500 would be accepted for training and less than 200 could get through the training. My class of 500 only netted 198 who were commissioned after three months. This was also a time when the Air Force opened up hundreds of career fields to women. We women took up the challenge and a lot of us did well, even if most of us never intended to become "lifers" and to stay in beyond four or eight years. They call us "90 day wonders", those of us who went to Officer Training School, Medina Annex to Lackland Air Force Base, Texas. I tell people that we became wonders long before those 90 days ever happened. The 90 days managed to humble us all as they constituted the longest, seemingly endless, and ultimately miserable period of time that a human being can go through. Our challenge was to get the same military training in three months that Academy Graduates or ROTC graduates get in four years. Strangely we all were eager to do the whole thing again as soon as we swore our second oath and threw our caps into the air. We were commissioned by President Jimmy Carter and we wondered if the real signature on our certificates was from an auto pen. I was a descendant of slaves and the first in the history of my extended clan to be commissioned by a President of the United States to serve as an officer in the United States Armed Forces. Then I found out what the "lieu" in "Lieutenant" meant. We non prior enlisted Second Lieutenants were essentially lower than plankton on the military food chain. But we were priceless plankton and had already cost the Air Force a bundle. As a result of our costly natures, we were carefully husbanded along to a point where we could be worth something. The hairs on our heads were numbered. We had neither private time nor private lives. Six months later, we were either in our technical schools or at our bases, taking on responsibilities that we had never conceived of having. For my first real Air Force job, I was put in charge of the highly volatile military grade aviation fuel, plus the ground fuels and oils, plus the liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen plants. There were also contracts to manage and additional duties to do. My subordinates were overwhelmingly male. None of them had ever had a woman as Officer in Charge, let alone a California native African American woman who went to college at UC Berkeley and was vastly shorter than most of them. Most of them did not want me for a boss, but it took little time for me to help them with reformulating their working opinions. The Air Force asked us women what we were up to. How did we plan to lead? What were our problems or issues? We were firm about our lipstick and earrings (plain, ball type, silver or gold only), and planned to be officers and ladies, not officers and little versions of gentlemen. There would be no behaving like men in order for us to lead men and women. We worked it out. We ended the Cold War. We put the strategy of "Peace Through Deterrence" to its successful and ultimate conclusion. We cranked out the fuel, kept the nukes in readiness and working order, flew the fighter jets, flew the transports, adjudicated the law, treated the patients, determined the strategy, and brought on the new computer and modern weapons systems. We dealt with birth, death, crime, justice, mental illness, life, evil, good, travel, and full immersion in strange places and in other cultures. We developed ways of paying attention to the whole world while speaking of the terrible potential of war in plain and clear language. We managed the stuff of complete and total destruction and we managed the stuff of life. We stood in the audience at Bitburg Air Base while Ronald Reagan ended our occupation of Germany. We helped the breakup of the USSR. We showed up for the Gulf War. We went into space. We went to the Antarctic and under the seas. We changed the face of the Air Force. We were, in turn, greatly changed and enhanced in ways that only we can know. The military changed me in many ways, including my health. Now I am a decorated veteran, a service connected disabled veteran, a veteran of foreign wars, a first in the history of my clan, and a proud veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces. And I would do it all again if I could. |
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