Air Command and Staff College

Yesterday I got an email that changed my life and its direction forever.

In order to progress in the Air Force, the system requires that you check certain boxes along your career. One of those boxes is to become an Instructor Pilot in a major weapon system--in my case, the C-130. My first C-130 assignment was to Yokota Air Base, in Tokyo, Japan. To those of you that have been reading for a while, you know that my tour in Japan was miserable, and I cashed in every chip I had to get out of there and come back to the US. I had an instructor school slot for the summer of 2001, in my last year at Yokota. At the same time they were looking for volunteers to go teach at Pilot Training. I turned my slot in, left the box unchecked, and left Japan.

The last thing my assignment officer told me was that he hoped I udnerstood that I would never be promoted above the rank of Major.

The following three years were the best of my career. I not only excelled as an instructor, but I loved it with all of my heart. I quickly advanced through the ranks of command in the squadron, and left there after three years as a Major to go do my staff tour at my current assignment. By taking the staff job, I ensured that I would never fly the C-130 again, and that box would never get checked.

Another box to check is called "Developmental Education." During your years as a Captain, you are required to attend Squadron Officer's School, a five-week course at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Another option is to do it in correspondence, but those who do that are rolling the dice on making Major. For the most part, pilots are guaranteed a slot to attend the course in residence. Those who go generally are promoted, those who don't have a shot, but it is considerably less than those who go in person. When you become a Major, your next Developmental Education course is Air Command and Staff College. I completed mine in correspondence almost immediately, because the chances of me going in residence were so small (due to my lack of an Instructor qualification in the C-130) that I was hoping getting it out of the way would increase my eligibility for Lieutenant Colonel. I applied for acceptance to the full ten-month college, but those slots are usually reserved for "fast burners" who are on their way to Colonel ranks. Without the IP box checked, and without the in-residence box checked, my chances of promotion were about 10%.

My current job is a career graveyard. Over the past two years I had come to accept that I was at the pinnacle of my career, and that my next assignment would likely be my last. I came into work yesterday after taking a week off to celebrate Odie's Baptism and checked my email.

I worked backwards, for some reason, from the most recent to the oldest. As I plowed through the 100 or so emails, I kept coming across congratulatory messages from friends I hadn't heard from for a while. I sped up, and eventually found what they were talking about. It was an email from the Air Command and Staff College.

I got in.

The promotion rate to Lieutenant Colonel for pilots who have graduated from ACSC is 98%.

In one email my career went from being pretty much over to pretty successful.

There are catches, of course. It is a 10-month class. You get a Master's Degree at the end of it. You have to learn how to speak a foreign language. And you have to live in Montgomery, Alabama. I have a wife and three kids.

I really don't have a burning desire to shove my kids into a school for one year, nor do I feel like forcing SW to give up her job here and move into an apartment for a year. So it's starting to look like they'll stay here while I go to school. We're still not quite sure how that will work out.

I don't know how, in a million years, I got accepted. I put my chances at about one in a hundred when I applied. There are questions as to what will happen afterwards--as to whether or not I will be flying again or be a staff weenie for the rest of my career.

But for now--I'm pretty friggin' happy.

military

Something Needs to Change

A Hawai'i-based Marine is among 11 U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq over the past two days, officials said.

The Multinational Division-West headquarters in Iraq said the Marine assigned to Regimental Combat Team 7 died Tuesday from wounds sustained in western Anbar Province.

Marine Corps Base Hawai'i confirmed that the Marine was with the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment.

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette newspaper in Massachusetts reported that 2nd Lt. Joshua L. Booth, 23, of Sturbridge, Mass., was killed by a sniper in Haditha, northwest of Baghdad.

Booth was married and had a 1-year-old daughter, Grace, and another child on the way, the newspaper said. Booth was a graduate of The Citadel in South Carolina, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in May 2005, the Telegram & Gazette said.

From the Honolulu Advisor

military

Woe to my Home State

This is ridiculous.

Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable.

Pretty soon recess will be eliminated altogether.

We don't need to get rid of any and every possible chance of something happening that could result in a lawsuit. We need to elect judges that have an ounce of common sense to eliminate these completely frivolous lawsuits. That's why I came close to voting for Kerry just to get Edwards' foot in the door.

You know who ends up paying for this completely asinine decision? The kids, who will probably have padded hopscotch games soon.

rant

Princess

Princess has finally learned to ride her bike.

While I was gone SW became a woman on a mission, and come hell or high water she was going to get Princess (the biggest wuss on the planet) to ride her bike without the training wheels on it. At seven years old, it was time.

She managed to finally get her to go down a short hill. And then a short distance. And then, using the motivation that I would soon be home and that she had to be ready to show me, she finally took off and rode around the circumference of the park where she was learning.

And right into a tree.

Back to square one.

Fast forward to this weekend, when we finally convinced her to try again, and with a little practice she was not only up and running, we couldn't stop her. She looks funny with her little daisy-imprinted helmet on, and at her age her posture is still perfect so it forces you to hum the theme from "Wizard of Oz" when the witch is riding her bicycle in the beginning. It's great to see her having so much fun, but it made me think of the difference between her world now and mine when I was a kid.

She'll never have the joy that I had when I was riding my bike. With the world today, she'll never have the complete freedom that I felt when I would just get on my bike in the mroning with my biddies and go. Or how cool I thought it was when I would pack a lunch in my backpack and go have a picnic somewhere by myself and not come back for hours. And I lived in the city.

The first time she'll have that complete and beautiful freedom will be when she gets a car, since I will always live in a constant fear of what will happen to her if she's gone out of my knowledge for more than a few minutes. And I wonder what that will do to this generation--delaying that level of independence for so long due to fear.

But for now, I'm going to enjoy watching her feel good about herself wobbling around a safe park with me and SW watching, and try desperately to hold on to this little girl while she still lets me.

family

Halloween Scare

As much as I love Spring, I love this time of year around here.

Sweatshirts, cool breezes, and mid-80's weather during the warmest part of the day really improve the mood. We don't get the foliage change I had growing up in New England, so I miss that, and the BoSox didn't even make the post-season so baseball is over, but beyond that it's just a good time of year.

I really dig Halloween, too. Especially now that there's monkies involved. Princess is forgoing her normal Princess theme and going as a Pirate. She actually found one on Amazon and fell in love with it, but when it came down to it it was too "skimpy" for me. We went (much to her chagrin) with one from a store here.

I am seriously not looking forward to her teenage years.

When I was 13 we moved from the city out into the suburbs. This was back when the developments you see today that go up in a week was unheard of. Each house in our development was built to completion, one at a time. Ours was the first one there. So, when we moved in in August of 1985, everything outside was very, very, dark. No streetlights. No traffic. No other people.

Around halloween I spent a Saturday watching the entire trilogy of the Amityville Horror. Spooky stuff. If you have seen it, Jody is an imaginary friend of the little girl who lives in the house. In reality, Jody is the devil in the form of a pig demon-thing. In one scene you see two glowing eyes outside the window of the little girl's room on the second floor.

I was reading in my room late that night. We had just gotten our first real family pet, a black mutt named Pepper. She had her dog tags on and made a quiet jingle whenever she waddled around. I had my bedside light on and was actually reading a scary book late at night. I heard a jingle-jingle from the hallway outside my door and looked up. Nothing.

I flipped through a couple of more pages and heard the noise again from the hallway. I nervously called out to the dog, thinking she was out there. Since she was jet-black, I couldn't see her in the dark outside my door. Just then she opened her eyes. The light from my bedisde table caught her just right so that her eyes did that animal thing where the insides light up in relfection. That's all I saw.

I almost fell out of my bed.

I slept with the lights on that night.

family

Foley

I'm tired of this.

Do I think he's a bad man? Yep. Do I think he should be investigated and punished if found guilty? Yep. Do I think it should be the top story across the nation?

Nope.

The only reason that this is still riding high is because of the elections. At the very least the Democrats, if they're leading this charge, are taking pot-shots back at the GOP. But it still comes around to the single-most reason that I am disgusted with our political system, that the people that are elected next month will be so due to the fact that some weirdo in FL sent text messages to a 16 year old kid.

politics

New Guys

Looks like I finally have some work.

After six months of trying to get a group of enlisted guys to be re-assigned under me, I finally succeeded. These guys had been floundering under their old leadership, with essentially noone watching out for them. It took a while, and a lot of convincing, but I eventually won the battle. What I had handed to me was a Cell that had been decimated by cuts over the past couple of years, is severly undermanned and overworked, and in the cellar as far as morale is concerned. I find it only slightly humorous when they get a quizzical look on their face when I ask how they're doing. I guess it's been a while since someone actually cared for them.

The only downside to this is that I have a lot of work to do to get them back up to a functional unit. I may just end up making the decision to recommend disbanding the unit altogether and reassign them to other places, where they can be more effective and allow their careers to blossom.

But not yet.

military

Back Again

Ok, I'm back. Officially this time.

You would think that five weeks away would give you all kinds of time to blog, but I just never had the desire. Maybe it's the thought of sitting at my computer at work that suddenly makes one start looking for blogs, which directly leads to me start thinking of writing again. We'll see how this works out.

Things are going relatively well--I just got off the best week of Odie's life for me, with me playing housewife and SW working while I spent the week at home with the monkies. Unless he was asleep, Odie was either in my arms or in a backpack that we bought strapped behind me. We have a lot of company coming in in a couple of weeks so cleaning was high on the priority list, plus we're thinking of getting a housekeeper and we wanted her to start off with a clean house. So I strapped Odie onto my back and dusted blinds, went through boxes that I've already gone through and threw out more stuff. The whole time he just sat there, curious, peering over my shoulder and taking it all in. When he would get tired we'd lay down for a nap. All in all, a great week.

So, now that I'm back at my miserable desk, plan on seeing more of me. I haven't decided as to whether or not I'm going to do any more reviews--it never really generated much extra traffic and I think it seriously contributed to me completely burning out on blogging. I'll leave that question unanswered for now.

Incidentally, my family and I got addicted (quickly) to this game I found on the internet. It's well worth checking out, but plan on waking up at 2 am when you think of an answer:

M & M Dark Movie Painting

blogging

Sirens

As I walked into my hotel room tonight, a fire truck just up the road threw it's lights and siren on.

It wasn't already screaming towards its target--the truck was already cruising down the road when it happened.

I was sticking my key in the door, fresh from a great evening with my classmate's very rich parents. I had just spent the past four hours drinking martini's in a house like none that I have ever been in, nor will ever probably be in again. I was sliding the key into the lock of my warm and safe room, paid for by the US Air Force and clearly safe.

A quaretr mile up the road I heard a siren erupt. I thought of the dispatcher in the station--getting that final urgent call that upgraded whatever engine #3 was doing from a routine checkout to something that required urgency, that required the lights to come on.

I thought of the driver in the truck, or the copilot who took the radio call, who made the decision to speed things up and move along, clearing the road of anyone else. Of the firefighters in the back--who have kids at home and mothers that love them, that tightened their equipment and pulled on their gloves, not knowing who or what they were going after, or how dangerous it was going to be.

I watched as the cars pulled to side of the road, and remembered how cool I always thought that was, and how badass I have always thought a screaming firetruck looks on its way to a mission.

And then I thought of us, the US military--how I wished that things were like that for us when we would go in to fight, how I wished that there were no questions asked, no media to worry about, and no political boundries to worry about breaching. Those firefighters are given a simple call--"go save them"--and they do it, without hesitation or question as to what the reasons are behind the decision to send them into harm's way.

I wish so much that those same rules applied to us--go do your mission, and we'll take the heat from the media. And the american public will be behind you--no matter what. Because they understand that the only reason you are there is because you believe, with every fiber of your being, that you are protecting the same people that those firefighters are screaming down the highway to save.

military

Where were you?

I was in an jet aircraft on one of my last flights in training to be an Air Force instructor pilot. We had just had an incredible formation flight over south Texas and were looking forward to flying high-G patterns over San Antonio. When we arrived in the pattern, the tower called us up and directed us to land immediately. Pilots don't like to be told what to do. After a few questions about why we were rudely being told to land, we reluctantly threw the gear down and called it a day.

As I walked into the squadron one of my classmates came out to meet me.

"Someone hit the World Trade Center. They think it's an enemy country." I remember, very clearly, thinking that it was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor, that we would soon be at war, and regret in taking a training assignment that would likely keep me out of said war.

When I walked into the building there was a crowd of pilots huddled around a TV watching the two towers burn. My only thought was to call my wife, which I did after putting my chute away and checking in.

Emily was also in the air. She was in the midst of getting her private license on 9/11. On that day she had been tasked to do her first "area solo." What that means is that it was the first time she had flown away from the runway on her own--without an instructor. Things were going just fine until an emergency call came across the radio. An interesting fact is that she was learning how to fly in Waco, Texas--a few miles from the President's Crawford, Texas ranch.

"All aircraft are immediately directed to land."

Emily freaked. Not only did just landing produce a daunting task, but she had to do it now--as fast as she could. Eventually she aquiesced and announced on the radio that she was a student pilot, and the VERY understanding ATC controller talked her back to the airfield.

When I recieved no answer from her phone, I debriefed the sortie. I remember having to convince the instructor that we still needed to finish the training portion of the mission. After maybe five minutes (a typical sortie debrieflasts for an hour) he gave me a perfect score and left. I logged onto the internet and got my first report of the attack, which I'll never forget. It was from AP.

"World Trade Center attacked by aircraft--at least four people killed."

For the next three days we were restricted to the base, immobile and unable to fly. I called the assignment center to see if they needed me to return to my combat unit to fly. I prayed a lot. My sister was due to be married the next weekend, which was subsequently called off and rescheduled because noone could fly. I still have the frame with the original date scratched out and the new date inscribed upon it. But most of all I lived with anger and fury that I wanted to fly and drop good guys on the bad guys wherever they were. It will always live as one of the most frustrating weeks of my life.

The following weekend I drove up to Waco to be with my then two-year old daughter and infant son. I will never forget looking at the skies and not seeing any aircraft, for the first time in my life.

That weekend my wife and I went to a church meeting dealing with the baptism of our son. I will never forget the flags that lined the streets that day, for miles and miles until we got to the church.

On 9/11 I was training to teach others how to defend our Country. Other than standing in the way of those who killed thousands of innocents, I would not have rather been anywhere else.