About the Air Force (*Updated* Still In Progress)
I began Air Force ROTC back when Ronald Reagan was still president, the Cold War was beginning to wind down but the Soviet Union was still viewed as our top threat, and Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists were basically a minor sideshow in the grand scheme of things. It was a nice bipolar world. We knew who our friends were, and we knew who our enemies were. Some of the military dictators of what we used to call the Third World should have been our enemies but weren’t, some of the nationalistic but otherwise America-friendly non-aligned or even some communists who were our enemies probably shouldn’t have been. The world wasn’t really as black and white as I like to remember it, but the big picture was the forces of freedom and human rights and free markets facing off against the forces run by the pigs who were more equal than others, with the occassional random aircraft hijacking to call attention to the fact that the Palestinians and other Arabs were annoyed that they kept losing to the Israelis whenever they attacked them. I wanted to be on the side of truth, justice, and the American way. While at age 18 it didn’t really matter whether I was handling an M-16 rifle or an F-16 fighter jet, I wanted to get onto the front lines, if front lines were to ever show up in a Cold War-turned-WWIII. I got to college and tried both Army ROTC and Air Force ROTC, and eventually decided to try my hand at becoming a fighter pilot. I had fun with both organizations, but when I realized the Air Force had little use for a pilot who happened to know how to drive tanks, fire squad-level machine guns, or tie a swiss-seat to rappel from a cliff or cross a river on a rope bridge, I dropped Army ROTC and concentrated on the Air Force courses.