My Time in the U.S. Air Force

When I was seventeen, I signed up for the U.S. Air Force. Actually, I talked to the army recruiters first. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I needed to fly out of the nest, and I wasn’t into university back then. When I walked into my parents room and announced that I’d made an appointment to go take the ASVAB military intelligence test, they were pretty shocked, I guess because I was hardly the “military type”. I got up very early the next morning and got a ride with an army recruiter to the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS). No, I wasn’t going to ship away that day, I was just going in for basic testing. It was my first experience in any kind of military environment, but far from my last.

It turns out I really rocked the ASVAB. I ended up deciding on the Air Force instead of the army, though I can’t remember why that was exactly. It was probably a good thing, though, because otherwise I might be dead right now: this whole story takes place in the early 2000′s, and I’d be doing in-processing to my first duty station right about when marines were doing “in-processing” to Baghdad.

I took advantage of the Delayed Enlistment Program, which let me put off shipping to boot camp for a few months. During this time I made some effort to beef myself up: unlike a lot of recruits who were struggling with being overweight, I was actually underweight. I actually bought some kreatine powder and forced myself to swallow the foul stuff, though I wasn’t really using it right (it’s supposed to supplement a good weightlifting routine, and back then I’d never walked in a real gym in my life). When the time finally came when I would ship out from MEPS, one part of the all-day-long paperwork process was a physical examination, and I’m fairly sure the airman lied when recording my weight so that I would pass.

I hadn’t thought about how they’d transport me to basic training, but I was expecting something military; instead, they sent us off on a civilian aircraft. Handed our orders to report at Lackland, we were bussed to the airport and then we were on our own: surprisingly, no sergeant would accompany us on the trip. We could’ve easily gone AWOL, and when I misplaced my ID in a food court, it almost looked like I was gonna miss my first flight out! But we all made the flight to Texas alright, and when we stepped onto the busses to the air force base, boot camp officially began.

I did bootcamp with Wolfpack Squadron, and it was a transformational time in my life. In fact, you can read about the boot camp experience in its own separate series: My Air Force Boot Camp Experience. Six and a half weeks spent in Lackland under the tutelage of irate drill sergeants feels more like six and a half years; I was like a soft piece of metal put through a merciless forge, and I emerged hardened and wizened. My time in the Air Education and Training Command would actually extend to a half-year, for after boot camp, I attended a very long tech school in weather forecasting, where conditions were only marginally improved over boot camp.

After I graduated and officially became a weather forecaster, I was able to take some of the leave I’d been accumulating during all those grueling days of training. I flew home to San Diego and enjoyed life back home like I’d never enjoyed it before, no longer taking for granted the long days spent idly around the house. I got a few extra weeks of leave by participating in the Recruiter Assistance Program (RAP). Theoretically, this means spending a couple weeks working regular work hours at the recruiter’s office. In actual practice, I went in for a couple hours a week, sealing envelopes of recruitment propaganda. It was pretty much just free extra leave days.

Perhaps because of my great academic performance in Tech School, I was granted my wish when it came to first duty station: Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona. I should mention that I’d made my preferences while still at Lackland, when my judgment was hardly at its clearest: overwhelmed by homesickness, I’d cast all my bids frantically for safe, stateside bases in the southwest U.S. where I’d grown up. For brand new weather forecasters, there are only a handful of bases, and DM was the most southwestern stateside one of the bunch. Looking back on it now, I wish I’d been more bold and made a grab for Yakota AFB in Japan, or maybe Sembach Airbase, Germany. But then who knows where I’d've ended up, where I’d be now? At the time, I was jubilant at my fortunes, and this was reflected when I arrived at the base with enthusiasm.

As if I hadn’t been through enough BS or enough classes in the past half year, it turned out my first duty as a weather forecaster would be to undergo even more training and more menial work. The base did its best to make welcome newcomers from the pipeline by assigning everyone two weeks of general base-cleaning duty. Uncle Sam had provided me with months and months of intense meteorological indoctrination so I could sweep floors and pick up trash. Next came a week or two of base-specific classroom briefings, most of which were repeats of briefings we’d already sat through once in Lackland and again in tech school. Yes, I’ve seen my life’s quota of suicide prevention powerpoint presentations– it’s enough to drive a man to suicide!

When we finally got through all the base-wide welcome party, and I finally fell under the jurisdiction of the actual weather squadron, that was only the beginning of my post-training training. For a couple weeks, we literally had no assignments, as we were simply waiting for the next in-squadron class to begin. During this limbo period, we showed up at work just to warm the seats. We were told to study our CDC packets, thick books of rote trivia tangentially relevant to our jobs, which we’d be tested on. I managed to pass the tests before I even got official copies of the packets, working instead out of xerox’d copies.

Finally, our class launched, and I spent the next couple months learning how to forecast the weather. This sounds all well and good, but it made me resent the whole time at Keesler Tech School: why did I suffer through six months there if they were just gonna train me again at my duty station?

The enthusiasm that followed me off the plane at Tucson International Airport was rapidly evaporating, and then came a turning point, before I’d even published my first real weather forecast. Someone wrote something on one of the bathroom stalls in the squadron. “Weather Sucks”, or something. When nobody stepped forth to claim responsibility, the entire day shift from that day was punished with a day of hard cleaning duty. If the squadron’s intention was to shatter whatever morale the unit had, they were quite successful.

Finally, I graduated from the 25 OWS training flight and proceeded to “the floor”, where I would actually produce operational forecasts, work that would actually have some effect on the world. It was close to a year since I’d packed my bags and left my parents’ home. There was a little more spring in my step for awhile, but my destiny was neither to be a cloud jock, nor any other kind of “normal” worker. On the operations floor, I began encountering little gripes that exist in any job. Bosses who punish you for being only four minutes early for work when you’re supposed to be five minutes early. Meetings with no real purpose besides fulfilling the meetings quota.

What really got to me, though, was the gradual horrifying realization that there was nothing I was doing that couldn’t be automated. To the extent that my job was creative, it was in creatively coming up with justifications to copy whatever the automated models were predicting. I was an expert at this, and if the models predicted the holy apocalypse, I’d be there justifying it with plenty of scientific-sounding verbage. I don’t know how unique I was in this. Maybe some of my coworkers really strained to “beat the models”, but ultimately you could copy them and nothing would happen.

I was so confident that parts of my job could be automated that I actually began the automation process myself. It began with the realization that one of our main pieces of software was programmed in TCL, a scripted language which isn’t actually compiled into machine code. I could just open the appropriate folder and casually browse the program’s original source-code! With only a little trouble, I was able to modify the program to add new functionality that would help us out a lot with our watches and warnings. My immediate supervisor was very nervous, so I had to undo the changes. But from that experiment I took away the realization that I could write my own scripts, as long as they weren’t interfering with the ones the Air Force had bought from civilian contractors.

In less than a week, I whipped up some scripts which reduced my workload by a good 25-50%. Suddenly, I had a lot more free time on the job! That should have made me feel really good, but it just made me resent the job even more. And with resentment came deeper, more disturbing feelings. I began feeling paranoid, that my coworkers were conspiring against me. My body was rejecting the USAF like a disease, and I had to get out. Thus began my darkest days in the service.

I was stuck in a kind of negative feedback pattern. I complained bitterly about everything around me, and in turn, that caused things to deteriorate further. In short, I had an attitude problem. At some point, any objective justifications for my complaints became irrelevant, it’s like I was flying on autopilot. I spread cynicism everywhere I went, openly badmouthing the service. This of course rubbed lots of people in exactly the wrong way and accomplished nothing constructive. I think that my very ego itself was rejecting the world I was in, and it’s like I was subconsciously sabotaging myself at every turn. I’d forget to salute a colonel, or sleep past a flight meeting, and find myself in a world of sh–.

Despite all this, I was the perfect airman in many ways. I was about the only guy in my flight who didn’t secretly drink underage (in fact I wouldn’t drink alcohol at all until years later). I hardly even left the base, living in the dorms long after a lot of my peers had taken advantage of off-base housing allowances. I saved money like Scrooge. Perhaps most remarkable of all, I was taking college classes full time. I requested night shifts specifically so I could spend my days in classes (conveniently held right on the base, some of them five minutes from my dorm room). Sometimes, I’d work a 12-hour night shift, go crash in my room for a couple hours, and then wake up and attend classes til the next shift began. When I first registered, they were hesitant to let me take so many credit hours, and warned me the Force wouldn’t pay if I failed a class. Somehow I ended up acing every course I took.

When I’d left my parents’ home, I didn’t appreciate college. Being an enlisted man gave me a deep new appreciation for education. The U.S. military is split into the enlisted ranks and the officer ranks, and the main thing separating them is education: an officer’s commission requires a 4-year degree. The difference in status was enormous, such that in theory, the lowest ranking second lieutenant was higher than the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force. At the same time, my childhood love affair with mathematics was re-emerging, and I longed to escape the drudgery of meteorology for the abstract theories of higher math. There was, however, a limit to how advanced of classes I could take while constantly working. It’s like I was trapped in a cage, and I could see this vast wonderful world all around me, but I had no hope of escaping. My resentment grew until I despised every terminal aerodrome forecast, every METAR, every shift-change briefing, every watch and warning.

A fleeting beacon of hope shone forth from Washington: Congress suddenly decided that the Air Force was overmanned, and it had to cut its ranks. Thus was born Force Shaping 2005, and across the service, volunteers were sought to leave early. I volunteered immediately, and then I waited while the applications were processed. I waited and I waited, suffering in anticipation, and then I was denied. There was too much demand for weather forecasters, they said!

I’d relished this desperate hope for release, only to have it snatched right from my hands. I decided I would try to malinger my way out; I met with base psychologists and told them I couldn’t cope. But I never had the guts to go as far as I’d really need to to get out this way. I didn’t have the balls to run naked around base raving about aliens, or declare myself Napoleon, or go catatonic. All I managed was to add shame to all my other troubles, shame because I knew that I was perfectly healthy and yet there I was trying to get a shrink to give me a medical discharge.

There came a turning point when I felt like I was about at rock bottom. In a moment of clarity I perceived the negative patterns I was stuck in, and I consciously decided to fix my attitude. I’d known since junior high about the importance and power of positive thinking, but I’d let my thoughts sink to the most negative state of my whole life. Reluctantly, I forced myself to acknowledge sole responsibility for where I was. Nobody made me sign the contract, swear oaths of allegiance, or choose the career I did. Whatever creative energy I had to alter my life, I was pouring into the dead-ends of blame and resentment.

I began intentionally working to be more positive. I resumed writing daily affirmations, something I hadn’t done in a long time. Immediately, a dark blindfold was lifted from my eyes. I began to see my workplace more realistically, no longer clouded by paranoia, cynicism or hatred. Although objectively I had no new powers to escape my surroundings, a kind of calm came over me, an unexplainable foreknowledge that powerful forces were at work and that all would be set right.

I was even beginning to take action to move my productivity TCL scripts up through the proper channels, to try and get them officially accepted and acknowledged. But suddenly all that became less important: a new round of Force Shaping applications were being called for, and it seemed that the AF was becoming more desperate to get volunteers. I submitted the second application the very first day possible, then I let it go and put my energy into improving my immediate surroundings. Dressing a little better, keeping my room a little cleaner, avoiding complaining. I wasn’t even thinking about that application, and early one morning, my flight master sergeant called my room. I had two weeks to out-process; I was accepted for Force Shaping!

My last two weeks in the armed forces were a little surreal. I was no longer going to the floor to forecast storms, I was going to various buildings on base and filling out paperwork. I was ecstatic. Suddenly I had new things to worry about and prepare for. I was going to be a math student at the University of Arizona!

Due to how the minimum contract length in the Air Force is four years, people tend to be a little surprised when they hear I was there for only two years and got out with a fully Honorable Discharge. I’m probably one of very few to have pulled that off. My experience as a soldier was one of constant mind games, ceaseless degradation, endless meaningless work, and for a long time, resentment and hatred. But would I have been better off if I’d gone straight to university? Who knows. The thing about life is, you can’t regret anything you do, cuz you never know how things would’ve been if you chose differently. My life is totally awesome today, but if I hadn’t taken the path I took, I’d certainly not be where I am now. The main thing is, I learned and grew from the whole experience, and the bad times might have been exactly the pill I needed to hammer home the power of how we think.

FURTHER READING

My Time in Air Force Boot Camp
My Time in Air Force Tech School
Air Force Core Values
Become More Intelligent by Doing New Things
My Anime Story