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CLEARED TO CLIMB

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Contents

Acknowledgements and Author's Notes...................................................................ixPrologue..............................................................................................xiOff I Go Into The Wild Blue Yonder....................................................................1"All Things Work Together For The Good...."...........................................................8Fun And Games.........................................................................................12Join The Airforce And See Texas.......................................................................17Enter Colonel Jake....................................................................................21Trouble On The Home Front.............................................................................29Pax Per Roborem.......................................................................................32Boy, What Are You Going To Do With Your Life?.........................................................35One Step Forward, Two Steps Back......................................................................37When One Door Closes, Another Opens...................................................................45The Legend Of Tammy Sue...............................................................................50The Customer Is Always Right..........................................................................56Crashing And Burning..................................................................................59Sitting Up With The Dead..............................................................................66Getting Hitched.......................................................................................69US Airforce, Chapter Two..............................................................................74Set For Life..........................................................................................80The Douglas Rocket....................................................................................84Thank God For Pork And Beans..........................................................................90I'm Going To Be A What?...............................................................................95Moving Out, Moving On, Moving Up......................................................................99Drinking And Driving..................................................................................102Love, Lust, And Other Illusions.......................................................................107Hail To The Captain...................................................................................110Today Is So Boring Let's Do Something Stupid And See If We Can't Ruin Our Careers.....................115Trw+A.................................................................................................121Fog, St Elmo's, Green Flashes, And Other Weird Stuff..................................................127Workers Of The World, Arise...........................................................................134DB Cooper, This Is All Your Fault.....................................................................138If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Burns Flat..............................................................141Nuts, Bolts, And Duct Tape............................................................................145West Texas Red........................................................................................155The Twilight Zone.....................................................................................161Back To The Future....................................................................................165The Art Of Getting Accepted...........................................................................172Ode To Mom............................................................................................178Fitting In............................................................................................181Captain Eddie.........................................................................................185The Changing Of The Guard.............................................................................192The Near-Jet..........................................................................................199Works Of Art..........................................................................................206Becoming One Of The Elite.............................................................................211Gone To Texas, Again..................................................................................216South America Redux...................................................................................220Nothing About Customs Is Customary....................................................................234Rubbing Elbows With The Rich And Famous...............................................................241A Man Must Know His Limitations.......................................................................249Enter The Dickster....................................................................................259His Heart Belongs To Politics.........................................................................266Mr Cheney Goes To Washington..........................................................................276Cleared To Descend....................................................................................281Cleared To Land.......................................................................................286

Chapter One

Ignorance is not always a bad thing. To be ignorant of the problems that might occur whenever you attempt an endeavor can help focus your attention on the possibilities. That's the advantage of being young. The young see what could be; the old fear what might happen.

It was with such youthful ignorance that I came to the end of my high school days and faced the prospect of adventures yet to be realized. In 1960, your adventures were limited until a certain obligation was fulfilled. That obligation was known as the military draft. Once you turned eighteen, military service was, for most, inevitable. There were ways to have it deferred, commonly by going to college. That was out of the question for me. I didn't have the money, didn't have the grades to qualify for a scholarship, and I was sick of school anyway. If I got a job, I knew it would only be a matter of time before that letter would arrive bidding me greetings and requiring that I report somewhere for induction into a branch of the armed forces of the United States. The problem with getting a job and waiting for that inevitable summons was that any employer who would hire you knew you were draft bait, and they would never spend money training someone they knew could be gone any day. Thus, for the foreseeable future, you were doomed to low wages and menial labor. The only other option was to choose the branch of service that appealed to you, enlist in it, and get it over with. And that's what I did.

On my eighteenth birthday, I dutifully registered for the draft, as required by law. Soon thereafter, I visited the Air Force recruiter and signed papers which, upon my graduation from high school ten weeks later, stated that for the next four years I belonged to the United States Air Force.

Ever since I was ten years old, I had wanted to fly. At that age I began hanging around the airport on the south side of the small southwest Oklahoma town in which I lived. Our house was only two blocks from the airport. One day I heard some of the men who owned airplanes talking about having a penny a pound day. That meant that anyone who wanted to take an airplane ride would step on a scale and the cost of the ride would be one cent times their weight. What a deal! It wouldn't even cost me a dollar. That night I opened my piggy bank in which I had some change from doing household chores and discovered I had plenty of coins to take a ride. On the appointed day, I went to the airport, stepped on the scale, paid for my ride in nickels and pennies, and braced myself for the thrill of a lifetime. I didn't tell my parents what I was going to do for fear they would say no. In those days, before everyone was paralyzed by fear of lawsuits, I didn't have to have anyone sign a waiver. I just paid the money and got on board. The flight was wonderful. The pilot simultaneously scared me to death and thrilled me to ecstasy, but from that time forward I was hooked. I read everything I could about airplanes and, for the next few years, I spent any extra money I had buying and building model airplanes. Of course, I imagined myself as the pilot of them.

Obsessed as I was, it shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone when I joined the Air Force. Shouldn't have been, but it was to my parents. Since I was eighteen, I didn't need their permission to enlist, and I really didn't think they cared anyway. I found out later I was wrong about that. Children are often wrong about how their parents feel, because they don't have any experience being parents. I did my parents an injustice by thinking they were indifferent about the things I did. They were having marital problems at the time, exacerbated by my dad's drinking problem, and all their emotional energy was spent in trying to maintain their sanity, leaving nothing left over to convince their children that they mattered. I was the oldest of my two siblings and was able to escape to the Air Force and not have to deal with their dysfunction. My sister, five years my junior, was affected the most and a brother, born when I was fifteen, was too young to know what was going on. By the time he was old enough to know, Daddy no longer drank, and he and Mom had finally gotten their act together. I now know they loved us, but the demons they were battling earlier just didn't allow them to show it.

The day after walking across a crudely constructed platform at the football stadium and receiving my diploma from Duncan High School, I boarded a bus for the ninety mile trip to Oklahoma City, where I would take my military induction physical. My parents took me to the bus station. We had a few awkward minutes wanting to say a lot to each other but in the end saying nothing of significance. I would learn many years later that, at my mother's insistence, they followed the bus well outside of town. When I was told that story, I wondered why they had such a hard time expressing how they felt. I then made a silent determination that if I should ever have a family, I would always let them know how much I valued them.

Arriving in Oklahoma City that afternoon, I made my way to the hotel that had been contracted by the government to billet future warriors on what was likely to be their last night as a civilian for a number of years. I ate the meal that evening that was provided for us and turned in for a restful night of sleep. That was not to be. The hotel was full of other young men, some draftees, some volunteers, all going into one of the four major services, nearly all touting the superiority of the branch they had chosen, and to a man determined to make the night a memorable one by testing their capacity for alcoholic beverages. I didn't participate in their shenanigans, but because of the constant celebratory noise ricocheting through the halls, I slept no better than they. The one considerable advantage I had over them was that I wasn't hung over the next day.

After breakfast, we assembled in the hotel lobby for the bus ride to the induction center. The party animals of the night before were a pitiful looking crew exhibiting pallid faces, blood shot eyes, and a general zombie-like persona. Most took advantage of the fifteen minute bus ride by trying to capture some of the sleep they had ignored the night before.

Upon arrival, we were told to strip naked, and then we made our way from first one doctor and then another as we were poked, prodded, and examined from our hair roots to our toe nails with several intermediate stops in between. I can only remember one guy not passing the physical. He was the only person I ever saw who had no neck. When he wanted to look in another direction, he had to turn his entire body, because it was impossible for him to swivel his head. He was also covered with hair and his arms were so long his fingers nearly reached his knees. He was the best argument to prove the theory of evolution that I had ever seen.

By early afternoon, the physical was over. We were herded en masse to a room where the oath was administered, and I was officially a member of the United States Air Force with the rank of airman basic. Amazingly, out of the fifty young men who took the physical, only two of us were going into the Air Force. I can barely remember what the other guy looked like, and I can't remember at all where he was from or anything about what we said to each other on the way to our destination of San Antonio, Texas.

What I do remember is the flight down. At Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City, we boarded a Central Airlines DC-3. I could never have guessed that in six years I would be flying a DC-3 myself for another airline. Central Airlines no longer exists, but it was then one of several local service air carriers that, aided by a government subsidy, provided air service to medium sized cities all across the country. The DC-3, though now almost extinct, was the workhorse of those airlines until the late 1960's.

Our flight left Oklahoma City, landed ten minutes later in Norman, proceeded on for twenty more minutes to Ada, fifteen minutes to Ardmore, and then one final hop of thirty minutes to Dallas. There we changed to a Braniff Airlines (another airline that no longer exists) DC-7 for the one hour flight to San Antonio. Upon arrival we noticed signs directing incoming Air Force personnel to a common location. Spotting an airman in a khaki, short-sleeved uniform with many impressive stripes, I approached him and identified myself and my traveling companion. My innocent introduction seemed to elicit a reaction of rage as he began a harangue the likes of which I had never heard in my life. To summarize it, he let me know that when a miserable amoeba such as myself addressed someone of superior rank as he happened to be ( and at that time everyone was of superior rank to me), I was to stand at attention and call him "sir." In the meantime, I was to sit down, shut up, and not move until ordered to do so. He also punctuated his lecture with numerous adjectives I had never heard before, and I was certain did not appear in any dictionary.

As time passed, small groups of clueless young men arrived, obviously rendezvousing from various parts of the country. They became recipients of the same colorful greeting that I had received, and, like a dog who has been kicked by his master, they skulked into the area where I was, all of us anxious to see what might be next. Of course, none of us had a clue as to what that might be.

Finally, at nearly midnight, the bellicose sergeant bellowed at us to get our lazy posteriors outside and get on the bus that was waiting at the curb. We were all too happy to leave his arena of fear. The only problem was that awaiting us on the bus was another sergeant with just as many stripes and even more eloquently foul language. His purpose in life seemed to be to remind us of what miserable examples of American youth we were, just in case we needed to be reminded.

As the bus made its way through the dark night to Lackland Air Force Base, the Air Force's training center, the sergeant profanely explained that the first stop would be the chow hall. One thing about the Air Force, they always made sure you were well fed. But, as we were to quickly learn, just sitting down and eating wasn't that simple in the Air Force. There would be rules even for something as ordinary as taking nourishment.

"You will," the sergeant explained, "stand at attention as you go through the chow line. You will side step as you move along. You will hold your tray out to the server, look straight ahead, and accept whatever he puts on your tray. You will eat everything on your plate." Actually, his speech consisted of three times as many words as I have quoted, all of a profane nature, but since nothing is gained by repeating them, you can use your imagination.

After the rules of the Air Force way of dining were enumerated to us, he asked if we understood them. We replied in a manner that we had heard soldiers reply in the war movies we had grown up with by shouting in unison with what I thought was a very satisfactory, "Yes sir." Apparently it wasn't satisfactory as far as the sarge was concerned because he profanely admonished us by saying a group of female adolescent cheerleaders sounded more manly than we did. Our second attempt was several decibels louder and seemed to satisfy him.

We arrived at the chow hall and did our best to obey the sarge's dictum as to how to proceed down the line, but he didn't seem to think we understood. He deemed it necessary to follow us down the line and continually remind us that our IQ's had to be doubled in order to reach the level of an idiot. He also picked out the biggest guys and seemed to delight in questioning their parenthood. Even the food servers got in the act by continually shouting at us to hurry up and move it on. After loading our trays with what passed for food and finding our way to a table, the sarge, just to help our digestion along, told us we had five minutes to finish, and every crumb had better be gone.

After our leisurely breakfast, we were herded back aboard the bus and taken to what would be our home for the next five weeks, our barracks. The barracks building had likely been constructed at about the time the Air Force had become a separate service in 1947. Before that, it had been attached to the Army, and it was known as the Army Air Corps. So in 1960 the Air Force as its own entity was even younger than I was.

The barrack's interior consisted of double rows of bunk beds. There was enough sleeping room for sixty men. Foot lockers were at the end of each bed with ample room for all the clothing and personal possessions the Air Force deemed necessary for you to have. Underfoot was a green, highly polished, and amazingly clean linoleum floor which, we were told, was going to be forever highly polished and amazingly clean, or else there would be some very unpleasant consequences. There was a narrow foyer just off the front door. At one side of the foyer was a staircase which led to an office that was the domain of the sergeant who would be our training instructor, or as the anachronism crazy Air Force referred to it, the TI. I think most of us were curious about what the office looked like, but we would learn that if we ever did get summoned up to that sanctum, it would not be to congratulate us for what a fine job we were doing, but rather to have our hind quarters roasted.

We were told to choose a bunk. I was lucky enough to get a lower one and, after peeling off my clothes, I collapsed into bed. The last thing I remember doing was looking at my watch. It was 1:30 A.M. In what seemed like milliseconds, someone was shaking me awake. It was an airman in uniform who I had noticed at the door when we had entered the barracks, but I was already beginning to learn the less said the less likely to get into trouble, so I didn't ask who he was. Now he was telling me that it was time to pull barracks guard duty. I had no inkling what barracks guard duty was, but I had also learned in the fourteen hours I had spent in the Air Force to never question anything you were told by anyone who seemed to know what they were doing.

I crawled out of my bunk, got back into my clothes, which were starting to emanate a most unpleasant odor, and along with four other poor souls, I made my way to the foyer. Since none of us had any inkling as to what a barracks guard was supposed to do, we were given a thin manual that explained it to us. I spent the next hour reading and rereading the manual and watched the real barracks guard, who had been in the Air Force about a week longer than I had, demonstrate how it was done.

At some point in that hour, as my sleep deprived brain tried to make sense of the manual, the guard leapt to his feet as though electrocuted and shouted, "Ten-hut." Not knowing exactly what ten-hut meant, I chose the wise course of doing what the guard was doing, which was to stand ramrod straight with eyes fastened straight ahead. The reason for the ten-hut walked through the door. He was a second lieutenant with a black armband with white letters proclaiming him to be the OD, military lingo for Officer of the Day. He didn't look any happier than I did having to perform questionable duty in the middle of the night, and, after signing the barracks log sheet to prove he had actually been there, the OD asked if everything was O.K. After being assured that it was, he stuck his head in where the bunks were, and seemingly satisfied that nothing illegal or immoral was taking place, he went back out into the dark night.

At four a.m., I was allowed to return to my bunk as five more brain-benumbed men were awakened to take our place. One hour after returning to the sheets, I heard a scratchy sound coming from somewhere followed in just a few seconds by a bugle call. The scratchy sound was someone preparing to play a record on a turntable. The bugle call was not the reveille that you expected to hear but was instead like a trumpet call one might hear at a horse race to summon the horses to the track. When the bugle sounded, you had fifteen minutes to shave, get dressed, make your bunk according to the TI's specifications and fall in outside in formation. Within a few days, I was able to train myself to awaken at the first scratch of that record and be halfway to the latrine before the call to the gate even sounded.

I stood outside at attention, and, as the first hint of dawn began to chase away the darkness, I tried to absorb what had happened to me that week. Three days before, I had just graduated from high school. Only eighteen hours before, I had taken my oath to defend and protect my country. I had slept four hours in the last two days. And now as I laid eyes for the first time on the stern looking TI that stood before us, I felt I had made the biggest mistake of my life, and I would have to pay for it for the next four years.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from CLEARED TO CLIMBby Charles Roy McConnell Copyright © 2012 by Charles Roy McConnell. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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