Category: My Glorious Air Force Career

glug

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I was assigned to RAF Digby in 1999 and worked there for two years with a couple dozen British people and maybe eight or nine Americans. I can’t tell you what I did there for the Air Force but I can tell you I drank a lot of tea on the job. That’s not a cliched stereotype; the British really do drink a lot of tea. We had tea first thing when we arrived, took a mid-morning break to drink tea, had another break in the afternoon when we drank tea, and I think we usually shoehorned at least one or two more cups in while we were working. Someone would come around with a tray to ask if you wanted any; all you had to do was give them your cup and your order, and ten minutes later they’d be back with a steaming hot cuppa.

When we took a proper break it was usually to stand around chatting while we sipped our tea. One of the blokes I worked with, Sean, did not sip his tea. He’d stand there, happily chatting away with his cup in his hand for the entire fifteen-minute break until, in the last ten seconds or so when other people downed the last drops of tea and began to make their way back to their work stations, he would say something like, “Well, suppose we’d better get back to it,” and suddenly upend his entire cup of now-tepid tea down his throat. That’s just how he liked it.

big log

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know if this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done, but many years ago while a medical doctor was trying to diagnose a little trouble I was having with my gastrointestinal tract, she asked me to keep a diary of what I ate and each time I pooped. She also wanted to know what kind of dump I had, i.e. was it firm, loose, runny, explosive, etc.

I did just what she told me. I got a pocket-sized spiral-bound notebook, kept it in the breast pocket of my BDU blouse, and each time I sat down to eat I got the notebook out and jotted down a list of each item I was about to consume. I had a very simple appetite and was a picky eater back then, so the list was usually short and easy to make. AND ALSO after each visit to the men’s room I would make a quick note of the visit and the ‘character’ of the expelled dookie. I did this for at least a couple weeks. I think it might have been a whole month.

On my next visit to the doctor I handed over the notebook, saying something like, “You wanted me to write down everything I ate and every time I pooped.” She acted puzzled as she flipped through the pages. “Wow, you really did it,” she said. It seemed to me this was the first time anyone had actually followed her directions. Weirdly, she hardly read the diary. She mostly just flipped through it, pausing to read two or maybe three pages before handing it back to me.

book meet nose

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Our oldest son, Sean, was such a dedicated bookworm when he was a lad. When Sean’s nose was in a book, he was not very easily distracted from it. It’s not a stretch to say that you could drop a grand piano from a great height to crash land on the pavement right in front of him and the odds were pretty even he might not notice.

Or, to be a little less hyperbolic: Once Sean asked me for a ride, then very nearly got left standing on the curb when he failed to notice me shouting and waving at him, even though I was close enough to hit with the proverbial dead cat. (Is it still a proverb? I just realized I haven’t heard anyone say that in ages.)

We were living on an air force base in northern Japan at the time. The O-mobile was a Mitsubishi minivan, which is not as small as the work “mini” implies. It had room to seat six grown adults in spacious comfort and a four wheel drive gearbox that we put to use to climb mountain roads with some regularity. It was a vehicle that was not easily missed when it drove by, is what I’m getting at.

As soon as I pulled into the parking lot I saw there was a parking space at the end of the row, right across from the entrance where Sean was standing by the curb waiting. Score! I pulled in, parked, and looked across the road expectantly at Sean. He did not look up from the book he was reading.

I’m an easily-distracted person. When a moving object crosses my peripheral vision, I look up to see what it is. I’m fully aware this makes me look like a walking nervous tick but I can’t help myself. Whatever makes me do that, though, Sean is full of the antidote for it. The arrival of a big, dark, growling vehicle virtually within arm’s reach did not register at all on his radar.

Which I was used to so, after chuckling to myself, I leaned out the window and said his name, just loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the engine but not so loudly that I might startle him. He was that close. But, apparently, not close enough. I repeated his name, a bit louder this time. Still no response, so I shouted his name, thumping the side of the van with the flat of my hand to give it a little added oomph.

Still oblivious. Wow.

Running out of noise-making options, I laid on the horn, which jolted him out of his reverie so suddenly he almost jumped out of his shoes. Seemed just a trifle annoyed at having been beeped at, too. I explained to him that I’d tried just about everything else but I seem to recall he wasn’t mollified and I had to just let it go.

knots to you

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

35 years ago this month I went to San Antonio to start basic training in the Air Force.

One of the skills we had to master in basic was getting dressed, running downstairs and falling into formation in an impossibly short time, something like thirty seconds. At first we couldn’t do it because most of us couldn’t even tie our laces in thirty seconds, to say nothing of the rest of it. After a few days, maybe a week of practice, though, we could reliably get dressed in about ten seconds by learning tricks like speed-lacing our boots and leaving a set of fatigues, neatly folded, on the chairs by our lockers. We’d sleep in our socks and when reveille sounded, jump out of bed, pull on our pants, speed-lace our boots, and button our shirts on the way out the door.

We also knew our places in formation after only a few days. I was in the front row near the right corner, for instance, so I just went there instead of jumping in any old place. When everybody learned to do that, we didn’t have to go through the time-wasting “if you’re taller, tap” routine that sorted everyone so the formation was neatly arranged with the tallest people in the front.

One morning, though, everything was confusion. Most of us were outside with plenty of time to spare, but some people were late, leaving gaps in the formation that we automatically filled in until the missing people came straggling down the stairs. After they wormed their way into their usual spot we had to re-form. Thrown out of our routine, it took us a lot longer than thirty seconds to clean this mess up.

Word got around fast that the stragglers were late because the sleeves of their shirts had been knotted while they slept, but nobody seemed to know who did the deed. Our sergeant was furious. When we were all back upstairs he herded us into the day room and demanded that whoever knotted the shirt sleeves had better come clean or there would be hell to pay. Nobody ever fessed up to him, though, and I don’t recall that we got into any more trouble for it.

On the last night of basic training the sergeant returned our civilian clothes to us and left us alone for the night. With no supervision, we had the closest thing to a party we could’ve had without music or alcohol: we stayed up late into the night, goofing around and telling stories.

The guy assigned to the bed right next to mine was Rick Neptune. At one point, Rick and I were sitting on our beds, facing one another, and he said, “You remember that time somebody tied knots in the sleeves of some people’s sleeves?”

“Yeah?” I said.

He laughed. “That was me.”

He’d gotten away with one of the most memorable pranks of basic training, but he couldn’t leave without telling somebody. Thanks, Rick, for letting me into your confidence. I still get a chuckle out of that all these years later.

akula

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I used to work with a guy who was, shall we say, a teller of tall tales. Any story he told would start out believable enough, but would quickly morph into such an outrageous and obvious truckload of manure that after hearing only a few of them, I would often roll my eyes or smirk at him but he would never waiver from claiming he was telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

An example: He told me a story about growing up in the Philippines that ended with he and his father fighting off pirates until they each came marching home with severed heads to spit on pikes over the front door of their house. The story he told might not have ended exactly like that – my memory’s not so good any more – but it was so close as to make no difference at all.

So when he ambled up to me at work one day, opened a tupperware full of cat turds, and offered me one, I didn’t feel I was being rude at all by refusing. He had about a dozen in there, on a bed of kitty litter. It’s like he didn’t even trying to disguise them.

“They’re really tasty when they’re fresh,” he said.

“I’m sure they are, but I just couldn’t.”

“You don’t like shark?” he asked.

“It’s all right,” I said casually, leaning a bit closer to the Tupperware and sniffing. “What’s that?”

“It’s shark,” he said, rolling his eyes as if I were stupid.

I had a good, long stare at them to confirm to myself that they were clearly cat turds. “Is not,” I said.

He seemed taken aback. “Sure, it is. Pan-fried.”

I took another good, long look. I ran through the situation in my head. They looked like cat turds. Tex was known to tell stories. And he was, after all, a Navy guy. I never met a squid who wouldn’t relish telling his buddies how he got a zoomie to eat a cat turd. “C’mon, buddy. Those are clearly cat turds.”

He appeared to be genuinely shocked. “It’s shark. My wife’s recipe. They’re delicious,” he said. He did not, I noticed, pop one in his mouth to prove it.

“No, thanks.”

“But it’s just shark!” he insisted, somewhat desperately, I thought.

“Thanks anyway.”

I guess it could’ve been shark, and even though I like to give most people the benefit of the doubt, I’m still glad, looking back on it now, that I didn’t find out the hard way.

bedford

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I dreamed I was back in Bedford, England, the town I lived in when the Air Force stationed me at the nearby Royal Air Force base, Chicksands, in 1985. I had just arrived, one might almost say materialized in the apartment I used to live in, which I somehow recognized despite the fact that it looked nothing like my apartment. For a start, it was way too clean. Not that I lived in a pigsty, it just wasn’t painted an antiseptic white on all surfaces. Also, the rooms were only half the size they should have been, so that I could barely move around and had to walk hunched over. Finally, it was on the third floor, and I know damned well I lived on the second floor. Several people I didn’t know were in the apartment with me; I gave them the nickel tour, then went for a walk.

I thought it would be neat to take a look around Bedford, to see if I could recognize anything, so I climbed on the first bus that came along and rode it through town. Couldn’t recognize a thing, but stayed on the bus anyway because it was such an enjoyable ride. Not even a little sarcastic, there; I was genuinely enjoying myself. About halfway through town, though, I realized I didn’t have any money to pay for my fare. I moved to the front of the bus and told the driver, who pulled up in front of an official-looking building and said, “Go find the room marked ‘Medical,’ they’ll take care of it.” I asked him to repeat that, to make sure I’d heard it right. I had.

I stepped off the bus into the lobby, because it was parked in the lobby. A big lobby. I crossed the lobby floor and found a door marked ‘Medical,’ stepped through it and walked up to the counter, showed them my ticket and explained my predicament. One of the ladies behind the counter took my ticket while another listened to my story. They both disappeared immediately after I finished my tale and I never saw them again.

I waited while the rest of the clerks left and were replaced by other clerks. Day passed into night. I asked one of the new clerks if this was the night shift. “Night shift,” she scoffed, but didn’t explain any further. I wandered around in ‘Medical’ but couldn’t find anyone who would help me straighten out my by-now irrelevant gaffe, so I left.

Walked around a little bit in a neighborhood I didn’t recognize, got on another bus and rode through town a bit more. Ended up at the airport where I ran into some old friends from language school. And this is where I started to wake up, so the dream because less chaotic and more like random memories of people I knew in language school.

talking back

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

When I was a younger lad with stripes on my sleeve, I used to work at a specialized computer that was especially intimidating to new trainees. I wish I could tell you why, but I’d be clapped in irons and sent to the gulag if I did. What this computer did was not exactly a secret. If you had made your home in the Denver metro area when I did, and you paid any attention at all to what was going on at the air base just east of town, you’d know pretty much all the interesting things there was to know. But I can’t tell you, now or ever, because I don’t like leg irons. Or the gulag. So you’ll just have to take my word for it that this computer was terribly important, and that hitting the “enter” key could be just a tad intimidating.

Trainees usually started out confident because they sat beside me for about a week and watched me point and click and tappity-tap-tap the keys. I wasn’t trying to make it look easy, or hard. It looked like a video game. A really nerdy video game, but not too different from any arcade game you’d pay a quarter for ten or fifteen minutes’ worth of fun.

So after a week of watching me play the video game and reading a training manual that was obviously written by someone with expository skills not much more advanced than they themselves possessed (everyone I’ve ever met thinks, “I could write that”), the trainees felt pretty confident about their ability to do this thing … and then I stepped aside and said it’s time for them to sit down and actually do it.

The first time they hit the execute button and it didn’t do what they thought it would do, they’d quietly mumble a clipped phrase under their breath, usually something like, “What the —?” before cutting themselves off. This is an important first step, but only a first step, because they were depriving themselves of the relief offered by a truly heartfelt cussing.

The next step I watched for to see if they were progressing was when they asked the computer a point-blank question. They’d bark out something like, “What’s the problem? There’s nothing wrong with that!” And then a light bulb would come on over their head and they’d start typing again.

The final step was when they just cussed outright, usually a good, soul-cleansing “FUCK YOU!” and it did exactly what they told it to, but they realized the moment they hit the “execute” button they did it wrong. I knew they were doing even better if they slapped the desk as they cussed. The louder, the better. If it sounded like a big-bore shotgun going off, they were ready to fly on their own.

My boss used the same yardstick to evaluate trainees. She would visit my desk from time to time when I had a new trainee to see how things were going. If she asked and I answered, “Pretty good, he’s starting to talk back to the computer,” she walked away pretty satisfied.

ringer

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

One of my previous employers made me exercise three times a week. I would literally be violating a federal law if I didn’t exercise as directed. Think about that when you’re complaining about all the things your boss makes you do.

Sometimes I was allowed to exercise on my own. If the weather was good, I would ride my bike for a couple hours. If the weather sucked, I would find an unoccupied rowing machine or treadmill at the gym and crank on that for an hour or so.

Sometimes, though, we did a group thing. Usually we ran. I got pretty good at running until my knees got old.

There was this one time a bunch of us played basketball. I don’t know a thing about basketball. Well, I know one thing: the ball goes in the hoop. That’s it. I don’t know the positions they play, I don’t understand the strategy. I don’t even understand what people are talking about when they try to explain basketball to me. It’s like when people try to talk to me in a foreign language: I just grin at them like a moron until they give up.

I told the PT monitor I didn’t know anything about basketball. “I’m not saying I don’t want to play, I’m just warning you.”

“Sounds like a ringer,” somebody said.

“No, honestly,” I pleaded, “I know absolutely nothing about basketball.”

“Yeh, whatever,” the PT monitor answered. He didn’t believe me, either.

I guess I can sort of understand that, basketball being a sport that almost everybody follows religiously. It would be like someone telling you he didn’t know a thing about breathing, or something else everybody knew about as if it was second nature.

There were five of us to start, so we broke up into teams of three and two. I was on the team of two. “Take the ball out,” the PT monitor said, tossing the ball to me.

“Take it out where?” I asked, so he explained it to me. Apparently I had to start the game by standing out of bounds and throwing it to him, which I did. Then I ran down to the other end of the court, because I was the only other guy on the team. It seemed to make sense. I was just past the mid-court line when he threw it to me, and I figured this was as good a time as any to take a shot, so I fired it in the general direction of the hoop … and it went in.

And not just the first time. I shot most of the time from mid-court, because if I got closer to the hoop, I missed every time, but from mid-court I had about a 50-50 chance of making it. I think I sunk about six shots that way.

Which only solidified everyone’s belief that I was a damn liar when I said I didn’t know anything about playing basketball. “Ringer” was my nickname for a while after that.

trash talk

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a random memory that popped into my head as I was taking out the trash:

I used to work with a woman I’ll call Lilly, for the purposes of respecting her privacy. We worked together while I was stationed at RAF Chicksands in central England and, coincidentally, we both went to language school in San Antonio at about the same time. I didn’t know her well, so my impression of her may have been wrong, but she seemed like a rather quiet person with a disposition on the sunny side. I never saw her angry, until one night at Chicksands.

Our jobs at Chix seemed really super-cool at the time, mostly because we weren’t allowed to tell anyone about it. I’m still not allowed to tell you about the details, but there is one aspect of the job that’s important to this story: We banged out a lot of text on teletype machines, which are a kind of electric typewriter. They printed all this text on that old computer paper with the holes along the sides that came out the back of the machine in one long ribbon of paper that never seemed to end.

The text was considered classified material, so after it was no longer needed, the paper had to be destroyed. The military preferred to destroy classified paper by shredding it, and at a station like Chix there was a lot of material to destroy, so they built some impressively huge shredders to do the job. Unfortunately, Chix didn’t have one of these monster shredders. They had a furnace at the back of the building in a dirty, stinking room called the burn room. Nobody wasted a moment’s imagination naming that room because it didn’t deserve it.

At the end of every shift, we collected all the paper in bags, labeled the bags so we knew where they came from, and piled the bags in the burn room. A couple times a week, two or three airmen were given the responsibility of firing up the furnace and burning as much paper as they could, a dirty job made even dirtier because they had to break open every bag and sort the paper from the garbage. It was strictly verboten to put garbage in the burn bags, but people did it anyway, and nothing but paper could go in the furnace, so all that garbage had to be picked out by hand.

I’m pretty sure it was a swing shift or mid shift when I found out how much Lilly hated being on the burn detail. I was sitting at the far end of the aisle I worked in — and let me back up to describe the aisle for you: We worked on what was called the operations floor, an open room filled by rows of tall gray steel cabinets. There was a gap between each cabinet big enough for one of the teletype machines to sit on a shelf. We sat in the aisles between the rows of cabinets, facing the teletypes. Our seats were in an aisle wide enough for us to sit back-to-back with room behind us for one person to walk.

The cabinets were chock-full of electronic equipment that hummed and buzzed and clicked. All that electronic equipment generated a lot of heat, so the room was kept very cold by refrigeration units blowing cold air up through vents in the floor. We wore headphones while we worked, and between the noise coming the headphones, the chatter of the teletype machines, and the rush of air blowing through the ventilation system, it was pretty easy to sneak up on us.

Enter Lilly. Did I mention she was a tall woman? At least as tall as I am, maybe even an inch taller. Dressed in green fatigues, covered in soot, dripping sweat, and face as red with rage as her hair, she seemed to appear in the blink of an eye. One moment we were all concentrating on our work, and the next minute this red-haired fury was in our midst. She held a torn-open burn bag in one hand and bellowed, so we could all hear her: “I AM SICK OF PICKING YOUR GARBAGE OUT OF THE BURN BAGS!” Then she swung the burn bag over her head, smashing it against the floor like the hammer of Thor, where it burst open, scattering paper, orange peels, apple cores, and paper cups dribbling coffee everywhere.

We were caught dead to rights. Written across both sides of the bag was our address and the date it had been sealed up. I don’t recall if that fixed the problem or not, but I will never forget the way Lilly glared at us with disgust before stalking away.

And I never saw her angry again. Maybe she got it all out that one night.

happy in this job

~ Dave O ~ Leave a comment

I recently went to a meeting with my supervisor, who was busily working up an e-mail or a memo or something as I walked in. “Give me just a minute,” she said, banging away at the keyboard in a most determined way and I answered, “No problem,” and waited while she finished her thought.

When she hit the final full stop and turned from her keyboard, I made an offhand remark like, “Are they keeping you busy much?” She took a deep breath, let it out and said, and I wish I could quote her verbatim but it was something like, “Oh, it’s been one of those days, but I guess none of us has ever had a job that we looked forward to every day,” by which I’m sure she meant only that there are good days and there are bad days, not that she wasn’t happy in her job. But her comment made me perk right up and blurt, “That’s not true!” It was out of my mouth almost before I realized I’d said it.

That stopped her dead in her tracks. She looked puzzled, then asked, “You had a job that you looked forward to every day?” as if she didn’t quite believe it. And then she had to ask, “Well, what was it?”

So I proceeded to tell her about when I was a resource manager, programming the work schedule at a military facility just outside of Denver, Colorado. I know it sounds lethally boring and I wish I could tell you exactly what made it so enjoyable that I looked forward to it every day, but I can’t because I’ve been sworn to secrecy about it, not in the cool I’ll-have-to-kill-you-if-I-tell-you way but in a mundane, we’ll-both-go-to-jail-if-I-tell-you way. Think Edward Snowden instead of James Bond.

But I can tell you that I was part of a small, specialized team of people whose work made it possible for dozens of other people to get their work done. Without our team, everybody else would have been sitting on their hands a lot of the time and billions of dollars worth of hardware would have sat idle. The team I was on found where those idle spots were most likely to be and reassigned the hardware.

It was entirely different work from anything else I had done before that, so I had to learn it from scratch, mostly by sitting next to the inestimable Chad Burlingame for a few weeks as he explained how things worked, talked me through what he was doing, then moved aside to let me sit in his seat and nervously try to mimic what I’d seem him do. I listened carefully as he patiently correct the thousand and one mistakes I made, and eventually he let me do the job on my own, so I must have learned it well enough.

I did that job for three or four years (I forget exactly), and loved it from beginning to end. There were probably a few off days, but I don’t remember them and I never got tired of the job. I would’ve done it for as long as the Air Force let me stay there.