People who meet me for the first time (those willing to do it a second time are in unsurprisingly short supply) invariably express surprise when they learn I served in the Air Force for eight years. Even when I explain while all of it was spent in sky blue clothes, much of it was serving with members of the US Army and I was a "791X1", a radio and TV production specialist.
They tend to see wings and jet engines.
Sorry, nope, not this mother's son. I volunteered to take a train to Germany from Greenland and the Wing First Shirt not sure if I were joking, spent an hour explaining the impossibility of rail travel. "Even with all the windows up all the time?" I asked. Turns out, especially with the windows up. By the time he had finished both sides of the discussion I was close to being qualified as a submariner, and that's a choice for me even less attractive than piloting a jet.
I did not make a career out of the Air Force (I had to assume my luck would run out and eventually I'd end up in a 'real Air Force unit on a real Air Force base.' Nein danke) but I had a fine run of eight years. I wasn't greedy, it was someone else's turn to serve his country and having joined in the first wave of post-conscription recruitment probably made me a poster child for Future Shock for airmen and officers who were making a career of their service.
I wasn't what was new but rather who was next as many more who thought like me, on the rare occasions when I did think, were reporting for duty and the defense of the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
As Bruce told Rosalita, 'I ain't here on business, baby; I'm only here for fun,'
I regarded military service as positive application of avoidance behavior. Whether or not I found any value in making my bunk while in basic training with hospital corners or pulling the blankets so tight you could bounce change off them mattered not a jot to me. All of that was the Drill Instructor's religion, and I was pretty much an agnostic. Except, I always figured there to be infinitely more unpleasant things that I could be made to do 24/7 if I found bed-making once a day too tedious, and I had no desire to explore those possibilities.
I'd read Joseph Heller's Catch-22 at college and thought it was fiction only to find myself in the real-life, real-time novel without my library card. The premise for which the book was named became my mantra, "Catch-22 says we have the power to do to you anything you don't have the power to keep us from doing." You had me at power.
The first time we fell out for police call at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, (the largest Air Force base in the world without a runway, seriously) I was unhappy to discover we weren't assisting law enforcement as the phrase police call suggested but, rather, picking up cigarette butts with our fingers. Thinking about Catch-22 helped me remember that this was a good time to keep my disappointment to myself lest there be other, even less savory items we might need to pick up.
In recent years, as both the composition of the military and the nation from whom its membership is drawn have changed, those in uniform have created a descriptive that has spilled over to the private sector, 'toxic leadership' whose style may be hard at times to distinguish but whose impact and long-term effects are easily discernible though sadly, not avoidable (at least so far).
If there's one thing the US military doesn't do, it's muddle along and the leadership of the armed forces having struggled for over a decade with an endless war that has challenged every assumption and eviscerated belief in long-held customs and traditions, are working to take the measure of toxic leadership straight-on.
where they can and when they can.
As a no-longer twenty-something who didn't know what he didn't know when he started on a journey that would make him a future veteran, having served with and worked for the USAF, the USA and the USN, I can assure those girding for battle that the color of the uniform matters far less than the character contained and constrained by its contents.
While each of us has a tale or two to tell as the victim, I know now we are often unaware that sometimes we're the practitioners of the politics of poison. It didn't start with us, but with us it must end.
-bill kenny
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