Sunday, December 14, 2008

I graduated!

Well, I graduated from the Academy of Military Science which means that I am now a Second Lieutenant in the Air Force...crazy. I have to say that those six weeks really went by so fast. On October 12th I boarded a plane and headed for Knoxville, Tennessee where I would spend the next six weeks learning how to be an officer in the Air Force and a better leader. The first couple of weeks were pretty crazy. We would have to wake up at 5 am every morning and jump out of bed so that we would have enough time to get ready, clean our room, and be standing tall in formation at 0530. Now when I say cleaning our room I don't just mean throwing old dirty clothes under the bed like at home. We took cleaning our room to a whole new level. Every day we had to leave our rooms in "inspection order" which meant that everything had to be perfect. We had a book on all of the rules that we had to follow while at AMS. There were like 6 or 7 pages giving us instruction on exactly how our rooms should be. For example our beds had to be exactly 3 inches from the wall, 6 inches from the side of our wall locker, and our extra blanket had to be folded and placed on our bed with the fold exactly 21” from the top of the bed. That is only the beginning, everything had to be perfect. Let’s just say I’ve never had to iron my underwear, socks and t-shirts so that they would lie perfectly flat. We would have inspections randomly and would have to stand in our rooms and wait for our faculty advisor to walk in; we would then go to attention and wait to be yelled at. They would storm around wipe their finger on our locker, look at it very closely, and then look at us and say, "are you kidding me, this place is disgusting".
We lived in two man rooms with a common Squadron Room connecting the 10 two man rooms. In our Squadron we started off with 20 officer candidates and graduated with 18. They were all a great bunch of people. Just to become an officer in the Air Force you have to go before a hiring board and get hand selected by a reviewing board, so the people at AMS where top notch. They were professionals ranging from fighter pilots to intelligence officers. We were given tasks that would require us to come together as a Squadron and work as a team. For example toward the middle of the program we went to Patriot Challenge which was a 3 day adventure in Georgia. We had to simulate that we were at war against some fictitious country. The first day we were dropped off at a point and had to hike into our camp a few miles away using land navigation (map and compass). My prior training in the Army really prepared me for this challenge. At one point we had to Cross a 50’, river bed with nothing but a rope and a bunch of carabineers (it didn’t make it easier that we each had 40 lb rucksacks with all of our gear). This is where we really had to come together as a team. We had been instructed on how to build a rope bridge before we left. We had practiced by tying ropes around trees outside of our dorms and crossing a make believe river. The real thing was crazy. Once we built the rope bridge we all had to cross by hanging upside down and pulling ourselves across. It was a lot of fun.
That is all I am going to write about AMS today because I ran out of time, but I plan on adding a couple more posts about the crazy things that we did while we were there. I will also add some pics.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Finally....Class Dates!!!

I got the call! It seems like I have been waiting forever to find out when I will be starting training, but finally the wait is over. I found out that I will be leaving for AMS (Academy of Military Science) on 13 October 2008. AMS is a six week leadership course somewhere in Tennessee that turns people into officers in the Air Force. I am actually excited to see what it is like. I have been through Army basic training and multiple Army leadership courses and I am curious to see what the Air Force has in store for me. I am so excited to get into training and start the whole process of becoming an AF pilot. The only problem about the dates of AMS is that my little boy, Porter, will be turning one on the 25th of October. It is going to be so hard not to be there for his first birthday. We are going to celebrate his birthday the weekend before I leave. It will be a couple of weeks early, but he won't know the difference.
Before I leave for AMS I have to go to a base in Texas and get a very extensive flight physical. They want to make sure that I am healthy before they invest all kinds of time and money into my training. I am scheduled to go on the 3rd of September. I feel so thankful for my health. Luckily I don't have any abnormalities or vision problems, so I should be O.K.
I still don't know the dates of pilot training. I will graduate from AMS on the 22 of November and from what I have been told I can pretty much count on a class date sometime in the beginning of January 2009. I will let you know as soon as I hear anything.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

It's been a while

Alright… I guess I haven’t done the best job at keeping this journal current. I don’t think I even told you what type of aircraft I will be flying in the Air Force. I am going to be flying the KC-135 (pictured above) whose main role is to refuel other military aircraft in air. It is funny because in the Army my job was to drive big fuel tankers, and so in the interview they where joking about how I am still going to be driving fuel tankers, only now they will have wings.

A lot of people have been asking when I will be leaving. I still don’t have dates yet, but I am hoping to know actual dates in the next couple of weeks. We are thinking that I will make it into the August officer school and leave for pilot training in October. When I was selected by the unit in Ohio I was actually selected for the fiscal year 2009 which begins the first of October 2008. I was told that there was always a chance that I would get a class date earlier since there are always people that don’t make it through training for whatever reason and slots become available. It looks like I am not going to be able to go any earlier though because I was serving in the Army Reserve and the transition process took forever. I was finally released by the Army and about a month ago I swore in to the Air National Guard. It was a crazy feeling swearing into the Air Force. I served in the Army for almost 9 years (right after I graduated high school) and so that is all I know. It will be interesting transitioning to a different branch of the military and getting used to all of their traditions, and customs. I am so excited! I am going to try and be better at keeping this blog up to date especially since I will be leaving soon. Until then....se ya!