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.