Experiencing the U.S. Air Force
Active duty: April, 1967 – January, 1971
The status of the military in American society has always been a point of confusion for American liberals and radicals. All too often the military is characterized as a conservative institution of gung-ho patriots that believe in a very strong "America first" patriotism. What is too often missing in such stereotypes of the military is an understanding of the role of the military as an institution of socialization into adulthood, particularly for young adults from poor backgrounds who have no other means of breaking free of their family. Thus one of the main goals of the following pages is to address, through my own experiences, how the military acts an institution that (in some ways similar to college) shapes the future of young adults.
A second goal, however, is to use my experiences from when I was stationed overseas to simply highlight the emotional and intellectual value of traveling abroad, particularly when young. It was through my military experiences in general and from being stationed overseas that I began to develop an understanding that most of my assumptions about the world (from what and how we eat, to how society is organized) were simply cultural habits that were no more "right" or "wrong" than a whole slough of other ways of thinking and acting.
The pictures on the following pages primarily reflect my military experiences while stationed overseas. All of the pictures used here were originally taken by the author during his military service. Having been in storage for 30+ years, the original slides had become discolored and were marred with mold. Fortunately, a friend was able to skillfully use a variety of software packages to restore these to their original condition.
So, let's start at the beginning...
December, 1966 -
April, 1967
During the Vietnam war (and before the draft lottery), you had to be in college full-time to avoid being drafted. Since I had to support myself and couldn’t get loans (I didn’t do college prep in high school), I was constantly exhausted from both working full-time and going to school full-time. Besides, I didn’t know what I wanted to major in, and I somehow knew I needed to leave Jacksonville (my home town). “Good Southern boys” didn’t avoid the draft by claiming conscientious objection, so I joined the Air Force in December of '66 to avoid being drafted. (“Good Southern boys” also didn’t admit to being queer (and I surely hadn’t), so it wasn’t a lie when I said ‘no’ to the enlistment question of ‘are you, or have you ever been, a homosexual?’)
In April of ’67, I showed up at a military base in Jacksonville for the physical and induction. That I was entering a whole new world was evident from the beginning. I had never been more than 400 miles from home and had never been in an airplane, but my first order on the first day of induction was that I was to be in charge of the other new inductees (about 10 of us) on the flights from Jacksonville to San Antonio. We flew by jet from Jacksonville, to Atlanta, to Houston – and then by prop plan ("Tree Top Airways" we called it – Trans Texas Airways) from Houston to San Antonio. It didn’t help that the flight from Houston to San Antonio was in a thunderstorm and the plane regularly felt like it was going to be ‘thrown’ to the ground by the storm.
Basic Training
Basic training
is what you go
through in the first 6 weeks.
Technically, I failed it. Being
in relatively poor physical shape with poor hand-eye coordination, I could not
successfully complete the obstacle course, could not run a mile in the required
time, and most of my rifle shots hit the target of the guy next to me. But, I had tested well for going to language
school, so it seems they weren’t too concerned if I didn’t have the physical
fitness for combat. (Which was the first sign that the military wasn’t as “rule bound“ as it led you to believe.)
The main thing about basic training is that it is where they try to break you – it’s sort of a test to see if you’ll tolerate being in the service. Having your head shaved; wearing uniforms that don’t fit and having your civilian clothes taken away; receiving arbitrary and nonsensical orders; being kept awake late at night and forced up early in the morning; having rules about when you can speak, sit, stand, sleep, eat, or perform essential body functions – all serve to break you from your sense of self, your own sense of self-importance. This doesn’t really work for long, since people do go back to being who they were -- but, it does break young men from their families and backgrounds, and gives them an identity attached to their military buddies.
I have no pictures from the Basic Training days at Lackland AFB or the brief excursions into San Antonio.