I joined the Air Force in 1988 at the age of 19 with a guaranteed job of Aeromedical Specialist, which at the time had an Air Force Specialty Code of 4F0X1. I was excited as hell to both get out of my small hometown which offered a high school graduate nearly very little when it came to job opportunities, and nothing along the lines of excitement either. Joining up as a United States Air Force medical technician offered both opportunity and I ended up having more excitement than I actually wanted.
I breezed through basic training. It was the easiest basic of the three different branches of military, actually four if you count the Marine Corp. We had minimal physical training and only one trip each to the rifle range and the obstacle course. Most of our days were filled with going from class room to class room learning the fundamentals of being an enlisted person in the US Air Force. Other than getting yelled at a lot, it was a pretty brain dead 6 weeks.
From there, I was transferred to my technical school at Brooks AFB, located in the south eastern corner of San Antonio, Texas. My move was accomplished by filling my duffle bag full of my issued uniforms and climbing on a bus to cross town from Lackland AFB, which was located in the south west quadrant of San Antonio to Brooks. I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to get to hell out of Texas. Being from a small town in Ohio, I considered Texas to pretty much be a barren wasteland.
Tech school was fascinating and fast pace. There was no room for slow learners and several people in that category washed out within a few weeks of starting training. From what I heard, they got shipped off to school to become Security Police. Fortunately, I had always been quick to learn and good student. I don't want to brag, but I maintained a 3.85 GPA through high school.
The nice thing about tech school was unlike basic training, where we lived in large bays and got told what to do from sunup to sundown, in tech school we lived in a regular barracks which comprised of a three story brick building with 20 rooms per floor. They stuffed us in two people to a room and two rooms shared a bathroom. After basic, that was pure luxury. If I remember correctly, I shared my room with a guy named Don Hammond.
I breezed through tech school during which I was taught to be an EMT (Basic), Emergency Medical Technician, and received national certification. Also, to prepare me for my first assignment, I was essentially trained to be the equivalent of a medical assistant in the civilian world. We were taught to do vital signs, assist in minor medical procedures, sterile fields, to give injections, start IVs, and a plethora of other skills we would need in the 'field'.
We were trained in the fundamentals of physical examinations too. We learned to do pulmonary function screening tests, EKGs, Visual Examinations (all the tests needed to screen pilot applicants), hearing tests and phlebotomy. By the time we were done with that block, we were all certified as Hearing Conservationists too.
Then we were taught how to respond to 'mass casualty' disasters and in doing so how to effectively triage various types of disaster scenes. Finally, we were taught fundamentals of field medicine, more specifically how to offer medical care in a deployment situation – that translated into what was needed for bare bones basing.
After graduating as one of the Distinguished Graduates, meaning I was one of the top 10 students, I received my first assignment to Hill AFB in Utah. The first thing I thought about the assignment was that it was a long way from Ohio. The second thing was that I was being sent to the ends of the earth to be surrounded by a bunch of Mormon crazies.
When I got to the base after taking a well-deserved 30 day leave back at home in Ohio, I was picked up at the Airport in Salt Lake City by my new supervisor, Staff Sergeant (SSgt) Scott Alderman. Sgt. Alderman was from Indiana so he was practically a next door neighbor in the grand scheme of things. The first thing I noticed about Sgt Alderman was unlike the Sergeants in basic training and tech school, Scott was actually friendly. He told me I could call him by his first name when we were off duty, which was unheard of during any of my training.
Since I arrived in the morning he took me by the 'office' to meet everybody. The head enlisted man in the Flight Surgeon's Office was MSgt Goldman, a big goofy guy from the Washington State whose title was the Superintendent of Aerospace Medicine. I was introduced to 2 other SSgts, and 2 Technical Sergeants (TSgt) one of whom was the Non-Commissioned Office in Charge (NCOIC) of the Physical Examinations section and the other was the NCOIC of the Flight Medicine Clinic. Scott's supervisor was TSgt James, a jolly Black guy from Virginia. Scott was in charge of Flight Physicals and I was to be his new assistant.
While I was at Hill, there were three significant events that happened. First I found a young woman who ended up being the light of my life. She was the daughter of one of the bases Chief Master Sergeants (CMSgt), which was the highest rank an enlisted person could attain in the Air Force. The second was that I was able to land an assignment as one of the squadron SMEs which I explain a bit later. The third was because of a greedy dictator in the Middle East.
Theresa McGraw was a pretty blond girl I met at the rec center playing tennis with my roommate about 3 months after I arrived at Hill. She was a high school senior who was playing a match with her best friend, Toni Tangretti. My roommate and I made a point to introduce ourselves to the girls and we joined up with them to play doubles, I took Terri as my partner and my roommate took her best friend. We had a blast, but most important thing that happened was I left that afternoon with a date for the next Friday evening with Terri.
After a series of dates, Terri took me home to meet her daddy and momma. I can tell you that I was more than just a little intimidated by her father, who was the Superintendent of CBPO, Combined Base Personnel Office. But over the course of the evening, I found out that he was a really cool guy and he seemed to like me. He gave tacit approval for me to date his daughter. His only condition was that I better not under any circumstances send his daughter back home to him pregnant. He didn't want to know what went on between Terri and me, after all, Theresa was 18. But, getting her pregnant without her being my wife would totally get me onto the Chief's shit list.
Terri was physically active girl and because of it she was in fantastic shape. You already know she played tennis, but she also played racket ball, shot hoops with a basketball, ran track and field as a distance runner, and just about anything else that got her outdoors. All of it suited me just fine because I loved the outdoors sports myself. We even went rock climbing on one of our dates.
On one date in the late summer, Terri and I were making out in my 1987 Ford F-150 parked on the bluff overlooking the Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island. It was just two blocks down from the USAF Clinic, which was an old hospital. It was the closest thing to a secluded spot there was on the base. We had been doing some pretty heavy duty snogging, when I finally got brave enough to put a hand up onto one of her breasts. We had been going out for several months and I had been chicken to attempt a move to second base. Probably because her dad was a CMSgt, but the biggest reason was at just barely 20 years old, I was still a virgin. I had opportunities as a teen to lose my cherry, but cupid was a fickle little fellow and threw road block after road block in my way of getting laid. That's another story.
Anyway, when I finally grew some balls and put my hand over Terri's breast, I felt her tremble in my arms. At first I was afraid I was doing something wrong, that's how inexperienced I was. When she trembled I quickly moved my hand away and I asked her, "Is everything okay?"
