Soul Baring

A comment from the last post:
How does it feel/ has it felt in the past when you left for work for what you thought would be a regular shift and you ended up in Central Asia? Or perhaps that's just my strange mind buzzing on about nothing...

That's not quite how it is. Perhaps there was a time when that might happen, but the Air Force has long since wrapped itself in thousands and thousands of pages of regulations, some of which are designed to prevent that sort of thing and generally succeed in doing so.

Much more common would be the situation where you are relaxing at home on Saturday afternoon, and get the phone call telling you that you are now in crew rest and will be leaving in 12 hours. Sometimes this is only for a simple local mission. Other times it's for a week-long TDY. When the Iraq war kicked off, people got the phone call at home, went to work 12 hours later, and didn't come back for four months. Lucky for me, I was in training at the time and didn't go anywhere more frightening than Oklahoma. A friend of mine complains that he "missed the war." I used to feel the same way. In that sense, my sanity level has actually improved over the last year.

But whether you have 12 hours or 12 days notice, there is still something unsettling about a job where you are approximately equally likely to spend the night at home as somewhere else. Sometimes this is a good thing, like last October when I spent four nights in Honolulu waiting for our receivers to get fixed. That was nice. I'll let the AF send me to Honolulu anytime. Only a couple weeks before I'd spent two nights in the Azores, and I feel much the same way about Terceira Island as I do about Honolulu. But then there are the times when you go to Qatar. Or Kyrgyzstan. Or Iraq. Or Perry, Georgia. It would be nice if it all evened out in the end, but it doesn't. In the military, you will get a chance to see the world; just not the parts you want to.

Between February 2004 and February 2005, I was TDY or deployed 187 days. That's slightly more than half the year and second highest among the copilots. Colleagues in the tanker community at McConnell or Grand Forks AFBs are often deployed as much as 220 days a year. In our squadron, a boom operator named Nate Hooper was deployed 223 days in that span, the highest TDY rate in the squadron. The AF does get off easy by comparison to the other services, but it's hard to pity a drowning man when you're suffocating yourself. (Also, as AF people often say, I joined the AF because it wasn't the Army, so don't tell me how hard the Army has it. I know. That's why I'm not there.)

In the same span, at least a third of the squadron members were TDY less than 30 days. So it's not evenly spread across the board, which as you'd expect makes things harder to take. Since December 2003, I haven't been at home for 60 straight days once. I have been in Kyrgyzstan for 60 straight days, however.

I don't know if I have it in my power to describe in writing how this whole situation actually feels. For some people, certainly, this makes our job interesting and enjoyable. I had hoped to be one of those people, but it turns out I'm not. If you can live in the moment, many deployments and nearly all TDYs can be very enjoyable (we even had a good time in Alpena, Michigan), and that is the only real chance you have. But eventually, the moments string together and you realize that a year has passed and you've accomplished absolutely nothing that has any meaning to you. And then you get depressed and start seeing a psychologist and taking SSRIs.

Being a flyer is very hard (although, after pilot training, the flying itself isn't). The schedule is built about a week in advance, and that's usually all the time you have to plan for what's coming next--although often deployments are scheduled farther in advance, though this is changing. Some trips are short and fun, some are long and unpleasant. Some are short and unpleasant. It's hard, if not impossible, to manage a regular social life under such circumstances, and I certainly have failed at this. The only thing that makes the lifestyle remotely livable is the flying, and thus it's true that to be an Air Force pilot, you absolutely have to want to fly more than anything else in the world.

When I was in pilot training, an IP told us that if we could see ourselves doing anything else but flying, we should get out of the flying business and find another career field. We were all headstrong and convinced that we were doing the best possible thing we could do, so none of us listened to him. But he was right. If you can see yourself doing something other than being an Air Force pilot, you won't be happy as an Air Force pilot.

Frankly, you have to love the flying more than anything else in the world. If you love the flying you can tolerate the lifestyle. But for me at least, and I'm sure for other pilots out there (probably even some in our squadron), the flying isn't enough anymore. It doesn't make up for the lifestyle, and week by week the gap grows larger.

In that light, you can understand why suddenly having sixty days of comparative normalcy in my life is a good thing, even if it means more uncertainty down the road.