OK, so we arrived after an epic drive of about 20 hours, and three stops to cat-nap uncomfortably in a car full of dogs, Christmas gifts and luggage - variously in Lordsburg, someplace about two hours farther west than that, and a rest-stop in the mountains above Tucson. Look, when it’s too cold to sleep, and the air mattress has developed a slow leak and the dog and your child are bogarting most of the available space anyway… well, you may as well drive. Dunno about what rush hour traffic is like in Tucson these days, what with all the new construction, but it’s a breeze at 2AM!

We haven’t killed any Californians yet, we had a nice Christmas and will return with less stuff than we came with, the dogs haven’t fought too much with my parents’ dogs, they think the Weevil is a charmer (except for her chronic tail injury opening up and her painting blood all over the place… thank god for the invention of liquid bandage and lots of paper towels and spray cleaner….) and Spike is as cute and fluffy as ever.

Blondie is spending a couple of days in Pasadena with Pippy and her family, and my youngest brother, I am holding the fort at Mom and Dads - where they still refuse to move into the last quarter of the previous century and venture into the wild uncharted waters of the internet. But they do have a functioning computer, and I am pounding out a couple of reviews and another two or three chapters of the Adelsverein Trilogy, or Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms.

Yes, we’re alive, nothing has blown up in our absence, and I just emptied 3,000 spam comments out of the queue - about par, considering.

Merry Christmas, to everyone but whoever is running the spam comment generator. (You should be tossed out naked in a field of poison ivy and fire ants.)

Sgt. Mom

Regular reader Robert D. emailed me overnight, letting me know that an ace in two wars, General Robin Olds had died over the weekend.

In my early time in service, General Olds was famous for a defiantly non-reg mustache, and for having flown with Chappie James over Vietnam, forming a duo nicknamed “Blackman and Robin”.

He was a colorful character; these days seeming like a character in a swashbuckling adventure novel, or a movie serial.

More here.

A meditation upon one of WWII’s most unusual missions… which in even at the time seemed almost as if it were a movie…

From Richard Fermandez, “Wretchard” at The Belmont Club, courtesy of PJ Media.

I listened to a story on NPR this week, about the finding of the wreck of the Macon, one of the great navigatable dirigibles that for a time…or so the great minds of the early 20th century assumed… would give a run for their money to aircraft. For quite a long time, beginning with the Montgolfier brothers, it was assumed that various forms of lighter-than-air constructions were the wave of the future… not those fragile little mosquitoes that were the prototypical airplanes. From just before WWI, and for some time after, it looked like dirigibles would be the kings of commercial aviation, the seas patrolled, and the continents spanned commercially by luxuriously outfitted air-liners. Images of great silver airships are ubiquitous in commercial art, and futuristic visions throughout the 20ies and 30ies; the Empire State building, after all, was topped with a mast from which it was fondly hoped to moor dirigibles. (The thought of disembarking from a passenger liner moored there, and tripping merrily along some kind of walkway down to the observation deck is enough to give any acrophobic a case of the screaming willies, though, which may be why it never came to pass.)

The Germans had developed such rigid-framed airships late in the 19th century, and used them extensively during WWI, first as bombers, notably targeting London and Paris. They were huge lumbering craft, capable of traveling great distances and staying aloft for many hours. Alas, they were also slow and un- agile, which made them splendid targets in offensive operations… and they also burned spectacularly when struck, since they were usually filled with hydrogen gas. Although such aircraft with a variety of types of frames, or no frames at all went on being used throughout the war, they were more utilized for observation, or on ocean-going patrols. But when the war was over, it looked like the day for long-distance rigid-framed aircraft had dawned.

The British built a series of them, one of which was the first to make a trans-Atlantic round trip, in slightly less than 200 hours, in 1919. That craft, and its successor both crashed and burned spectacularly, as did an Italian-manufactured dirigible purchased at around that time by the US Navy. In 1923, the Navy built an entirely rigid-framed aircraft designed to be lifted by helium, the “Shenandoah”, the first such entirely built in the United States. Two years later, while on a publicity tour in the Midwest, the Shenandoah was caught in a violent thunderstorm and ripped into three pieces. The command cabin dropped like a rock, killing all in it, including the Shenandoah’s commander, but the stern and bow sections floated down more gently. Crewmen in the bow section called out to a farmer on the ground below to grab ropes trailing from the nose and tie them to a tree, and when everyone had slid to safety, brought shotguns for the survivors to use to puncture the helium cells.

Another dirigible manufactured in Germany and delivered to the US as part of war reparations was renamed the “Los Angeles”; fitted out as a passenger liner, with Pullman staterooms and bunks, it made over 200 uneventful trips, mostly to Puerto Rico and South America. An Italian semi-rigid airship called the Norge, fitted out by a scientific expedition flew from Spitsbergen, Norway to Teller Alaska by way of the North Pole in 1926: it would have been the very first aircraft to fly over the North Pole, but for Richard Byrd in an airplane, three days earlier. The Norge, and part of it’s crew was subsequently lost on another flight over the Pole, two years later.

But enthusiasm ran high during the mid-Twenties, regardless. Progress would always be a little bumpy, seemed to be the prevailing mood, and all these problems would be worked out, eventually. The American company Goodyear was granted certain patent rights related to dirigible construction, and began work on two more dirigibles for the US Navy, the Akron and Macon. They would be essentially flying aircraft carriers, capable of launching and retrieving four or five single-engine patrol airplanes from a hanger-bay equipped with a trapeze-like winch.

In the meantime, the British government launched a great project to build two enormous dirigibles, the R100 and the R101, which would be the largest in the world with accommodations for 100 passengers. The Germany Zeppelin firm had begun to recover enough to launch an enormous airship named after its founder. The “Graf Zeppelin” would be the first airship to circumnavigate the globe, and with it’s successors, partake in regular scheduled transatlantic passenger service. It was hoped that the British R 100 and R 101 would similarly expand passenger service: the R 100 flew to Canada and back, with no other event that being caught in a storm. On return, it was put into a hanger, pending return of the R 101 from it’s maiden voyage to India. But the R 101, plagued by technical problems and forced to fly too low in compensation, clipped a church steeple and crashed in flames near Beauvais, France early in 1930 , with the loss of nearly all on board. The British government quietly pulled the plug on subsequent airship construction; so later did the US Congress. The Akron, launched with great hopes in 1931 was caught in a violent storm off New Jersey two years later, with the loss of all but a handful of its crew. The Macon, put into service at the same time was also caught in a storm, this one off the California coast near Monterey in 1935. Most of the Macon’s crew survived, and the wreckage of it and the patrol aircraft it carried, has just recently been located on the sea-bed.

The spectacular loss of the Hindenburg, two years after the crash of the Macon, only added to public misgivings, although the argument has been made that the great airships were doomed, by increasing competition from commercial airplane services and the coming of a new war, where conventional air craft would be of far more use. But the fairly constant series of spectacular airship disasters probably darkened the public and the political view, too. In the long run, airplanes may have been as much at a hazard, the development of air services just as rocky, and the cumulative casualties just as many. But there was enormous prestige placed in those few great dirigible projects, and great expectations by the public made the various disasters all the more public and crushing. It would have been as if over half the Mercury or Gemini flights launched by NASA had failed spectacularly in mid-flight. No matter what the prestige involved with dirigibles, or the lofty goals, a lot of people just quietly decided it just cost too much, even if it wasn’t a technological dead end in the first place. Now there are only a few places where you can stand, and imagine a great silver craft, hovering overhead, or being winched into a huge hanger: this great hanger at Moffit Field, near San Jose is one of them. And now the underwater wreck of the Macon may be the largest piece of interwar aviation history still identifiable on earth.

Reader Kaj added this comment, which was deleted in in my haste to clear out an accumulation of 30o auto-spam-comments this morning 9-29-06

“Admiral Byrds claims of being first to the pole by air are at best a bit
tenuous. The first undoubted crossing was by Norge, incidentally making Roald
Amundsen(and crew) the first, and the first to be on both poles.
I would have liked to refer to Wikipedia, but their page on admiral Byrd has
been used by hollow earth conspirazoids, claiming Byrd found the entrance to the
inner earth(!).
So much for Wikipedia credibility. ” - Sgt Mom

Unaccustomed as I am to giving a good goddamn about the blatherings of movie stars and other reality-challenged morons in the entertainment industry— we pay these people inordinately large salaries to dress up and pretend to be other people for our amusement, and I have always just tried to think of them as a breed of well-trained performing monkeys— I am a little surprised to find myself even considering a blog-post about Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving arrest and his subsequent widely publicized anti-Semitic outburst, recorded apparently in its very ugly entirety. It’s been all over the entertainment industry media, to which I never (well hardly ever) pay attention, but Blondie does… and if her reaction to the whole thing is anything typical, the very photogenic Mr. Gibson may have a big-post rehab problem. She was honestly revolted by the whole nasty diatribe, will probably not see whatever his next movie is, and is even put off by the thought of watching any of the old Mad Max movies again. In vino, veritas, you see, truth at the bottom the wineglass; she and I have been around long enough to know that an over-sufficiency of alcohol doesn’t really change a person. It just loosens inhibitions, and their grip on whatever façade they maintain over their true personality. Everyone knows people who are kind, funny and amusing sober, and even more so when smashed… and conversely, at least one individual who only appears to be kind, funny and amusing, when sober. When that kind gets a skin-full, the real underlying person comes out, and it is usually a memorably nasty piece of work. So, while drunk on his ass, a movie star who has a public persona of being a rather genial, fairly devout sort of family man is revealed to be… well, something rather less genial, to put it kindly. And since he is in the entertainment business, this has implications for more than just his family, circle of friends and therapist.

It’s enough to make one madly nostalgic for the old studio morality clauses, actually. On the whole and over the long run, we rather prefer our entertainers to have a private life pretty much be congruent with what they play on the screen, assuming that we have to know anything about their personal lives at all. Frankly I’d rather see someone like Meryl Streep or Judi Dench spend three decades or more playing a great many different and interesting characters, and living a dull and blameless personal life out in the suburbs between movie shoots. Or even a Robert Mitchum, who seems to have in real life been pretty much the same kind of two-fisted, hard-drinking brawler he often played. I’m fairly sure that Rock Hudson would never have been as big a movie star as he was, if everyone had known that in real life he played for the other team, although we can now appreciate him being a much better actor than we thought back then, playing all those love scenes, with women. If he had been outed in the 1950ies, Rock would have been dropped…er, like a hot rock. What he was in real life, was just not congruent with the roles he played, and the public personality he appeared to be. I get the giggles myself, picturing him in a passionate movie cinch with Doris Day, knowing what I know now. So, how many people will giggle cynically when they see Mel playing a regular guy?

As I wrote here last month, anti-Semitism in the US never quite has attained the virulence that it has in Europe, for a number of likely reasons. Not to say it anti-Semitism never appeared in the American cultural or political body politic; there are plenty of examples to the contrary. But set against that are even more accounts of how in a lot of places, and on a lot of occasions, it was something that, to use an English expression, was just not done, being neither condoned or approved of, and on one famous occasion, it brought down a bigger hero than a movie actor, a man whose credentials for being an American hero were somewhat more substantial than being able to recite lines in front of a camera; Charles Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, Lucky Lindy himself, who by 1941 had spent nearly two decades in the public eye, after his epic crossing of the Atlantic, solo and non-stop in a single-engine and the ghastly kidnapping and death of his first child and the resulting investigation and trial. Aviator, writer, scientist and traveler, he had become a passionate speaker, and one of the leading lights in the America First Committee, a group formed to oppose any American involvement in what would become the Second World War. Many of the founding members- intellectuals, businessmen, and politicians alike- were honorable, and passionate patriots, who were convinced that the war in Europe was none of our affair, and that involvement in it would not end well or to American advantage, and had the example of the first war to go on. Conventional wisdom of that time had it that America had been suckered into participating in World War One by an unholy cabal of slick politicians and greedy arms merchants, and as war broke out in Europe in 1939, Americans very rightfully felt they’d better not get fooled again. But there were other, less honorable motivations motivating members of America First, traditional dislike of Britain’s imperial and financial powers, admiration for , or fear of Germany, deep dislike of President Rooseveldt…and as historian David Gardner wrote “ Anti-Semitism was the most inflammatory issue in the isolationist debate. Jews had good reason to hate Hitler… Jewish interventionists could therefore be motivated only by a desire to help co-religionists in Europe. To save them, Jews appeared willing to sacrifice American lives. …The fact that interventionist sentiment was strongest in the traditionally conservative south and southwest, areas of small Jewish population, had done little to change popular belief that Jews were leading the drive for war.”
And by the fall of 1941, events had skidded way beyond anyone’s control, least of all the passionate anti-interventionalists of America First. Rooseveldt had won re-election the year before, a military draft had been instituted, Lend-Lease aid and volunteers flowed towards Britian, along with considerable American sympathy. After a U-boat fired on an American destroyer, President Rooseveldt authorized the US Navy to shoot back. Passions ran high, as events converged, and Lindbergh addressed an America First rally in De Moines, saying “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire …These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence… it is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany… But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences… Their greatest danger to this country is in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government…”
Lindbergh had long been a hero to most Americans, even as he had become so deeply involved in America First, and certainly viewed by many, especially in the Rooseveldt administration as an admirer of Hitler, and the Nazi Party , but this speech— described as intemperate and inflammatory— brought down a storm on his head. The America First Committee, fractured and was made irrelevant by Pearl Harbor, and Lindbergh himself was all but made a political outcast by the opprobrium that descended upon him.
Curiously, the speech that killed his political career was made on September 11th.
(More fascinating stuff about America First Committee… much of which seems curiously relevant, these days)

This month is the anniversary of the very crack of dawn, for American military aviation, and it happened in San Antonio. At the Fort Sam Houston parade ground… or to be precise, over it. More here, by a local reporter.

To: Ms. Jill Edwards, Ms. Ashley Miller, Student Body Senate, University of Washington
From: Sgt Mom
Re: “The University of Washington’s student senate rejected a memorial for alumnus Gregory “Pappy” Boyington of “Black Sheep Squadron” fame amid concerns a military hero who shot down enemy planes was not the right kind of person to represent the school.”

1. How very, very precious, and I do not mean that in a complimentary way, Ms. Edwards & Ms. Miller. It does not reflect well on the education for which someone is presumably paying a great deal of money, to be so casually dismissive of the qualities of someone who of someone who— along with a great many of his contemporaries— risked his life decades ago in order to make it possible for you to sit in a quiet, well-appointed classroom and pass judgment… and a factually misplaced judgment, at that.

2. I really can’t, at this distance, make out what you and your peers may have been taught or not taught in your comfortable, academic Eden, but it appears that history, ancient and modern, is most decidedly not on your personal study plan. If more than anything can be learned in a… ahem… a real history class, not the thinly disguised Marxist polemic so in fashion at certain establishments, it would be the truth of the old adage that “Peace is the dream of the wise, but wars are the history of men.” And by “men” of course, I mean humankind as a whole, not the gender in particular. So sic the Women’s Studies Department on me for not using the approved PC phrase du jour… like I give a flying F**k anyway.

3. Since war is lamentably a certain constant, much as we might wish and hope and pray otherwise, warriors are also a constant. Let me break it to you gently, Ms Edwards, Ms Miller, the common experience of a lot of your fellow humans down the ages has been that of being hapless, inoffensive, hardworking and peace-and-quiet loving… prey. Yes, my dear, sweet innocent student body senators, they wound up having their peaceful happy little agrarian communities or states smashed and ravaged, burnt and sacked, and themselves and their families murdered, raped and/or enslaved by every robber gang, army or larger, more un-socially aware human organization… unless the community, state or kingdom which they happened to find themselves resident in had the ability and the will to prevent this from happening.

4. Yes, my dear innocent students, peace is not the natural happy state of humankind… it is a rare and dear-bought commodity, purchased in blood for, and sometimes by the citizens of the state or city in which they lived. The first, and most original obligation owed by the free citizens of ancient Greece and Rome was their duty to defend their polis, their city, their community and their fellows and families with arms, as soldiers, according to their means. This, alas, was a necessary duty, for people who just want to live in peace and quiet, with their families, communities and livelihoods all secure. If you don’t believe me on this, just check any of the recent news stories about Darfur. Just because you are not interested in war, does not mean that war is uninterested in you.

5. Of late, in this age of specialization, we have tended to farm the job of military defense of the polis out to those who are truly interested in doing it, and who have a natural skill. There are, and have always been people who do not mind going into danger, and in fact rather enjoy blowing stuff up. They are good at it, for the most part. Warriors, like war, and the poor, are always with us; wishing it weren’t so won’t make it all go away. The whole purpose of a military, as I have written before, is to kill those designated as our enemies. Think of our warriors as another blogosphere essayist did, as they are our sheepdogs, protection against the wolves, the wolves that always threaten any community.

6. Yes, I can see why Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington would not exactly be the beau ideal of your pretty little campus: he was crude and rude, an unrepentant killer; a rowdy, undisciplined and brawling menace; a drinker and alleged wife-beater, cheerfully willing to go to China as a mercenary… not exactly anyone’s notion of a model citizen. He lived fast and recklessly, and was probably the most surprised of all that he lived long enough to die within a breath of old age; No, Ms. Miller, he would not have been your set’s cup of tea at all. Very probably in some vast imaginary late 20th century dictionary, there is a picture of him, next to the entry for “Politically Incorrect.”

7. And yet… there you go; he had a certain set of skills; as a pilot, a leader, and a warrior. For whatever his reasons, he served, in China and in the Pacific. He and his ilk kept the wolf of the moment from the door of the peaceful, the harmless and the inoffensive, in such security that they could begin to think their shelter owed everything to their own honest good will, and not the blood and dedication of those who secured such for them at such cost. For all his faults, and in company with his peers, “Pappy” Boyington might have done more to protect the defenseless than all the college senates and interest groups ever convened.

8. Frankly, I am enjoying a mental image of a statue of Colonel Boyington coming to life and delivering a good old-fashioned and profane Marine Corps ass-chewing. Such might be a truly educational experience to a student body which, lamentably appears to be a collection of sheltered, spoiled, candy-ass yuppy puppies… and one which seems to exist in ignorance of the means by which they can continue to be sheltered, spoiled, etc cetera.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom.

(Link courtesy of The Belmont Club.. BTW, Cpl/Sgt. Blondie points out that most USMC Medal of Honor awards were made postumously)

I got the shock of my life this morning. An email from an old friend who was stationed with me at CCK AB in Taiwan. I have no idea how he found me, but it was a joy, and a pleasure to catch him up on the last 25 years. We worked together in the base MARS station. If you ever were overseas and talked by phone patch to home, you know what I mean. I was able to talk to my wife about every week due to my position. It made the tour much shorter! Some days are just jewels!

Blackfive has paratrooper porn.

Yeah I know…what can you do with people who think jumping out of airplanes is fun? Ya make ‘em Airborne.

Yeesh…

From Air Force Space Command News Service:

CAPE CANAVERAL AFS, Fla. – What took years to build took seconds to knock down Aug. 6 when 171 pounds of strategically placed explosives were detonated, toppling the historic 179-foot mobile service tower at Launch Complex 13 here.

The 1,300-ton structure was used to launch Atlas/Agena space launch vehicles in the 1960s and 1970s. The most famous of those launches were five Lunar Orbiter missions for NASA in 1966 and 1967. Those missions photographed about 99 percent of the moon’s surface and helped pave the way to men landing on the moon in 1969.

The pictures are pretty cool, but it’s a little sad to see this. I’m sure it’s tough to have to maintain an unused launch tower, but this was a piece of history, one of the monuments to our nation’s continuing pioneer spirit.

Fortunately, the towers at Launch Complex 39 are a little bigger and would be harder to take down.

I am again watching a cable show decrying the virtues of the F-104 Starfighter. But wait a minute… Weren’t it’s records for top speed, time-to-speed. and time-to-altitude, eclipsed first by the F-106 Delta Dart, and then the F-4 Phantom?

First, lets get the formalities out of the way:

This is a chain interviewing game for blogs. Here are its rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying “interview me.” The first five commenters will be the participants.

2. I will respond by asking you five questions.

3. You will update your blog/site with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. (Write your own questions or borrow some.)

Here are Stryker’s Questions and my answers:

Were you a “4 and Out” guy who stayed in or have you always planned to make a career of it?
I was very much a “4 and out” guy. No one was more suprised than me that the AF and I got along so well.

What was your best assignment (or shop) and why?
Three years as part of the Commander’s 24-hour Watch at USPACOM. It was a feast or famine job. Either there was nothing going on and we watched a lot of TV and built boring briefs or we were slammin’ and jammin’ for our 12 hour shift while trying to build informative briefs. Extremely tiring, sometimes extremely stressfull, but very rewarding. Also…Oahu is a great place to have downtime.

What’s the best single piece of advice you would give an Airman?
Take care of your family. That includes the people you work with, that work for you, that you work for. Take care of each other. Be aware of each other. Become a positive part of the lives of the people you interact with everyday. The root word of Sergeant means “to serve.” Be of service to those around you and you won’t go home at night wondering what the hell you’re doing. It’s not easy and I haven’t always done a great job of it, but when I keep that in mind, I have better days. There is no shame and certainly a great deal of satisfaction in being of service to those around you.

What is the single worst thing to happen in the AF during your career?
That’s hard. At the risk of mugging it up for the audience I’d have to say that we’re still recovering from Gen McPeak and I don’t know if we’ll ever get out of that tailspin. There’s an entire generation of folks that believe that their goal is to get enough training and experience to become a contractor.

What major talent do you possess that has nothing to do with the AF?
I’m a competent character actor.

I just posted a story about my week’s flying - funny I hope! at my personal blog here

Enjoy!

Joe Comer

Because as she was adjusting my crutches and showing me how to use them for post-surgery tomorrow, she said something like this:

You want to make sure you have about a 30 degree bend in your elbow so your triceps take all the weight and my…you do have some triceps don’t you?

Why yes…yes I do.

She’s a wonderful human being…a fine young American…and she knows how to make an anxious older guy feel damn good. That’s natural talent dammit and it deserves respect.

when there was a rent-a-cop at the gate of my base checking ID Cards.

I don’t like it one bit.

I know there was talk about this, but who thought it was actually a good idea?

Everyone I’ve talked to, including contractors, thinks that this is just going too damn far.

Discuss.

Got this one from a friend of mine, thought I’d share.

For those of you stationed in or above the snow belt, nothing is much stranger than “SnowCall.” We’re the military right? We’re the ones defending our country? Yet, sometimes 6 inches of blowing snow can shut down a base to all but “essential” personnel. Why? Because somewhere at sometime in the past, some uniformed person from Florida tried to drive to work in the snow with their ultra-light but 4 wheel drive pickup and took out a civilian family and thus…all of us are not allowed to drive in “X” amount of snow any longer.

That’s part of the equation.

Once upon a time delayed reporting meant, “You have three extra hours to come in to work but don’t push it okay? Take the time you need but get here.” These days, mostly because we don’t have guys in uniforms behind the wheels in the plows any longer. We have civilians. Who may or may not show up when they’re told to work. Who can tell you, “No thanks, I don’t want no stinking overtime.” Who can suddenly say, “Hey, the city needs extra drivers and they’re paying BIG money because they shorted their contract.” and they can bail on us. These days delayed reporting for snow means, “Don’t even think of trying to get here before the 3+ hour mark because neither the streets nor the parking lots will be cleared yet.” Once upon a time “Don’t come in.” meant that Odin himself had taken a special interest in our part of the world and dumped FEET of snow on us. Now it’s an indication that our “civilian partners” couldn’t handle 3-5 inches of new snow over about 30 acres in any less than 18 hours.

Yes folks, privatization is saving us lots and lots of money and making the military more efficient. You betcha.

But hey, Boyo doesn’t have school today either and I get to roll around in the snow with him so…who am I to complain?

Exertional Compartment Syndrome is what I’ve got. Been thinking about it and decided that if I’m going to do the First Sergeant thing, I should be running with my folks and not wimpin’ out on the sidelines doing the bike. Yes the bike is harder than it was…but no, I still don’t feel like it’s a real test.

So…sometime in the next month or two I’ll have my lower legs cut open from the knee to the ankle, but not very deep, just skin, fat, and then the facia slit on the tibialis anterior muscle of both legs and then the legs will be closed up again. I’ll be home the same day. Takes anywhere from 4 to 12 weeks before I can start really working them again…I’ll be able to walk the same day although not far.

I’m very happy my Doctor did what he did. He made me run on a treadmill until my legs hurt like hell and then sat me down and felt up and down the shin and around and said…”Nah, don’t have to stick a needle in that…it’s pretty obvious that thing’s gonna blow at any minute.” Funny guy.

I wasn’t going to post this…I was going to save it and wait for it to break via the Air Force Times or some other medium and then giggle about how “I knew that.” The problem is…the story isn’t breaking. It’s the end of the year. Supposedly everyone has either passed their PT test or they’re in classes to get their scores where they need to be. That’s what should have happened. That’s the way the system works. You either passed, or you’re working on passing. That’s the deal. Having my leg give me fits and having to work on trying to run and then realizing that I can’t run and it not being my fault and watching all the folks I was in class with bust their asses to get their run times down or get their bike test where it needs to be was a great experience. I’m proud of my score. I earned it. I’m proud of the folks I was in class with. So for the folks who haven’t passed and who aren’t in class trying to pass, I have little to no sympathy. There was a gal in my PT Class who was in a freaking CAM Walker (removable walking cast). I really don’t want to hear any sob stories, ‘k?

The new Air Force PT Test consists of three parts:

Aerobics: which consists of either the 1.5 mile run or the new, harder, bike test. That’s worth up to 50 points right there. That’s the big kahuna. You don’t score in the upper 30s there…you aren’t passing.

Body Composition (Your Waist Size): Worth up to 30 points. If your waist is over 40″, you’re going to class to learn how to cut some of that goo off of you. No, Stryker, they don’t recommend liposuction.

Muscle Fitness:
Pushups. Worth up to 10 points.
Situps. Worth up to 10 points.

For a possible total of 100 points.

A score of 90 or above is considered “Excellent.” You-da-man. If you score here, you don’t have to be tested again for two years. You’re in shape…we get it.

Now, you need a score of 75 or greater to be considered “Good.” Good means that you test again in another year.

If you score 70 to 74.9, that’s considered “Marginal.” You should have to take a class that encourages a healthier lifestyle and will test again in 6 months.

Under 70 is poor. You not only have to spend some time in a classroom to encourage you to get thy shit together, you’re being handed over to “them.” You know who I’m talking about, they were the gym teachers when we were back in school. I’m sure they’re called something like “Physical Lifestyle Enhancement Facilitators” or something equally as smarmy, but I just call them (shudder) “Trainers.” My Trainers were young, in very good shape, and just plain mean. I owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

So where exactly is the system broke? You take the test, you get your score, you know right away whether or not you’re participating in “mandatory fun” at the gym for the next couple months or not. How could the system be broke?

As most of you know…in this day and age…no event in the military really takes place until you enter the results into a computer. And depending on the size of an Air Force Unit, the folks who are giving the test, may not be the folks who are putting the data into that computer. The folks doing data entry may have up to 10 different folks feeding them score sheets.

Take another look at the block up above and notice where I say that each area is “worth” up to “X” amount of points. Say a 43 year old guy runs the mile and a half in 12:10. That’s worth 40.5 points. It’s entered into the computer as 12:10…the computer does it’s thing…it computes 12:10 for a 43 year old male as being worth 40.5 points. How would a 43 year old guy score the full 50 points? He’d run the mile and a half in 10:24 or better.

You know what you score if you walk off the track or fail to complete the mile and a half? You score a zero. Or, I should say, it’s “worth” zero. However, that’s not what the computer is looking for…the computer isn’t looking for you to feed it the score…it’s looking for the time. And because the folks who built the database weren’t thinking everything through and because no one was double checking the results the computer was coming up with as they put in score sheet after score sheet…as far as the computer is concerned, 0:0 is just another time under 10:24 that’s worth 50 points.

How do I know this? Because when I went to have my real passing score of 75 put into the computer in my Orderly Room, they had to remove the score of 89 that was in there from back when I failed my PT Test in October.

So…if you’re Air Force and you KNOW you didn’t do as well on the PT Test as you should have and you’re still waiting for your unit to contact you, perhaps…just maybe…you might want to log onto the Air Force Portal and take a look at your score.

‘Cuz I KNOW my unit is working on fixing this thing but what I don’t know is what they’re going to do to the folks who have been sliding since they failed. See, our PT Managers told each and every person who failed to contact them or the Orderly Room if they hadn’t heard back from them in 10 Duty Days. I don’t know what your folks told you but I’m thinkin’, “Hey, they never contacted me after I failed.” isn’t going to fly…especially if you’re still a tub of goo who can’t wobble around the track in the right amount of time or ride the bike with a decent heart rate.

AFI 10-248 is the prescribing directive for the Air Force Fitness Program.

Any of yous guys ever had something called, “Exercise Induced Compressed Compartment Syndrome?” I’m looking for folks who have had it and had the surgery to correct it. I’m going to have to make a decision next month on whether or not to let the Air Force cut my leg open. The other option is a semi-permanent waiver from running, which, with my knees, sounds very attractive. I save a surgery and my knees.

To the makers of those wonderful gel paks that you put in the freezer and then put on painful spots on your body…you have my undying gratitude.