My life in the Military Industrial Complex

I served as a mechanic in the United States Airforce from 1987-88, before being released from my duties due to my critical view of the military. Anyway, I thought it might be fun to recount my experiences here, for your amusement and edification. Please stay posted, I will be adding to this post as time (and infant) permits.

In the meantime, let's meet the Pentagon's new spokesbot:
Pentagon's Unmanned Spokesdrone Completes First Press Conference Mission

In February of 1987, I was 22, I got on a plane and left Boston, where I had been studying, but had run into a fair amount of trouble (involving women and men with knives, just for starters). I returned to Britain, with my knife wounds and a healthy wariness of entanglements with members of the fair sex.

My mother and my friends were all happy to see me alive and in excellent health, but after a while, it became clear at my age I could not very well be hanging around the house all day. Britain being a welfare state (not quite Sweden, where my mother said that if you went there to sign on the dole, they would meet you at the airport in a limousine to drive you to the dole office), I went down to the dole office in Fulham Broadway and declared myself homeless.

They told me that if I could find an apartment, they would get the rent. I found a very nice place for about 500 quid a month, but then I did a few calculations in my reptile brain (utterly failing to see what a great deal I had on my hands). My simple calculations told me that as long as I signed on the dole, I would be eligible to have my rent paid, but that any job I could get could not even pay the rent, let alone allow me to live. Therefore, in my utter brilliance, I thought I would be better off enlisting in the US Airforce....doh! the stupidity.

If I had simply got myself in that apartment, finished my studies, my whole life would be completely different now. Well, too late to have regrets, but let me tell you, it does make a difference if you take the right or the left turn....

Anyway, regardless of the rights and wrongs of my decision, I found myself at RAF Mildenhall, which hosted a US squadron of bombers at the time. I spoke to the recruiter and made an appointment to come back up and take some tests. Later I went up with a handful of Brits who were American simply by dint of parentage, but British in every other way. My scores in the tests indicated that I ought to work with electronic gear, but seeing a bunch of Americans with M16s jumping into the back of a truck I thought that looked good and signed up to be military guard, or SP.

In any case, I found myself on a 747 with three or four of these other guys, and on my way to San Antonio, Texas.