As my days in Las Vegas drew to a close, my coworkers arranged a going-away party for me… at Star Trek: The Experience.
Before leaving for the party, I checked my email, and discovered a message from the base education office. Apparently, the results of my last CLEP test had come in, fulfilling the final requirement for my Associate’s degree in Emergency Management. Effective June 1st, I was finally a college graduate.
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As 2006 opened, my friends brought me along to a New Year’s party on the Strip, to help get my mind off everything that had happened over the past year.
The weekend, of course, brought new challenges to the brand new year. My dorm room shared a bathroom with the room next door, and my neighbor and I hosted a small party in my room. He, unfortunately, had too much to drink. When he insisted on trying to drive one of the girls back to her dorm, two blocks away, she and I both told him that he wouldn’t be driving anywhere that night, and took his keys away to make sure of it. His thinking process was clearly impaired, because his response was to dive headfirst off the second floor balcony at the end of the hallway where our dorm rooms were located.
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In August, not long after I’d returned from summer camp with the Boy Scouts, the annual Las Vegas Star Trek Convention came around again. This would be my third year attending the convention, and this year, I would enter the costume contest.
Wearing a custom-made and fitted uniform from the movie era of the original Star Trek–specifically, the 2280s and ’90s, as seen in the films Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan through the first act of Star Trek: Generations–I made my way to the Las Vegas Hilton. The contest wasn’t until later in the day, so I wandered the convention area. I’d tried to make the costume as accurate as possible. Heads turned everywhere I went. People wanted to get their photo taken with me. Some people even thought I worked at Star Trek: The Experience.
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The events of the last two months clearly illustrated to me that my supervisor and superintendent were, most assuredly, not on my side. In fact, they were actively trying to find an excuse–any excuse–to build a case to force me out of the military.
I couldn’t figure out why. The most plausible explanation, according to another senior sergeant that I worked with, seemed to be that they felt threatened by how much more I knew about our job than they did: my supervisor wasn’t even from our career field and had never been trained for our primary job, and my superintendent had been in a headquarters position for several years, and the job had changed significantly in that time. Whether this was true or not, I’ll probably never know.
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The year had been rough so far, but with only two months left to go, the worst was yet to come, with only brief moments of excitement to shake things up.
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I started off 2004 on a high note. I was granted permission at the end of 2003 to move off base, and I was living in an apartment complex just across the street from the South end of Nellis Air Force Base. It was a one-bedroom, and it was the first time I had ever had a place that was completely my own. My dad gave me a kitchen table and chairs that he was no longer using, and I packed it into the back of my car during my visit at Christmas.
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After returning to Nellis Air Force Base from my brief deployment in the Middle East, I was granted leave time. I drove out to visit my dad and his side of the family in California. While my relationship with my father hadn’t been the best since my parents divorced when I was young, the events of the past year had begun to force me to reconsider everything I thought that I knew.
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After spending the holidays with my family, I took my car, which had been sitting in my mom’s driveway in Iowa since I had left for Basic Training in August, and drove myself back to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. I returned a couple days early, so I didn’t have to go back to my classes immediately. I was nearly finished with my training; only a few more tasks remained ahead of me.
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Leaving Basic Training behind and beginning the next step in my career as an Airman was surreal. I left Lackland Air Force Base, which had become my home over the past two months, at oh-dark-thirty. Stripes on the sleeves of my dress Blues uniform and a duffel bag in my left hand, it seemed strange to shake my TI’s hand and say goodbye.
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During my second semester at Iowa State, in the early weeks of 2002, I came to realize that I wasn’t able to live up to the expectations of a university environment. Ever since September 11, I’d been floundering academically, and although I was an Air Force ROTC cadet, my major in Journalism ensured that I wouldn’t get the scholarship I needed, as they were only going to math, science, and engineering majors. Without that scholarship, my debts only continued to mount, and I was rapidly reaching a tipping point. Something needed to change. With all of this–and more–in mind, I chose to drop out of school and enlist in the Air Force.
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