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.
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.
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.
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.
At the end of 1990, American servicemembers began to build up in Saudi Arabia, along the border that country shared with Kuwait. This action, Operation Desert Shield, was precipitated by the fact that Kuwait had been invaded by its larger neighbor to the North, Iraq. While these events were front-page news across the globe, they had an immediate, direct impact on my life, as I was a teenager growing up in Baumholder, an Army post in Germany.
I wanted to be a scientist when I was a boy. To be an astronaut was even better: they were scientists who got to go into space! Of course, I had other dreams as well: writer, teacher, even becoming a priest… well, at least until I discovered girls. The desire to someday become a father outweighed the boyhood interest in the priesthood and its accompanying celibacy. All these dreams had a unifying pattern: they were all professions of highly intelligent people that I respected and admired.
I’m falling behind on updates for this blog. I need to rededicate myself to this project, as well as to others. Mostly, though, it’s just because I’m so damned busy. Between working 30 hours per week at two jobs and taking a full-time courseload of 12 credits of upper-division history classes, I don’t have a whole lot of extra time left over for, well, anything, and most of what little free time I do have gets eaten up by playing video games. (Star Trek Online is, in fact, a key offender in that area.)
Recently, I found an old book I’ve had since middle school. This book is kind of special to me, partly because it was autographed “To Jeffrey” by the author when I met him, but also because it reminded me of one of the first pieces of fiction I’d ever written (well, that I can recall, at least).
The first year after my parents separated and we’d moved from California to Wisconsin was, relatively, uneventful. My mother told me that, at the time,…
