Memories of the First Life, Part 5

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

Part 4 is here.

It was the end of 1984 and I was nearly at the end of my first four year commitment in the Air Force, so I had a choice to make. I could stay in my present career and position for another four years, I could accept a position as a Training Instructor (TI) in Air Force Basic Military Training School (BMTS) at Lackland AFB, Texas, or I could cross-train into a new AFSC.

There was no way that I was going to remain a bomb loader, so that choice was made. Being a TI sounded like it might be fun for about a year. The problem was that the position was a four-year controlled tour, meaning you did four years minimum, period. It sounded like jail.

I thought about getting out and going back to school; I had dropped out in the middle of my sophomore year at the University of New Mexico to join up.

But, I figured that there was no point in putting up with the rigor of the military if you didn’t get to go to some other country.

So, cross-training it was.

Did you know that the Air Force has a quota system? Yes, it does. Along with its previously-mentioned affirmative action system for women, the Air Force has a quota system for racial minorities who cross-train. (This was back in the 1980s; I don't know how this system operates in the 21st century.)

Now, I know that most of my readers are up on such terms as “affirmative action” and “quota system,” but I still want to make sure that I’m being clear. When I say “affirmative action,” I mean that standards for a job are lowered in order to get more members of a target group into a particular job. However, a quota system tries to get more members of a target group into a specific job and standards are not lowered which, of course, means that the member of the target group has to meet the same standard as everyone else.

Obviously, as you found out back in Part 1, I was subject to both.

Therefore, I was not allowed to cross-train into a field that had a high percentage of black persons within and was only allowed to pick a field that was the opposite. As it turns out, every last one of the Military Intelligence (MI) fields qualified, but I had to have two things: a high ASVAB score in the General Knowledge portion of the tests and a passing score in the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB).

I’ve mentioned here before that my ASVAB scores were high, but it’s not a set of IQ tests. The General Knowledge portion takes a measure of how many useless basic facts are rolling around in your head. Which president gave the Gettysburg Address? What’s the outermost planet in the solar system? Who invented the telephone? That sort of thing; the kind of thing to which a good education, good parenting and a fairly decent memory will contribute. Like all AF tests, this one is a multiple guess choice type, which increases the odds of both success and failure, depending on one’s knowledge level. I scored a 99 in General Knowledge. (Thanks, Uncle John.)

The DLAB was purported to be an IQ test, but all it really measures is one’s ability to recognize patterns. I passed that one, too. 

Having met the standards, I had my pick of MI jobs, most of which involved learning a foreign language. Though they were pushing me towards harder-to-learn languages like Russian, Arabic and Mandarin, I picked German - which was hard enough, but at least I didn’t have to learn a new alphabet. (I ended up learning Russian anyway, but that’s for a later part of the series.) 

And I picked German for an additional reason.

In my teenage years, I read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I think I knew about the Holocaust before I read the book, but I don’t recall how I learned of it. It certainly wasn’t taught in school.

As a result, I wanted to know what kind of people … and I figured that the best way to find out was to learn their language.

Spoiler alert: Germans are a kind and wonderful people. They have a beautiful country and wonderful culture - just like you and me. 

That was the most frightening thing I learned about them; that they were no different than the rest of us and that we could become that which they became.

Anyway, this is how I became a part of that oxymoronic entity known as military intelligence.

To become an Air Force linguist, one must attend two technical training schools. The first is at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey in Monterey, CA. The other services send their translators, interpreters and interrogators there as well. Last I checked, the Presidio is primarily an Army installation.

So, there I was, back on the road again.

TO BE CONTINUED