USAFA Class Histories

I'm teaching HS classes in Kaiserslautern, Germany, close enough to hear the sound of freedom at Ramstein Air Base.  For a kid from Chicago whose grandfather and father worked for Al Capone to a retired Lt Col/HS teacher in Germany, it has been quite a ride. I wound up at USAFA because I had to turn down a West Point appointment since it was a payoff to my family for my forebears involvement with Big AL. Unfortunately, I still can't talk about some of my AF career.  I do recall being asked if I'd like to join a beltway bandit company and I asked them for June, July, and August off with my DoDDS wife and they laughed while I walked down the street and signed on as a teacher. As a detachment commander in Vietnam (65-66) I was almost tossed out of Vietnam by MACV's J2, Gen McCristian. I was taken to the Philippines for court martial and sent back to Viet Nam by an Air Force Colonel. I used to occasionally eat dinner with Gen Nguyen Kao Ky, and I had the NSA and CIA both looking over my shoulder but I wouldn't let then have my data.  I taught AFROTC at VMI, in fact, a former student teaches just down the hall from me.  I had a great time flying on the airborne command post over Cambodia while President Nixon was telling the American public that we were not fighting in Cambodia.  I was an intelligence resource manager dealing with Habu, TR-1s, ships, stations...all the toys.  I frequently would have to tell the generals to tell me what the question was and I would assign the best resources.  Some of my activities involved the Pueblo, Kho Tang Island, the evacuation from Saigon, working with Henry Kissinger to create CentCom, playing with DARPA toys to create the internet.  In many cases I was just an action officer and in others I had a direct role to play, but it was exciting right up to the end. There were some amusing incidents like the night we did a TACEVAL of a Belgian fighter unit where the only man on guard was a Spanish conscript who did not speak any language except Spanish, and when we finally talked our way onto the base (my pigeon Miami Spanish) and woke the duty officer, we discovered they had just gone to bed at dark thirty following the grandest party of the year.  Fortunately the fog/rain/name the WX disaster, rolled in the next day and not a single mission was able to takeoff. They taxied one fighter and called it an exercise. I had a great 25 years in and now I've been teaching for 25 years (not counting the ROTC assignment.)  I remember being told that my butterfly heart would prevent me from flying (I still wrangled a combat flying job on the ABCCC, 7th ACCS-Hillsboro) and had decided to go into the Marines when a Colonel came into my cadet room, woke me up and said he had a great job in mind for me... he was absolutely right... particularly when Marine Lieutenants had about a fifteen minute life expectancy in VN.  Was my career exciting?  Hell yes!  I'll probably be long buried when someone realizes what we did back then...in the days. Do I enjoy teaching?  Beats stealing money from the government...it's not about teaching stuff as much as teaching how to take chances and expand one's knowledge by making connections between the known and unknown.  It's a ball.  I have no ideas relative to retiring.  I am still enjoying myself too much to quit.  I don't know what the voice/video thing is....have someone read this.

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