Forty short years ago today I was on a plane to Lackland AFB. I had sold my car, quit my job and spent Thanksgiving weekend banging my 36 y/o boss and now it was time to get going on an adventure. She was awesome and had an incredible rack. In a bit of awkwardness she had an 18 year old son who was about 18 months younger than me. He would have been pissed, but my second job was working at the coolest bar in town. I had presale access to every ticket for every rock concert in the state. To smooth things over, I got him 3 rows back from the stage at Van Halen and made a fair trade for his mom.
I spent the holidays at basic training and there is not a lot to be happy about for Christmas at boot camp. I got to meet and spend the next couple of months with the oddest collection of people on the planet. One side of my bunk had an effeminate white kid from a good family in Nashville, his mom got him a new pair of New Balance running shoes for basic. A pair of New Balance running shoes was like a Rolls Royce, easily costing a week's pay for normal kids. These would be like $300-400 dollar running shoes today. On the other side was an athletic black kid from Cleveland named Sheb. He was even broker than me and while he had played sports and ran track, he had never seen a pair of New Balance shoes in person either. We made the most of the next two months together and tried carefully to avoid the Drill Instructors line of sight, lol.
Back in the olden days, there were no cell phones, texts or emails. You filled out a post card for your parents and got 90 seconds to make a phone call home to let mommy and daddy know you arrived alive. This is harder to do than you think when there are 20 phones and 60 guys and 6 instructors screaming at all of you. Failure was not an option. The bad news was that success was not a fucking option either. My mother was long gone off with some asshole so nothing to call there. My Dad was a pussy hound of the first order and it was "Ladie's night" at his favorite country bar. Unless I could swing dance and was a brunette with big tits, he wasn't available. I called my former boss. Her nearly perfect pair of C's and great laugh were already making me a bit homesick. She was quite surprised and happy to hear from me, we had the briefest of conversations and I gave her an update. She was an honest to God sweetheart and promised to call my Dad tomorrow and let him know I was alive and in BMTS.
Twenty-Seven years later I retired from the military, while it was a miserable way to spend the holidays it was the start of an adventure. It was a different world in the early 1980's. Most Americans loved their country, we had borders around the edges of it. We were actually trying to defeat communism and socialism back then. We only had the two genders back then as well. It was rare to have a dick and be a woman or have big latex tits and be a man in the grocery store. The 198 genders were not invented yet and with very little soy in the food, males were not sniveling gutless bitches like they are today. We had to be able to read and write, we learned actual math and science and our information was based on actual facts. We had to be able to tell time, show up on time and the world did not revolve around our feelings. We did not have to check our "likes" to see if we had friends and the internet was 3600 baud and worked like shit over a phone line. TV signals travelled thru air and you got them for free. MTV was new and played actual music, people got to see bands for the first time without going to a concert. Hell, cable TV was new and I do not think CNN ran 24 hours a day yet. This was so long ago, CNN actually reported news in a fairly honest way.
The highlight of basic was New Year's Day college football. To this day I could care less about football. But our primary instructor was a TSgt with a line number for Master and he had the duty. I was ordered to "procure" extra cleaning supplies and we got to GI the office areas for the holiday. If we did a top notch job we got to watch football and he actually bought a few pizzas so we all got a slice or two or pizza and a cold can of Coke. It was like those beers the convicts drank on the roof in Shawshank Redemption, lol. A couple of weeks later it was a 16-hour bus ride to the next location and nearly a year of extremely complicated tech schools.
Back then were hoping to survive the Ice Age that the climate dip shits of the era were predicting, we only had a year to two to go before glaciers wiped us off the earth. We hadn't had the massive droughts that never showed up next to wipe us out and the imaginary famines of the late 1980's were only a dream. Of course climate dip shits were screaming about oil running out, still claiming it was made by dinosaur rot and other typically stupid climate lies.
I have literally survived an Ice Age, a massive world ending drought, the disappearance of petroleum leading to the collapse of society, the horrors of nuclear winter, massive civilization ending famines of the early 1990's, global warming, global cooling, the end of snow in the northern hemisphere and now the ravages of climate change. We have had "ten years to go before the world ends" about SEVEN times in just the last 40 years.
And it all started with a plane ride to Texas in November of 1982.
