Lima Charlie, Episode 26 with Ted Roberts

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hm, I've got no reason. The chief of a killing

(00:24):
season with a need to please you with the light,
goes Gring. Let's believe him in the zone to be
from a end of mayankdom a yangee good. Agree, I
must say when you call the meath, because I'll weird.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm a one of a kind, and I'll bring death
to the glacier about a week.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Another river of blood running under my feet, forging the
fire did a long ago stand next to me? You'll
never stand alone. I'm last to leave, but the first
to go. Lord, make me dead before you make me
old A feet on the fear of the devil inside
of the enemy faces in my sight, being with a
handrew shoe, with a quill, with a heart like our

(01:00):
day guys, god Im, Soldier Man Martin. I am a
worror and this is my song, basting the roll of

(01:21):
the rising wall.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
They waste to the ground of an enemy. Sure I
read you, Lima Charlie, loud and clear.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Welcome to another episode of Stewing the Nun presents Lima
Charlie with our special guest, Ted Roberts. Welcome, Ted, Thank
you so tell us a little bit about yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Ted Roberts living in Virginia. I did thirty one years
in the Air Force, started in nineteen eighty nine and
retired from the Air Force in twenty twenty. So thirty
one years.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
Thirty one years. Wow. I just interviewed on here a
friend of mine. She retired at twenty nine and I
had about a half twenty nine and a half years.
So you'll be our second second Air Force person on
this show. So let's talk about the Air Force and
what made you choose the Air Force.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
I just, you know, I grew up in Florida and
in South Texas. I just always liked planes. Even when
I was like two or three years old, I would
point at the guy and shout air ba, and my
parents said, you know, they look around, couldn't see a
plane or hear it, and then finally they saw it.
So I think I heard it before I saw it.
Just always liked them, and that's that's one of the
things that I always liked was planes. And I liked
space too. I had a uncle, Red, who worked with

(02:38):
a space program, and I loved talking to him about that.
He worked on the Apollo program and the Gemini and
Mercury and Space Shuttle, programs and always thought, oh, I
love planes, I love space. I want to work around that.
I thought air Force was probably the best way to go.
What part of South Texas Daniel Corpus, Christie, a little
town called Portland, Texas.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Okay. I'm originally from Texas. I'm from Southeast Texas, Okay,
across across the bay from Houston. But I go down
to the Corpus area. I go down to Padral the
National Seashore every year during Veterans Day Vetter's Day weekend
and do some fishing with some friends. So it's a
good time. So, so you chose air Force. Did you
consider the Army or you know, like go on Army

(03:19):
Aviation or Marine Corps or anything like that. I did.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
I considered the Navy. Actually, So graduated from high school
in eighty eight, and you know, Top Gun came out
in eighty six, and I was kind of at the time,
I was also thinking about I wanted to be a doctor,
you know, go to med school and all that. And
then I did Medical Explorers and realized maybe needles and
doctoring isn't a thing for me. And I realized I

(03:43):
like math and science more. I got a letter from
lots of colleges, you know, my sophomore and junior year
in high school, and one day I got a letter
from the Naval Academy and says, hey, we hear that
academically you're a top gun. And I told one of
my friends because I was working at HB at grocery store,
and I told him that I got that, and he goes,
I dare you to apply? He'say, you know what, I
think I'm going to apply. I think I'd really like

(04:05):
to fly or go in aviation. So I decided to
apply for the Naval Academy. It's actually my first choice
in high school. And applied and I got a nomination,
but I didn't get in. I applied for the college
for the ARTC scholarships both the Navy and the Air Force,
and I actually got an Air Force RTC scholarship, but
not a Navy one. They said it was a medical thing.

(04:26):
So I didn't really do well on the depth reception test,
so the Navy said I was waverable. The Air Force
said I was commission qualified, so I got the Air
Force Art to SEE scholarship.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Okay, well, the Corpus christity of that area, I mean
there's a fairly decent naval presence down there, and the
Coast Guard as well, So the Navy kind of makes
sense being close to the coast. I'm sure you probably
like fishing, you know, So you go to the you
go to the Air Force Academy in Colorado, Colorado Springs
and see where it's at.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
I ultimately went there. I took kind of a long
route there. So, like I said, I got an r
TOC scholarship. I went to the she had Texas for
one year. After that one year, I left and I
enlisted in the Air Force in eighty nine. So I
enlisted and went to basic training at Lachlan. I did
three years and listed, and then I applied for the
Air Force Academy and got in and I made the

(05:15):
age cut off by ten weeks when I got in there,
so I was one of the oldest of my class.
So I actually I went in there for the class
of ninety six.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
So back then I went in ninety one. So just
a little bit after you and we had what was
called the Green to Gold. You could go and listed
to officer. Did they have I mean, was that a
kind of a similar program in the Air Force.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
So they had. I knew that they had eighty five
slots a year for active duty airmen to go to
the Academy, but they had only been filling about twenty
five or thirty of those a year, and I thought, oh,
that's probably a good way to try to get in
was to go and listed and then try to get
in to the academy. So I was listed and listed
doing my assignment. I was taking night classes on base

(05:57):
there at the school, and then I was telling my
friends about my plans and goes, well, you need to
start applying. By then I was realizing it was about
two years in. It's like, you're right, I need to
do it, and I realized this is my last year
of eligibility. So I applied and then got in. So
they didn't have a formal program back at the time. Actually,
when I was at the academy, all of the prior
and enlisted cadets we formed a prior Enlisted Council and

(06:20):
we said, you know, we're only feeling about twenty to
twenty five slots a year out of these eighty five available.
So we actually started initiative there to start going out
to the bases and recruiting and telling airmin about it
and telling you should apply to this, and that kind
of evolved into becoming something called the Lead Program LAD
And I don't recall what the acronym stands for, but
it's a lead program in the Air Force to try
to encourage active duty airmen to try to apply to

(06:44):
the academy.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Very nice, very nice. What was your job enlisted?

Speaker 2 (06:50):
So that's an interesting story. So I came in, I
went to base training, and I went to the Security
Police Academy. So I was going to go into security
police career field. So I finished basic training at Lachlan,
went across base to the Security Police Academy, and I
had orders to go to Ramstein Air based Germany, and
I was all excited. I said, yes, I want to
go overseas, go see the world. While I was at

(07:11):
Security Police Academy, one day they told all of us
in tech school there, I said, everybody has to go
to the Security Police auditorium for a presentation tonight after dinner.
So we get there about seven pm or so, and
as we're entering the doors, there's a bunch of these
airmen in these ceremony uniforms, you know, seeing us come
in and as soon as we walked in the door,
they started grabbing all the tall airman and said how

(07:33):
tall are you? And I'm six three, So they said,
all right, your six three stay. After the presentations we
go in there. There's the US Air Force on a
guard in Washington, d C. On a recruiting visit, and
after they showed us a movie, had the drill team perform.
You know, we get out of the presentation. Those of
us they told to stay. We stayed, and they took
our height and weight measurements and had us go in

(07:55):
and do an interview with a panel of Honor guardsmen.
And then you know, we went back to the barracks
at that night and went to bed. Didn't think anything
of it. The next day, I'm in the training area
and this van pulls up and it's the superintendent of
the Honor Guard is in there and he with the clipboard.
He calls a bunch of us by name and says
get on the van. He's like, all right, where's this going.
So the band goes over to the gym and they

(08:15):
have to run some laps around the lap the track
at the gym, and then go in the gym and
do some arm curls some exercises, and they told us
back in the band, took ex back in the training area.
Like I said, I had orders to Ramstein. So I'm
all excited. I got my sponsor packet, you know, it's
showing me all the pictures of Germany. And about a
week later, our military training advisor calls a bunch of

(08:35):
us by name, including me, and says, your orders have
been canceled. You're now going to Bowling Air Force Base
in Washington, d C. So it's like, I didn't sign
up for that, but I guess it didn't matter. So
my orders to Ramsign were canceled and ended up going
to the Bowling Air Force Base in Washington DC.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
So is that of a requirement for that Honor Guard
or is it just preferred? I mean, do you have
to be over like six foot So.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
At the time you had to be at least five
ten to be in the Honor Guard, but to be
a Colors troop where you're on the color teams, you
have to be at least six to two. So I
think they really actively tried to find that the people
who were six two and taller to be on the
Colors element, because whenever you do the Joint Service color
guards around Washington, d C. You're there with the Army, Navy,
Marine Corps and all of them are tall too, so

(09:21):
they like the color teams to be sanitized and everybody
be tall. So the requirement was to be six You
were taller.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah, the Army guards for the Tomb of the Unknown,
you have to be at least six foot or higher.
And of course you have to be infantry. It's called
the Old Guard in the Army, right. Yeah, So you
go to bowling and how long are you?

Speaker 2 (09:41):
There was a two year assignment, but I was there
about two and a half years. Actually, one of my
best friends in this day is one of my best friends.
He and I went were basic training together, we went
to tech school together, we went to four diss for
air base ground defense, and then we reported the on
guard together. We're there for two years and then we

(10:02):
put in for our assignments. So he and I both
got orders to go to Carswell Air Force Base in
Fort Worth, Texas. But because I was applying to the
Air Force Academy, they canceled my orders and said we're
going to wait and see how this plays out, and
so I stayed there and then end up getting into
the academy and then left that com duty to go
to the academy.

Speaker 3 (10:18):
So anything stand out about that time in bowling, I
mean any specific funerals or anything or events that you
guys did.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
I think a couple of things. I mean we did
lots of funerals. I mean a typical day would be
three full water funerals at Arlington. So you do one
or two in the morning, one at nine, one at eleven,
and then you do one in the afternoon. You do
three a day in the summer. That was not fun
because it's really hot and human there and you're in
your full ceremonial dress. During those funerals. There was one

(10:50):
Catholic chaplain, lieutenant colonel. We just saw him. We called
them Father Time because he would talk and the sermons
that the services would go forever and say, oh, this
is going to be along when when we saw him.
But I remember one time we did one for a
Medal of Honor winner and I don't recall the name,
but one of the NCOs told us, you know, ask us,

(11:12):
we've seen that movie twelve o'clock hi, And it's like
I hadn't seen it at the time, and they said, well,
there's a Medal of Honor winner in that movie. This
is that guy. We're doing his funeral.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Another one was we did the funeral for an astronaut,
Frank Irwin. He was one of the astronauts on I
think Apollo fifteen. He actually drove the moon buggy up
on the moon. We did his funeral back in ninety
because I was there from nineteen ninety two. The really
big thing I remember it was, you know, I reported
the Honor Guard in February of ninety, like in August

(11:43):
of ninety was when Iraq invaded Kuwait and then Desert
Shield and Desert Storm kicked off. So that was all
spinning up, and everybody's talking about how this is going
to be a huge war. Iraq is the number five
military size in the world, and we're thinking, okay, we
could get really busy here at Arlington depending on how
this goes. And then President Bush had put down the

(12:07):
deadline of I think it was January sixteenth or seventeenth,
So I remember we go do funerals at Arlington and
January sixteenth and I came back and I went up
to my barracks room and I fell asleep that evening.
I just tired that day and one of my friends,
ken Wright was my friends or he came in and said, hey,
we did it. It's like did what because we attacked Iraq?
We're wars, Like what? So I go down to the
day room and they have a big screen TV down

(12:28):
there and we're watching CNN and we're seeing all the
strikes and everything in Iraq, and then I get worried.
They're putting a commitment sheet up. So whenever we had ceremonies,
they would put commitment sheets up, so it had by name,
like if you were falling, you had to fall out
of seven fifteen for inspection. They get on the bus
and then go to Arltin for the funerals, and the
commitment sheets always said ceremonial uniforms, so we had specific

(12:51):
uniforms we were for ceremonies. Ceremonials. Well, they were putting
up a commitment sheet that night and it's had fifty
of us on there, which I said, that's a weird number.
And report in service dress and so like okay, this
is really strange. They said, show up downstairs at like
seven thirty am in service dress and you're gonna be inspected.
They always inspected us before we go went out anywhere.

(13:12):
So we're all getting our service dress already and checking
it for strings and ironing it, getting ready, and we
show up downstairs get inspected. They don't really tell us much.
They said get on the bus, and we went to
Fort Meyer, which is over next to Arlington, and then
we get off the bus and they tell us to
get in line here and they're these metal detectors that
we're getting ready to go through to go into the
Fort Myer Chapel, and it's like, all right, what's going on?

(13:34):
And then everybody starts forming rumors. Well, we see like
fifty Navy ceremonial guards, been fifty Army Old Guard members,
fifty Marines, US fifty Air Force guys. And we finally
go through the metal detectors and they have this all
sit in all the pews there, but leave the kind
of the middle section open. And as things go on,
we see, like you know, General Colin Powell comes in,

(13:55):
some of the other Joint sheets of staff, all these people,
and finally President Bush comes in there and they gave
us these programs, which I still have my program somewhere.
I don't know where it is, but I know I
have it somewhere in my attic. But they had the
chief of chaplains for each of the services get up
and speak for a few minutes, and then Billy Graham
got up in the podium there and I'm one of
like two hundred junior enlisted guys in this chapel with

(14:18):
President Bush and Colin Powell and these people there and
Dick Cheney the Secreary defensive time. And Billy Graham gets
up there and gives a sermon praying for the war,
and everything goes well. And I remember his one part
of his sermon. He goes, you know, we should not
pray that God is on our side, we should pray
that we are on God's side. I remember him saying that.
So that was kind of a highlight of my time.
There is that being part of history, And I'm thinking

(14:41):
this is kind of a historical moment here. I'm in
a chapel here at Fort Meyer and there's President George
Bush and Billy Graham's giving a sermon. I'm one of
the two hundred or so people in here listening to
this and watching this.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
What is it?

Speaker 3 (14:53):
What is the Air Force? Service service dress.

Speaker 1 (14:56):
What is that?

Speaker 3 (14:56):
Is that the short sleeve blue.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
It's so service stress is like what Army would call
Class a's. So it's like our long sleeve blue shirt,
the tie, and then the coat or blouse with the
ribbons and everything on it. Okay, so we're in full
up like Class a's. I think this is what the
Army would call it.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
So that metal detector was just going off for everybody.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 3 (15:16):
So there's a lot of hardware on even even a
junior enlisted So right, okay, so you that's that's pretty interesting.
I mean, not a lot of people could say say
they did that. So you anything else stand out about
your time there?

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Uh no, I just I mean it was kind of
neat being in DC around that time. My last four
months there in the Honer Guard. They picked h there's
two jobs that you can get from the Honer Guard.
One of them is to be an office as Secretary
Defense Century, so you're standing in front of the Secretary
of Defense's office. The other one is to be a
Penning on tour guide. So I got selected to be

(15:53):
a Penning On Tour guide in my last four months
here from February till June of ninety two, and you know,
it's kind of neat taking people through the Pentagon tours
and tour groups through that because this is just about
a year after Desert Storm ended, and servery's really on
a high patriotic level. And then they've got really excited
because every once in a while you see, like, you know,
General Colin Powell in the hallway when you're you know,

(16:15):
going by, and everybody's also pulling out their cameras and
getting pictures. And he didn't do it for me, but
one of my friends was giving the tour and then
General Powell stopped and said, so it was ermin. Of
course he'd giving you a good tour here, and he'd
stop and talk to the people for a couple of
minutes and then he said, all right, I gotta go
and leave. But it was kind of you know, a
lot of star power there, and some of the tourists

(16:36):
were star truck struck and if they saw him in
the hallways, because he was on the CNN every night
during the war, so there was a bige. The tourists
noticed that that they happened to see him.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
In the hallways absolutely absolutely, So you you finally get
your your date. How did how did that? I mean,
how does that kind of work in the Air Force?
You apply to the academy, did they give you any
kind of time before you have to go? I mean,
how does that work?

Speaker 2 (17:02):
So the way it works is I came in on
a four year enlistment, so my enlistment didn't until August
thirty first of ninety three. But because as one of
the Academy, my report date for the Academy was June
twenty ninth of ninety two, so they actually gave me
orders and they separated me from the Air Force on
June twenty eighth, and so I actually had a break
and service of you know, a few minutes there, I

(17:23):
guess technically, and I reported in the twenty ninth. So
I had some leave. I took some leave, took my
car and some of my stuff home to Texas to
leave with my parents, and I flew back to DC
and then I had like two weeks of leave that
I took there and I think assault some lead back
and then I went home. And then I actually left
from corpus Chrissy, Texas and flew to the Academy on

(17:46):
the twenty ninth and reported in.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
So how long did you have to commit for? Was
it just the four years of school or you know,
how does that work?

Speaker 2 (17:54):
So I think since I was an active duty airman,
if I had quit or left the academy in that
first couple of years, I probably had to go back
and finish out the last year or so of my time.
But I know around that time they were doing a
lot of reductions in force too, because I remember when
I was in the Hounergard there were a lot of
NCOs that were getting offered, you know, bonuses to get out. Hey,

(18:15):
you're at fifteen years, here's you know, forty thousand dollars
to get out. And you know, people told me it's
probably going to be happened. If you don't make it
an academy, You're not going to be brought back in.
They're just gonna, you know, send you home. The way
the academy works is if you go for two years.
You know, for normal civilians, you can leave after two
years and have no commitment. But once you set foot

(18:37):
in your first class to your junior year, then you
have a commitment to either finish out of the academy
or you go to the enlisted service and serve sometime.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
And so once you graduate, is that is it then
start like an eight year commitment? Do you have a.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
Had I had a five year commitment. So if you
graduate from the academy, you have a five year commitment.
If you go to pilot training. I think at the
time they would make a make it like an eight
year commitment. And it's varied over the years, but at
the time, typically it was a five year commitment on
w you graduated and got commissioned.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
I think the Army does an eight across the board
for all officers. Okay, I think so, I think so.
So so you get to the academy, what do you think?
And are you like you're getting there and you're like,
oh crap, what did I do? Or you know, were
you pretty excited?

Speaker 2 (19:24):
I was excited. I knew what I was getting into.
I mean I had I'd applied for the Naval Academy
at a high school, you know, applyed to the Air
Force Academy. So I knew the process. I just knew
that I had gotten nominations for my congressman. I actually
when I got in that time, I got a nomination
for my congressman. But I also got a commander's endorsement
from my squadron commander at the Honor Guard so I

(19:44):
had kind of two nominations and I got in through
that avenue. It's the active duty airman to get in there,
so I knew it was gonna be tough. I had
done a lot of school at night school in d C,
so that the hardest part for me wasn't the military piece,
because I knew that being an Honor guardsman in the uniforms,
I had that down. Marching I had down, had to

(20:06):
study hard. It's not an easy school to go. But
the two things are hardest for me is one the
physical just all the running, especially at seven thousand feet
altitude and getting used to that. And the other part
was being almost twenty two years old and having junior
seniors who are like twenty or twenty one years old
yelling at me and having to just just take it.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
So at what point do you when you go to
the academy do you start putting forth your career, like
where you're gonna go? Like what branch or not really branch,
but what you know? Are you gonna go ordinates, are
you're gonna go fight? Are you gonna go where? Do
you get to pick that.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
So you're earlier part of your senior year, you put
in your preferences, like your top six career field choices.
At the time, pretty much if you were pilot qualified,
you'd go to pilot training. If you wanted to go,
you'd get that. They kind of really cut back the
pilot training slots a couple of years before I was

(21:06):
graduating out of class of ninety three. They thought they had,
you know, the saying there was two zho and go
just go to the academy, get a two point zero
grade point average, and you get the pilot training. Well,
in the summer of ninety or the fall of ninety two,
Sheila Woddenall, she was Secretary of the Air Force. She
came in and they had all the senior class, the
class nine three come to the auditorium. Arnold Tall was

(21:27):
the auditorium there and told them, we know that typically
about eight hundred of you go to pilot training every year,
but we are really scaling back the pilot training right now.
So there's on going to be five hundred and twenty
five slots given out this next year. Two hundred and
twenty five are going to your class and the rest
are going to RTC and ots graduates, so it's going
to be a highly competitive process to get pilot training.

(21:49):
So the seniors when they came back to the barracks,
they were pretty mad about that. Some of them might
have taken it out on some of us freshmen too,
but fourth class cadets, so they started making it more
of a competitive process at the time to get pilot training.
But if you were going to go to pilot training,
you would do some of your preliminary flight training there
at the academy. But your senior year you get to

(22:10):
put in for your career field, and you get to
pick six choices, like your first, second, third, fourth, fifth
choice and so on. You put that in and then
sometime around the spring semester before you graduate is when
you find out what your career field is. So what
were your six My first choice was space ops, space
and missiles. Second choice I think was Intel. I put

(22:32):
like engineering because I was majoring in astronautical engineering there,
so I put engineering acquisition some of those things, and
then I put security forces. But I think I was
like my fifth or six choice because I didn't have
a strong asartey to go back there. I wanted to
do something more operational, like flying or space ops those
kind of things, and I got picked for space ops.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
Nice. Nice. So you're pretty pretty excited about that. I'm
assuming I was. You're already working at it. Get you get,
so you get anything else happened that stood out while
you're in school, you know, before you get to your
senior year and you get to.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
I think the big thing is between your sophomore and
junior year, you do these summer programs between the academic years.
And they had one in between your third class year
sophomore year and your second class year junior year called
Air Education and Training Command ae TC Leadership Program, and
that's where you got to go to a Lachland Air

(23:28):
Force Base and you got to shadow the drill instructors
and basically be like a military training instructor for six
weeks down a Lackland. So I sign up for that one.
So I had gone through basic training as a basic
trainee there in eighty nine. Five years later, in summer
ninety four, I'm back there as a cadet to at
least your program, actually working with the drill instructors and

(23:49):
helping train the basic trainees there and actually saw one
of my old mti's military training instructors there when I
was down there in ninety four, so that was kind
of interesting getting to see him.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
So you get your you get the career field you want.
Where did you go? Where was your assignment right out
of school?

Speaker 2 (24:07):
So I got space. So I went to VanderBurg Air
Force Space because they had at the time is undergraduate
Space and Missile Training because back then Space and Missiles
ICBMs was a combined career field. So you do a
ten week USMT course and at the end of the course,
based on your class ranking, so I had seventeen in
my class. They ranked this one through seventeen, and then

(24:29):
they put nineteen different like bumper sticker type magnets on
a board at the O Club, and so the number
one guy got to pick his choice and put it
by the name. The number two guy got to go
up and pick what was left and so on and
then so we got to pick our assignments. So I
picked Mounstrom Air Force BACE ICBMs because I wanted to
do missiles first. They had the minute Man Education program

(24:49):
where you could get your master's degree while you're doing
missiles and I wanted to go to Montana.

Speaker 3 (24:53):
So ask where Malstroam is.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
Yeah, great, Paul's Montana.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
Okay, would you think about I loved it.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
I actually met my wife there too. I've been married
twenty seven years there. She's from Great Falls, so I
met her a few months after I got there. And
it's a four year assignment. So yeah, I really liked it.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
Yeah, anything stand out. I mean you get to Montana
and your boy from Texas, you're from Corpus Christi area.
Down to the coast, you get this super landlocked mountains
around everywhere, Snow drifts as high as you can you
can imagine. So what do you think? And you're like, oh, no,
what did I get myself into?

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Well I got there in early April, so there was
still snow on the ground. It was cold. It's like,
oh this is this is the end of winter or two.
I remember driving across the Missouri River to work one
day and I looked over at one of those bank
thermometer signs and it said minus thirty nine degrees and
it's like, it's cold here. But I kind of acclimated

(25:51):
to it, I guess. I mean, you never really get
used to the cold. The nice thing about Montana. People
don't know. They think it's just cold for five months straight,
which North Dakota. Yes, Hannah, it gets really cold. It
gets like twenty five or thirty below, but then it
warms back up and they get these chinook winds that
comes through and it gets up to like forty degrees
and it melts all the snow. Chinook actually, I found

(26:12):
out my wife says, that's a Native American word Chinook
means snow eater. So they get these chinook winds in
Montana that eats up all the snow and melts. It
gets up on the forties or so, and then it'll
get really cold against so the you know, the temperatures
kind of go like a signed way throughout the winter
there in Great Right.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
Do you do any hunting or any outdoor Are you
an outdoorsment at all?

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Awesome? I went hunting with one of my wife's cousins.
I went hunting one time and had beginner's luck and
they got a nice white tail buck deer. So I
got the antlers for that. Did some trout fishing and
learned how to fly fish and all of that. So
like that, I like going up in the mountains and
going hiking on occasion.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
Nice a friend of mine that I interviewed on here
that did twenty nine years in the Air Force. Her
the common theme for her was everywhere she get stationed,
it was like, well, we had to go this far
for shopping, you know, because every place she got she
got stationed way up in Alaska, and she got stationed
in Oklahoma and she would have to drive hours upon
hours just to get the good shopping. I can imagine

(27:13):
Montana is probably pretty close. I mean, if you're not
in Bozeman, you're probably not really close to much.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Great Falls wasn't bad. Great Falls is about sixty to
sixty five thousand people, So it had a mall and
some other things, and the bases on the east side
of town. So you had some decent things in the
in the city there. But yeah, if you wanted to
go to buildings, it was like a three hour drive.
Or Missoula is about a three hour drive the other direction.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Okay, so you get there and you're you're oh one,
I'm assuming yes. How does how does that rank work?
Like in the army, one to three is not really automatic,
but it's it's more automatic than not. How does that
work in the Air Force.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
It's pretty automatic. Ye, unless you're really mess up. You're
gonna you get graduate and get oh one. You're gonna
put two on two years later, and then two years
later you're gonna put three on again. Almost automatic unless
you really mess up.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
Okay. So did you make GO three while you were there?

Speaker 1 (28:07):
I did?

Speaker 3 (28:08):
You did? Okay? So do anything stand out Montana? I
mean anything else.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
Just being a missileer and doing ICBMs and all that,
I think the big thing there. So I was there
from ninety seven to ZHO one, so we would You know,
when you're in a missileer, you go out with a
two person crew, you go to your squadron pre pre
departure briefing, and then they have all the squadrons come
together because at the time there's four missile squadrons and
the missile capsules. The missile fields is spread out over

(28:36):
like twenty three thousand square miles up in Montana. So
the closest site was like twenty six miles away from
the base. The farthest was one hundred and fifty one
miles away. So you come in, you do your squadron
pre pre departure briefing, and then the squadrons all get
together in the auditorium for the group pre departure briefing
and the kind of brief you on the weather, the maintenance,
what's going on. And then you go back and you

(28:56):
call your crew that you're changing over with and you
see if you need to bring in it applies out
for the capsule, like you know, printer paper or markers
or any of that sort of thing, and then you
get in your crew vehicle and you drive. You know,
if it's Oscar was the one that's one hundred and
fifty one miles away, you would drive three hours to
Oscar and then you go out there, you pass your dispatch,

(29:17):
you know, the flight screw controller that you in, You
get a briefing from them, check everything out, and then
you go down and take over for your relief crewse
you got to inventory the classified. So I don't know
if you've seen the first few minutes of wargames, Yes,
that sort of loosely depicts how it is. You used
to joke about that because they said, yeah, they're doing
a high five change over where you just kind of

(29:37):
go in high five. Those guys leave and you stay there.
But it's like a forty five minute process because they
have all the classified documents laid out on the bed
and you have to inventory all of that. They give
you a briefing on what's going on that day, like maintenance,
whether any faults with the missiles, you know, error messages.
Then you have to actually go through and count all
of the cookies that they call and those are what

(29:59):
you have to open to authenticate messages if need be,
and then you put them up in your lock box
and then you put your locks on there and then
you sign for the alert. So it's actually a thirty
to forty five minute process to inventory everything and get
the changeover. So it's not like war games where two
guys walk in the other two guys walk out and
go home.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
It's so then how how long are you there? How
long are you there?

Speaker 2 (30:18):
Before you go back to twenty four hours? Oh so
it's twenty four hours, yep, twenty four hours. So you're
you're out there, you're you and your crew partner are
down there. It's like one hundred and one hundred, one
hundred twenty feet below ground and a missile capsule Launch
Control Center is what they call the LCC and you're
down there. You've got the eight ton blast door that's closed.
You can open it if you need to get They

(30:39):
send food down for you, so you order your meals
from up the top side. We call it up in
the The building upstairs is called the Missile Alert Facilities.
You have a flight security controller, a facility manager, a chef,
and then some other security forces members and so that
you call up to the chef say hey, we want
to order this for lunch or order this for dinner,
and they'll send your meals down to you on the
oellow and you open the blast word and go get it.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
And Domino's pizza and having them bring it in.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
No, you're probably you're often like two hours away from
the closest Dominoes.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
There, so yeah, they're knugging to deliver that in thirty
minutes or less. Well, that's that's that's really cool. So
you're there for twenty four hours and then you go
back and then I'm assuming you're off for twenty four
hours or you're doing something else for twenty four hours,
and then you're back.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
You do so on say you go out on alert
on Monday, So Monday, you drive out, you change over
the crew and you take over the alert. On Tuesday,
a crew comes out and leaves you and you drive
back to base. I was in twelve missile Squadron, so
our sites were all pretty close, like you know, the
farthest site we had is like sixty seven miles away.
So you usually get back to base by about noon

(31:47):
or one, and then you get to go home and
enjoy the rest of the day. And typically the day
after that, the third day, like a Wednesday, you're just off,
but then you go back on alert on Thursday, come
home Friday, and it gets surday off. So that's kind
of the uh, you know, the rotation that typically goes.
You also have like a T one class, like an
EWO class you have to do every month. You have
a classes for your weapons system and codes class, so

(32:10):
you do that once a month, and you have to
do a simulator ride once a month. So typically, like
if you're online just doing cruise shifts, you'll do like
eight alerts a month, and then you have your codes
and Weapons System class, an EWO class, and then a
sim ride.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
Would you consider that kind of a high stress, high
stress type job or.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
It can be.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
I mean there's times when it is there's times when
you go on alert and it's really boring and that
you've got, you know, worried about too much. But then
there's times when it's really busy, like you got me,
it's going out in one of your missiles. You have
code change, because when you're in a launch control center,
you're you're controlling ten ICBM missiles out there. Sure, so
our launch control center might be like in this one place,

(32:51):
and you might have one missile that's like twelve miles
in that direction and another one is like fourteen miles
in that direction, so they're not even anywhere close to you.
They're spread out all over across that missile field. But
you're hardwired to each of those ten missiles that you see.
Plus you can monitor the other missiles and the squadron.
So one squadron consists of five launch control centers. Each
one has two crew members and a total of fifty

(33:13):
missiles that you're monitoring, and then you have to do
maintenance on them or calibrations or things like that. When
they do code change every year. That's a really stressful
thing is you got teams going out to all the
missiles and doing the code change, and then you got
to do all this code Chaine stuff in your capsule
and that's about a week week or so long, and
that's really pretty intense and busy.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
So that wasn't the old ten inch floppies, was it
that we saw in the news a couple of years ago?

Speaker 2 (33:36):
We had eight inch floppies there.

Speaker 3 (33:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:41):
So some of the first equipment I was signaled in
the army and some of the first equipment I repaired
was the big disk packs and the big the big
floppies and the real to real tape drives and the
card root punches. Right, that was all the stuff I repaired.
So so you're you're there, that's a four assignment? Is

(34:01):
that it go by pretty quick for you? Or being
kind of your first assignment.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
It went by pretty quick. I mean, I'll like it.
And remember I said that they had that MINIMN education program.
So I was doing my school at UCA Montana. I
got my MBA while I was up there. Made captain
was up there. I didn't do just missile alerts for
the entire four years. So after about seven or eight
months in the squadron, I got hired up to the
evaluator shop and was in at the time. They call

(34:26):
it OPS Group Standard val or OGV. So I as
an evaluator for one year up in the office. You
still pull two or three alerts a month to keep
your proficiency, but then you're working an office Monday through
Friday and doing evaluations on the crew members. And then
so I was a deputy evaluator crew member and then
I went back down to the squadron after a year
of that and upgraded to be a crew commander. Did

(34:47):
the crew commander think about a year and a half,
and then I got selected to go up to the
instructor shop and be an instructor crew commander from my
last year there.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
So the instruction is right there out of the base
of antenna.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
It is so so remember I said, they have the
sim ride that all crews have to do every month.
My last year as an instructor, I was actually one
of the simulator instructors, So I would give the sim
ride to cruise and it's typically like a three to
four hour simulator ride that they have to do. So
every month is a different simulator ride. They kind of
go through the different tasks that you could do and
different scenarios. But then they also had an upgrade sequence.

(35:21):
So when a new crew member comes or when a
deputy is going to upgrade to be a crew commander,
they give them a new deputy, they have to go
through an upgrade sequence. They have to do four simulator rides.
So on Monday they come and do a four hour
simulator ride, another one on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, four
of them, and you're prepping them for their evaluation, and
they kind of go through all of the potential task

(35:42):
or scenarios that they could see so that then when
they take their evaluation then they're prepared for it.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Okay, wow, So where did you go after this? Your captain?
Now you're No. Three, so I mean you're probably moving
on into more command oriented type positions, right.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
Typically Air Force you do like two or three crew
crew type assignments, like operation assignments. So I did missiles first.
So then from Mountstrom, I went to Vandenberg again, California.
That was a training base for space and missiles. So
I went back to Vanderberg for a Discus three Defense
Satellite Communication system three, so it's a communication satellite system
that the Air Force operated, so Discus three that we

(36:24):
call it. I went there for five months of initial
qualification training to be a Discus three satellite vehicle operator.
So we had to learn for like five months how
to operate these satellites, how to fly, and we had
to memorize the telemetry, tracking and commanding diagram for the satellite,
learn how to you know, when we do a operation
on a satellite, we call it a pass plan that

(36:46):
you write. Whether you're going to do a five minute
just state of health support, if you're going to do
like a three hour maneuver for that satellite, you got
to have like a thirty page pass plan that tells
you all the different commands and steps you're going to do,
the prept the satellite and then tell it the fire
its thrusters until it the stop firing and then you
you know, then come down off of that. So we
had to learn all of the ins and outs are

(37:06):
how to operate a satellite. So it has a five
month school So.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
You definitely putting your schooling to work though, I mean
what you went to college for, You're definitely putting all
that that to work. Right, You go to five months
out there, back to Vanderburgh and then where did you go?

Speaker 2 (37:19):
I went to Shreever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Okay,
and the third Space Operation Squadron they operate. At the time,
they operated Discus three satellites and they also operated NATO's
sky Net satellites. So when I got there, there were
some officers and NCOs who were NATO sky Net satellite
vehicle operators. I was there with other officers and NCOs

(37:40):
who were Discuss three satellite vehicle operators and they were
all on crew together.

Speaker 3 (37:44):
What year is this?

Speaker 2 (37:46):
This is in two thousand and one to two thousand and.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
Four, Okay, so anything, I mean, what do you think
Colorado Springs, You're You're back in that area, And.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
So I liked it a lot. One thing I do
recall is like, so when they actually accelerated our class
just a little bit. In Discus three SVO Operator school
in Vanderberg's, we were supposed to graduate around September the
twenty first, Well we got through the syllabus a little
bit faster, so they accelerated our graduation in September fourteenth.
So they had a few us take our evaluations on

(38:17):
the Monday and a few of take our valuations on
Tuesday schedule for that. So I took my evaluation on
September tenth, twenty ten or two thousand and one, and
so I think, okay, I got my valuation behind me.
I'm in my apartment and my mother in law calls
about six thirty in the morning and says, hey, are
you watching the news. It's like no, why, she goes

(38:38):
a plane just flew into the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon's on fire. So I go and turn the
news on. So it was September eleventh, and that's when
that happened. So it was right when we were getting
read to do our evaluations to graduate from that school,
and I'm watching the news and then they did a
recall and said we all need to come in the base.
So we I had a friend that I wrote in
the base with there, he's one of my classmates. He

(38:59):
comes to pick me up and we go to get
on base, and the line of cars to get on
bases like almost stop because they went to threat condition Delta.
It's just locked down and they're very strict about who
they're letting on, searching everybody. And we finally get in
get to the auditorium for the training squad and they
have us come in in this kernel. I think as
a training group, commanders talks to us and tells us

(39:22):
about what's going on and what they knew at the time.
They said, yeah, we've got the you know, a couple
of planes have flown in the World Trade Center, the
one the Pentagon. There's other planes that are flying around.
We don't know what's going on, but you know, just
stay close and this is what we're going to do
and be ready for this. And that kind of went
right at the end of our class. There is one thing,
big thing I remembered, writer says, getting ready to move
from that school back to Colorado Spring.

Speaker 3 (39:44):
So did you did you pretty much just stay on
post then or did you stay out? You know, because
you're living off posts at this time, right, And that's
that lockdown happened for quite some time.

Speaker 2 (39:55):
I recalled. They led us off base and said we
could go home because I was living in to my
wife and of my oldest daughter was like three months
old at the time, and we were living in an
apartment in Lompo, California, So they let us. They let
us go home after that because I think my friend Bill,
he had already done his evaluations too. But the other
couple of people in the class still had to do

(40:15):
their evaluations, so they had to figure out to do
it that day or the next day so we could
finish and graduate on that Friday. So I do remember
getting to go home that afternoon and go back to
the apartment, but they were still pretty strict on the
base security getting on and off base the rest of
that week.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
So you you get that call from your other in
law and you know all this is going down, you
get on base. I mean, I know in the military,
you kind of get lost and you know, I've got
the next thing to do, the next thing, right, But
what were you thinking, you know, doing all of this,
what was kind of going on?

Speaker 2 (40:47):
Just kind of shock and that that had happened, and
kind of wondering, what are we going to do? What's
this mean? And you know how things are going to
go because it definitely was perceived as something the world
that changed at that point, but we didn't know what
what that meant, but we knew we were trying to
get done. And then they said, all right, when you graduate,
get to your base and get to work because we

(41:09):
need you because you know this is going on. You know,
we didn't know, you know, how that was going to
play out, and I think a lot of people were
still trying to figure that out. But that's kind of
where we were then.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
So you graduate and then then where do you go?
Would bre you out next?

Speaker 2 (41:24):
So I'm pack up the U haul and we go
to Shrever Air Force Base. My wife and I had
bought a house and a couple of springs kind of
sight unseen, so we show up in town. It's like,
we don't even know where our house is that we bought.
We got to find a realtor to get the keys
for it.

Speaker 3 (41:37):
Everything.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
But we get settled in the color of Springs. Finally
get settled in our house and I'm working out at Shreever.
So when we get there, after we did that five
months of school in Vannberg, then we have to go
through uniqualification training to actually start doing training there for
a couple of months to get up and certified so
we could be a satellite vehicle operator. So I did

(41:58):
that for a couple of months, you know, got there
in September. By November, I'm a certified satellite vehicle operator.
And since I'm a captain, like you said, you kind
of move up in the chain. They tell me, you know,
in December, it's like, hey, next month, you're going to
start CREWK comander training. And so as a crew commander,
you don't touch the satellite, you don't operate them. You're
the crew commander, you're in charge of people. So it's like,

(42:19):
I thought, it was kind of funny how I did
five months of school and training and then two months
of unit training to actually do the job for two
months and then become a crew comander and never touched
a satellite again.

Speaker 3 (42:30):
So was Shreever still on lockdown when you got there?

Speaker 2 (42:33):
I think they were. I think that the base security
is still pretty tight there.

Speaker 3 (42:38):
I mean most Air Force bases are pretty tight normally, right,
I mean they have They've always been that way. Whereas
some of the installations I was on before nine to
eleven were open bases, right, you could just like Fort
Hood and Fort Bragg, for example, we're open posts and
anybody and everybody could drive through there. But then, of
course after nine eleven everything got locked down. So you're
at Shreever. Now you're moving up the chain. You just

(43:00):
had all this schooling and now you've got a couple
of people. How many people are underneath you at that point.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
So when I'm a crew commander, you typically have about
ten people on your crew there. So you have a
crew commander, which was a captain typically a crew chief,
which would be like an E six or E seven,
and then you have like two or three Discus three
satellite vehicle operators which could be like tech sergeants or
so E six's or lieutenants and captains a lot of
times lieutenants. And then the NATO sky Net satellite big

(43:29):
operations which are lieutenants or captains. And then you have
like five or six ground system operators. So when we
went to do a command on our satellites, we'd have
a ground system operator next to us, so they'd link
us up to the satellite through the Air Force Satellite
Control Network. So if we have a Discus three satellite
that's flying over Hawaii, they would link us up to
say the Satellite Control Network Antenna and GUAM and it'd

(43:50):
link us up to the satellite and we do our
state of health. So we had like ten Discus three satellites,
and you would do a five minute state of health
check on each of those satellites three times a day.
We have like thirty five minutes supports on all the satellites,
but then you have longer ones for like battery reconditioning,
season maneuvers. You know, there's lots of different things that
you could be doing with the satellites just to maintain

(44:12):
them and make sure they're good. If you do a
state of health, like you log in a satellite, you're
quickly looking at all these different telemsty screens and printing
them all out and then just doing quick check on
some of the numbers make sure they're within parameters. If
they're not, then you write it down and you come
down off your state of health. If it's not an emergency,
and then you call the engineers and let them know, hey,
we saw this is out of tolerance and the satellite

(44:32):
and they might tell you to schedule another support for
that satellite for like thirty minutes so you can troubleshoot.
If it was critical issue, then you would call the
tell the crew commanders like, hey, we need to go
to Category one Priority one a Priority two for the
satellite Control network, which kind of trumps all the other
satellite systems, say we need to take control of this

(44:52):
antenna for the next two or three hours to troubleshooting satellite.
Then you're calling the engineers and gain help troubleshoot that
because it's the life of the satellite is kind of
at risk there. And I recall now I haven't thought
about this in twenty years, but the different categories. Category
one was like for manned space like like if the
Space Shuttle or the ISS was up there that had
Category one. If we had an satellite mergency, we could

(45:14):
go Category two is the only thing that would knock
us off there would be like a Space Shuttle or
ISS e mergy because this manned space flight there.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
So did y'all do any kind of cross training with
the with the the NATO sky Neet type of stuff.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
No, they pretty much they did their supports for their satellites.
We do our support for our satellites, the ground system operators.
It was kind of the same process for them to
link up those ground and tenas like at Guam or
in Hawaii. I think this one there's called Hula, you
know Guam tracking station. I think there's one in Germany.
You know, they're all around. And that was the other

(45:50):
thing I remember about our satellite. So the discuss free
satellites for communication satellites. We did the s band ttn
C for that, so we basically drove the called this
the bus drivers. We drove the bus and kept the
satellite up in orbit. The X span was the communications
on there. There were actually army units around, like there's

(46:10):
a Camp Roberts in near Vandenberg. There's one in Buckner,
I remember Fort Buckner in Japan. They would actually control
the payload on the satellites. So there was two different
entities controlling SATs. We drove the satellite, but they controlled
the payload packages and the line channels. Like if you know,
certain bases or units needed a channel on that satellite,
they would be the ones that allocate the channels on that.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
I remember when I was in Bosnia, almost all of
our communications was satcom so it was all satellite communications
that encrypted decrypted. So yeah, well okay, so you're how
how long are you with this dude? Assignment?

Speaker 2 (46:48):
About three years?

Speaker 3 (46:49):
Three years then go by pretty quick. I mean, weren't
we got nine to eleven? Right? So this is this
just happens. You're at this assignment, which is a pretty
pretty important role, right, I mean satellit communications is v
actually at that time because communication was key. Right, when
you don't know what you don't know, that's a problem, right,
So this is a pretty important role. I'm sure there
was probably a lot of visibility on a lot of that.

(47:12):
So did you go by pretty quick?

Speaker 2 (47:15):
Pretty quick? My last year there, I was in our
wing weapons at Tactics section, so we did a lot
of stuff with the different squadrons. I remember one thing
we did there is my boss was a major Reagan
shop and he was an Air Force Weapons School graduate,
and we went and worked toge on this thing called
the Space Power Survey. So we went through and analyzed

(47:36):
like how was Trever Air Force Base specifically in our
space system supporting the war fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Because threesops controlled the Discus three satellites. Onestops controlled like
the DMSP satellites and DSP satellites or DSP satellites, you
had the Defense Meteorological Support Program satellites. DMSP was there.

(47:57):
Four stops controlled the Millstar satellites, but r Satcom and
then twosops controlled the GPS satellite. So that's a really
important mission there at Shreeber it was GPS and two
such because they controlled the GPS constellation and GPS was
being used a lot, but sadcom is being used a
lot as well. So we did this space power survey
to kind of figure out how are space assets for
being used to support the war fighters in Iraq and

(48:18):
Afghanistan during OIF and OEF, and that space power survey
that we worked on actually got briefed up to like
the Chief of Staff at the Air Force and then
to the Joint chiefs and giving them an overview of
how our space assets were supporting.

Speaker 3 (48:32):
Yeah, that's that's important. I mean communication is key, right,
I mean specially in the battlefield. So you your three
years there, where did you go next?

Speaker 2 (48:42):
So? I actually I applied for and got selected for
the US Air Force Weapons School as well. So the
Weapon School is at Nellis Air Force Base and it's
about a five and a half month school. So they
have it used to be called the US Air Force
Fighter Weapons School back when it was like F fours
and F fifteens, F sixteens, but it started expanding so
they had like an intel school, a space school. So

(49:03):
I went to the Space Weapons Instructure course here at
the Weapon School. So I got there and started July
fifth of two thousand and four, and then graduated in
December of two thousand and four. Where's nellis It's in
Las Vegas, Las Vegas.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
Oh okay, that's a pretty cool assignment.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
It was, Yeah, it was different.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
You spent a good portion of your career up to
this point on the on the eastern or the western
side of the United States. Yeah, so, okay, so you
go Weapons School. I'm assuming shortly after this you probably
make four. I mean, you're right along at this point.

Speaker 2 (49:40):
I actually met my major's board at the end of
Weapon School, like that November of that year and four
when I was at Web School, I actually met my
major's promotion board. My record met the promotion board. I
didn't hear the results till May five. So I graduated
Weapons School in December, class zero four. Bravo. And then
my follow on assignment for Weapons School was to Vanderberg

(50:00):
Air Force Base at the time was fourteenth Air Force
and the fourteenth Air Force Space AOC. I got there
in January of five, and then in May of five
they redesignated the Joint Space Operations Center.

Speaker 3 (50:11):
You've spent a lot of time at Vanderberg. Yeah, You've
only know that place pretty.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
Well it's now Vanderberg Space Force based.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
So right, okay, so you come down you make four,
how does that change from what you were doing as
an O three?

Speaker 2 (50:26):
You kind of move up into more leadership positions. So
when I got to VanderBurg, I was a cell chief
on the jaspox ops store, so they had four cells.
I was made the cell chief of the Global Surveillance,
Tracking and Targeting Cell. So we kind of worked with
some of the NRO satellites, worked with like the missile
warning assets and you know, doing the censor management for
our ground based missile warning like all the radars that

(50:48):
we have. Did that for a few months, and I
upgraded to be a senior Space Duty officer, so I
was one of the crew commanders of view O for
the jspo OPS floor and doing that and had some
interesting events during that time there, you know, six five
and six. Like one of the things was the Space

(51:11):
Shuttle Columbia accident had happened a couple of years before,
so they were getting ready to do this first launch
of the Space Shuttle since that accident happened. Also, North
Korea was doing lots of missile tests around that time,
so we'd see the Space Shuttle launching and it's going off.
Then all of a sudden, you see, I said, I
just thought of my mind goes, what if North Korea

(51:32):
tries to shoot down the Space Shuttle? And sure enough,
a little while later, all of a sudden, you start
seeing all these warnings going off that North Korea is
launching missiles like that, and we end up having the call.
General Shelton was the commander at the time, and all
of them come in and it was just a really
stressful day that day. I think it was in July
of six and remember correctly, and I remember he was

(51:53):
in there, and I was the senior Space Stuty officer
in command there in General Shelton, all the senior leaders
were in the conference room next to the ops floor,
and I'm going back and forth between there all the time,
and then having to you know, kind of leave everything
in the offs floor. And I just remember at the
end of the day, I felt spent. And I remember
when everything cleared off the conference was empty, that General
Shelton was in there at the head of the table.

(52:13):
You see him just kind of rubbing his nose and
have his head down like he'd been through it too,
and It's like, I'm not going to bother him right now.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Probably a good choice. Good?

Speaker 1 (52:22):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (52:23):
So all right, so have you? I mean, because I
know in the Air Force, you guys get to volunteer
for your deployments, right, So if you were to go anywhere, now,
does this type of role that you're in, I mean,
is there any deployable job for you, like in Afghanistan
or Iraq?

Speaker 1 (52:43):
There is?

Speaker 2 (52:44):
So because I went to Weapons school, that made me
a lot more deployable because they like to send weapons
school grads or patchwhears is what they call them the
Air Force, to deployed locations to provide that space support. So,
while I was a senior Space duty officer, one night,
one of my weapon school classmates it's emailed me and said, hey, Ted,
I hear you coming to visit us or you're coming

(53:05):
to replace me here in Afghanistan. It's like what. So
I'm emailing back and forth and he's telling me, Yeah,
I'm deployee here. I'm the Space Liaison officer at CGTF
seventy six at BOGRAM and you're going to be coming
to replace me here in September. It's like oh okay.
So I started getting ready for that. And so September eleventh,
two thousand and six, five years to the day after

(53:27):
nine to eleven, I'm actually at the Santa Maria Airport
waiting to get on a plane to fly out to Norfolk,
Virginia to then catch a rotator to fly out to
Afghanistan and do a deployment. There's their space, guy, what.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
Are you thinking going into this? Were like, I don't know,
a little nervous.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
I was a little nervous because I had never been
to Afghanistan or anything like that. I was kind of excited,
but nervous and didn't know what to anticipate. The perception
I had at Bogroom, It's like, Okay, it's this little
base with a couple hundred people, you know last year. Look,
the big surprise for me is when I got the
Bogram and seeing how huge it was and sprawling and
there were like thousands and thousands of people there, and

(54:07):
it's like, this is actually a really big base.

Speaker 3 (54:10):
Yeah, yeah, there's there's a lot going on. That was
a central central club for a lot of a lot
of things. So so you get to Bogram, of course,
you get you get handoff from the guy you're replacing
any anything stand out while you were there. I mean,
you get there and you see this just enormous place right,
real busy. It's got an Army on it, it's got

(54:30):
marines on it, it's got Air Force on it.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
So right, yes, So the thing I was worked on
the jock floor a lot. I worked closely with the
Army Spaceport element guys. CGT seventy six, which was the
tenth Mountain Division from Portrum, New York was running that
so at the time as c GTF seventy six, so
I was the Air Force. I was on the Air

(54:55):
component of coordination element. So the way he's organized is
you had the four fifty fifth Air Expeditionary Wing which
is there bogram and the wing commander was also the
Air Component coordination element for the Joint Task Force Combined
Joint Task Force, and under him he had a staff
of like six officers. He had an intel officer, fighter
officer to a couple of airlift people, and I was

(55:18):
the space person. So there were six of us and
I was a space person in that group of six
that were on the air Componic coordination element for him.
Like I said, I worked closely with this Army spaceport
element folks, and so I worked a lot to figure out,
all right, what kind of space integration could we do
to support the work righter there.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
And that was, if I remember correctly, that was a
pretty busy time just in Afghanistan and you know, even
Iraq at that time, so that was a pretty busy time.
So a lot of a lot of going goings on.
So do you guys have any any you know, missile
attacks or anything on the base while you were there?

Speaker 2 (55:55):
Quite a few. I mean a lot of times we'd
find out about when we got in the morning. So
there's a missile attack last night. It's like, oh okay.
So we never really got affected by it that much.
You hear about it next morning. But I don't remember
too many sirens going off or evacuating our bee huts.
So we lived in these plywood bee huts on So

(56:15):
they had it Bograam divided into all these different camps.
So I slept and stayed on Camp Cunningham, and so
they had these plywood bee huts. So we had one
bee hut for all of the six of us that
were there. We had our own little cubicles with our beds,
and close. You're a little locker rekeeep all their stuff
and stay there and then you know, you get up

(56:35):
in the morning, go to the train and do your
showers and get ready and then get getting your uniform
going to work or go to the gym and work
out and then shower and then go to breakfast and
go to work type thing. So but yeah, I don't
really remember the ever being woken up for rocket attacks,
but there were quite a few when I was there,
but it just never really seemed to have an effect.
We'd always hear about.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
It next morning. So how long was this deployment for you?

Speaker 2 (56:57):
About four and a half months.

Speaker 3 (56:58):
Okay, that's a pretty decent time. So then you go
right back to Vanderburgh after this I did.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
Yeah, So I finished my time at Bogram January of seven,
I go back to Vandenberg. And then after I got there,
so I've been in the six fourteen Space Op Squadron
and Combat Ops Division, and then when I go back,
they moved me to the Combat Plans Division, and so
I was helping build like the Master Space Plan and

(57:27):
the Joint Space Tasking Order. So we would do that
every week and then submit send that to the unit.
So we were like the operational level command and control
for all the space units, telling them what things do
with their satellites or the space systems to provide space effects.

Speaker 3 (57:41):
And at this point, you've been in the Air Force,
either enlisted or officer for almost.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
Seventeen years, right, yeah, yeah about that.

Speaker 3 (57:50):
So you're you're pretty senior to just about everybody. So
you go, you leave there, you go back to Vanderburgh.
Now what's next next for you?

Speaker 2 (58:01):
So went to Vandenburg. I was there till eight and
then when you go to weapons school you owe them
five years or two assignments. So Vandenberg was my tier
one assignment. My tier two assignment was going I had
to go to a headquarters Air Mobility Command. And when
I first found out about that, it's like, oh, how exciting.

(58:21):
See five tactics, you know. But one of my weapon
school classmates was actually there, so I went and replaced
him there. And when I got there, it was actually
a lot more interesting than I thought because there was
a lot going on with airbility cranks. They fly all
around the world. I mean they're flying missions around Africa
and everywhere, and so kind was that located. It's Skyty

(58:42):
Force BACE is in O'Fallon, Illinois, So it's about fifteen
miles west or east of Saint Louis, Missouri. Okay, Okay,
And so that's where the headquarters for Air Mobility Command is,
and you also have the headquarters for US Transportation Commander there.

Speaker 3 (58:55):
Yeah. My friend who did the twenty nine plus year
she was there for a little bit.

Speaker 1 (58:59):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (59:00):
Yeah, So you're an Air Mobility Command, you have to
did four years there, I mean the three three okay.

Speaker 2 (59:08):
Three years there. So I did three and a half
Vandenberger and then I got the AMC Airmability Command did
three years there. So when I got there, I was thin.
My duty title was Chief of the Space Tactics Branch,
but I was the only space guy there, so I
guess as a chief of a branch of one. But
then after a couple of months my boss said, hey,
do you want to be the Info Ops branch chief?
I said sure, So I became a branch chief of

(59:30):
charge of about fifteen people there. That's the Info Ops.
I still did all the space stuff, but it was
also the info Ops, an aerospace integration branch, so I
had a lot of people there. Like NCOs and a
couple officers who were info ops and cyber officers too.

Speaker 3 (59:44):
So I still had you made five at this point, No,
I still four? Then okay, okay, So anything interesting happened
while you're there.

Speaker 2 (59:54):
The big thing is when I got there doctor don Erpslow,
he was a chief scientist for amability. So the Air
Force decided to do a day without space study. So
this kind of tied back. So remember as in Afghanistan
until January of about January twenty sixth and seven. Earlier
that month, China did their ASAT test where they launched

(01:00:15):
a SC nineteen a SAT up and destroyed one of
their thing Young one Charlie satellites weather satellites. Well, that
impact created about three thousand pieces of debris one thing
at the j spock is. We tracked all of those.
We tracked all those space debris objects that are in orbit.
And at the time it was about thirteen thousand. When

(01:00:35):
they hit their satellite, it created about thirteen thousand pieces
of debris, So that spiked up the sixteen thousand pieces
of debris that we're tracking, and then that debris cloud
started spreading out and form a ring around the Earth
and it's still up there. Then we did our operation
Burnt Frost for we had a Entero satellite went air
and it was full of hydrazine fuel which is really toxic,

(01:00:58):
and it was in lowerth orbit. So we went I
was at Vandenberg at a COMBT Plants division. We actually
planned the Burnt Frost operation where they got an AEGIS
cruiser Navy cruiser shot down our satellite over the Pacific
and did that. So we demonstrated our capability to do
the same. And now you have this Debrie cloud is
growing and growing, growing, and we realized, okay, there's our

(01:01:19):
adversaries recognized how important space is to us, and it's
very likely they're going to try to take our space
cabilities away if we ever go to a big conflict
with a near peer competitor like China or Russia. So
we did a day without Space study at Amrability Command
in conjunction with Air Combat Command and Air Force Special
Operations Command, where we went and analyzed what's our current
use of space on our platforms. So am ability is

(01:01:43):
like the C one, thirty, C five, C seventeen, KC
one thirty five, KC ten's all those things and so
I actually led a workshop where I got pilots from
each of those platforms, and I brought a couple space
folks out from Shreev and we did an analysis for
a couple of days and made a spreadsheet a database
of what is the current use of space assets on

(01:02:03):
those platforms and what's our future use going to be
in about five to ten years. So typically a lot
of it was like SATCOM and GPS for position navigation timing.
And then we took all that information and then we
went and did this exercise at Nellis in Las Vegas,
Caught an emerging threat tactics teams. We're actually simulated all right,
if we had these space cabilities taken away, how would

(01:02:25):
we fight through this? And what would be the impact
to the Mobility Air Force and the combat Air Force.
And we did this big report, you know, day without
space study. I actually had to go to Air Combat
Command and brief at the General you know Corley I
think was the General Command of Air Combat Command of
brief this. And so this was a kind of a
big study that went up high in the Air Force
to look at all the I mean, when you.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
Start talking about things like a wax I mean, now
you're talking about all your land movement as well, right,
So I mean without without some of that stuff, you
can't really track some of your true movement. Right. It's
all integral to that. So I want to ask you
a odd question. So typically when we talk satellites, we
have one of two choices. Right, you can leave it
there and eventually maybe it'll come down, or we can

(01:03:07):
like bring it down. Right. Is there no option to
just send it Jennison into space or do we just
not want to be the bad neighbor and junk up space?

Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
Now?

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
So, if you have satellites in lower Earth orbit, typically
what we'll do is we'll deorbit them. So we'll use
the last bit of fuel on the thrusters to slow
them down and bring them back into the atmosphere, and
we typically try to have them re enter and crash
into the Pacific Ocean somewhere and have them sinking them
Arey on His Trench or some deep place like that.
Away from popular areas. The Discus Street satellites we're out

(01:03:37):
in the geostation area, which is like twenty three thousand
miles out around the equator. So those Discus three satellites
have a design life of ten years, but a lot
of the ones we operated at three stops were you know, fifteen, eighteen,
even twenty years old, and the big limitation on them
is fuel. They start running out of fuel after you
do know, those maneuvers every month or so to keep
them on station. So when they got low on fuel,

(01:03:59):
we use that last little bit of fuel and we'd
super se them and put them into a bigger orbit
that they're going to stay in for you know, thousands
of years because there's no drag out there that far.
If satellites are in lower worth orbit like where the
ISS is, the atmosphere has drag, and the atmosphere expands
a contracts based on solar activity. When it expands, it
increases the drag and some of those low orbiting pieces

(01:04:20):
of debris will actually re enter and come in to
the Earth. So it's actually good. It kind of clears
out the lower Earth orbit piece. But yeah, so your
option for the ones really far out super sync and
put them a disposal orbit. For the ones close in
is to deorbit them, bring them into the ocean and
crash them.

Speaker 3 (01:04:36):
Interesting. Interesting, Okay, so now you leave Illinois, where do
you go after that?

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
North Dakota, North Dakota.

Speaker 3 (01:04:45):
You'd mentioned North Dakota earlier and when we were talking
about the snow and everything. North Dakota is a little
more isolated than your Montana assignment.

Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
I'm assuming yeah, yes, it was. So there's minor air
Force bases in the middle of the eight and the
joke about mine not because they have missiles there. It's
one of the other missile bases and they also have
BF two. So we will say the air force why
not mine?

Speaker 3 (01:05:08):
Not?

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Reason is the reason. So you have minored Air Force base,
you have brand Forks Air Force Base, which is on
the east side of the state. Well, if you go
way up north in between them, there's a third little
Air Force station at the time called Cavalier Air Force Station,
which is up near Cavalier, North Dakota. We call that
North Dakota's third Air Force base, and that's where we
got sent. So I was the I had pinned on

(01:05:29):
lieutenant colonel in two thousand eleven right before I left
Scott Air Force Base, and then I reported into Cavalier
to be the director of operations for the base and
the squad So I was like the number two person
on the base.

Speaker 3 (01:05:40):
There So did you piss somebody off to get that
assignment or how did that come down?

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
No? I actually I did another deployment in twenty ten,
and this is funny. I'm kind of embarrassed to call
it a deployment, but it's technically a deployment. So I
knew I was hot to get another deployment around two
thousand and nine ten and my boss said, you need
to call your space guys at Space Command and asked
them if you can have any deployments available. And I

(01:06:06):
called them and they didn't have anything available for me
right now. So then right after New Year's in twenty ten,
I got into email saying you've been tasked with the deployment.
It's like, oh, here it comes. So I called the
deployment manager. I said, I can you tell me about
this deployment because all I have is a unit line
number and he said, okay, yep, it's one hundred and
twenty deployment. It's like, okay, that's good, it's only four months,
not six. He goes it's to mcdal air Force Space

(01:06:28):
in Tampa. It's like, oh, I need to go buy
a lottery ticket. So I was deployed to mcdal Air
Force Space in Tampa to Sentcom J five to be
a Security Cooperations type officer there and help out in
Security Cooperation Division. And then about a month later, one
of my friends at Air Force BACE Command A three
tw said hey, are you available to deployment Summer's like, no,

(01:06:50):
I'm already tagged with one. He goes, oh, we really
could have used you. He's like, well, I called you
guys two months ago and you said you didn't need me.
So now they tagged me with this one. And so
I deployed the Tampa why is down there. I had
another friend who was working at US SOCOM Special Operations
Command and the J thirty nine, So I went met
with him and I was talking to them and said, hey,
I would love to come here for my next assignment.

(01:07:11):
So they actually worked a buy name request for the
SOCOM J three to me to buy name request me
to SOCOM to be a jpit and nine staff officer,
which had been great because I grew up in Florida too.
Before I moved to Texas, my parents lived down in
Fort Myers, two hours south. It's Florida. You can't beat that.
So I had a buy name request to go to
STOCOM and thought everything was all good. Well, somebody else

(01:07:33):
put a buy name request for me at twenty first
space being at Peterson to go be a director of
operations for a squadron. And so one of my friends
was at the personalel center called and said, hey, we
got a buy name request for you. It looks like
you gave a mask to a to be ado and
a squadron, which is better from a professional development standpoint
because that lines you up to be a squadron commander
and move on and get promoted. So I said great.

(01:07:54):
So Florida Vandenberg, Colorado goes Cavalier in North Dakota, Say
can I Can I trade that? So yeah, So I
got tagged to be the do O for the tenth
Space Warning squad and at the Cavalier Air Force Station,
North Dakota. And that's that trump the SOCOM move because
again it's better from a professional development standpoint. So said, no,

(01:08:15):
you got to go to North Dakota and do that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:17):
So so com I here's another bad assignment. Though that's
I hear. No, it's pretty good for your career as well.

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
Well. When I when I was down there, they said yeah,
there's there's two commands at McDill you got Synthcom and
so Coom, Sad Calm and happy Com. And I saw
the truth of that because the tenth comm guys would
be there working until six or seven at night on
a Friday. The Solcom guys are all leaving at four
four thirty pm and going and having barbecues and have
a good time and hitting the feet.

Speaker 3 (01:08:42):
So yeah, yeah, so you're you're in North Dakota cold
probably what you don't have any you don't have any
chinook wins up there. I'm assuming it probably just when
he gets cold.

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
It's cold right, yeah, yeah, it gets a little freezing
in October. It stays there until March.

Speaker 3 (01:08:59):
So n nice. How does that? I mean, how does
that affect your work?

Speaker 2 (01:09:04):
I mean, I mean I lived on the base and
so I had it's the base is like two hundred
and eighty acres. So there's like six duplex homes on
the base for the squadter members and there's two bigger,
bigger homes kind of off on a cul de sac.
One of them. They're identical in every way except that
one has a two car garage and the other there's

(01:09:25):
a one car garage. So the two car garage was
the commander's house and the one car garage was the
d o's house. So we lived in the one car
garage house, and then she and her family lived in
the two car garage house.

Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
And I'm sure up there they're more prepared for, you know,
the snow and the ice than they are saying Corpus Christi, Texas.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
They do. So you have to get block heaters in
your car. They had plugs in the parking lot where
you plug your car or truck in when you went
to work in the wintertime. And then the radar building
was like one hundred and ten foot tall co you know,
big radar site that's facing north because it's a missile
warning site, so it's facing north to you know, to

(01:10:06):
see any missiles in down If Russia or somebody decides
to launch against us, they're going to pull into the
Arctic Ocean to the Hudson Bay and launch against the
sod radar is up there, pointing north in about four
degrees off to the right of true north to give
the full view over the Hudson Bay.

Speaker 3 (01:10:23):
So I'm sure that that probably freezes quite a bit.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
It gets cold, so anything.

Speaker 3 (01:10:29):
Exciting happened while you're there. I mean, this is your
I mean, you're you're really moving up, moving up on
the chain at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
So yeah, no, I mean it's a missile warning site.
We also did space revaillance. So they built this missile
warning site for you know, if the Soviets at the time,
back in the seventies, society, you know, they saw they
had a missile warning site up in Alaska. They have
one in Cape cod, they have one in Filing Dale's.
But they realized there was a gap in coverage over

(01:10:57):
the Hudson Bay. So this was built in like seventy six,
and it's called the Spartan is part of the Spartan
Antibalistic missile system. So they built it. So we were
called the Spartans. Was the squadron mascot. And so Congress
spent a couple of billion dollars in a Spartan antiblistic
missile system. They went and built it, They went operational,
and one day later they took it offline because of

(01:11:18):
the ABM Treaty. And Congress said, we just spent billions
of dollars on this, we have to be able to
use it for something, and say, well, we're going to
use it for missile warning, and then they found that
when they were using it for missile warning that it
also was picking up all the space objects out to
three thousand miles, So it actually cut a lot of
the space track data on orbiting objects that were going
over the poles, and it actually produced about forty percent

(01:11:39):
of the space track data that they used to maintain
the space catalog of all those at the time sixteen thousand,
Now it's about twenty six thousand objects that they're tracking
and maintaining a catalog on.

Speaker 3 (01:11:48):
The military did something efficient, crazy, isn't it? That doesn't happen?
So you're there for three years? Where'd you go after that?

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
I was there for a year year and a half.
It's a shorter tur up there because I guess they
figure it's too cruel and unusual to be up there
for three years. So it's about a year and a half.
From there, I moved to Norfolk, Virginia, went and did
a joint assignment. So there's an organization called the Joint
Enabling Capabilities Command or US transcom Jet at Naval Station Norfolk.

(01:12:18):
So I went there to be a joint planner and
also a space guy there.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
Okay, I mean you live in Virginia now.

Speaker 2 (01:12:26):
So yeah, we loved it. So we found a really
nice house here in southern Chesapeake. I love the assignment
because you're you're working with Army Navy Marines in the
joint community. I got to learn all about the joint
planning process. I got to travel around the world. I
got to go to Japan. I volunteered to be exercise
lead for the Japan Keen Edge Exercise. So I went

(01:12:48):
to Japan for the planning conferences and then I led
a team of jet planners to support the Keen exercise
in Japan and January fourteen, I got to deploy, got
to go to Bahrain for an exercise, got to go
to Alaska for an exercise, got to deploy to Kuwait.
Then I was one of the leads for the Australian

(01:13:08):
Exercise Tablet Savers. I got to go to Australia a
couple of times. I mean, I love that that assignment.
It was one of my favorite assignments.

Speaker 3 (01:13:15):
Just I've been in North for a couple of times
and just seeing that, I mean that how big those
ships are is just impressive. I mean, when you look
at that and you're probably thinking, man, I could have
been in the Navy and done that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:26):
Well, that's a funny thing. So when I was I
was the team lead for our team that was supporting
the Australian Exercise. We went down there. We were actually
on the USS Blue Ridge and I actually slept in
a state room they called it. And the stateroom in
the Blue Ridge is one tiny room with three bunk beds,
so you got to lower a middle and an upper
bunk bed. So six people in this tiny room in

(01:13:47):
the tiny bathroom. And it was definitely Air Force Appreciation
Week or a time. I said, Okay, I chose wisely.

Speaker 3 (01:13:55):
I made the right choice, especially being six with three
I mean right, you would not have you would not
have fared well on some of those ships because they're
not made for tall people. No, all right, so you're
you're in Norfolk? Is this where you? Is this your
final final stop.

Speaker 2 (01:14:09):
Or it's my final stop? It wasn't my final assignment,
so I uh, I was a jet planner while I
was there. I got picked for jp ME two at
the Joint Force of Staff College which is here in Norfolk.
And when I went there, I really liked it. I
liked the academic environment. So I said, hey, I wouldn't
mind staying here. Do you do you need people to

(01:14:29):
teach here? I mean, I'm a jet planner at the JECK,
and it's like, yeah, we'd love to have you. So
they did a by name request for me, and it
was a no cost move. So when I finished my
JECK time, I just went over to the Joint Force
of Staff College and started to teach JP me too,
And I love that assignment too, And I actually taught
there for five years and then I retired out of there.

Speaker 3 (01:14:45):
So did you retires in five or you pick up
six oh five oh five? Yeah? So you really you
really enjoyed teaching and uh.

Speaker 2 (01:14:55):
I did?

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
Yeah, when when you were getting ready for retirement. So
here your You've had a great career and you get
into that close to retirement point. Was that was that
pretty hard decision? Or did you think you know you've
done enough?

Speaker 2 (01:15:09):
No. When we moved here in for my first assignment,
our daughters at the time were in sixth and fourth grade,
and I knew it was gonna be about a three
year assignment, which put them about to start high school.
So we promised them. It's like, we're not going to
move again. We're not going to make you move. We're
going to stay here as long as we can, and
then I'm going to retire here one way or the other.
So when I got that other assignment to the Staff College,

(01:15:30):
it was a three year assignment. I requested an extension
because my oldest daughter was going to start our senior
in high school. So they gave me that, and then
I was coming up on having to do another assignment.
So I asked my assignment seems like, hey, could you
take me off the vulnerable mover list just for two
months and I'm going to drop my paperwork and they said,
oh yeah, sure. So they gave me a one year
extension around that time. And so then it was coming

(01:15:53):
up with twenty twenty, so, you know, June twenty nineteen,
I was coming up in time to renew my clearance
and all that stuff. So I get an email from
the Air Force Personnel Center on June twenty sixth from
one of the guys there. He goes, he didn't address
my name. He goes, Lieutenant Colonel, we'd like to see
your interest in doing one of these assignments in Pakistan
doing F sixteen foreign military sales. Please call me asap.

(01:16:15):
It's like so, I called the guy and he goes, yeah,
So you're number three on our list of twelve people
to go to this assignment in Pakistan for a three
hundred sixty five day tour. So you can either take
the assignment. I said, no, that's a thumbs down. He said,
you can wait it out, but you're probably going to
be matched to this since there's two assignments and you're

(01:16:36):
number three on the list, and if you get it,
you're going to have to take it, or you have
to seven day out and be retired within six months.
And I said, or you can apply for retirement right now.
I said, well, it's Thursday, June twenty six. Can I
wait till Monday to come in and do my lgibly
checking all that. He goes, yeah, we won't get you
in the middle of the week next week. So and
I said, I'm a space guy, what do I know
about F sixteen foreign military sales? And we don't care

(01:16:57):
anybody can do that. You see an officer to fill it.
I said, all right. So I came in on like
six thirty in the morning on Monday, July the first,
twenty nineteen, and I submitted my eligibly check, so I
want to see if I can eligibly retire on July first,
twenty twenty one year out. On Wednesday, about noon, I
get an email saying that I've been mastered to an
assignment to Pakistan. So I emailed the guys, like, what's

(01:17:17):
up with this? I did my eligibility check. I'm waiting
for that. He goes, as long as you did the
eligibility check. When that comes back, submit your retirement application
and it'll kill the assignment. And then about an hour later,
I got an email saying, congratulations, you've been approved to
apply for retirement on July the first of next year.
So I quickly did my assignment of my application retirement
and got it approved, had my orders in hand by

(01:17:40):
July twelfth. The funny part of this is that on
April August twenty ninth, I got an email from that
same guy saying the Secretary of the Air Force International
Fairs has decided a change their policy and they're converting
this to one hundred and seventy nine day TV wire
and they're inviting anybody who applied for retirement to withdraw
the retirement application and stay at active duty. So I

(01:18:00):
wrote back to him, I put funny exclamation point, put
a smiley face, and just send.

Speaker 3 (01:18:04):
It to him. Nope, Nope, not going to do it.
So see going to retirement? Did you just fully retire?
Did you take another job after that? What do you
do now?

Speaker 2 (01:18:16):
So while I was at the Staff College, this is
where I thought about writing an article called a funny
thing happened on the way to my dream job. So
my dream job, I thought, was to retire from the
Air Force and then apply and work as a civilian
faculty member at the Staff College. So why About a
year after I started Staff College, I started a doctoral
program at Reaching University. So in twenty twenty, I graduated

(01:18:38):
from Reagent my doctorate in May of twenty twenty. I
retired in June and twenty twenty. I wasn't really sure.
And this is when COVID happened. So they shut the
Staff College down and send us home. I'm at home.
I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do
when I grow up. Now, and a good friend of
mine reaches out to me on Facebook Messenger in April
and goes, hey, Ted, how's retirement going. It's like it's

(01:18:59):
going well. He goes, you find a job yet It's like, no,
not yet. And he says, well, I got a friend
who's looking for a space a couple of space people.
If you're interested, i'll send you the email with the
job information. So I said, sure, send it to me.
So he sends me an email and there's this small
company out of McLean, Virginia that's looking for a couple
of space people, space experts, and they say weap the

(01:19:20):
school graduate is highly desired. So I said, okay, So
I sent my resume to the guy on Saturday. We
did a phone interview on Sunday, did another phone interview
on Tuesday. I had a job offered by Thursday to
start us a subspace act matter expert in a senior
defense analyst. Start in July first. I retired on June thirtieth,

(01:19:41):
and then started that job on July first, twenty twenty.

Speaker 3 (01:19:43):
Wow. That's great, that's fantastic, that's awesome. So we've been
going for quite a while here. It doesn't take long
to spend an hour talking about right, So is there
anything else within your career that this stands out that
you want to you want everybody to know.

Speaker 2 (01:20:02):
Now, just a small world in the military and the
Air Force. It's kind of funny because I mentioned I
graduated high school in eighty eight. When I was at
Discus three Satellite School in two thousand and one, they
had a map on there where there were pins in
the map of where people were from. And I looked
at the map and there was a pin in Portland, Texas,
And I said, who's from Portland, Texas? So I looked

(01:20:23):
at the list and there was a person in the
class before me, David Traylor, and he and I graduated
high school together. I hadn't seen him in thirteen years,
and we were in the same school, and then in
the same squadron together at Streever thirteen years later. And
just running into different people, like when I was in Afghanistan,
I ran into a Maggie O'Hara. She's a friend of mine.

(01:20:43):
So we were in art to see together. You see,
in Texas for one year she was at Mountstrom, I
ran into her. She was a helicopter pilot by then.
And then when I'm at Afghanistan, I'm getting read leaved,
I see her coming in and I see her so
you just kind of run into people at different times.
It's kind of strange. So it's a small world. But
I've just made some great friendships and lifelong relationships, you know,
and friendships in the military, and wouldn't trade it for

(01:21:04):
a thing. I had a great ride.

Speaker 3 (01:21:05):
Yeah, the military definitely makes the world a little bit smaller,
you know, you run into a lot of those. So, well,
I appreciate you coming on. I mean, it's a fantastic story. Uh,
you know, I really appreciate you coming on and giving
us your time.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. And thank you
procusing me and give me an opportunity to share my experiences.

Speaker 3 (01:21:26):
Absolutely, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (01:21:29):
All right, if

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

The Joe Rogan Experience

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Lima Charlie, Episode 26 with Ted Roberts

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

The Joe Rogan Experience

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

All Episodes

Lima Charlie, Episode 26 with Ted Roberts

Stuff You Should Know