So I signed on the dotted line and began the wait for my official orders to arrive in the mail. My predetermined path would send me through boot camp, school, jungle warfare training (I chose a land-based rate over maritime) and have me back in my home town in less than a year. I decided to enlist in a new program that would allow me to meet my obligation to the military while limiting the amount of time I would spend in active duty. That left the Navy, so I gave the Army the finger and it was “anchors away” for me. And the Marines looked way too much like the Army. My wings were clipped, so the Air Force was out of the question. My path to a government-paid career in aviation had come to a screeching halt.Īt this point, I had the option of continuing down the Army path in a far less glamorous role - or change direction and join a different branch. Despite my pleas for a recount, I was formally rejected. I couldn’t believe it! Surely I could get a point’s worth of extra credit somewhere! But this was the government, and rules are rules. Much to my dismay, my final grade was 299 - just one point below the minimum score required. We had to wait a couple of days to receive our scores, since the grading had to be done by hand. I remember commenting to myself that if I could answer these questions I wouldn’t need flight school.
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You definitely had to know how to pilot a plane to score well in that area.
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The answers showed a series of stick and rudder movements, one of which would result in the aforementioned view. One part consisted of questions posed as illustrations of cockpit views that reflected various attitudes of the aircraft I was virtually piloting. The test was hard, but I was feeling pretty good about my performance. In order to pass and gain entrance to flight school, I had to achieve a minimum score of 300 out of 400 possible points. When test day finally arrived, I showed up for the 8 hour written exam that was being conducted at our local Gunter Field.
In preparation, I checked out a stack of books on the piloting of fixed and rotary-wing aircraft from the local library and even took a few flying lessons at a local airport. I only had one shot at passing the test and time was short.
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Though Sky King was one of my favorite old TV shows, I figured that even several seasons of loyal viewership probably wouldn't get me through. That left the written exam, but I didn’t know much about flying a plane - let alone a helicopter.
I already had the high school part down and I was in pretty good physical shape. They needed replacements so badly that they temporarily lowered flight school entrance requirements to the need for a high school education, the passing of a physical exam and successful completion of a written test. Our exodus was largely being facilitated with the use of Army helicopters and hundreds of ships were shot down. The Vietnam War effort was winding down and the withdrawal of US forces was well underway. It was pretty apparent that, even if my grades were much better than they were, I was headed to Southeast Asia as a ground pounder - that is, unless I came up with a better plan. As luck would have it, my draft number came out of the hopper at number 4. I was attending the University of South Florida as a freshman in the summer of '71, right at the tail end of the war in Vietnam. During the times that the US was engaged in conflict, birth-dates were drawn from a lottery pool to see who was going to get an all expense-paid trip to the battlefront. Up until 1973, every able bodied American male by the age of 18 was mandated by the US Government to register for potential servitude in the armed forces. When I witnessed first hand how transformational the boot camp experience was, (particularly for the young men that were less grounded and more defiant than yours truly), I could see how beneficial a few months of 'character building' could be. I have a pretty vivid recollection of what boot camp was like for me and, quite frankly, I don't think that many of today's kids could hack it. It's a sad statistic, not just because of the implications regarding national security, but it's an indication of how the current generation is faring health-wise. A recent LinkedIn post stated that over 70% of today's youth fail physically and/or mentally to meet the minimum standards for entry into US military service.
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