A Moment or a Mountain

I don’t like reality TV.  I’m certainly a fan of reality, but I’m convinced that reality TV is just a clever way of saving money on actors and writers.  If you’re a fan, sorry.  However, there is a new show that I do kind of like.  Technically it’s a reality show but it has a different wrinkle and, as a commander, it’s the kind of thing I wish I could get away with.  It’s called Undercover Boss.

If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that a CEO wants to find out how his company works so he changes his appearance and then travels around the country pretending to be some down and out schmuck looking to change careers.  Sadly, once Hollywood gets hold of a good idea, they turn it into a festival of tear jerking emotional goo, but if you look through the weepiness they actually do get to see the problems in their corporations.  What amazes me is how successfully lower and middle management shields upper management from the problems that, in many cases, keep the organization from reaching its true potential.  Many times the boss gets out there and finds out that the employees are working in unsafe conditions, or benefits have been cancelled, or most sadly, great ideas are being ignored by those that want to continue the status quo.  In the end, the CEO always helps those in need by giving away cars or paying for their education or helping with medical bills or sending them on vacations.  They all cry and hug and go back to work.

What I find most interesting though is how the CEO reacts to the realization that all is not rosy.   Some of them see it immediately and in a take action.  They’ll announce who they really are, stop operations on the spot and call in the experts to fix it.  Hard decisions made in a moment.  On the other hand, some bosses are in denial.  They bounce from division to division telling themselves that the problems are localized and are just minor hiccoughs in an efficient organization that they’ve spent years building.  Only when there’s a mountain of evidence to the contrary does it finally dawn on them that there are drastic changes needed to prevent a complete failure of the company.

Sadly, we never get to see the follow through on the problems or how the CEO deals with those that let the company down.  I’m pretty sure successful corporations don’t just move bad managers to other divisions or promote them.  Only the government, and military do that!

When companies fail, jobs are lost, stockholders lose money.  But if we fail, if we don’t make the right financial calls, the price is much higher.  When we make bad decisions and then let either our ignorance of the true situation or our pride get in the way of changing our minds we do a disservice to the nation we serve and to the people who look to us for leadership.

Keep your eyes and ears open.  Get away from the desk.  Check and double-check what the yes men tell you.  The facts are the facts no matter how hard you sometimes wish they weren’t.  Be willing to confidently change your mind.

It’s time for an old story.

When I first escaped active duty I discovered the Sleepy Hollow of AFRC, Youngstown.  It’s not that exciting things don’t happen at the “Yak”, it’s that it, pretty much, sits in the middle of a corn/soybean field depending on which crop rotation they’re on.  There isn’t anything nearby.  No hotels, restaurants,  fast-food, mini-marts, just corn.  As a result, deciding where to go for lunch in 30 minutes can be challenging.  Back in ’86 it was even worse than it is today so we often ended up at some odd places.

One of our favorite places back then was the Dairy Queen in the thriving megalopolis of Cortland, OH, right next to beautiful Mosquito Lake.  “Cm’on kids we’re vacationing at Mosquito Lake this year!”  This wasn’t your run of the mill Dairy Queen, this was one of those fancy Brazier Dairy Queens complete with inside dining. And, to my joy, in ’86 they were serving those new-fangled treats call a “Blizzard”.  Anyway, we headed there for lunch one Tuesday, me, Les, Lee and Marty I think, and walked up to the counter to place our orders.  As we took turns, I noticed a sign next the register which listed all of the great Blizzard flavors available and, on a whim, I decided to break out my trusty grease pencil and add one of my own.  I wrote, “Fish-head”.  I giggled to myself and when it was my turn, I ordered a hamburger, fries and a small fish-head Blizzard.  The woman behind the counter gave me a sideways look and told me, of course, that they didn’t have fish-head Blizzards so I matter of factly changed my order to a small chocolate shake.  Aircrew being aircrew, we all had a good laugh and went on our merry way.

Fast forward one week and there we were again standing at the same counter and, much to my surprise, no one had rubbed of my addition to the menu.  So, I strode up to the counter and placed my order.  “I’ll have a hamburger, fries, and…….. a small fish head Blizzard”  This time her response wasn’t as pleasant as the last time as she informed me that they still did not have fish head Blizzards and that it sounded disgusting,  So, I changed my order to a small chocolate shake.

We laughed even louder this time, but as we sat eating, an odd little man walked in and made his way to the counter staring intently at the menu along the way.  I describe him as odd based mostly on the black socks and sandals, checkered shorts, striped shirt, and coke bottle bottom glasses held together with scotch tape.  Not that I’m a fashionista, but I’ll only wear that at home.  He got to the head of the line and in an unsurprisingly nasal tone ordered a hamburger, fries and a small fish head Blizzard.  That’s about all the girl behind the counter could take and the poor little geekish man took the full brunt of her verbal assault.  “What is wrong with you people!  All week people have been ordering fish head Blizzards!  Who ever heard of fish heads in ice cream!  Are you crazy!  What makes you think we have fish head Blizzards”  Under a glaring stare that could kill a small animal, the man answered.  “It’s right here on the sign, Fish Head, right below Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups”.  The girl leapt over the counter, read the sign, and proceeded to rip it from the wall.  She then calmly walked back around to the counter and the odd little man said, “I guess I’ll change that to a small chocolate shake”

I’ve always been interested in the decision making process.  It’s not that I’ve always made the best of decisions, ask my wife.  There was the Christmas that all of her gifts had electrical cords and I’ve never lived that one down. I’m a guy after all and even our judgment in important decisions like in picking a spouse is usually clouded by brain-drop.  Luckily, I got a hot and smart one!  But, I’ve often wondered why people, and organizations, make decisions that can be so counterintuitive to an outside observer.

My brother Bob, a minister and author, once told me that the most difficult part of ministry was being asked by someone for advice on a big life decision and then the person doing the opposite of his advice, it going terribly wrong, and then coming back to him and asking why God did this to them.  It happens all the time and with the same people over and over again.  Even decisions that you would think are mundane can have far reaching, long term consequences.

Back in ’03, when we were getting ready for OIF to kick off, I remember weeks of phone calls with HQ.  They were trying to decide which of the two Youngstown squadrons should be activated.  There was the 773^rd which is a standard C-130 airlift squadron, and the 757^th which not only does all of the normal stuff, but is the only large area aerial spray platform in the DoD.  At the time, the 757^th was responsible for the coastal oil spill coverage for most of the US and was scheduled to spray for mosquitoes/biting midges over the entire summer.  My recommendation was that the 773^rd be activated first and 757^th provide follow on based on the future needs.  We talked about it for days, HQ agreed, and we just waited for the tasking.  The day came and when I looked at the order, it read “757^th”.  I called HQ thinking that there must be some kind of mistake, but they said that they had changed their minds the night before and the decision was final.  So off we went on the 1^st of February with the entire squadron for an “undetermined” length of time.

Fast forward to a beautiful May spring day in Germany (sounds like The Producers) when I received the first email.  It was from HQ.  “When will you be able to start spraying Langley?”  I ignored the email.  I ignored the second one, the third one, the fourth one, each getting a little more demanding.  I, of course, wasn’t working for AFRC.  I was working for USAFE supporting CENTCOM.   I was launching every aircraft, every day.  Supporting evacuations in Liberia, earthquakes in North Africa and Marines in northern Iraq.  So I waited for a phone call from USAFE.  When they did call I was advised that the Commander of ACC, at Langley, was in a pissing contest with the commander of AMC and AFRC demanding that his base be treated for a particularly bad mosquito season.  I called AFRC, I listened politely to, as chance would have it, the same guy I had spoken with about the deployment in January  and after listening to his long sad story, I spoke three words and hung up.  “You chose poorly”.  Yes, I do like Raiders of the Lost Ark.

“The way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice, Proverbs 12:15.”    Some people don’t really want an answer, they just want reinforcement of a decision they’ve already made.  All we can do is offer the best advice we can and feel no remorse when it’s not heeded.  The difficulty is not offering unless asked, no matter how much it hurts to watch, and not rubbing it in when it’s obvious you were right.  I’ve been accused of always having an opinion and I won’t deny that, but the only thing I ask is that you never ask me for dating advice or what color to paint the walls.  No one ever listens on the first and I don’t care on the second.

My Uncle George is the most mellow man I’ve ever met……. He passed away last Thursday, 0300, quietly.  Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers.

I think I need to dedicate a couple weeks to Uncle George stories.

Uncle George sang in the church choir.  He didn’t have a booming voice like my brother Tim, but a smooth soft bass which, like him, blended with everyone.  We had choir practice every Wednesday night and the whole family went.  You either sang when you got to the point your voice didn’t crack anymore or you sat and listened and learned.  During the summer we all took turns, after choir practice, going home with Uncle George who shared a house with our Grandmother. We always fought over whose turn it was to partake in the joys of spending a night with Grandma and, as grandmas are prone to do, getting spoiled.  Well, on this particular warm summer Wednesday in 1968, it was my turn.

Oh yes, there’s one other piece of information critical to this story.  There was a woman in our church, a rather large woman, who Uncle George would drive home every Wednesday after choir practice.  She was a lovely lady whom I had known pretty much known my whole life but she had a deathly fear of water, and on a warm summer evening in an un-airconditioned church the combination could be, let’s say, problematic. Let’s call her Mrs. X.  Mrs. X only lived three blocks from the church so it wasn’t a long ride, but the ride that night would put even the mellowness of Uncle George to the test.

I dove into the backseat of Uncle George’s two door Dodge with visions of ice cream before bed and Capt Crunch for breakfast dancing in my head but as Mrs. X fell into the front seat and slammed the door shut I slowly, inexorably began to lose my appetite.  There was an odor floating through the car like none I had ever encountered.

By the end of the first block I felt it necessary to air my concerns to Uncle George and, as most 12 year olds do, I expressed it as diplomatically as possible. “Uncle George, something really stinks in here!”  In true Uncle George fashion he calmly replied, “It must be something outside, maybe the wind is blowing up from ALCOSAN” (the local sewage treatment plant).  So to test the plausibility of his theory, I popped open the little back window and poked my nose outside.

The second block.  “No, it’s not outside, it’s definitely in the car and I’m not feeling so good”.  Now the mellow was starting to show a little wear around the edges.  “Maybe a mouse got in the trunk and died” he postulated.  Well being the science geek kid that I was I, of course, came up with a theory that I thought more closely fit the evidence at hand, “I don’t think it’s a dead mouse, I think it’s a dead fish!”

The third block.  If I had looked closer or if it had been light outside, I would have seen Uncle George quivering, but I didn’t and it wasn’t so my next comment was; “I’m really feeling sick Uncle George.  I think I might throw up”.  Mustering every ounce of mellowness from the deepest depth of his soul he said;  “We’ll figure it out when we get home”.  Seconds later we were at Mrs. Xs front door.  She flung open the door, rolled out and thanked Uncle George for the ride.   With the sound of the slamming door still ringing in my ears, Uncle George slowly turned around in his seat and on his face was a look I don’t think anyone had ever seen.  It looked like he was using facial muscles he had never used and it looked painful.  He wasn’t well versed in anger, but he did the best with what he had.  “That smell was Mrs. X.  She’s afraid of water and that includes baths.  Don’t you ever do that to me again!”  Still shaking, he turned around, dropped the shifter into drive, and drove home.  We never spoke of it again.  43 years and it was like it never happened.  But, I think I’m the only person that ever made Uncle George mad.

What is the nature of forgiveness.  We think we forgive, but do we really?  We hold grudges and look differently at people that have wronged us even after years have passed.  Let it go, set it aside, forget, forgive.  Forgive as you have been forgiven.

My Uncle George is the mellowest man I’ve ever met.  It’s not a child of the 60’s kind of mellow, or an “I don’t care” mellow, it’s just, well, Uncle George.  I call him Uncle George, but he’s really my great uncle.  My paternal grandfather was significantly older than his youngest brother George and in an earlier time when extended families tended to live together, George was only 9 years old and living in the same house when my dad was born.  So, since dad had two older sisters, by default George became his big brother.

When WWII started George was almost 20 years old and like most young men of his generation he stepped up to the task  of defending his country.  He joined the Army Air Corps and boarded the train heading west to pilot training.  I have his pilot training yearbooks on the coffee table in my office. He’s easy to pick out in the photos of eager faces with flight caps cocked way too far to the right.  I’ve often wondered how many survived the war and how many are still alive.

He never talked about his experiences.  He flew B-25s and A-26s in India, Burma, and China bombing and strafing Japanese positions until the end of the war.  It wasn’t that he had PTSD or was traumatized by what he’d seen, it’s that it was just what he had to do.  No fanfare, just a part of his life that was over a long time ago.  Millions of others had sacrificed a lot more and his part was no big deal.  His generation had been through the great depression and now was looking forward not back.  Eventually we started asking him about his experiences and I think as he grew older he started to enjoy telling stories that he had never told.  He told me about bombing missions in India and how they knew in advance where the Japanese AAA sites were because the natives told them.  So they would fly their low levels and watch the airbursts pop up from the jungle well out of range.  He told me how the Japanese RPM gage that sits on a shelf in my living room came from a downed Zero he came across on an abandoned airfield.  He showed me a piece of the wing of his aircraft that was damaged by enemy fire.  His crew chief repaired it and then gave him the piece as a souvenir.  He told me the closest he ever came to death was when, on a night combat mission, both he and his copilot fell asleep and woke up at tree top level, just in time to pull up.

I think he became “mellow” after he got back from the war.  He went off to college, got married, had kids, but after combat the daily stressors are, well, not so stressful.  After his divorce, I suspect his wife thought he was too mellow, he moved in with my grandparents.  When they passed, he stayed.  He became our de facto grandfather and he lived either with us or, for 28 years, next door to us.  He was, to us, our friends, and our church, Uncle George.  Three years ago he moved into an assisted living home called Shady Rest.  He was to the point where he couldn’t quite take care of himself anymore and, even though every time you visited him he asked when he could go home, his health improved and he had constant contact with other people his age.  He turned 90 on January 2^nd.  We a took a cake and sang happy birthday.  We talked and laughed and tried to convince him that he was really 90 years old when he thought he was 68.

Two weeks later he had a small stroke.  We thought he was doing fine, but then pneumonia set in, a week in the hospital, a week in a nursing home, now back to the hospital.  More pneumonia, renal failure, DNR, machines turned off, and waiting. Like my dad, I’ll slip a pair of wings into his breast pocket and send him on his final sortie.  Not with the roar and oil spray of twin Wright R-2600s but on the silent wings of angels.

I love Germany.  I don’t speak German.  I don’t drink beer.  I don’t like their politics.  But, I love the food, the Autobahn, the cars, and, best of all, it looks a lot like western Pennsylvania.  Although with a name like Hartman, I think it might be something genetic.  So, when I found myself activated and deployed to Ramstein at the beginning of OIF, I wasn’t really too upset.  We were told to expect to be deployed for a year so I settled in for the long haul.

Delta squadron had been around a long time, at least since the Balkan conflict, and it had originally been at Rhein Mein.  But when they got the boot from Frankfurt the squadron moved south to the slower pace of K-Town.  It didn’t really matter though, it was still Delta squadron.  Hanging out at the CQ, looking for rides into town or deciding which restaurant within walking distance in Sembach needed your business, yellow fields of rape and slowly spinning windmills, it’s not a bad place to be.

Eventually we became a fixture at Ramstein.  We were included in all of the wing events, attended all of the meetings, and relearned why we left active duty.  My favorite meeting was the weekly OG staff meeting.  It’s probably because operators all pretty much think alike.  We talked about the standard overdue OPR/EPR issues, crew misbehavior (It made me really appreciate our more “mature” crew force), flying schedules, and some issues I didn’t really understand or care to understand.  Around April we started to hear other squadrons talk about floats.  I learned a long time ago to not ask questions about things you don’t want to be included in so we, basically, ignored the whole thing.  We had been flying 9 out 10 aircraft every day for months and we didn’t need any distractions.  But eventually, expectedly, we couldn’t avoid it any longer.

Since his father was a retired Guardsman, the OG, uncharacteristically, appreciated the Guard and Reserves.  He understood our desire to hack the mission and get the job done.  He let us manage the schedule which consequently made him look good.  Smart guy!  Well, as we sat around the big table in the OG conference room, he finally asked the question I knew he would eventually ask, “How’s everyone doing on their floats?”.  We had done a little due diligence so we had discovered that every year there was a parade on base that coincided with some sort of German holiday.  Every squadron built a float that had to comply with the base “Float Operating Instruction” which included basic safety requirements like brakes, fire extinguisher, ventilation, steering radius, and visibility.  We, of course, had no intention of participating.  Our ops tempo was staggering yet the active duty still took “Goal Days” so that they could have 3-4 day weekends while we ran the 7 day marathon every week.  But I digress.

As we went around the room, each squadron dutifully described their progress and challenges in constructing their float.  Eventually the OG turned to us and asked, “What about you, Delta?”.   Well, without pause, Tim Costa, 757 AS Squadron Commander, explained how our sheet metal guys had figured out how to fabricate the large metal cylinder required, that we had plenty of black paint, and we could incorporate all of the safety features.  But then I interrupted.  Comedy is all about timing after all, and I said, just like we rehearsed, “We just can’t figure out how to write “Eat Me” in German”.

Crickets chirped, you could hear a nasal drip for what seemed an eternity and finally with all eyes turned on him the OG said, “OK, good luck, who’s next?”.  They never asked again and we never offered.

I think what separates us from our active duty brethren are our priorities.  I heard lots of lip service about the mission and I hear it today as well, but the whole system appears to revolve around the next job and the next promotion or you’ll be out on your ear.  Traditionally the reserve system is about the mission, your family, your community, your employer and how you can support them all.  I pray we aren’t heading down a road that makes us less effective/efficient and more careerist.

Mike was my first aircraft commander.  I showed up at Ellsworth AFB in January 1980, a brand new 2ndLt B-52 copilot and I suppose they found it fitting to match up the worlds’ oldest, crustiest LtCol with the newest squeakiest Lt.  At the time I thought Mike was ancient although he was probably 10 years younger than I am right now.  He had been a C-47 gunship pilot in Vietnam and an air attaché in the US Embassy in Saigon when it fell, one of the last Americans out of Vietnam.  He followed that career path to the US embassy in Tehran and, you guessed it, he was there when the Shah fell and ended up hiding out with friends until he could be evacuated out of the country.  Supposedly, the parts to his dismantled .45 are still under the ballroom stage in the Tehran Hilton, but that’s another story.  Enroute, during his evacuation from Iran, he was asked what he wanted to do and since he was tired of being chased out of war torn countries, he figured flying B-52s in South Dakota sounded pretty safe.  So he moved there with his wife and 4 sons and settled in for a mellow last assignment.

I learned a lot from Mike.  He taught me how to estimate surface winds by the size and direction of white caps on the water.  He taught me how to fly a good NDB.  He taught me that in the Air Force there are important things and then there are IMPORTANT things and how to tell the difference.  He taught me about leadership and motivation and how it can happen with very little effort with the right attitude.  He taught me that after facing enemy fire, every other crisis in life becomes a little less of a crisis.  And, sadly, he taught me that a decision I had made years earlier was a good one.

As most of you know, I don’t drink.  It’s not that I gave it up because I had some black out/woke up in a ditch experience, it’s that I’ve never had a drink in my life.  I’m not a Mormon or a member of a religious sect that doesn’t allow drinking, I just grew up in a family that didn’t drink and couldn’t think of a good reason to start.  I remember asking my mom when I was 8-9 years old what beer tasted like and after a thoughtful moment she looked me straight in the eye and said, “I think it tastes kind of like ear wax”.  Well I had tried that once and wasn’t interested in anything that tasted even remotely like it.  When I was 16 I started dating my future wife Peggy and in that first year of dating I became keenly aware of how her mother’s alcoholism had affected her life.  Kids shouldn’t have to find their parents passed out, carry them to bed, clean up after them, find the hidden bottles, make excuses to friends and family, or be embarrassed when friends come over.  I know I kid her about “retiring” 30 years ago, but when her mother finally passed 3 years ago it took her a long time to get her head around not having to check on her mom 3-4 times a day and deal with the weekly crisis.   We stayed put in Pittsburgh these last 28 years so she could take care of her mother and she should be nominated for sainthood for it.

Anyway, we made a conscious decision before we got married that we wouldn’t support the industry and wouldn’t drink.  I’ve never looked at anyone differently based on whether they drink or not, but the older I get the more I’m convinced that no good comes from it.  Without much effort I can rattle off half a dozen great Air Force people who either died untimely deaths, have lost everything, or said and did things while drunk that they’ll never recover from.  I don’t know if it’s physiological, psychological, sociological, or genetic, but it seems to me that, like base jumping and alligator hunting, the risk assessment analysis points to avoiding it all together.  Like anything, if you don’t want your kids to do something, don’t do it yourself.  Alcohol abuse is a learned behavior and your young airmen ache for good examples and will emulate successful life choices if you demonstrate the results.

We deployed to Guam for 6 weeks at a time back in the early 80s and I found myself being the designated driver and helping Mike back to billeting on a very regular basis.  One night the command post called me because they couldn’t find Mike.  His wife had had a miscarriage and they needed me to find him and break the news to him.  I tracked him down at a local bar, did what 23 year olds shouldn’t have to do, and then got him back to the Q.  Eventually Mike divorced and the last I heard he was living somewhere in Utah, although the number I have for him is disconnected.  I like to think that he went through rehab and is doing well but my experience is that, with few exceptions, the success rate isn’t good.

All choices, no matter how seemingly insignificant, have lifelong consequences and we need to pick a good guide and take the forks in the road that lead to the scenic mountain drive.

I have lots of books.  I’m not really a book collecting kind of guy, but over 34 years I’ve accumulated a fairly substantial library.  At home I have an office, or man cave in the current vernacular, although I don’t have a TV.  It’s just my computer, my “I love me wall”, and lots of bookshelves (If you know Peg, IKEA of course!).  I’ve got a “do it yourself” section, a theology section, a fiction section, a Ronald Reagan section, and a smattering of political references.  On the other hand my library at work leans towards, shall we say, eclectic.

I have books jammed in the credenza, in the drawers, on the coffee table and every time I move I’m amazed at how many boxes it takes to empty the office.  I’ve got Ayn Rand, Charles Colson, Natan Sharansky, and C.S. Lewis just to name a few, but there isn’t really an overarching theme to any of it.  Just things I find interesting.

At the top of the “interesting” list is a thrilling read entitled, “Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, 1995 Report to the President”.  In 1995 I was here at Pittsburgh as the Chief of Stan/Eval.  A job I loved but, after 9 years and multiple ASEVs, decided to leave in 1999 for a DO job in Youngstown.  But I digress.  I remember clearly the day that the proposal was made by the DoD to close Pittsburgh and that moment is captured precisely in the Commission Report with the quote: “It’s operating costs are the greatest among Air Force Reserve C-130 operations at civilian airfields”.  Well, we were gobsmacked!  We knew our financial situation here at Pittsburgh.  We only pay $25,000 per year to lease our property and it includes all fire fighting and crash/rescue services from the County.  Greater Pittsburgh has an international reputation as the most efficient snow removal airport in the nation and the runways are open 24/7 with almost no interruption even with the occasional blizzard.  The county even comes over and repaints the lines on our ramp for free.  We could only conclude that either other airports pay the units to be there or there was something “rotten in Denmark”, or at least Georgia.

We had some pretty smart guys here at the time, math/accounting types, so after the BRAC folks provided us their data base we were able to dig into numbers and it quickly became obvious that something wasn’t quite right.  “Someone” had taken many of the highest costs from all of the C-130 units and plugged them into the data for Pittsburgh and in some cases, numbers were just fabricated.  AFRES had decided what they wanted the answer to be and had, through the plans office, made the numbers add up.

The BRAC commissioner assigned to talk with the 911^th was a small businessman from Rapid City, South Dakota and as we started the interview I remember him brushing aside discussions of value to the community and economic impact.  His perspective was that all communities suffer when their unit is closed and he just wanted facts.  Well, when the cooked books were presented to him, his whole attitude changed.  He gathered up the spreadsheets and headed out the door.

His conclusions were veiled in the paragraph:  “The commission found costs to operate Pittsburgh International Airport Air Reserve Station were inaccurate.  With corrected data applied to the COBRA model, the commission found Pittsburgh was one of the least costly installations to operate”.  As we all know, the commission eventually placed all C-130 bases on the list and made them defend themselves.  The rumor was perpetuated, and the myth continues to this day, that Pittsburgh pointed the finger at all of the other units when, in reality by attempting to cook the books, HQ placed all units at risk.

Eventually Chicago closed, mostly because the mayor literally told the commission that he didn’t want the unit there.  General Macintosh came to Pittsburgh and apologized at a commanders’ call for “mistakes” that were made and told us that “heads had rolled”, or at least been move to other offices.  But the end result was a community which now rabidly defends the 911^th as it does all things “Pittsburgh” and offers its sons and daughters to its Reserve unit at a higher rate than any other C-130 unit in AFRC.

Luckily, we’re much more enlightened these days.  We’ve imbued our AF culture with TQM/6 Sigma/AFSO21 and all decisions are fact based/metric-micro-managed and we can be sure that everything we do is done to save the taxpayer the most amount of money and not to meet petty political parochial agendas.

‘Til next time, “on glidepath, slightly right of course”

It’s easy to get lost in zeros so let’s put the plight of the 911^th in terms we can all understand.

“A Tale of Two Houses”

Let’s say that you’ve been transferred to a new city.  You sit down with a realtor and make a long list of all the things you want in a house.  Good curb appeal, granite counters, open concept, low crime rate, great school district, and a nice backyard.  She goes back to her office, checks the listings, and comes back to you with two houses that fit all of your needs.  As it turns out, the houses are only blocks apart and, since they’re in the same plan, they are identical.  Not just similar, but exactly the same, even down to the room colors.  The only difference is that they are in different townships.   Which one do you pick?

You realize that the only thing you haven’t looked into is the tax rates so you call the township offices.  Township #1 tells you that it’s a great place to live.  The people are friendly, the schools are great, and the property taxes are identical to all of the other townships in the area.  There’s only one small issue.  They’ve experienced some cost overruns in maintaining the roads and street lights.  Their firefighting costs and ambulance fees have skyrocketed over the last few years so they’ve found it necessary to levy an additional fee on every household that probably won’t go away in the foreseeable future.  Now you’re worried.  So, you ask, how much is it going to cost me?  Sadly, they say, it’s going to be $20 per year for at least 20 years.  Well, $20 a year, you figure you could probably forgo 1 pizza a year, but 20 bucks is 20 bucks.  So now you call the second township.  They go through the same diatribe about schools and taxes and they come to the same sad story about additional costs and a necessary levy.  Here’s where the pacemaker kicks in.  They tell you that the levy is $6,000 per year and that it will probably go up every year from here to eternity.

Do we even have to ask which house you pick?  The 20 year cost on house #1 is $400, the 20 year cost on house #2 is $120,000.

Now let’s add the zeros in and change the houses to Air Force Reserve facilities.  House # 1 is Pittsburgh Air Reserve Station.  Its’ fixed costs for keeping the runways and taxiways in good repair and providing Fire/EMS coverage for the facility and aircraft is $20,000/year.  A fixed cost guaranteed for at least 20 years!  For the sake of comparison, house #2 is Dobbins Air Reserve Base.  Both bases provide the exact same capability to the new National Defense Objectives.  Both bases have the same number of aircraft.  The difference is the cost to maintain the airport infrastructure.  The Air Force must maintain the runways and taxiways.  The Air Force must provide a fire department and the personnel to man it.  The Air Force must purchase and maintain firefighting equipment.  All of these costs add up to over $6,000,000 per year and those costs will go up every year with inflation.

Pittsburgh 20 year fixed costs, $400,000.  Dobbins 20 year costs (unadjusted for inflation) $120,000,000.

Welcome fellow Hoverers!   It’s not a word and it’s hard to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else.  I’ll start off with a little history so that we’re all on the same page.

I started sending out emails back in January as a way of saying the things I’ve been wanting to say during the last 34 years in the Air Force but for a variety of reasons, cowardice and self-preservation mostly, I’ve never said.  And that’s where the “hovering over send” thing comes in.  I know you’ve all written a passionate email about an injustice, or someones stupidity, or a difficult situation and after you finished it you moved that little Microsoft arrow over to the ‘Send” button and just stared at it, hovered over it, trying to decide whether to click it or move over to “delete”.  Well, I’ve decided to cut back on my hovering and triumphantly embrace the click.

I’m going to post the last 24 weeks worth of blogging here and continue as long as I can come up with stories and thoughts.  As always comments are encouraged and welcome.

Counting down to the day they fire me!