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whole painful process took about eighteen months. So, it was wear a cloth tie and sit in an office for forty years—or cheat death and fly fast jets.
    No contest, really.
     
    B Y THE SPRING OF 1986 , I’ D COMPLETED A FIVE-YEAR COLLEGE degree in four years so I could be commissioned on time and keep my “slot” for Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT). This is Air Force basic flight school and is only open to commissioned officers who’ve been physically and mentally screened to absurd levels. In the late eighties, there were five air bases devoted to washing out future pilots, and I’d been given a choice: to wait nine months and head off to beautiful, sunny Williams Air Force Base in Arizona or go in five months to Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma. With the eagerness and ignorance of youth, I chose Vance. You know that “nowhere” place everyone is always in the middle of? That would be Enid, Oklahoma. A small town right out of the movie Footloose . No kidding. They legalized dancing there in 1987.
    UPT was generally composed of guys like me: newly minted second lieutenants fresh from a university, the Air Force Academy, or Officer’s Candidate School. We’d been selected by several different boards, who minutely examined the sum total of our lives up to that point. That included background checks, grade-point averages, sports, letters of recommendation, extracurricular nonsense, and probably how we parted our hair. There were physicals, eye exams, psych evaluations, interviews, and a comprehensive qualifying exam. This was just to get commissioned as an officer. The vast majority of the seventy thousand Air Force officers stop right there and enter one of the mission-support fields, like personnel, maintenance, or supply. There are additional batteries of tests designed to trip up prospective pilots, make you feel stupid, and, yes, specifically test your aptitude to enter the flying world. Only about ten thousand of the seventy thousand officers eventually become pilots, and less than three thousand have what it takes to become active fighter pilots.
    So, assuming you pass all that with high enough scores, you get past the gate and up to bat. For your efforts, you’re guaranteed nothing except a shot at the silver wings of an Air Force pilot. Everything that comes later is up to you. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t matter where you came from, who your daddy knows, or what university graduated you. Air Force pilot training is an equal-opportunity destroyer of hopes and dreams. I saw all types wash out. Academy guys, 4.0 GPA engineering types, and men who arrived with a thousand civilian flying hours who couldn’t fly formation or land a jet.
    You’ve either got it or you don’t.
     
    I T WORKED LIKE THIS.
    The first two weeks were spent doing everything but flying: registering with personnel, the flight surgeon, security police, etc. For brand-new lieutenants, this usually meant doing it two or three times to get it right. We also began academics immediately. The USAF is big on technical classroom instruction, and any formal training course, whether you want to become a parajumper or a pilot, has a syllabus. The Air Force requires the highest qualifying scores of the four main service branches just for enlistments, let alone for officers. Given the extreme complexity of modern jets, especially fighters, this is understandable. Since we were recent college graduates, the course load was familiar to us, and we were happy to finally be on the “flight line.”
    On any USAF flying base, the flight line consists of the squadrons, maintenance facilities, and everything in between that makes an aircraft go up and down. Located immediately adjacent to the runways and taxiways, this usually remained a pilot’s home until he became a field-grade officer and had to pay homage to gods of paperwork on a staff somewhere. Of course, we weren’t pilots yet. We were “Studs”—short for STUDent pilotS. (Naturally,