In Wolf's Clothing: Book 2 - The Wannabe - From newbie to neophyte to rookie warrior. So accomplished, he could hardly stand it

By Steve Stipp

How did such a socially inept, unscarred, high school marching band geek, chess club nerd, piano-playing, teetotaling mama's boy wind up with a parachute on his back, a knife in his teeth, and a team of America's finest warriors following him out of an aircraft's jump door into the night? How did he get there? How did he STAY there?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sole Proprietor
• Release date: Feb 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781681029146

Steve Stipp

Steve Stipp is a lifetime dabbler, trying everything in which he ever held an interest. He's been a pilot, a skydiver, a world-touring bandleader, an air traffic controller, and briefly, as described in these books, an Air Force Combat Controller. He currently resides with his wife in Orlando, Florida.

Book preview

STORY XIX

HOME,

HOME OF THE

STRANGE

1

FRESH OFF THE

PUNKIN TRUCK

October, 1977

McChord AFB, Tacoma, Washington

AH, SEATTLE. LOVELY SEATTLE.

A solid plain of fuzzy white mold beneath our wings.

I can’t help it. That’s just what it looks like to me: a total horizon-to-horizon undercast deck with a single snow-capped volcano sticking up through it. That’s my introduction to the ‘beautiful’ Pacific Northwest. If the pilot hadn’t just announced that we were starting our final approach into SeaTac (the Seattle-Tacoma) Airport, I would never have suspected that we were anywhere near civilization at all.

Dammit!

The deep disappointment from having been assigned a base this far from my home in Miami once again resurfaces. And another glance out the window at the rising undercast just curdles it into something even more slimy and bitter.

I don’t want to be here!

But the plane sinks into the cold white soup anyway. And as we continue to descend, the murk outside just gets grayer and grayer and grayer until it blanks out the world altogether.

We break out the bottom barely a thousand or two feet above a dreary wet cityscape, a dismal contrast to the sparkling sunny-blue autumnal ether we’d left above the clouds. I’m sitting in a window seat on the right side of the aircraft, and beyond my wingtip, the lush rolling terrain seems to be drawn up into the overcast like a fistful of sodden quilting being pulled up through the clouds by a giant.

It’s a closed environment out there, a bowl of lumpy green curds with a gray lid on it.

Shit.

* * *

OUR LANDING IS UNEVENTFUL, our taxi-in bumpy and boring, then we’re at the jetway.

I stand, stooped, under the overhead bins, waiting for the gridlocked center aisle to move, and I attempt to straighten up my rumpled uniform. I’m wearing my casual blues again; short-sleeved sky-blue shirt opened at the neck with a white T-shirt peeking out from behind its unbuttoned collar. Dark blue trousers, my piss-cutter hat tucked up under my belt like a hand towel, and my brand new chrome parachutist badge twinkling silver above my left breast pocket. Which means I’m looking better than I feel right now.

I can’t help it. I’m just dreading everything about this assignment.

There’s a guy wearing cammies (camouflaged fatigues) standing in the gate area when I emerge into the concourse. He’s tall and rangy—a little dorky-looking, truth be told—with an unruly ‘mushroom cap’ of curly hair tangled atop his head like a bird’s nest. He’s also chewing gum and slapping a dark blue beret against his thigh as he tracks the passing ladies.

I approach him, snapping him out of his reverie, and we exchange a manly handshake. Then he reads my name tag out loud.

You must be Airman Stipp, he says, I’m Darryl Murton, but everybody just calls me ‘Skeeter’. He doesn’t say why. I’ve got a truck outside to take you to the base, as soon as we get your bags.

Nice to meet you, I reply, And all I’ve got is a duffel.

Well alright then. Let’s head this way, and get you to baggage claim. And he turns to follow the crowd up the narrow concourse—all but his head, that is, which swivels hard left to follow the sashay of a tightly jeaned feminine derriere going the other way.

Subtle, Skeeter is not.

2

JUST A PHASE I’M GOING THROUGH

THE SCENERY IS PRETTY as we barrel south down I-5 into Tacoma. Lush, green, and rolling over the hilly terrain. But the dreary weather saddens it, washing it out like the pale sepia tones of an old photograph. Rain patters the windshield, and every car on either side of us hisses past, either drifting back or charging ahead of us, dulled by its accumulated road film. I keep my eyes out the windows, nodding and issuing "Uh-huhs" at all the appropriate junctures in Skeeter’s ceaseless blathering, but otherwise leaving my attention fixed on the alien tableau outside.

Skeeter, it seems, is the Team’s equivalent of ‘Radar’ on "M.A.S.H.". Fully Phase III qualified and accomplished in almost all aspects of the job, he has nevertheless found himself settled into a more clerical role of late. In other words, his ability to type and keep an organized file cabinet has subtly evolved into a full-time occupation for him, capable of getting him out of any undesirable deployments, exercises, schools, and apparently, judging by his duties of the moment, out of the office as well.

Well, all power to him. Hopefully my own abilities along those lines will lead to a similar evolution down the line.

The verdant roadsides south of Seattle unravel into the flatter, more industrial mosaics of Tacoma—with its belching smokestacks, rundown warehouses, freight yards and dirty looking port (Skeeter warns me about the impending odor, referring to it as the Tacoma Aroma)—and I finally look away from the passing landscape to interrupt his monologue with a question.

Yeh, about that Phase III thing... what exactly does that mean? What about Phases I and II, for that matter? Nobody’s ever really explained any of that to me yet.

Skeeter seems thrilled to have someone actually asking him something for once.

Well, as he explains it—with both hands cavorting through the air as he speaks, making only intermittent contact with the steering wheel, just enough to keep us between the lines of the hurtling interstate—Phase I CCT, as it was called back at Keesler, wasn’t actually Phase I at all. It was more like a "pre-Phase I." All prep, no perks.

This much I already knew. I wasn’t technically Phase I until I pinned my jump wings on just three days ago back at Fort Benning, Georgia. So, for all the work it took for me to get this far, all that being ‘Phase I’ really means is that I am now jump qualified, and legal to jump with my team... which is a minimum prerequisite for starting any other training with them. And all it entitles me to is the wearing of an additional set of jump wings on my ‘field cap,’ plus an extra fifty-five dollars a month in Jump Pay. That’s all.

What’s a ‘field cap’? I ask, homing right in on the important stuff. "You mean my fatigue cap?"

No. A field cap is different. It looks kinda’ like a green Civil War cap, only smaller. Flat on top, tiny little brim. The Marines wore ‘em a lot in Vietnam. You’ll get a couple issued to you once you get to the Team. Anyway...

To become Phase II apparently, you have to complete Combat Control School—CCS—an eight-week ball-buster of a course (two weeks longer than Basic Training) down at Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas. And that’s where you earn your pretty blue beret.

Typically, however, you have to have been with your team for at least six months or so before they’ll even consider sending you to CCS: time to gather a little experience, a little gear, some acceptance from your team, as well as a little clarity as to whether or not this is really the career for you. But once you’ve reached that point, with your team’s concurrence and endorsement of course, then it’s off to CCS with you.

And that’s when the game really begins.

Presuming that you graduate from that—and a third to a half of all candidates do not—then you’re officially Phase II: essentially a trained apprentice-level badass, having been exposed to everything, but mastered nothing, designated as such by the wearing of your brand new beret... but with those same old Army jump wings still affixed.

That’s right; jump wings only. Not the prized Combat Control ‘flash,’ the official insignia of the journeyman Phase III Combat Controller. No, that comes after something like another year back with your team, attending other specialized schools, participating in ever more complex exercises, and racking up time and experience in all aspects of the job, all of which will ultimately have to be checked off for proficiency by a certifying member of your team. And then, and only then, once every checkbox on every page of your training records has been signed off, will you be awarded your flash—your parachute-and-lightning-bolt signet, to be proudly displayed on the facing of your beret.

That’s apparently what every yeoman Combat Controller, as a minimum, aspires to be... "Phase III and meant to be, U.S. Air Force CCT." Or some such happy Bolshoi.

Phases IV and V get into more supervisory and command levels of proficiency, typically reserved for longer-term and higher-ranking operators, so I don’t need to put much thought to those for quite a while yet. If ever.

Hmmm. Interesting.

So, six months or so before they get around to sending me off to CCS, ay? And up to a year after that before I will have exhibited sufficient expertise and perseverance for them to brevet me with a CCT flash on my beret, hmm? A total of eighteen months or so... give or take.

Wasn’t that about the length of time for which Sgt. Beaudry—my pre-Phase I recruiter and instructor—suggested I tough it out? "Give it about eighteen months or so, then see how you like it." Wasn’t that what he said?

What a coincidence.

In other words, see it through CCS and a half dozen or so other exotic schools—see it through to a beret anointed with a flash, basically—through all the steps leading up to Phase III (‘journeyman’) status. See it through to at least that far, then see if you still want out.

So that’s what he was saying, the sly old dog.

Hmmm. Okay.

Yeh, I think I’m up for that.

3

SORRY. WRONG ADDRESS.

AS THE MAIN GATE of McChord Air Force Base rolls into view at the bottom of its dip in the road, Skeeter starts wrestling with his pockets. From his right thigh pocket he produces a ratty wallet, from which he then extracts his military ID card. Got to have that to get past the gate guard, of course.

I take the hint, and pry my own wallet out from under my ass.

As I’m doing so, Skeeter reaches into his left thigh pocket, and pulls out his beret as well.

What’s he need that for? Are we supposed to wear a hat whenever we enter this base?

He slows the truck—just enough to give himself the time needed to don his beret and crank his window down—then we’re coasting up to the guard shack, holding up our IDs for the guard’s perusal, and exchanging curt pleasantries. And that’s when I notice it.

When the SP—the ‘Security Police’ airman—sticks his head into the window to look at my ID, for a moment the beret on his head hovers right next to the one on Skeeter’s. And for the very first time, I notice that they are identical. Not just vaguely comparable, not just both generally blue-ish, but twins. Those two berets are exactly the same—dark royal blue.

Only the flashes are different.

Now how the hell did I manage to miss that similarity until only just now? I mean, I saw lots of SPs at Lackland. Of course, that was during Basic Training. I’d never heard of Combat Controllers at the time, and there wouldn’t have been any on that base anyway. And my last posting? That was Jump School, on an Army installation—Fort Benning—on which there were no Air Force SPs (obviously), and I was the only ‘Combat Controller’ around. But at Keesler AFB? Air Traffic Control School? There were SPs and there was Sergeant Beaudry... although I guess I never saw him wearing any form of headgear. He was always either in work-out togs, or sitting indoors behind his desk. Still... the point is, I never made the connection.

Skeeter doffs his beret as soon as we pull away.

Does McChord have a ‘hat rule’ or something?, I ask with an awkward chuckle.

Nah, he says as he squirrels away his wallet. "I just like to make sure the fuckin’ SPs get a good look at what a beret looks like on someone who fuckin’ EARNED IT!"

He’s shouting at his mirror by the time he’s done.

He looks over at me, and smiles at the big fat question mark on my face.

"Did you know that in all the Air Force, there are only two, two job specialties that call for the wearing of a beret as part of the uniform? And you just saw both of them back there. Combat Controllers have had ‘em since 1953 after the Air Force first became an independent branch of the services."

Yeh, Sgt. Beaudry had told us that Combat Controllers used to be called Pathfinders back when the Air Corps had been part of the Army.

And the goddamned SPs just got ‘em about five years ago, he continues, "as part of some stupid-assed, in-house, esprit de corps, morale-building circle jerk."

He sighs and grinds his teeth.

"But let’s just ignore for now how the SPs are a bunch of goddamned morons, the low-scorers and the wash-outs from all the other career fields."—(seems unlikely, but that’s what he says)—"Let’s ignore for now that at no point in either their job or their training do they require or ever do anything to actually earn a beret. But on top of all that, with an entire rainbow of colors to choose from, especially for a purely ceremonial piece of headgear, as it is in their case—I mean, it’s not like they’re going to be wearing them in combat or anything..." (of course, neither would we)—"It could be white for all the difference it makes to them. And with only one color out of the entire spectrum already taken—by us—the fuckers had to go an choose the exact same color as ours!"

You know, I’m starting to get the impression that this just might be a bit of a sore subject for old Sgt. Murton here.

Now no one can tell us apart! He thumps the steering wheel with both hands. "People see me walking around with five years of the most difficult schools in the fuckin’ Air Force behind me—with all the jumping and demolitions and special weapons and all the fuckin’ survival schools under my belt—and to them, for all they can tell, I’m just another wash-out from the Motor Pool who settled for being an SP instead of working in the chow hall or the damned gym, handing out basketballs!"

Skeeter’s eyes dart back to his mirror where the SP is already long gone, out of sight.

"Fuckers!"

And I gather that no one in a position of authority has suggested another color for them? I ask carefully.

Oh sure! he shouts right back. "We’ve raised a helluva’ shit storm! But there’s nothing they can do about it now, they say. There are a lot more SPs out there than there are Combat Controllers, and it would cost too damned much money to replace all their shit with something different. So if anybody’s shit is going to be replaced, it’s going to be ours!"

"Wait. They steal our beret, and now they want us to change?"

Damned right! How’s that for a kick in the balls?

Any idea what the new color’s going to be?

Nah. No decision yet. But at least it won’t be green, black or burgundy. Those are already taken by the Army’s Green Berets, their Rangers, and their general Airborne.

Yeh. We wouldn’t wanna’ take somebody else’s color. What kind of low-life bastards would do something like that?

And to think I used to like the SPs.

* * *

THE RANTING FIZZLES OUT as we cruise into the heart of the base. And actually, McChord does appear to be a lovely installation.

I say "appears to be" because, for all its beautiful trees, grass, and general foliage—for all its manicured soccer fields, baseball diamonds, and golf courses—it’s still muted by this iron gray overcast and the continuous drizzle that’s staining everything dark.

Skeeter loops us past a massive brick edifice that he calls The Castle. It houses our squadron’s headquarters, our First Sergeant’s and Commander’s offices, one of the base’s two main chow halls (I’m sorry: ‘dining facilities’), and the billets for our ‘bachelor airmen’ (like me). Then he does a quick drive-by of the Airman’s Club, the Base Theater, the Library, the bank and the BX (that’s the Base Exchange, the Air Force’s ‘department store’), before rolling down a long straight road flanked by some other squadron’s barracks on the left side, and five colossal hangars on the right.

Abeam the second hangar, he turns onto a dirt access road that cuts across the grassy infield, and we charge into the hangar’s crowded parking lot just ahead of our own wake of flying gravel.

I get a quick peek at the flight line as I step out into the drizzle—all C-130s, it looks like from here, rows and rows of them, parked wingtip-to-wingtip—then I follow Skeeter around to the building’s ‘front door’ on the street side of the structure.

The hangar is depressing enough from the outside—five or six stories of featureless and windowless aluminum siding painted a moldering rain-streaked beige—but inside it’s even worse.

Its vast internal ‘cubic acreage’ is no longer used to service aircraft, but instead houses several different ‘shops,’ each one of which has claimed its own little pigeonhole around the outer walls. On first glance, I spot a radio maintenance niche, an electronics storage cage, a row of pre-fab offices with stairs leading up to a collection of desks and cubicles on its roof, and a pair of long parachute rigging tables, all looking temporary—or at least improvised—at best. It reminds me of the forts I used to build in our backyard as a kid, cobbled together from scavenged leftovers and discarded lumber.

Great, I’ve come full circle... to this.

Skeeter threads his way through the rigging tables, bound for the office door at the base of the stairs. It has a photographic enlargement of a CCT flash on it, mounted on cardboard and nailed above a formica nameplate on which "CPT. J. FORTH" is etched in white. I’m just spitballing here, but my guess is that my new Team Commander is some guy named Captain Forth, and this is his office, and this is who Skeeter is taking me to meet first.

But that’s just a hunch.

Before we reach his little nook though, another cubbyhole’s door bangs open at the rear of the space, and out march three of my new fellow teammates in a whirlwind of profanity, boisterous laughter, and big movements. Worn and washed-out cammies, spit-polished jump boots, and a confident glint in their eyes that says they’ve seen and done it all before, and what the fuck is it to you!

Yep, that’s what I want to look like some day.

The largest one, a massive Mexican-bandito-lookin’ dude—built like a bank vault with stripes, and tanned almost copper—snatches a rolled-up beret from his thigh pocket and wrenches it onto his head in one fluid motion, his eyes locked on me the whole time.

Whatcha’ got there, Skeeter-Peter?, he booms, no doubt impressed as hell by both the dinky little gnat wings on my sleeves and the obviously brand spankin’ shiny new jump wings on my chest. Another sky warrior for the Team?

‘Skeeter-Peter’, huh? So that’s where ‘Skeeter’ comes from.

One of his buddies erupts in a single mighty "Har!," and stops to appraise me himself. Skeeter flushes (in more ways than one, probably), chuckles self-consciously, and assumes an introductory stance between us.

Gentlemen, this here is Airman Steve Stipp, fresh off the punkin truck and signing in with us today. Airman Stipp, this here is Sgt. Manny Santos,—indicating the towering Mexican bandito whose beret looks tiny now, more like a yarmulke, on that massive blimp-sized head of his—Sgt. Joe Montreaux over there... we just call him ‘Monty’—the shortest of the trio (about my height), square-jawed, gray-eyed, bow-legged, and still smiling after his mono-syllabic outburst of laughter from a moment before—and Sgt. Cole Mabry—a tall, somber drink of water who looks like he might have fixed farm machinery his entire life.

He also looks like he already doesn’t like me.

Manny and Joe shake my hand enthusiastically, welcoming me (in a vaguely unsettling way), all the while enlightening me as to Skeeter’s general uselessness, unreliability, and homosexual proclivities. Skeeter chuckles again, strangely self-conscious now around these senior sergeants.

Sgt. Mabry, on the other hand—Cole—remains dour and distant, calmly donning his own beret on the far side of the rigging table, out of reach.

He and I exchange only a nod.

Manny looks puzzled, though. Stipp. Stipp, he says, rolling my name around in his mouth for a moment, as if it might taste familiar or something. Airman Stipp. Then his brow abruptly lifts, and he turns to Skeeter. Oh, is this the guy?

The guy?

Yeh, you know. The... the Pope guy. The guy you were talking about this morning?

The Pope Guy? What’s he talking about?

I turn to face Skeeter myself. He somehow manages to look even more uneasy, cornered maybe. After a couple of seconds of looking back and forth between Santos and me though, an exaggerated expression of dawning realization suddenly hits him.

"Oh, the Pope guy! Yeh, I know what you mean now. Yeh... this is him. And he swings his hand out, as if to say, Tah-dah!."

The ‘Pope Guy’? I finally ask out loud.

Yeh, says Manny with an oblivious chortle, "When we got your notice that you’d be arriving today, we had no idea who you were. We had no orders for you, and we weren’t expecting anyone new. So old Skeeter here had to do a little tap dancin’, checked a few things out, and it turns out that you were supposed to go to Pope Air Force Base! Not here! Ain’t that some shit?"

Pope? I mutter hopefully. "I’m supposed to be at Pope?"

Pope AFB? Fayetteville, North Carolina? The southeast? My first choice? The Air Force didn’t screw me after all! It just screwed UP!

Yeh, somebody in Personnel fucked up and gave you the wrong orders. Sent you here instead of there, ya’ lucky bastard.—huh?—Nobody wants ‘No-Hope Pope.—yeh, I do!—Man, you skated out of that one by the skin of your dick!—aw, see, now there’s an image I didn’t need in my head right now!—Skeeter, you better hurry up and get this man in-processed before they figure out what they did!

Santos laughs and pounds me on the shoulder.

Welcome aboard, ya’ lucky shit!

Yeh, but... but...

And the three crusty amigos march out the door and into the drizzle. Skeeter’s discomfiture magically vanishes at the same time, and he turns to resume his slalom through the tables and desks to the commander’s office.

He’s right, he says, We need to get you signed in right quick here.

He knocks on the door of Captain Forth’s office.

Look, I stammer, I don’t... I don’t want to cause any problems here. I mean, if Pope’s where I’m supposed to be, then...

Come! shouts the voice behind the door.

Don’t worry about it, says Skeeter with a wink, We’ll take care of you. Then he swings the door open, and leads me inside.

But... You’re missing the point!, my mind screams. I want to be at Pope! I don’t want to be here!

Cap’n Forth, Skeeter announces, This is Airman Steve Stipp, signing in today, fresh out of Jump School.

The captain, who looks barely twenty himself, and uncomfortable in his shiny silver bars, rises from his squeaky second-hand chair, and steps around his crappy little hand-me-down desk to shake my hand.

Welcome to the McChord Combat Control Team, Airman Stipp. I think you’re going to like it here.

Skeeter is all smiles.

I return a mincing smile of my own, and accept the proffered hand.

Thank-you, sir,—(*sigh*)—Glad to be here.

4

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

THEY’VE ROOMED ME WITH Airman Randy Pogue, another relative newbie on the McChord Team (about six months worldlier than me), whom I take to right away... mostly because he’s not here right now. He’s actually off at Combat Control School as we speak, way down in Little Rock, Arkansas—McChord’s one and only candidate on this class cycle—trying to prove himself worthy of his very own blue beret.

Good luck, Randy! You can tell me all about it when you get back.

Our room is ridiculously huge, probably more than five-hundred perfectly square feet, with a towering ceiling and an enormous white-paned window that overlooks the central flagpole and the triangular-shaped ‘square’ across the street. It’s on the second floor of ‘The Castle,’ just as Skeeter had said it would be. And all things considered, it ain’t bad a’tall.

Everything’s big about this place. The corridor outside is broad, carpeted, and brightly lit. The communal ‘Day Room’—with its big TV, a couple of ill-stocked vending machines, a card table, and a two-shelf ‘library’ of severely used paperbacks—is more like a small theater. A nearly empty one, what with barely half a dozen cheap vinyl chairs and a single vinyl-padded couch scattered across the floor space. Still homey enough though for the ranks of the financially destitute. Like me.

There’s a large communal laundry room with two washers and two dryers—all clearly ancient (probably coal-burning, from the looks of them) and thoroughly abused—an even larger communal bathroom (not a ‘latrine,’ they tell me), and a huge but beautifully accoutered chow hall at the far far end of the extensive hallway system, in a wing of the immense building that’s clear over on the other side of the central courtyard. But it’s all clean, tidy, and bright. And while perhaps a little austere, sterile, even institutional, it’s still friendlier than I’d anticipated on the long flight up here. Not too far off from what you’d expect of a building dubbed ‘The Castle’ either.

And I am told that the next floor up—the third floor—is the women’s floor! Hoo-HOO! How handy!

Our room has been artfully divided up by Airman Pogue, who used the big wooden lockers, dressers, desks, and beds to reconfigure the clear space between them all into a semi-S-shaped path that leads from doorway to window sill. And he has apparently claimed as his own the furniture nearest the door.

Perfect!

That means I get the window!

* * *

MOUNT RAINIER IS A fourteen-thousand foot snow-capped volcano about forty-five crow-flying miles due east of McChord. It’s a great beast of a landmark that just friggin’ owns the eastern fourth of the horizon. I mean, when it’s actually visible—as in, "on one of those rare occasions when the drizzle and low ceilings have actually receded far enough that you can see as far as the horizon"—it is a broad, massive, spectacular presence. And because it’s due east, the sun rises each morning from behind it.

And so it is this morning—Day Three with my new Team.

Following a truly delectable ham-cheese-and-mushroom omelet up in The Castle chow hall, I have donned my brand spankin’ cracklin’ new camouflaged fatigues, and headed off down the little hill behind the building.

I’m on foot, bound for the team’s hangar, about a mile away around the west end of the sprawling flight line. And no sooner do I step out into the crisp mid-October breeze than I realize that I can see long morning shadows on the ground!

Which means the sun is out! Hah-hah!

And when I turn to the east, there, like a great monumental cathedral, piled high with snowy buttresses and backlit by God’s own Holy Light, is Mount Rainier, still dark with morning shadow on this western facing, crowned by the sun itself and limned with its golden light like a vast halo. The first vestige of the sun I’ve seen since I got here.

I don’t want to walk any further. I don’t want to destroy this moment. If I move, the buildings and hangars will be drawn inexorably into the foreground, and there goes this absolutely breathtaking view.

I tell ya’, it’s almost enough to make you think you’re in the right place after all.

Almost.

* * *

TODAY IS APPARENTLY A ‘busy work’ kind of day. A time-killer. No exercises or deployments or jumps scheduled for today. So Sgt. Santos (that big Mexican-bandito-lookin’ dude), and Sgt. Sherrod (a placid, sleepy-eyed ‘older’ gentleman that everybody calls Smoke, perhaps because of his ghostlike abilities in the field, or maybe just because of the ever-present pipe that’s seldom very far from his face) have improvised a ‘class’ on the set-up and uses of a 20-man GP (or General Purpose) tent.

Regardless of its make-work nature though, this little hands-on session at least brings most of the team together for the first time since I got here last Monday. And I’m glad to see that they’re nothing like the rowdy breed of hard-drinking, wild-carousing, brawling, battling, womanizing, fire-eaters that I’d expected to find in a job like this.

Actually, yes they are. But it turns out that they’ve got a civilized side as well (or at least a convincingly mature face that they can put on whenever the situation warrants), which might just be enough for my naive near-virgin ass to fit in.

For a moment then, when the deuce-and-a-half truck first pulls up on the wet grass and the group converges on it to unload the tent components, I get about a minute-and-a-half to look over the entire team—well, the dozen or so that are out here for this ‘class’, anyway—as they gather in a loose clot around the tailgate. And I can see now what Skeeter was referring to when he spoke about the different Phase levels and how they’re delineated by all the varied hats, badges and flashes.

By far, the vast majority—nine out of the twelve—are capped with blue berets. So apparently, most of the team is at least Phase II, if not Phase III certified. Good to know.

I see Daryl Murton—Skeeter—the guy who picked me up at the airport and helped me get my feet under me once I’d hit the ground. And of course, there’s big old Manny Santos—Wetback, as I heard one of the senior members call him once, though no one else has ever dared call him anything other than Manny in my presence—and his two ‘old-head’ buddies, scoop-jawed Joe Monty Montreaux, and stoic Cole Mabry, the head of the Radio Maintenance side of the operation. I even spot Captain Forth in attendance.

Over there is that old Tech Sergeant—the oldest guy on the team, actually, and its unofficial Supply Sergeant—named Miles Campbell, who took me through his nearly empty equipment storage lockers the other day, and managed to rustle up what few team-specific items I now have in my possession. In other words, he got me my two sets of cammies, my web belt and canteens, my compass, my K-Bar combat knife, and the dapper little ‘field cap’, with jump wings affixed, that I’m wearing right now. And that’s about it. He’s promised me a closetful of job-related shit over the next two to four weeks, as the Air Force gets around to replenishing his depleted stock, but until then, those meager pickings will just have to do.

There’s the aforementioned Sgt. Sherrod—Smoke—doing just what his nickname implies as he supervises the raising of the tent’s two endposts with the long ridge beam connecting them. He’s a soft-spoken Hardy Kruger type that everyone on the team seems to like and respect, in a fatherly sort of way. And Connor Duncan—who I’ve heard called both Dink and Ozzy (or Aussie, I suppose)—a dumpy, overweight (as in ‘beer-gutted’) but fun-loving Australian ex-pat, who still managed to out-run me on my first five-mile run with the team yesterday.

There’s also a Chief Master Sergeant to whom I was introduced this morning, who has since left to attend to other duties while we fiddle with this stupid tent. Skeeter had referred to him as "the Chief Roswell," as if anyone who’s militarily aware at all would know the name, and merely uttering it would spark a gasp of awe from me.

It didn’t, though. I’ve never heard of him. But he apparently is quite famous among military circles. He not only holds something like the third or fourth highest freefall altitude record in history, but he was also one of the live test dummies on the new zero-zero ejection seat trials. He actually rode one of those rocket-propelled seats out of a stationary cockpit simulator sitting on the ground... zero altitude, zero airspeed.

Wow! Ballsy!

He’s a dignified silver-haired eight-striper now, less than a year from retirement, and the NCOIC (Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge) for the McChord Combat Control Team. Quite a badge of honor being associated with him,