Fate Decided

With our assignment night rapidly approaching on Friday, today played a key role in our fate on Friday. Our flight leadership got together today and put together our assignment. Today, our fate was decided. They traded with the flight commanders at the other bases, to get us what we want and hopefully, we will all be satisfied. Rumor has it that we got all the good stuff and nobody got anything outside their top 12 choices. This scares me somewhat, because my 12th choice is none other than FAIP. Anyway, people are freaking out. We cannot stop talking about our assignment possibilities. I just want this night to be over with. It is just getting ridiculous how long we have been waiting.

To help illustrate how big a day this is for us, I will run a brief overview of how I got here. It all started in college, when I was at Mt. SAC and decided to join the AFROTC program at USC. After my first year in ROTC, I had to go to a "boot camp" called field training. We were evaluated and racked and stacked during field training. My junior year, I began attending USC and continued on with ROTC. During my junior year, I had to compete for a pilot slot. To put this into perspective, I was going up against probably 1200-2000 other students at other ROTC units throughout the country. Only about the top 500 or so got pilot slots. That was the first major milestone. Then I had to graduate. After graduation, I was assigned a casual status job at Vandenberg AFB on the central coast of California. While stationed at Vandenberg, I had to attend Introductory Flight Screening in Pueblo, CO. This was supposed to be 6 weeks but was extended to 8 weeks due to bad weather. The second milestone complete. After about 8 months at Vandenberg, I moved to Pensacola, FL to begin pilot training with the Navy. The first school was called Aviation Preflight Indoctrination (API). API lasts six weeks and is fun and a pain at the same time. A few weeks later, I began primary flight training at Whiting Field, north of Pensacola, where I flew the T-34C. I completed primary after 6 months, which is relatively fast for Whiting. At the end of primary I track selected to the T-1A. Third milestone complete. After about a 4 month break, I arrived here at Vance AFB in Enid to complete pilot training. After about 5 months of flying the T-1 I completed the syllabus before we went on the Christmas break. Forth and perhaps the most significant milestone complete. Now, after about 6 years of concentrated effort, not including the previous 18 that I have been alive hoping and dreaming about flying, a significant portion of my future is at stake. Will I end up in the dream location of Hawaii, or am I destined to fly the T-1 here at Vance for the foreseeable future? Only God and my flight commander know the answer. Until Friday....

Pray for SURF,

Chris