Veteran’s Day weekend was nice here; we connected with some family and friends, had a cookout, played around with our new puppy, and watched a little football. In the midst of that, I decided to take a little break from a larger drawing project that I’ve been working on and just do a little sketching for fun. Veteran’s Day weekend this year was a confluence of a couple of events for me; besides the holiday, the weekend also lined up with the dates of my last F-16 flight and retirement ceremony, five years ago. So, I thought it might be fitting to sketch my USAF wings as a little personal commemoration of the day.

When I retrieved my wings from an old shoebox full of military things, I blew the dust off of them and realized it was probably the first time I’ve looked at them since I retired. As I began my sketch, I picked my wings up a few times, put them down again, and turned them this way and that way to look at the details of the wings from different perspectives. As I did so, I wondered if I had ever really looked at my wings in such detail. Probably not. In a way, that lack of close examination seemed a fitting metaphor for the end of my career; besides all of the necessary tasks associated with retiring from a 22-year career and moving halfway across the country, I had already been hired and had begun the transition to the airline that I work for now. Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for reflection at the time.

I am often asked whether I miss being a fighter pilot. Quite honestly, I don’t. I miss my friends, and I miss the day-to-day associations in the fighter squadrons that I had with some really great people, but I don’t really miss the job. The F-16 was an incredible and exhilarating challenge to operate well; there is nothing quite like it. And I was damn good at it. At the same time, the years of physical punishment resulting from that kind of flying had taken a toll on my body, as it does with all of us who fly the airplane long enough. It was time to do something else, and I was ok with that. I had always envisioned being a fighter pilot as something akin to a professional athlete – one knows from the beginning that one can’t do it forever. Father Time always wins.

In the years since I’ve retired, I’ve spent a lot of time working on my body to counter the effects of the years of high-G force flying; I have a great chiropractor, I do a lot of yoga, I pay close attention to my diet, I do a lot of strength training, and so on. I feel good, thankfully. But I wondered, as I was finishing up my sketch of my wings, what about the intangible parts of the military experience that one can’t put away in a shoebox – the persistent specter of death, the wars, the deployments, the periods of isolation, the friends and colleagues lost along the way? Have I spent the same amount of energy on dealing with those parts of my experience as the physical parts? Probably not; but then, it’s not as simple as pointing to a sore spot on my back to the chiropractor. I feel like the military helped me to develop personal qualities in many positive ways – focus, strength, courage, bravery, resilience, fortitude, excellence. But, one must acknowledge that many of the experiences yielding those positive traits came at a high cost – death, pain, sorrow, loneliness. Perhaps now, with a life that is gratefully a little more stable, and with five years of retrospect, it’s time to turn my attention towards those things that perhaps affect me in ways that I don’t fully realize.

I have no regrets about my career; I’ve often said that if I were 22 again, I would do it all over again. And I would. Whenever someone thanks me for my service, I always respond the same way: I tell them that there is no need to thank me, it was a great job. No matter how good, difficult, or challenging the circumstances were, I went to work every day feeling like I was doing something worthy, important, and necessary. On this Veteran’s Day, I still feel that way, and that is a great gift.

AB18