Leaderboard

Rich had some assignments that were "under the radar" if you will. Probably not open source info. I first met him when he was an IP at Corpus & I was a student. He was by far the most energetic and probably flat out the best IP I had there. I ended up in the same squadron at Pope he had ben in previosuly and he took the time to sit down with me and detail out what to expect, what to do, and most importantly what not to do in the "real Air Force". A class act all around. Rest Easy.

I doubt there's a flying squadron in the Air Force that hasn't felt the benefit of what Rich has done. There's no way to begin to quantify the positive effects of his work. We're all in his debt. Thank you, brother.

Holy shit nostalgia reference of the day winner

I'm guessing it was something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTXzcILPPp8

Don't give up too easily. I'll preface this by saying my information is dated, but when I rotated out of Bagram in Jan 2008, we were sure there would be at least a 3-day layover in Manas, with accompanying subzero temperatures etc. Rode the C-17 up from Bagram and went to the inprocessing brief, where there were specific instructions for "transient aircrew" to go through a separate process to get immigrated into the country. My compatriot and I went over there dressed in our DFDUs and weren't questioned at all, we just let them take our passports over to the civilian side for about 20 minutes and then proceeded on to billeting to get our private rooms. Much better than rooming with 100 of our closest Army friends, in my opinion. We were transients, and we were aircrew, right? No falsehoods required. Since my fellow aircrew member was female, the billeting airman asked if we'd be needing any help at our alert time since the dorms were separated by sex, at which point I looked at my watch and thought for a second, then told him we'd take care of it. I'm glad he hadn't gotten to the portion of his CDCs that taught insignia and the various types of wings, or he might have realized that there's no aircraft, either stationed at Manas or otherwise, that is crewed solely by two navigators...