If you watch enough movies you are bound to see countless portrayals of what life in boot camp is like and I will admit I was scared that it might actually be like that, and perhaps had I chosen the Marines or the Army it very well could have been, but for me, Air Force boot camp was a blast! When those short six weeks were over I was sent to my first and only base, Travis Air Force Base, in Fairfield, California, bypassing having to go to a Technical School for training. Although being sent to California was about as far from where I wanted to go (I had requested to be sent to Iceland) I was lucky to bypass school and learn what I needed to simply by on-the-job training.
Being the quiet and shy guy that I was at the time, and still am to a point, the hardest part of the Air Force for me in the beginning was being thrown into an office of people whom I did not know and having to find my place. You would think that after a lifetime of moving from place to place that this would have been something that I not only would have been used to, but would have mastered at this point in life. Luckily there was a lot that I needed to learn and so I was constantly learning new things and all these people around me were there to teach me and help me learn and there was very little time for me to think about how nervous I was being surrounded with so many new faces.
Although my focus when I joined the Air Force was to have some sort of direction in life, life itself began to take on a whole new meaning for me and soon I began to struggle with demons that I have struggled to suppress for years. My job was fun, I really enjoyed it and I worked hard everyday to learn more and gain the respect of my peers, and did so in many ways. It seemed, for a while, that I was on the right track, yet things slowly began to fall apart. I began to notice that the puzzle of life that I thought that I was piecing together had many pieces that, although I put them together, did not exactly fit together and had been forced into their places and were starting to show me so.
President Clinton was in office while I was in the Air Force and it was the height of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" era and with each passing day I was struggling more and more with this part of my life....
