Pilot training at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona had been an exhilarating experience.

I had no prior flying experience other than flying the T-41 at the Air Force Academy, so I started out slow in the T-37. Other than instrument flying, which I took to readily because of my technical background, my scores were average. But by the time I finished the T-37 program and had learned to read ground references as well as the more experienced flyers, I was as good a pilot as anyone in our class.

In fact I excelled in the T-38 as part of Tipper flight, and when graduation came I was raring to go operational. My dream was to fly fighters, specifically the same F-102 I flew at Tyndall during the Z-I tour after our fourth class year. The lead-in aircraft to gain experience before transitioning to the F-102 was the T-33, and that was my first choice of airplane.

They had recently altered the system for choosing assignments at graduation. Only the top 10% would get to actually choose what and where they flew. The rest of us would fill out dream sheets, and the Air Force would do the rest.  I wasn’t worried. The Academy had taught us that performance mattered.

I was about to get my first lesson in politics.

Filling out the dream sheet, I numbered all the available fighter aircraft as my first choices; then the transport aircraft; and last listed tankers and bombers. I carefully selected as my first choices the areas in the United States that had fighter bases, and put the northern parts of the country with bomber bases at the end of my list. We had been told that both the type of aircraft and location would be considered, and I tried to be consistent.

A few days before our assignments were to be announced, my flight commander came to me. “Hey,” he said, “how would you like to stay at Willie and fly the T-38?”

“You mean be an instructor?” He nodded.

I winced. “I want to go operational, sir. I’m ready to go into the real Air Force.” He nodded again and left.

After lunch the flight commander came in to where I was sitting once more. “You’re an Academy graduate, right?”

“Yes, sir,” wondering where this might lead.

“The Academy is looking for a T-41 instructor. How would you like to go to the Academy and teach cadets to fly?”

“The Academy?” I thought about it for only a minute. I had waited four years to graduate from the Zoo and was ready to conquer the world. To go back now didn’t make sense.

“No thanks, sir,” I said again. “I really want to do operational flying out of here.”

Today I’m smart enough to get the unspoken message my flight commander was trying to deliver: “The Air Force has given you a bum assignment, and I want to help you get to do something else.” I had refused to hear the message.

Strategic Air Command had become frustrated with mostly getting pilots who graduated near the bottom of their pilot training class, so it had worked to change the selection process of who got assigned to what. We would be the second class under this new system. The rumor was that SAC had already taken most of the top half of the previous class at Willie into KC-135s and B-52s. We didn’t know that they had decided to take most of us in the top half of our class, too.

The top 10% of our class made their choices. Our F-4 navigator who had flown in Vietnam as a backseater got his own Phantom. I recall the others were pretty happy, too. Although he didn’t finish at the top, our former prisoner of war, Neil Black, was assigned an aircraft outside the normal selection process. He hadn’t gotten the fighter he was hoping for, but he seemed content with what the Air Force gave him.

Later, the rest of us sat expectantly at our tables, and the flight commander read out each person’s name and assignment. When my name was finally read, I heard, “KC-135, Loring Air Force Base.”

I looked around the room. “Loring Air Force Base? Where’s that?”

“Maine,” someone said.

“Maine?” It was one of those states like Rhode Island. It was supposed to exist, but you never met anyone from there.

Burr Wyatt got my T-33 and was going to Rome Air Force Base in New York. Brad Hirschi had taken the T-38 at Willie, the base where we trained. Dean Kinder had happily taken the T-41 back to Colorado Springs. I, meanwhile, was on my way to northern Maine, to a place ten miles north of the northern most city on the east coast of the United States. Two miles south of the Canadian border. Home of the world’s biggest bombers and best potatoes.

I trained in the KC-135 at Castle Air Force Base in California for four months before heading to Loring. The plane was complex, the mission challenging. My instructor had flown in Vietnam, and he knew his stuff. It turned out to be a great experience, and I was encouraged. I had heard there was no such thing as a bad airplane in the Air Force inventory. It was true.

My wife and I arrived in Northern Maine to our first assignment after pilot training in early February of 1975. The snow was three feet deep everywhere, and all it did was snow. We were consigned to live in a trailer for three months, and because I had done so well at Castle I was assigned to a two-copilot crew. Vietnam was winding down, and the Air Force had too many pilots and didn’t know what to do with us all.

“We need to put guys who aren’t doing well onto crews where there’s only one copilot so they can catch up with everyone else.” Coming out of the Academy where performance was rewarded, this new arrangement seemed backward to me. I thought back to pilot training and felt resentment for the system. And for Burr, and for Brad, and for Dean. Good guys all, but I deserved better, too.

I learned soon after my arrival that almost no one ever left Loring still wearing Air Force blue. Navigators eventually resigned or went to the Air National Guard after reaching the end of their commitment. Pilots who hung on could get assignments at seven years plus to South Dakota. One copilot with connections at Randolph would eventually “escape” and was sent to Hickam to fly RC-135s.  All the other pilots sooner or later took a shot at the airlines, went to the Guard, or just hung on until the Air Force gave them the boot.

There were only 43,000 people living in the entire northern third of Maine. Twelve hundred in Limestone, ten thousand in Caribou, another twelve thousand down in Presque Isle 23 miles south. No active movie theater in the community. One MacDonald’s. A sears catalog store. Radio stations that went off the air at night. And with no recent construction anywhere in the vicinity, virtually everyone lived on base. We were inundated with excited calls from friends who were buying their first house. They couldn’t relate to living in a rented trailer, temperatures 34 degrees below zero, or what we had been told would be the annual highlight at the Officers Club: the Moose Stompers Ball.

I saw no future with the Air Force. Life was not fair, and I was a victim.

I don’t remember now how I heard. Maybe it was because he was the first in our class that word spread so fast. Burr Wyatt was killed in his T-33 while flying a training mission with another pilot: a flameout and a failed emergency landing.

In July ’75, just a few months later, we got the news that Dean Kinder had crashed near the Academy, killing himself and his girlfriend while flying a rented Cessna. The Air Force would respond by no longer letting new pilots return to the Academy to teach cadets how to fly. Dean had been one of the most religious and admirable people I had known. He had given each of us a Bible when we graduated from pilot training, and I realized it was the only thing I had to remember him aside from our time together at Willie.

Dean’s death hit me especially hard because of what had already happened to Burr. I had begrudged them both for their good assignments—and which I had grown to perceive to be at my expense.

After this, I never again saw myself as a victim. When the “system” was unjust as it tended to be in those days and I didn’t fight it, my wife complained that everyone was taking advantage of me. I shrugged, made the best of the situation, and carried on knowing that in the end things would work themselves out.

Four years after our arrival at Loring and six years into the volunteer force, the Air Force established a policy that set the maximum tour on the Northern Tier at 36 months. After four and a half years, we finally departed Loring for greener pastures in the August of 1979.

A year later, my view of what was fair and unfair in life was settled once and for all when it was reported that Captain Brad Hirschi was killed when the C-141 he was flying crashed near Cairo.

Life of course continues to be unfair at times. Bad situations haven’t always worked out for the best. There have been many regrets and disappointments. But I no longer complain about the seeming vagaries of life. For unlike Dean and Burr and Brad, I still have a purpose in life, a destiny.

I am grateful to my three friends who reminded me that living life is really what it’s all about.

They are gone, but not forgotten.