It always pains me when one of my followers gives up on their hopes & dreams just because he had gone to a recruiter’s office to take that shot and was told ‘no’.
Whenever that happens, I always ask them questions like “What about trying another service?” or “What about a different commissioning program?”
It’s unfortunate that these folks could only see one path that lead to their specific dream and that that was the only way for them, in spite of all of the options I’ve presented to them in the Fighter Pilot Power Pack and the Afterburner Club calls!
But we have many Afterburner Club members who persevere! For those of you unacquainted with the word, perseverance means sticking with it. If one path doesn’t work, then you find another! If the recruiter said ‘no’ because of something wrong with your package, then fix it!
If one branch of service won’t take you, another probably will. If you didn’t qualify for the Air Force Academy, there are still a whole slew of other options!
One of the reasons I founded the Afterburner Club is because there is so much bad information out there about what kind of a person you have to be and what it takes to be a fighter pilot. Most people think you have to be superhuman.
Chris Pope is not superhuman. He is no different that you are. In fact, he had not only been told ‘no’ by a recruiter, but was told he had “no chance of getting into the Air Force”, much less becoming a fighter pilot.
Well guess what… Lieutenant Pope (that’s right, Air Force Second Lieutenant Chris Pope!) will be joining us on our August Afterburner Club Call to tell us all about how he got in and got through Air Force OTS and selected for flight training.
Don’t miss this amazing story of perseverance in face of adversity!
If you could ask Lieutenant Pope one question about your career… what would it be?
Ash says
100% true. I was in Ed’s program right up until last year and if there’s two lessons I learned over any others, they were 1) Be prepared for anything, 2) Never give up, never quit, never back down.
When I, at the age of 29, called that first USAF recruiter and I said all the right things (honestly of course), put my best foot forward, and made myself look like the best possible candidate I could, I was shocked that I received a big, fat “No!” My age was not on my side, but I talked up my graduate science education, my flight experience, and my leadership experience. I tactfully pushed back, and I pushed back, and after two straight weeks I still got “No,” and the recruiter was starting to get angry about me “bothering” him. He lost out big on that one. Because I didn’t give up.
I switched gears and started training for Army Warrant Officer Candidate and Flight School, found a very receptive recruiter and started the application process. I quickly rose to the top of the stack and a mere two weeks before I was scheduled to meet with the OCS selection board I sustained a devastating leg injury that required surgery. I was told I would never run again. I pushed to get waivers even with a hip replacement but the recovery time took me far outside the probability of getting an age waiver on top of a medical implant waiver. But I pushed. When it was finally clear that there was no way Army WOCS was going to take me, I switched gears again.
I wanted to fly and I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. So I called NASA’s Johnson Space Center and worked my way via phone to their medical office. I’m now going to see what it will take to fly for NASA – the possibility of getting waivers is a bit better, and there is no age cap for astronauts. I just finished my civilian flight training last month, and I now have 100+ hours and 300+ landings, in high wing, low wing single engine planes, as well as some flight time in helicopters. All the great stuff Ed shared with me taught me that every time I meet resistance, I either push back, or adapt. Never give up.
tea&crumpets says
All I’ve ever heard is ‘no.’ My folks thought it was a waste of time for me to go after a military pilot slot. An unnecessary step best skipped. Straight to the cubicle was what they wanted for me. When I was a sophomore in high school I got a 2 hour lecture on why the military wasn’t for me and into the trash went the Air Force academy ‘send me an application packet’ info card I was trying to find a stamp for. They said ‘no’ to every school with ROTC and ultimately tried to buy me off with flying lessons. I got my ticket when I was 17 but the experience proved more a curse than a blessing. After that I was really hooked on flying and knew for sure that I wanted to fly for the military, but with all options for a military slot blocked, I was only becoming more restless and more frustrated. Each time my instructor recommended that I pursue a military pilot slot the smoldering frustration grew a little hotter. He was wasting his time trying to sell me on it. It was my folks who needed to convert.
The folks wouldn’t let me leave home to go to school for fear I might do something ‘crazy’ behind their backs. And with all the tension between us, I spent more time fighting with them than doing homework. After one year of college at home, my GPA was a 1.1, the culmination of a steady decline that had begun during my sophomore year of high school. Out of frustration I dropped out of college and got a job working as a baggage handler. It got me out of the house, but I had no way to pay for school. I was out from under the parents’ thumb, but all the opportunities they refused to let me take advantage of had passed me by.
After a series of subsequent disappointments and still more parental conflict I enlisted in the Air Force. My reasoning had been that the Air Force would be my best chance to get college classes done and would thus be my best option for getting my GPA up to something respectable.
The Air Force, in all its infinite wisdom stationed me in my home town. They then added insult to injury by refusing to let me take any college classes until I finished my 5 level upgrade training. Thanks to a series of bureaucratic screw-ups on their part, this process took 1.5 yrs. I wasn’t cleared to retake the classes I needed at the school where I needed to retake them until 1 week before I had to report to my next assignment… in England.
Once in England it became clear that no supervisor was going to waste their time on a ‘package’ for an Airman with my grades. Their advice was for me to stop wasting my time and enjoy what they called ‘an easy job.’ Perhaps it had been easy during the kinder gentler 90’s. From 03 to 07, it was slave labor.
They couldn’t understand why I would want to fly an F-15 anyway, especially after seeing first hand the way they were maintained.
My hands were further tied by the fact that I could take only CCAF degree classes while in England (associate’s degree stuff.) Still worse, not a single soul on base knew anything about WOFT (again, the GPA pretty much made this a no-go, but I still wanted to try.) I had to figure that paper nightmare out all on my own only to discover that I had missed my application window by a month. I only had 11 months retainability by the time I had figured out how to get a flight physical in Germany through an Army recruiter there.
Thats right, I was stationed on an AirForce fighter base, RAF Lakenheath, and could not get a flight physical there to save my life. I was going to have to take leave and pay my own way to Germany just to talk to a flipping recruiter who would only sign me up for Ranger school, “you don’t want to fly airplanes, you want to jump out of them.”
During my mandatory meeting with a reserve recruiter toward the end of my enlistment, an alternative was offered. A reserve slot as flight engineer on C-5 galaxies, they were flying enough for me to make a full time gig of it and they would at least be able to put me on full time orders while I was in Tech school and during my on the Job training (a full 1.5-2yrs of full time employment.) After jumping through the most frustrating bureaucratic hoops imaginable just to get the aforementioned, impossible to get flight physical (which required a letter from the recruiter’s CO, a Major), after separating from active duty, returning to the US and preparing to move all the way across the country, after flying from Nevada to Massachusetts on my own dime, after convincing myself that getting stuck behind the pilot’s seat wouldn’t push me over the edge, after butting heads with in processing admin people who tried three days in a row to get me sign a contract before I had even gotten the chance to talk to anyone from my gaining unit, I was finally was told by an NCO from said unit that they could not put me on full time orders.
I would have to live on nothing for 2 yrs while working full time for them. I still don’t know if this was an up and up condition or if they were just blowing me off for some unknown reason. Either way I still wound up stranded at my parent’s house with no job and still no path to a cockpit. With 1 month to start of fall semester I signed up for a full load. At first, my goal was to retake the classes I had bombed to get my GPA up out of the gutter. Three years later I am living in a college dorm and still struggling with a Mechanical Engineering curriculum. Yes, I’m 28 and its every bit as awkward as it sounds. My GPA is still not a 3.0, and I’ve got at least another three years to go before graduation (This September I turn 29.) I’m not in engineering because I’m a genius, I’m in it because I’m a retarded masochist who can’t switch majors. I hate engineering too much to let it win. Besides, if I’m going to run the risk of getting stuck with a job I don’t like, I may as well get paid for it.
In the mean time, all the officer recruiters I harass either tell me to pack sand or try to sell me on a career field I don’t want. They never seem to believe that I’m serious about this. An insult of the highest order after all the crap I’ve gone through, and all the brick walls I’ve run into head first. It may be my inherent lack of tact, my growing lack of patience or my inability to tolerate lazy recruiters who just don’t want to do the extra paperwork, but I often get dial tone shortly after I react to their consolation prizes.
Everyone I talk to seems to think they are doing me a big favor by not doing a damn thing to help. I’ve had it. Each time I talk to someone in search of a path, I loose another ounce of patience and get that much closer to wringing someone’s neck. All I want is a straight answer. I’m sick of the bung hole sunshine and the sugar coated double talk. What do I need to do to make this happen? It seems there is no way, and people just don’t have the balls to tell me so. Otherwise they’d be able to give a straight answer.
I haven’t yet reached the ‘falling down’ stage. But after getting the run around from dirt-bag Army recruiters who take 20 minutes to staple an SF-86 packet together and smell like pot, after butting heads with an endless parade of self-promoting slackers who’ve never wanted anything more from life than video games and a couch, I’m done. I think its time to just chalk this up to the military having missed its chance.
In short, will power is not enough, wanting something is not enough, and being good at something is not enough. It takes luck and someone being willing and able to give you a shot. Two things I seem to be perpetually short of. In my case, I am certainly not the ‘exceptional fag.’ I am just another member of the endless parade of woulda coulda shoulda folks for whom trying was a complete and total waste of time. Maybe I should have been more irresponsible in my youth. It would have made no difference, and at least I would be able to look back on the last 10 years and say that I had some fun. Instead, I’ve only managed to shorten my life span, give myself grey hairs, and waste the last 10yrs of my life on a wild goose chase. Believe it or not, I now curse the day that I soloed.
Stewart Fryslie says
Hey Ash, would it be possible to contact you personally via email or something? I have read your response to this post and would like to ask questions about how you chose the path you did with your education and career. I have just graduated suma cum laude honors with a BS Electrical Engineering, a BS Physics, and a minor in Mathematics and am trying to figure out whether it would be best to pursue my fighter pilot aspirations before or after I attend graduate school. My ideal path in life is to become a fighter pilot in the USAF, become an astronaut for NASA, and then teach as a college professor. I know that this sounds like high hopes but I’ve always aimed high and it has usually turned out well. Currently I am in the gathering information phase for both my graduate studies and fighter pilot career, and you seem like somebody who may have great advice for me. If anybody else who reads this post has advice for me, please do respond. And thank you Ed for all the solid information you give to guys like me. I know it will pay dividends towards achieving our common future goal.
Ash says
Stewart,
Feel free to email me at ash.giger(at)gmail(.)com. I could definitely share with you some things that could benefit you. A few words here though, for the benefit of others as well. I made it through graduate school myself, starting a Ph.D. program in astrophysics after getting my B.S. in physics. I ended up switching to a more practical route after a few years and went for applied optics with an M.S. in physics. Whether you want a master’s or doctorate degree in any science or engineering field this constant will be true: grad school will eat up your time and your money. Depending upon your age, grades, and leadership experience, if you want to get to the top of the stack on OCS or WOFT candidates, then time may be a critical factor for you. It certainly was for me. Feel free to email me. And best of luck to you, and the rest of you. Never give up, never quit, never back down.