So last Friday was the thirteenth of August.

And it only just occurred to me that it was a notable day in the chronicles of who I used to be and how I'm not anymore, and how I got to be who I am now (which is somebody else).

So on the 13th of August, 1969, a new cluster of 2LTs (USAF) were created (by gosh & by golly & by act of congress), down in San Antone, at the old USAF OTS campus known in those days as "Medina" which was sort of an annex to Lackland AFB (more properly LMTC or Lackland Military Training Center, which was the main tenant of Lackland AFB). It was a hot day, and we marched all toy-soldierly out onto the bigass parade field, and stood while some buncha brasshats uttered the usual outrageous bumph, then we were commissioned and all of a sudden transformed from snot-nosed, wet-eared, greenhorn mewling & puking recent college graduates into the Air Force's version of Trained Killers. Well, maybe soon-to-be-trained-killers. If at all.

We threw our wheel hats high in the air, and somehow actually all managed to find our own (at least I did, I dunno how many lost theirs), and then glad-handed each other and got first salutes from various folks, fetched our gear from the barracks, and hauled ass out of San Antone with all possible haste.

I was a couple months shy of 23 years old. Hoping not to be sent to Southeast Asia, where there was a nasty shooting war underway. Many of my pals from Basic Training and OTS (I was one of the twice blessed who got to participate in BOTH levels of indoctrination) did indeed go to SEA - Vietnam & Thailand mostly. As far as I know they all came back. I lucked out & went to Korea. Some pals went to Alaska. After remote assignments, we ended up in places like Syracuse, Duluth, Petersburg Virginia, Seattle, etc. I ran into a couple of my Basic and OTS compadres later on at Syracuse. After leaving the service, we all pretty much left it & each other behind, though recently I've been in touch with a couple of the guys, quite by accident - one's a professor of something wet in Florida, and one's a golf pro.

Military service seems to stick with you; it plays a huge role in shaping who you turn out to be - sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but always, it seems to me, for keeps. It's the classic "wouldn't want to do it again, but wouldn't have missed it for the world."