Seeing is Believing

Fifty years ago today, I boarded a bus in downtown LaSalle, Illinois, bound for Chicago and the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station—AFEES. It was my first real step toward enlisting in the United States Air Force, a path that would run from June 1976 to May 1980, though I didn’t yet know what shape that life would take.

It was brutally cold that morning. The kind of Midwestern winter cold that doesn’t just sting—it settles in and refuses to leave. The same kind of cold Korea has today. I don’t mind it. I might grumble, but I’ve always loved days like this—hard blue sky, low gray clouds racing overhead, the air stripped down to something clean and unforgiving. Winter makes things honest.

I wasn’t alone on that bus. Another kid from the area, Kim Parsons, was headed to Chicago, too. I knew Kim from high school. We met in chorus, though I couldn’t sing a tune to save myself in a karaoke, Kim had a wonderful voice. He would leave for Lackland Air Force Base the very next day.

When we arrived, we caught a taxi to the Avenue Hotel on South Michigan Avenue, where the military put us up for the night. They served us a spaghetti dinner—nothing special, but it felt official, as if we had already crossed some invisible line. Kim and I wandered the hotel afterward, killing time, not quite sure what to do with ourselves, before eventually turning in for the night.

The next day was a blur of forms and procedures. I took the ASVAB—the Armed Services Vocational and Aptitude Battery test, the SAT for kids about to disappear into uniforms. I had my physical, where I was, as Arlo Guthrie once put it, “inspected, injected, detected, infected, neglected, and selected.” Then I chose my career field—Air Force Specialty Code 65430. Inventory Management Specialist. A tidy, official name for supply. I told myself it was temporary, that I’d bide my time and cross-train later, maybe into photography. That was the plan. That was what I wanted all along.

I was entering under what was then called the Delayed Enlistment Program, which meant that when I raised my right hand and was sworn in that day, my Air Force clock officially started ticking. Time in service. Pay grade. It all began right there.

I finished late that afternoon, just in time to make it to the bus station in the Loop for the ride home. On the way out of AFEES, I ran into another kid heading into the Air Force—a Chicago guy—who pointed me toward the station. I remember that small kindness. I remember realizing, suddenly, that I was on my own. Seventeen years old. No parents. No teachers. Just me and a bus ticket. I was only going back to LaSalle, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like standing on the edge of something I couldn’t see.

Whenever I think about that day, I think of movies like The Last Detail or The French Connection. Maybe it’s the cold, the way winter presses down on those cities, flattens them, exposes their seams. Chicago felt raw back then. Diesel fumes hanging in the air. Steam pouring from sewer grates. Wind slicing down the streets. The city felt alive and indifferent all at once—like it didn’t care what happened to me, and somehow that made everything feel more real.

Looking back now, it was more than a day in an induction center. It was the moment the world quietly widened, when a boy stepped into the cold and let it close in around him, not yet knowing how far it would take him—or what it would ask in return.

The next morning, I was back in school, moving through the halls like nothing had changed. But it had. I walked around with an invisible badge of honor pinned to my chest, even if no one else could see it.

When several of my classmates asked where I’d been for the past two days, I told them. Most thought I was crazy for joining the military so soon after Vietnam. They shook their heads, rolled their eyes, and said it was a mistake. A few talked to me like I was naïve, like I didn’t know any better.

But what did they know?

I had a plan.