Off They Go
I was eighteen years old.
Like most eighteen-year-olds, I thought I knew a lot more than I actually did.
Earlier that day, several of us gathered at a local mall beside an F-104 Starfighter that was on display there. It was great public relations for the Air Force and probably not bad for our recruiter, either. A photographer from the local newspaper snapped a picture.
Looking at that photograph now, I can't help but smile. We were standing there in bell-bottoms, striped shirts, and long hair, products of the 1970s, trying our best to look confident and grown up. Fifty years later, that photograph remains a frozen moment in time—a glimpse of seven young men standing at the threshold of adulthood, with no idea where the years ahead would take them.
What you can't see in the photograph is how hungover I was. The night before, I had gone out alone to a local bar and drank myself stupid. The bartender either didn't notice or didn't particularly care that I was only eighteen. It was my last night at home, and I suppose I was trying to prove something—to myself if nobody else. Looking back, I'm not entirely sure what that was.
We had all enlisted for different jobs. We knew we were headed to Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas. Beyond that, the future was a blank page. On paper it all seemed straightforward. Sign the papers. Get on the bus. Go to Texas. Learn a skill.
Life, of course, is never that simple.
The Vietnam War had ended only a year earlier. America was changing. The military was changing. In a small way, so was I.
I remember saying goodbye to family and friends. I remember the excitement of finally getting started and the uncertainty that came with it. At eighteen, you don't spend much time thinking about how a single decision might alter the course of your life. You're too busy looking ahead.
But that bus ride changed everything.
Had I not joined the Air Force, I probably would never have left Illinois.
That bus ride led first to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and then to assignments at Howard Air Force Base in Panama and George Air Force Base in California. After leaving the service, it eventually carried me back into classrooms at Southern Illinois University, Eureka College, and Western Illinois University.
The journey didn't stop there.
It took me to Japan and then to South Korea, where I would spend more than three decades. It led to a career teaching English and later to unexpected opportunities as a journalist with The Korea Times.
Along the way I found myself doing things I never could have imagined as an eighteen-year-old kid standing beside an F-104 Starfighter at a local mall in Illinois. I traveled across Korea and throughout Asia, visited the Demilitarized Zone, and even had the opportunity to fly in the back seat of an F-16 fighter.
It also led me to write my first novel, War Remains.
None of it was planned.
Everything that came afterward can be traced back to that day.
Looking at the photograph now, I find myself studying the faces of those young men standing around the Starfighter. We were carrying dreams, expectations, and assumptions about the future. Some of those dreams came true. Others didn't. Life took each of us in directions we could never have imagined on that June afternoon.
The photograph captured a moment suspended in time—the last hours before adulthood arrived in earnest.
What strikes me most is how young we looked.
When you're eighteen, you imagine yourself grown up. Looking back from the distance of fifty years, I see seven kids standing beside a fighter jet, ready to take on the world.
The world, as it turned out, had a few surprises waiting for us.
Still, if I could go back and speak to that young man standing beside the F-104 on that warm June day in 1976, I think I would tell him only one thing:
Get on the bus.
The adventure is about to begin.
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