Surviving military aviation Chapter 1: What not to do

Whats OLQ?

Officer Like Qualities.

Ahh...well that seems like a bullshit reason for a down. At least make something up about why his flying sucks?

Not sure what I would do if Wrestlemania XXI broke out next to me in a briefing room.

Call the Ultimate Warrior. Duh.

nah, Hulk Hogan....AMENNNNN BROTHERRRRRR

Like doing a line of coke at Seville's only 12 hour's before your morning flight the next day? Those random drug tests can be a real pain in the ass...

I'm thinkin', that must be a joke? If not, I'm totally stunned...
BzB

Oh no, that's a very real and true story. I knew the dude pretty well, but not about his little, uh, habit.

No, but he did get the details of the incident wrong.

....and?

Speaking of nose candy and other amazing things,

I remember a fleet pilot, from a sister squadron, popping positive for coke on a urinalysis... the squadron sent him TAD to the wing, figuring that although the investigation would take only a short time it would still be better to get him out of the squadron for the meantime. Well in the meantime, he popped again(!). Pretty sure he got orders to Leavenworth after that (the short-fused PCS type, not the ones to the war college there).

Another pilot, from another sister squadron, used the Navy's computers to download porn, even after being told to stop it. I suspect it wasn't ordinary porn, because he too ended up with special orders to the brig. It's always fun to look up people like these on the bubba list.

Yet another pilot, from yet another sister squadron, got busted by the local sheriff's cybercrime task force... it seems that the teenage boy, with whom he was arranging a liaison, turned out to be a cop.

I'm not sure I can pick a clear winner out of these three. Each is disturbing in its own way. When the career brief says that O2-O3 promotion is 99.9% with an asterisk, sometimes guys like these are that asterisk. Crime and punishment... all kinds of people make both good and bad choices throughout life, but the outliers make some truly horrible choices.

Cheez, 3 sister squadrons...what are the odds on that?

It's absolutely mind-blowing to me that a Dude with a dream goal, the education w/ grades, package quality, medical qual/physical fitness, (and dumb luck/timing) just to be selected.

Then the work & ass pain of OCS etc. Work/study in API, study, brief, fly, debrief ...learning, slowly closing on the dream, then very probably blow it all almost instantly with one insane decision. It's just incomprehensible to me. I guess I'm naive & not very knowledgable re. addiction.
BzB

Even worse for those that make command. All the asspain to get to that point to lose it all. Zipper malfunctions and addictions can do powerful things.

Makes you long for the good ol' days when naval aviators were the world's largest body of practicing alcoholics

Back in the day we were preparing for a change of command. Two days before the CoC, the outgoing CO gathered everyone into the hangar and told us that the XO was not going to be CO and instead we would get another CO. The old XO was being sent off to be the CO of a NAS overseas. Were were told not to speculate and no details were ever leaked out.

Many years later while on a staff tour on a late battle captain watch, another officer told me a sea story about the CO of a NAS he was at on his last tour. This CO had been caught with his zipper down at a local shopping mall during his previous tour and was shipped overseas. Once overseas, he was caught with his zipper down again with a male sailor in his command. A name check verified we were talking about the same guy.

Back when Nittany and I where mere SNAs at VT-3 we had an IP get busted for attempting to solicit sex from what he thought was a minor (actually undercover escambia county cop).

Hi! Why don't you have a seat over there!

Had an AME2 in my first fleet squadron. Good guy, only E-5 working in QA, pops + for coke. Doesn't fight it and we Ad Sep him quickly. A couple weeks later the Oak Harbor cops shop up with NIS (before they were NCIS) with pictures of this guys head and other hacked up body parts they found in the crawl space of a house in town. We had all squadron quarters and the pics were put on the big screen in the hangar. Couple of guys passed out and a couple puked but we didn't have anyone else pop positive in the two years after that before I PCS'ed.

Sounds like he should apply to the Secret Service..

Well played, sir! The first two were HSL but the third was P-3s. Don't worry, off the top of my head I don't have any "creepy 53 guy" stories.

If this was in late 2004 then that's the one. I say BZ ECSO.

It seems that I've crossed paths with an extraordinary number of freaks, but the first two were out of about 200-300 pilots in the wing (HSL squadrons are big) and for the third was one out of 400~ish in the wing (training squadrons are big too). Still makes you go "hmmm" though.

I remember the coke guy being a few classes ahead of me in OCS, and he was one of those guys who spent a few minutes helping a lower class do some of those mindless-yet-important-at-the-time OCS things. Go figure.

I actually turned over duty with the "solicit sex with a minor" guy. This amounted to "here's the duty cellphone, here's the binder, here's what's going on" JO handoff on a long weekend. I remember thinking it was odd that he would have grown some goatee stubble... sure, long weekend, that's his business, but being on duty is still being on duty... Yet again, go figure.

On the lighter side, when you run across guys like this on the bubba list, usually it goes "How did that guy get orders to BUPERS*??? Wait, was does it say here, oh, shiii...."

* or Leavenworth- pretty sure I've seen it annotated both ways