Poetry, Part Eleven

This was the late summer and fall of 1973, when I attended Air Force Officer's Training School in Lackland, Texas. In the Marines the year before, when a Marine officer at an auditorium class mentioned that we graduates might still have a chance to fight in the Vietnam War, many of the young officer candidates--those who had not had prior military service--were verbally and loudly gung-ho about the possibility. I glanced over at Zebal, a guy who had been a Marine enlisted man in Vietnam, and he was simply shaking his head at the foolishness of the others who did not know of war first-hand.

During one of our classes in the large auditorium at OTS, however, when an Air Force officer mentioned the possibility of our getting a chance to fight in the war before it ended for U.S. forces, he was roundly booed. These men and women were no longer fooled by the lies we'd been told about the war. Nixon may have been massively reelected the year before--I'd proudly voted for George McGovern in my first election now that I was 21--but the President's administration was already beginning to experience the first stages of coming completely apart the following August because of Watergate.

The war was not only winding down, the several branches of the military were beginning to downsize, as well. The need for officers and enlisted men and women was no longer as great as it once had been when the war was at its height. Significant changes were in the air.

The F-102 Delta Dagger was the Convair fighter jet that had entered service back in the 50's, before the more-advanced F-106 Delta Dart.

Air Force OTS, 1973 (Forbes Hall F-102)

I was a small part
of a greater diminishing
in barely noticed ways.
Numbers were not the need,
and there were enough weekends
through the window where I could see
fewer officers train to salute in passing.

We were more significant now;
not like the powerless fighter on display:
winged
without insides remaining sufficient to fly.

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