George Tucker and I shaking hands afterwards

This picture mom took after we were commissioned.  Nancy, with her back to the camera, and Linda look on.

George and I had met back in California before either of us had even met up in El Paso, TX, for the final leg of the drive to San Antonio.  The two of us and the other two guys from CA stayed in a motel the night before we reported.  George and I were in the same flight during the first six weeks of OTS.  We were in the same flight through FSP.  And we assigned to the same flight after we left FSP and became upperclassmen.  Now, we had just been commissioned together.

In all, we'd been through fifteen weeks of training together, starting in August in the heat and humidity of Texas.  Now it was December 5th.  He would go on to pilot training, and I dn't recall to which base he was assigned.  I would go home on leave and then report to Minot before returning to California and missile training at Vandenberg AFB north of Santa Barbara.  I am not certain that I would ever hear from George or see George again, our careers took such different paths.

The only OTS trainee I would see again was Bruce Culp from my Marine OCS days.  He would go through missile training but flunk out.  (I doubt if he really wanted to be a missile officer.)  He then was able to get into Air Force security police, becoming a "Sky Cop" in Minot, of all places.  We lived in the same dorm building there for a few years.

One other interesting Marine connection also occurred.  I learned that Marine Cadet Palms, who had left Marine OCS after six weeks along with John Ormbrek, turned up at Air Force OTS when I was an upperclassman.  We spent an evening at the OTSOM.  He'd been prior service Air Force.  Again, that was the last I saw of Palms.

I don't recall where many of my flight mates ended up.  Mel Kaya, my roommate in the final three weeks was in Columbus, Ohio.  I chatted with him one afternoon when I was there, delivering a top secret missile "can".  I believe that Linda was stationed there, too, but I was unable to locate her.

Since several of the others were either prior service or pilots, none of them ended up at a base like Minot, and so we all lost track of one another after this day.

But that was all in the near and distant future.  This day, like George and I getting as close to hugging one another as men got in 1973, we were all overjoyed to be in one another's company one last time.

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