Day Five

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

There’s no school today. Not now, anyway.

We were actually on the way to school when there were a bunch of explosions. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from at first, but then smoke clouds rose up in the direction of the air force base. There were sirens almost immediately and that loud air raid siren thing they always use in movies. I didn’t know that was a real thing. I stuck my head out of the window of the car so I could look for airplanes, but Mom yelled at me and started pulling on me and swerved all over the road. She didn’t like it when I yelled at her for trying to kill me.

Mom took me back home even though I didn’t want to go back home. Home is so boring, now, with no internet or TV that I WANTED to go to school! But it turned out that they closed school, anyway. Everyone thought we were under attack.

I think the radio is stupid. I mean the news on the radio is stupid. So, of course, Mom had to listen to the news all morning, not that she wasn’t already doing that, but she was more insistent about it because of the explosions and wouldn’t even let me talk. At all! She just kept shushing me!

But the radio is stupid because they just speculate all the time. It’s dumb! No one knew what had happened at the air force base, and it took a long time for anyone to find out. Hours. So they spent those hours talking about what might have happened. Were we being attacked? Should people go to bomb shelters? Was it the Chinese? If it was the Chinese, how did they get here?

Lots of people went to bomb shelters. The radio said they were all filling up. Mom wanted to go to a bomb shelter, but she wouldn’t go without Dad, and she couldn’t get through to Dad. All of the phones were jammed up with people using them. As it turned out, Dad was in a bomb shelter.

Mom was SO mad even though he didn’t have a choice. Everyone from Dad’s work was sent to the bomb shelter because everyone thought there was an attack. There was no way for him to call Mom about it, but she didn’t care. She was just mad at him and didn’t talk to him all night. Not after telling him that SHE COULD HAVE DIED while he was all safe and stuff and she was never going to wait for him again.

He said “good” and “fine” and, after a little while, once he figured out that she wasn’t going to talk to him anymore, he went off to… I don’t really know. I went to my room and stayed and am still here. Mom is still listening to the radio. I’ve been reading a little bit.

Oh, yeah, I got a book at school yesterday, Slaughterhouse-Five. I wanted Hunger Games, but she didn’t have any copies left, so I wanted Animal Farm, but she didn’t have any of those left, either. Slaughterhouse sounded like a cool title, though, and there wasn’t a lot to choose from, so I picked it.

I don’t understand it, though. I think it might be good, but I can’t figure out what it’s about. It’s the only book I have right now, though, since I couldn’t trade it for something different today. If I can’t figure out what it’s about by tomorrow, I’ll try to get a different book since reading is the only thing to do, right now. IF there’s even school tomorrow.

There will probably be school tomorrow since we weren’t under attack. Maybe. The radio said the base was sabotaged. It said they were going to send out planes to bomb somewhere on some secret mission but, as soon as the planes started getting ready to take off, they all blew up.

It wasn’t just here, either. It happened at bases all over the US. All the planes that were going to go on this secret mission all blew up. Well, not all of them, but a lot of them. Or most of them. Hundreds of them. I don’t know. They don’t give a lot of details on the radio, just a lot of talking about nothing.

And then they had Trump on talking about nothing, too, because he said it was a great attack on the sovereignty of the US by horrible, terrible enemies and terrorists and about all of the brave brave men who had died except they had already said on the radio, at least at our base, that no one had died. The explosions just crippled the planes and made them no good, but the explosions hadn’t killed anyone.

Trump also said they had a glorious success on the mission. It was beautiful. But he didn’t say what the mission was, only that there was a mission and that it was a success.

I don’t believe him.

Dad said it sounded like Yemen and Jalalabad and Mosul, but he wouldn’t tell me what he meant. Probably because Mom was mad at him. Nothing good, though.

So I think there will be school tomorrow, because, so far, everyone is trying to pretend that everything is okay. Everything is normal. But everything is NOT normal. I wish it was normal and that there was still the internet and I wasn’t stuck reading a book I don’t understand.

A Note from the author:
I hope you are enjoying this piece of FREE! serialized fiction. At least so far as it is fiction. For the moment. Who's to say what could be happening a year from now considering where we are at this moment in time.
Speaking of FREE!, because this is FREE!, it would be great, if are enjoying this story, if you could support the author by purchasing one of his other stories. Look, there are links all of the page and many different types of stories available.

It's always great to feel supported.
Thanks!

How To Be... a Fighter Pilot

The dad of my best friends when I was a kid was in the Air Force. Every so often, I would get to go to the base with them, the base being Barksdale Air Force Base. It was the coolest place. Except for one thing: no fighter planes. Oh, there were some, but Barksdale was a bomber base, so, mostly, it was full of B-52's. I never did get to go in one, but, man, are they big. I don't know if this is still the case, but, in the 80s, Barksdale had the largest strategic bombing force in the nation and, at need, could "bomb Russia" without the need for refueling. It was great, because it made Barksdale in the top 3 on "Russia's" nuke list. But I digress...

As cool as the bombers were, they were never what we were interested in. My friends (3 brothers (and a sister)) had books and books about fighters, and that's what we wanted to fly. My favorite was, and has always been, the F-16. To put it in Star Wars terms, the F-16 would be the A-wing, as it was designed out of a need to have better air-to-air fighters. Basically, it was a plane designed around dog fighting. The things can pull 9-g maneuvers! Let me just say that when everyone was busy being enamored of the F-14, a Y-wing at best, after Top Gun came out, I was never dissuaded from my love of the F-16, the far superior plane (as attested to by the fact that the F-16 is still in production and the F-14 is not). But I still digress...

The F-16

Although I never wanted to be a fighter pilot, every boy wants to be a fighter pilot. I mean, how cool is that? Unfortunately, it's not the kind of career you can just decide to do and spend your life working toward it. There are physical limitations on the job. Like basketball but in reverse. Yes, there really is a height limit to being a fighter pilot. For the Air Force, that's 77 inches (6'5"). I suppose, above that, there's no way you're cramming yourself into one of those cockpits. There's also a height minimum: 64 inches, along with a sitting height requirement! Between 33 and 40 inches. How many of you have ever thought about how tall you are while sitting? Yeah, that's what I thought. Me, either. So it's not just about height but about body proportion, which is pretty specific.

And we haven't even gotten to the part about the vision yet! Vision requirements are somewhat easier to meet these days. When I was in high school, you had to have at least 20/20 uncorrected vision. Now, as long as it can be corrected to 20/20 vision, you can have vision as low as 20/70. See, my vision, which is in the 20/30-40 range, was the only thing that kept me from accepting an invitation to the Air Force Academy after high school. I'm not a good fit for the military because of that lack of respect for authority thing I have going, that and my tendency to use that word which is the bane of parents everywhere: "Why?" However, I would have gone if it had meant a chance to fly fighters. It's all just as well, I suppose.

But why was the Air Force Academy after me to begin with? Test scores. Even though I never applied there or anything. And I'm not talking flyers in the mail kind of stuff, either, although they did send me stuff in the mail. And call me. A lot. And even sent someone to my house to talk to me. So, yeah, you have to be smart. Although, after looking at their requirements on the their website, the current academic requirements don't seem that stringent. At any rate, you have to have pretty high scores to get into the Academy, and you have to have even higher scores to be considered for flying.

And then there are all the physical shape requirements...

So, then, how do you get to be a fighter pilot?
1. Don't be too tall.
2. Don't be too short.
3. Have the right length torso.
4. Have good vision.
5. Be smart or study hard enough to seem like you're really smart,
6. Be in excellent physical condition.
One you've taken care of those basics, you might get the shot at being a fighter pilot.