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[crisavec]

Last weekend I was home we did a big cleanout on the front half of the house(or started anyway, we ran out of both recycle bin as well as trash bin) and among many other things I found a program guide to Cheyenne's Frontier Days for 1994. And yes, I am aware that makes me an incredible packrat, but there was an actual reason I kept that particular program.

According to the program the USAF Thunderbirds performed on July 27th that year. That date means something, because if I recall correctly, that was the day 20 years ago that I raised my right hand and was sworn into Delayed Enlistment into the USAF. My recruiter had done a minor bit of finagling to arrange it for that day so that I could have the Colonel in Command of the Thunderbirds do the actual swearing in. Seems a tad silly now, but it felt like it was a bigger deal, and made it more "Real" to me then.

That was the day my Total Federal Service commenced, so I guess that means I'd be eligible to retire if I'd stayed in?

Didn't actually leave for Basic till mid November...timed perfectly to spend Thanksgiving, Xmas, and New Years there.

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[name-omitted.livejournal.com]

1994, 3 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, 1 year after the attempted coup in Russia the Yugoslav Wars of Succession were well under way, but not really on the domestic radar. Clinton's health care plan was gasping for breath, it was widely assumed that it would be a failure and Clinton a one-term president.

Internationally, Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons with the promise that Russia and the West would maintain its national borders.

We had a weak Commander-in-Chief, leading a military that had been built around the treat posed by a country that had just dissolved.

The Arleigh Burke had just been introduced to the Navy, and with the success of the Tomahawk Cruse Missie, as a proven combat system, was only about 3 years old.

The average American's concept of modern war was get in, get done, get out. The National Guard was called out for natural disasters.

It's startling to think of how much change your tenure would have been involved with. More to the point, it's startling to think of how recent so much that seems permanent now really is.

I just read a book that suggests that 10 years from now, the war with fundamentalist extremism will be essentially over. Our children's relationship with that piece of history will be similar to our relationship with the Vietnam War. If his thesis holds true (and it does make sense), someone enlisting today would have a 20 year career driven by a completely different set of threats and assumptions than the past 20 years.

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