Nearing the end of my first four year commitment, I had a choice to make. I could stay in my present career and position for another four years, I could accept a position as a Training Instructor (TI) in the Air Force Basic Military Training School at Lackland AFB, Texas, or I could get a new job.
There was no way that I was going to remain a bomb loader, so that choice was made. Being a TI sounded like it might be fun for about a year. The problem was that the position was a four-year controlled tour, meaning you did four years minimum, period. It sounded like jail.
Besides, I figured that there was no point in putting up with the rigor of the military if you didn’t get to go to some other country.
So, cross-training it was.
Did you know that the Air Force has a quota system? Yes, it does. Along with its previously-mentioned affirmative action system for women, the Air Force has a racial quota system for those racial minorities who cross-train.
Now, I know that most blog readers are pretty up on such terms as “affirmative action” and “quota system,” but I still want to make sure that I’m being clear. When I say “affirmative action,” I mean that standards for a job are lowered in order to get more of a target group into a particular job. A “quota” system does the same thing, except that standards are not lowered and the member of the target group has to meet the same standard as everyone else.
In my career, being both black and a woman, I was subject to both.
Simply put, being black, I was not allowed to cross-train into a field that had a high minority percentage. I was allowed to pick a field that was the opposite only. As it turns out, every last one of the Military Intelligence fields qualified, but I had to have two things: high ASVAB score in General Knowledge and a passing score in the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB).
I’ve mentioned here before that my ASVAB scores were high—except for mechanical aptitude--but it’s not a set of IQ tests. It takes a measure of how many useless basic facts are rolling around in your head. Which president gave the Gettysburg Address? What’s the outermost planet in the solar system? Who invented the telephone? That sort of thing; the kind of thing to which a good education, good parenting and a fairly decent memory will contribute. Like all AF tests, this one is a multiple guess choice type, which increases the odds of both success and failure, depending on one’s knowledge level. I scored a 99 in General Knowledge (thanks, Uncle).
The DLAB was purported to be an IQ test, but all it really measures is one’s ability to recognize patterns. I passed that one, too. So I became a part of that oxymoronic entity known as military intelligence. Two long technical schools later and off I was to the Deutschland of Donnie’s heritage and junior-flip thuggery. What a blast! And, as it happens, this tour in Germany was very significant to the life of my family: one of its consequences was that part of my first life continues into my second. That’ll be part of the next installment.
