Under Pressure

Calafate, Argentina - Photo by JoAnn Sturman

W.R. Priskna
fliesinyoureyes.com

Most new entrants to the Air Force Academy are eighteen years old and newly graduated from high school, but a small portion of the class attended a prep school, college, or served as an enlisted person in the regular Air Force. For this reason a doolie, a derogatory term for a freshman attending the Academy, can be admitted up to the twenty second birthday.

At eighteen years old, 5 foot 10 inches tall, 140 pounds, with cheeks never touched by a razor, and a candidate for the Vienna Boys Choir, if I had any musical ability and lived in Austria, I arrived at the Air Force Academy in 1968 knowing nothing about military life at a service academy. After having my head shaved, standing in innumerable lines, and receiving bag upon bag of military clothing, I found my assigned room in Vanderberg Hall. When I entered, I saw a man sitting at a desk by the window, spit shining his shoes while smoking a cigarette. He introduced himself as Jack, one of my two roommates who would share the room.

Jack was close to the twenty-two year maximum age limit, a Prep School graduate, and a former enlisted man. While I had no idea what to do with the piles of underwear, socks, uniforms, fatigues, and footwear laying on the mattress of my unmade bed, Jack was a different story. He had neatly stowed all his clothing and was spending some extra time “burn shining” his shoes and polishing them with cotton balls.

As I would have done at home, I started to throw the clothes haphazardly into the chest of drawers next to my bed.

“Hey, you shouldn’t do that,” Jack suggested. “The reg book tells you how to fold and where to put every piece. Take a look at my drawers.”

He opened his top drawer. Every item was placed precisely where it should be. He had made the extra effort of placing a cardboard form in the top piece of each item in each pile, so it was stretched tautly. Laying beneath, every under shirt and under pant were folded to perfection. Socks were lined neatly in a row and rolled together in the prescribed manner.

I marveled at his closet, where every hanger was exactly the same distance from its partner. On the floor rested two pair of shoes and one set of combat boots shined so impeccably that they could have doubled as mirrors.

I realized I was in serious trouble. There were only a couple of days to prepare for the change of command ceremony, when our peace would be shattered by the turmoil of the fourth class system. There was a year of brutal, old fashioned hazing and bedlam in store for us, and I didn’t know how to shine shoes or fold clothes properly.

“W.R., let me give you some advice. You have to make your bed so tight that you can bounce a quarter on it, so make it once and never sleep under the covers. Keep an extra blanket in the laundry bin, and use it when sleeping on top of the made bed. It saves a lot of time.” It was the one bit of Jack’s advice that proved particularly useful for the next four years.

The transition to the fourth class system occurred abruptly two days later when the upper classmen descended on us while we were standing in formation waiting to march to the evening meal. They screamed and cursed us with every derogatory slur known. None of us ate a morsel at the meal; we were kept busy sitting at attention in our chairs while shouting rote knowledge until hoarse.

When we returned to our room, the contents of every drawer and the closet were dumped on the floor. The beds which took so long to make were upended in a heap. All of Jack’s labors were for naught. When on the floor, his beautifully displayed clothes were no different than mine. Each evening after a grueling day of military training, we repeated the ritual of putting the room in inspection order, only to find it in shambles the following day.

On the third day I returned to my room to find the pile of clothing considerably smaller. Jack and all of his equipment were gone; he disappeared, vanished, evaporated as suddenly as he appeared. For all his bravado, experience, and apparent self confidence, he could not cope. He functioned comfortably when life was predictable and tasks were prescribed, but pandemonium was a different matter. It took only three days in the pressure cooker for him to say “that’s enough” without even so much as a farewell to his new friends.

Some think walking on a flat treadmill at a leisurely pace for an hour means being in shape, but increase the incline to 15%, up the pace, and see if you can chat casually with the person next to you. Training and educating is no different. If a student is not exposed to stress in practice, how can one predict if he will implode when exposed to real life pressure situations and simply quit and take his rumpled clothes home with him?