When I was stationed at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, we had three squadrons of B-52s -- the 319th Heavy Bomb Wing. And 150 Minuteman III missiles -- the 321st Missile Wing -- with missile silos spread over a third of the state.
The mission was deterrence: Everyone was to do their jobs so well, so exceptionally well, that we would be the margin of doubt and prevent an attack.
Soon after I was transferred to Germany one of the Grand Forks B-52s caught fire on the maintenance tarmac. Nine airmen were working on the plane at the time. Five of them died, but they prevented the fire from spreading and killing others.
Doing their jobs exceptionally well.
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A few years ago I was sitting on the front porch of Jose Donaldo (Papa Joe to me) the father of a close friend in the Philippines. When Papa Joe was 15 he fought the Japanese alongside American soldiers in the brutal, gruesome Battle of Leyte -- the first land battle in the liberation of the Philippines.
It was hand-to-hand combat with bayonets and knives, often in a swamp filled with snakes and leeches.
Papa Joe received a special citation from the US Army for saving a platoon of Americans by single-handedly taking out a Japanese machine gun nest. 56 years later, it was framed and hung prominently on his living room wall.
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My Uncle Walt served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II. He was a cook and a deck gunner (his battle station). His ship was hit by Kamakazes late in the war but managed to limp into Midway.
My Uncle Loren was in the Air Force and stationed for years in Japan. We didn't know until he died that he was one of the maintenance guys on the U-2.
My older brother Charles was a medic in the Air Force. One night, while stationed in Omaha, he saw a baby incubator about to fall off a cart, and lunged for it. To this day he has intense, chronic back pain.
My nephew Antonio is an electrician in the Air Force, now on his fourth tour in Iraq. His wife and two children are in South Dakota.
My brother-in-law, Jose, spent 23 years in the Philippine Army, much of it in Special Forces, training American soldiers in jungle survival. When he retired he took a lump-sum payment instead of a pension so he could buy a jeepney and have his own business. In less than a year the jeepney was crushed by a truck, with no insurance.
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I had the 2nd best job in the Air Force. I was the editor of the base newspaper, and I got to interview and write about these kinds of people every day.
The back story was that we knew our Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps newspapers were being scrutinized in Moscow, and distilled for the leadership. So they got to read thousands of stories each week about how we don't want a war, but we are trained, equipped and ready: once again, the margin of doubt.
One of the best moments was a spectacular air show at Tempelhof in Berlin. We hyped it for a couple months, so the Soviets could get all their best people to East Berlin and see the Thunderbirds, the Blue Angels, the Golden Knights and their equivalents from UK, Holland and Germany.
The goal was demoralization of the adversary: for all those people to go home and say "comrades, there is no way we could possibly win."
