Date of Rank, Nov. 10, 1964

Once upon a time I went to Officer Training School:

"It took me awhile to get the hang of OTS (officer training school). At first I was too stressed out about it. Physically prepared. That wasn’t the problem. I’d run all summer getting ready and in the preceding year, my senior year of college, had worked my way up to three hundred pushups and as many situps a day. But I wasn’t ready for the head games that Captain Kafer sprung on us. He was the FTO (flight training officer), a regular Air Force captain (as opposed to a reserve officer). This was his permanent assignment, herding twelve OT’s (officer trainees) at a time through the ninety-day-wonder commissioning program that had been around since WWII.

Kafer was about five feet five and had the classic little guy complex. In fact, he looked a bit like Napoleon B. himself. Dark hair with a bit of wave, wide nose and thick lips. A bit heavy around the middle, he didn’t look like he could do half the stuff he made us do. But he ground on our flight with an amused smirk on his face, giving us the impression that none of us would ever make it.  And, it’s funny how when they work you hard, throw lots of strange stuff at you, and sleep deprive you, you could start to believe that this Mickey Mouse little program was something akin to airborne training. Not even close. It was serious, though, in that it temporarily screwed up the lives of those who washed out. You had to be a college graduate to get there, but if you failed the program you were looking at four years as an EM (enlisted man), a big ego buster though not the end of the world.

Kafer enjoyed making us miserable and his favorite form of misery was the room inspection. He’d show up early in the morning wearing white gloves and run his finger across the window sill or the floor. I’d be up way before reveille to clean the linoleum with my bare hands. This saved having to hide  a dirty rag.  Then he’d poke in the closet to see if uniforms were hung properly and according to the drill. We had one drawer that we could actually use to keep stuff in. Everything else was a display and not useful. Kafer’s favorite part of OTS was writing up “gig slips”—AF Form_____ with comments like: “Woolies in corner.”
I didn’t even sleep under my sheets. Once I got the sheet tightened down with a Rube Goldberg arrangement of paper clips and rubber bands and my blanket snugged in, I slept on top of it. It was warm in San Antonio from August to November. Hot when we got there; cooling off when we graduated.

We had arrived in San Antonio at dawn after a red eye flight from Seattle on a commercial airliner. The sun was coming up, back lighting some puffy, blackish clouds and the air was thick and warm at five a.m.. Five or six of us had taken the oath together at a recruiting office down by the Navy Pier, said goodbye to our folks and been loaded onto a military bus and run down to Sea-Tac where we had tickets on a Continental flight that had mechanical problems and sat at the gate for several hours before takeoff. They wouldn’t serve us a drink as we were recruits...
The whole thing here

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