It all started with a bored, curious kid growing up in the mountains of Arizona. By the age of three, I was already taking things apart just to see how they worked. By five, I could usually put them back together, which only fueled my curiosity.
At twelve, I picked up a handful of junked early computers from a local auction for the kingly sum of $20. They were primitive by today’s standards, but at the time, they completely captured my attention.
Out of the four machines, I managed to get one working, and that was it. I was hooked. Around that same time, I came across a slightly battered soldering setup and a nearly complete chemistry set. That combination opened the door to hands-on learning and more than a little trial and error.
I later attended New Mexico Military Institute, partly because I needed more of a challenge and partly because my mom wanted better opportunities for me than what was available locally. She didn’t live to see me graduate, but her push to aim higher has stayed with me ever since.
While at military school, I made a little money putting my soldering skills to use, fixing my fellow cadets’ electronics, usually boom boxes and portable TVs. The chemistry experiments, however, were eventually retired after a few projects proved a bit more… energetic than expected.
After NMMI, I joined the Air Force because I had been taught Duty, Honor, and Achievement, and at the time, it felt like the right thing to do. My 18th birthday 'present' had been being shown the door, which was not unusual for that period, so stepping into the military also felt like a direction rather than hesitation.
Life in the U.S. Air Force during the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, was not subtle or abstract. It was pressure, discipline, and constant readiness. The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was very real, and so was the expectation that everything had to work every time, without exception. Aircraft, crews, and nuclear systems were maintained under the assumption that failure was not an option, because sometimes it really felt like failure could mean everything.
I left after my initial enlistment because it felt like living on a hair trigger, always preparing for a war that never came, but also never stopped feeling imminent. While Cold War veterans may have been treated much better than those who came home from Vietnam, there was still a blatant dismissal, as if we had joined because we had nowhere else to go, rather than because we chose to carry that responsibility. In the end, it left me feeling smaller than expected and somewhat insignificant, after joining something presented as a patriotic duty with an all-important purpose. The mission was absolute when you were inside it, but once you stepped out, it was hard to tell what it had actually meant to anyone beyond the system itself, like stepping out of Wonderland and realizing no one else saw what you had just lived through.
I spent the next decade moving around the Southwest, with stops in Colorado and Southern California, working my way through various colleges and chasing what was often called the 'wave of the future'. Some of it lived up to the promise, but most of it didn’t. The pattern was the same as it had always been, take it apart, figure out how it works, and make it better.
