Sappho Speaks: Those Who Guard The Skies

What Would Sappho Say?

Lectori Salutem! or L.S. (Greetings to the Reader!)

In January 1990 I joined the United States Marine Corps with a perfect score on the entrance exam and my pick on professions. I chose Air Traffic Control. I don’t think my parents or anyone else saw my Type A personality lasting past the first week, so when they got a calling saying I was the platoon and series honor graduate and would they like to come to the ceremony as special guests of the base General you could say there chins hit the floor.

After boot camp I went straight to Naval Air Traffic Control (ATC) School in Memphis, TN. I loved that town and its famous Beale Street blues and Jazz clubs and live music venues. I’ll never forget one visit to the bursting metropolis when we were seeing strange couples all over the streets in the weirdest of outfits before we realized it was one of the largest square dancing conventions in the world!! I loved ATC School and its competitive nature. They had the high scores of the past year for every test on the walls out side of each classroom with the name of the student who made the score. The school was only 16-weeks long but I left with my name up on the wall at least 12 or 13 times.


I was honor graduate of my class and got to pick my duty station. I had visions of Hawaii or Washington DC but had since learned that the only place to go if you really wanted to be an Air Traffic Controller in the real world was Yuma, Arizona, a desert town on the Mexico, Arizona, California border. So I was off to Yuma.

Being good at the school doesn’t always translate to being good at the job but I loved it and it loved me. ATC is a weird job. It takes all kinds because the skill set is so specific but random in how it might come together in others. Not all are brilliantly smart though some are, but most are eccentric in some way. You have to do simple math multiple times simultaneously and keep and store information in your head (even though there is a digital read out), you must be able to see a flat screen in three dimensions as well as hand drawn approach routes and know where the aircraft are in reference to each other visually in your head, and most importantly you must be a good communicator, a team player, and a bit arrogant to hold these lives in your hands without thinking about it detrimentally.

So, I got to Yuma and shot off like a shooting star. It was like I had found a ride at a Carnival that I would get paid to do. When it was busy the adrenaline rush was such a high that the feeling would last for hours after I got off one of the positions, especially when I got to the last positions Approach and Arrival Control which was bringing the planes down to the airport. Some days you’d get 40 or 50 fighter jets come screeching out of the desert from doing their training maneuvers and all want to land at once while you still had your normal traffic to deal with as well. What a feeling!!! So, I set the goal of being the quickest at getting qualified in all the positions at the Air Base.

 A few fellow controllers, one in particular, were jealous and used their higher rank to try and shut me out of my training time, trying to assure he would be given the notice and recognition that had been reserved for me. He stooped so low as to play the women get everything because of “well... you’re a nice looking woman.” This is a man telling me how easy it was for a woman in the United States Marine Corps back when the percentage of women to men was 96.5:3.5 or 3.5% women. I met with more hostility being a woman, much less a woman with extraordinary talent and who was really great at her job and getting promoted fast, than anyone else in the other four women out of 120 men in our facility.

Anyways, I got this illness far away from my family home and instead in Yuma, AZ where I was working in the busiest Navy/Marine Corps Air Base learning to be the best Air Traffic Controller that facility had ever seen. Its traffic was on par to an airport the size of Austin, Texas – the exact reason I went to such a god awful desert town full of migrating “snow birds” (old people who move south for the winter to be in a warmer climate & double the town’s size also making a 60 year-old man feel like he has whole life in front of him) and only one gay bar, a dingy place full of self loathing queens and your occasional young woman ready to latch on to anyone for a relationship.

I did what I set out to do in Yuma and became the fastest controller to qualify in the RADAR room on all positions in a long time winning me a Navy Achievement Medal, not something given out on a whim, and it was quite a big deal. Very soon after, that first round of a series of illnesses reared their ugly head. When it came, it was bad, but after a month (2 weeks in the hospitalized and 2 weeks convalescence leave in Houston) I had recovered enough to come back to the base but as controllers we must pass the same flight physicals as pilots and any major illness gets a controller or a pilot’s flight ticket pulled for an initial period of six months.

This cliffhanger will be continued tomorrow.....

Much Love.


Inspired By Sappho’s Muse

MUSIC OF THE DAY
Since we’re talking about the USMC I thought I’d give us a sense of pride in America and then a great song about our military and the sacrifices of even one gun being used in battle. The first is Ray Charles’ version of America The Beautiful and the second is an amazing song called Til The Last Shot’s Fired by Trace Atkins with the Armed Forces Choir, a haunting song about the costs of war.

America The Beautiful     Ray Charles
Til The Last Shot’s Fired Trace Atkins and the Armed Forces Choir

QUOTE OF THE DAY
It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.
Abraham Lincoln

It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor. Live bravely and present a brave front to adversity.
Horace