Recently I graduated from API, which is the six-week academic indoctrination before Flight School. The acronym API, in fact, means "Aviation Preflight Indoctrination." It is heavily academic, and instructs students in the basics of aviation: how planes stay in the air, how engines work, how weather affects flying, basic navigation, and the like. Over the first four weeks, in fact, we have six tests, and failure could mean being dropped from the program. However, the final two weeks consist of survival training, and I have spent them parasailing and simulating ejections. I also took a road trip last weekend to Louisiana to help a good friend celebrate his wedding.
I learned early this past week that ejection is rather common in Military aviation, or at least more common than I thought. Apparently 1 in 5 military aviators eject, due no doubt to the relative age of our fighter and attack jets (25-40 years) and the extreme flight regimes we put them through. Because of this, two weeks are spent teaching us the ins-and-outs of parachuting and ejection, covering ejection at high altitude, parachute malfunctions (!), and ejection over land or sea.
First, we completed a parachute simulator event. It consists of a special virtual reality helmet that presents us with the sights of descending in a parachute while we hang in the harness. Via the helmet visuals, we are presented with common parachute malfunctions and are taught how to correct them - for example, if we have twisted paracords, we have to separate our rear risers (the rear straps connected to our harness) with our arms and bicycle kick to straighten everything out. If we do it right, the simulation reflects our success. It can be kind of funny to listen to students handle their particular problem ("Uh, I don't seem to have a parachute at all." "No, actually yours hasn't inflated. How do you correct for that again?"), but it is good training nonetheless.
Later, we got to go "redneck parasailing," which is basically parasailing behind a pickup truck in a field. Ironically, we do it in Alabama. We are attached to our parachute, then towed several hundred feet up into the air, and are released so we can practice landing correctly. Ideally, we land on the balls of our feet, then control our fall in such a way as to spread the force of hte impact on the side of our legs and spine, instead of absorbing it all with our feet and knees. It is basically a funny-looking controlled fall. The parasailing is of course very exilarating, but the landing was daunting - especially since the ground seemed to approach very quickly for all that I was wearing a parachute and all. I ended up hitting my head on the ground, but that was more embarrassing than anything else, and such scrapes were typical. Nobody got really hurt.
This weekend, a good friend of mine from TBS got married to his longstanding girlfriend in Bunkie, Louisiana. I drove the five hours out in my non-ejection seat car on Friday afternoon, and arrived in time for the rehearsal dinner. The wedding was Saturday, and was followed by a great reception. All the stereotypes about the "friendly and hospitable people of the south" are quite true - rarely have I met such friendly, happy, healthy-looking, and beautiful people as the two families I partied with. And I mean "party." They were eager to chat, unashamed to dance, and very disposed to drink. After the reception, we moved to the bar underneath the hotel we were staying at. This was a good idea until a drunkard attacked my friends sister, which nearly started a full-on, broken-bottle, 15-20 person bar brawl. Fortunately, the cops arrived before any punches were thrown, and the night turned out dramatic rather than painful. But even that was memorable and fun. The hometown crowd joked that we out-of-towners were getting exposed to a "real Louisiana wedding."
I remember well at TBS the great attachment I developed to the specific place of Quantico, Virginia and Washington, DC. For some reason, I tend to associate memories with places. One of the great themes in Catholic Philosophy (at least that I have studied) is that the world we live in nurtures us in faith and understanding. At Notre Dame I discovered what this meant by the rich beauty I found in the campus there, a result of both nature, such as sunsets over the dome, crisp golden autumn days, and new-fallen snow, and human investment, such as the striking and beautiful architecture of the campus and the careful land-scaping. In a way, my memories of events and people are localized in specific places, and I am surprised and lucky that I have found all those places beautiful. In fact, it is often the place itself that strikes me most positively during times of struggle, such as the hard schoolwork of Notre Dame or the tough physical training at TBS.
This all came back to me rather forcefully this weekend because almost every single Louisiana resident I met asked me if this was my first time in their state. They also asked (with more interest) whether I liked it there. I answered, truthfully, yes: there was no honest answer after meeting such lively people this weekend. But there are other attractions, too. I can personally confirm many Louisiana stereotypes: on the road to Bunkie, I counted only three other cars (that takes into account both directions of traffic); after about 30 minutes of driving on the road to Bunkie, I could hardly see out of my windshield for the vast number of bugs that were splattered across it; and I played a rather hectic game of slalom with the random possoms and turtles foolishly crossing the road from one side of the swamp to the other. It was all overwhelmingly "redneck." Yet there is a remarkable beauty as well - only in the field at TBS have I seen so many stars, or seen them so clearly, for example. And the people make a big difference to my perception of the place.
It is easy for me especially to fall into the Pathetic Fallacy when thinking and writing about these places. In my memory they are closely associated with emotions, which I end up associating in turn with the place itself. There is a kind of thick heaviness about the south now, that lingers in the humid air and manifiests in the choking, overgrown boughs. It lends a kind of carefree anonymity, as if each day bore no witness to the last, as if each event were cloaked or hidden or reduced by the solitude and density. By contrast, it seemed to emphasize the human events. I know what Evelyn Waugh meant when he spoke of Oxford: "It was this cloistral hush which gave our laugher its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamor." It is admittedly a far cry from the clearness and freshness of the northwest - but it can be seductive.
I get the strong sense that the trials and opportunities of my military lifestyle - particularly in seeing different areas of the country - is necessary to my continued growth and maturity. My discoveries about places, with their rich complexity of landscape and people, are central to my experience. Spending time on the military base with my nose buried in a textbook temporarily removed me from this kind of activity. But it was going on all the time, I think - I noticed suddenly the rare glory of Pensacola evenings on the beach; it carried all the impact of a conversion. In that sense my brief weekend break between API and Primary was just the vacation I needed.
