Active Duty All the Time

As an air force base you are on active duty all the time where you’re not in army, we used to refer to it as garrison, they wouldn’t be out in the field where we were always... our field was our base and that’s where we launched aircraft from to do their job and we had to have a certain amount ready to go at all times so we were active combat all the time. We always started a lot earlier as the ground crew because we had to get the aircraft ready to fly and because they were so noisy they didn’t want us, we couldn’t fly all night unless it was an actual mission but we tried to keep it so we didn’t disturb the civilians much and, of course, air force bases were out on, away from the general population so it wasn’t too bad. It started out, getting up, going to breakfast, heading to work, getting the aircraft ready and launching all the aircraft or as many missions as we had to do and then recovering them and putting them all to bed and then going home and going to bed and that was basically it. If you had the day shift or night shift, like we had early morning shift and you worked until after dinner and then the other ones started just before dinner and took off late til the last flying day so you usually had two shifts. Whenever they had exercises or max flying things that they had on it was always, you always had a really, it did feel good at the end of the day when everything went perfect and you got all the airplanes away and you got them all back serviceable because you had to have 80 % of your fleet serviceable before you actually shut down for the night so it always felt good when it was over.