At the end of the two-week break, there were only twenty men left in training. The training became even more intense, and by the end of the second month-long block of training, they were as prepared as the school could make them. All twenty men “graduated,” but there was no ceremony, no pins and no certificates. This whole program was highly classified, and the Air Force thought the less paper trail the better.
Much like the US Navy SEALS at the time, Air Force Scouts were not given a unique specialty code (AFSC in the Air Force). They simply kept whatever AFSC’s we already had. Unlike the SEALS, no record was kept of the schools the Scouts attended.
So, thus began Pete’s journey that took him to the Philippines, Thailand and Laos multiple times during his enlistment. The detachment was originally split up between five Air Force bases, with four Scouts at each base. In each location, there was an officer who kept track of the training regimen and took care of administration. The number of bases shrank as the number of Scouts decreased. When Pete first became an Air Force Scout, there were twenty men in the detachment. When he left the Air Force, there was only one other surviving Scout. Pete felt that he had already used up twelve of his nine lives, and it was time to get out.
The Air Force Scout program was then discontinued. Later, in 1985, when the president ordered the records of the “secret war” in Laos and Cambodia to be declassified, The CIA and the Air Force found it easier to just destroy all records that still existed about the war on the ground because there were so few survivors. FOIA requests all came up empty … No such records exist.
Pete was discharged from the Air Force early because he had been accepted to a university starting right after New Year 1972. By the time he received his acceptance letter, almost all of the flights back to the US had been filled for Operation Santa Claus. There was one seat available the day before Thanksgiving, which was only two days away. He took it. He had used his “off” time to take college classes while in the Air Force, so he had acquired over thirty semester credit hours when he got out. He had applied to several universities, and chose the one that best fulfilled his desires … BYU. It sounds funny, but BYU, a Mormon university, accepted students from other religions at the time, and Pete (a Catholic) got accepted.
Fate sometimes gets in the way, though. Even though he was planning to go to BYU for its engineering programs, as soon as the Air Force learned of his imminent discharge, his father received orders to Southeast Asia flying AC-119 gunships. Pete was very familiar with these planes. Probably the only reason his father hadn’t been sent to the war zone previously was that Pete had been in the theatre of operations on the ground, and the sole-surviving-son law would not allow the Air Force to assign his father. As soon as Pete was no longer going into Laos, his father got orders.
Because of that, Pete decided to stay with his family while his father was in Southeast Asia and go to a local community college for a year. Pete arrived home the day after Thanksgiving Day. His father had always wondered what Pete did in the Air Force. Pete had been promoted to Staff Sergeant (E-5) in only 34 1/2 months, and his father knew that wasn’t possible without being in combat. However, because Pete’s job was classified, he could never tell his father what he did. Even after his father read through Pete’s DD 214, he still had no clue how Pete had been promoted so quickly. None of his training or assignments had been documented in his DD 214 except those from his bypass test, his original assignment in Base Supply and the bases where he had been assigned. TDY’s to Southeast Asia and training connected to being an Air Force Scout were omitted.
So, because he had earned college credits while in the Air Force, Pete started his Sophomore year at the local community college in January 1972. He had contacted BYU to make sure that his acceptance there would still be valid the next year. It was.
Chapter 2 — Shirley
It was the first week in January of 1972, and Pete was getting to know the small-town community college where he was enrolled. He had been discharged from the Air Force in November expecting to attend BYU in January, but when his dad got orders to Southeast Asia, Pete opted for a year at Solano Community College in Rockville, California. That way, he was able to stay close to his family while his dad was overseas. He couldn’t get any real engineering classes there, but they had plenty of good math and science classes, and he could complete all of his general education requirements. Solano CC was jokingly referred to as UC Rockville by some of the students.
Pete found the classes interesting, and he really enjoyed the small class sizes and fairly small school. He had some really good teachers. His days were filled with chemistry, physics, calculus, and sundry other classes, but he found classes much easier than he had in high school. It was amazing how almost four years of trying to survive difficult situations could change a person’s perspective.