Читать книгу The Seven Year-Old Pilot - Capt. Steven Archille - Страница 22

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in summer 1990 and the build up to the first Gulf War began, thoughts of my Uncle Jolex came to mind. He was stationed in the Pacific Northwest at the time, and we prayed he would not be sent to Iraq. I still remember sitting on the steps of our basement family room when the bombing started one evening in early 1991. The US-led coalition force was starting “Operation Desert Storm” to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. With college and my first flying lessons due to start that fall, I was filled with a sense of anxiety about the war, and wondered what it meant for the future. One of my back-up plans for paying for college was to join the military for four years, for which they would pay for a large portion of my college costs via a program called the Montgomery GI Bill. After my acceptance into FIT, I arranged a meeting with the Air Force recruiting station located down by the Staten Island Ferry terminal in the St. George area of Staten Island. I knew that Mom and Dad had many family and home expenses, and I wanted to find a way to minimize the burden that my college costs would be on them. I met with the recruiter shortly after my 18th birthday and explained that I wanted information about military college fund programs and came away feeling as if I’d found the solution to our family’s problem of how to pay for my college tuition. I did the math, and after four years of service in the Air Force, I could combine my military college fund money with government grants, loans, and scholarships, and Mom and Dad wouldn’t have to pay a dime. Although I wouldn’t be eligible to learn to fly in the Air Force (that privilege was reserved for Air Force Academy officers), I would get some training in basic aircraft maintenance, which I reasoned would help me when I started my flying lessons after my enlistment ended. The Air Force Academy had long been ruled out as an option for learning to fly because my dream was to fly airliners, not military planes. Therefore, I concluded that enlisting for four years was the perfect compromise. Although the military was not my first choice, I was ready to make the sacrifice since it would reduce the burden on our family.

After the meeting with the recruiter, I went home to tell Mom and Dad about my perfect plan to fund my college costs while not breaking the family bank, but their reaction surprised me. My parents and I gathered around the kitchen table again (the important family conversations always seemed to take place there), where I proceeded to show them the glossy brochures from the Air Force, while I explained what the recruiter had said. After my presentation, Dad was neutral on the idea of me enlisting but Mom was dead-set against it. With the Gulf War still in the news and on our minds, she said that there was no way she was letting her first-born son go to the military. It was one thing if joining the Air Force had been my dream she said, but it hadn’t. She and Dad knew well that flying for Pan American World Airways was my dream.

Dad, in an effort to help, chimed in saying that he had seen an advertisement in the Staten Island Advance (our local newspaper) for air traffic controllers that had said they would provide training and that salaries for controllers topped out at over seventy thousand dollars per year. “How about becoming an air traffic controller son, it’s in the same field,” he said. Dad was trying to be pragmatic, and he figured that anything in the aviation field would be good enough to make me happy. However, his suggestion had the complete opposite effect. Upon hearing those words from Dad, tears started to well up in me. I could feel my dream dying right before my eyes. My mind was spinning, I felt trapped. From what I knew, our family couldn’t afford what it would cost to put me through college, but Mom wouldn’t let me join the military to pay for it, and Dad was suggesting I take a consolation prize. I don’t want to be the one telling the pilots where to turn as they fly off to faraway places; I want to BE the one flying to those places! I thought.

We sat there silently for a while and then I looked pleadingly over at Mom, as I fought back my tears. I was an eighteen year-old boy, but I needed my mommy now. I needed her to do what she had always done for me: to tell me that everything was going to be okay. She put her hand on top of mine and looked at me, then at my dad, and said words I will never forget, words that instantly made everything okay again, bringing my dying dream of flying instantly back to life. “Son, don’t worry”, she said, smiling reassuringly, “we will find a way”. And they did.