Replying to a message of mark lewis to Ross Cassell:

 RC>> Your boy claimed to have been a full fledged A10 weapons mechanic in
 RC>> the USAF, didnt happen with 65 days of service.

 ml> interesting... USAF Basic training is 6 weeks... that's 42 days
 ml> leaving 23 days... the "shramies" that were trained in
Rantoul, Il at
 ml> Chanute AFB (where i took my 6 months MMII Ground Control Systems
 ml> Specialist training) were fully fledged air-missle techs in 2 weeks
 ml> (IIRC)... the MPs and Firefighters that were there were also 2 week
 ml> schools... our 6 month schooling on the MMII systems was the longest
 ml> of all courses taught at Chanute...

 ml> so, how is it impossible for someone to have learned to be and been
 ml> classified as a weapons tech in less than 65 days???

IIRC Sauer went from Lackland to Lowry for tech school.  Given the usual 5-7 days
travel time and in-processing leaves a bit more than two weeks (which is ten work
days, eleven if you count Saturdays as half days) of actual school.  Note that ATC's
system used six hour class days (so they could ramp up (to 24 hour days) and run 4
times as mamy students thorough without building more classrooms.  At Keesler they
had early shift (0600-noon) and late shift (noon-1800), although not all of
the courses
used both, in fact, most didn't.  I lucked out and my classes were on the
late shift, so
I didn't have to get up early; we used to play cards in the day room until
the wee hours,
and I'd sometimes go to early breakfast at 0300 and *then* go to bed.  That
in the mid
1970s, BTW.

When I left basic I got a *30 day* delay enroute between Lackland and Ft.
Meade, Md., 
where I spent a year not learning the Vietnamese language (I've never been
able to read,
write, speak or understand it, but I did go through the school).  The
schools for computer
operator (at Sheppard AFB) and computer programmer (at Keesler AFB) were both 13 week
schools, I went through both of them (at different times, obviously).  The
radio traffic
analyst school at Goodfellow AFB was also a 13 week school, but I didn't go
to that one -
I took the bypass test, aced it and was awarded the AFSC (it's fairly easy
to ace a basic
proficiency test if one has been working in the field for 4.5 years ).


It occurs to me that my terminal leave (Oct 3 to Nov 30) was nearly as long
as his entire
career.

--- FleetStreet 1.19+