PC in the Air Force, 1980s

(Note: Howard Sutherland has contributed a substantial comment, below, on preferential treatment of blacks (and women) in the Air Force and Marines.)

Jason S. writes:

I saw your posting regarding the book Palace Cobra by Ed Rasimus. Like your correspondent John K., I have read both books by Mr. Rasimus regarding his experiences as a fighter pilot in Vietnam, and found both of them to be excellent.

While reading the latter book, I smiled when I reached the very account your correspondent points out in his e-mail, because I saw a version of this first hand when I was in the USAF in the late eighties—but by then it had gotten much worse (it behooves me here to mention that the first time in my life I ever heard the phrase “politically correct” was while in the Air Force, by an Air Force officer—and he was using it approvingly, as a code of “conduct” to aspire to).

I was stationed in Europe during my time in the service, and one evening there was an altercation at a bar downtown between a white airman and a black one (over a girl both of them were sweet on). One of the black airman’s (black) friends jumped into the fray, and then a (white) friend of the white airman likewise got involved, coming to the defense of his friend in what was turning into a tag team. The local cops showed up and broke everything up, then detained the four participants; they waited until the Air Force Security Police arrived, and handed the miscreants over to them.

I was the guy who came to the aid of his friend, and out of this minor fracas came my first full-throated experience with an odious, government-sponsored and enforced identity-politics program.

Because the fight involved more than two persons of a different race, it was given a level of official scrutiny that would’ve normally attended a murder investigation (I exaggerate, but not by much). But even when the common sense conclusion was arrived at, i.e., it was a personal, not racial, matter between two guys who were striving for the attentions of the same girl, the Air Force refused to just punish the four involved and leave it at that.

Instead, not too long afterwards it scheduled a “stand down” day where everyone in the unit was required to attend a “social actions” seminar. This included folks who weren’t within twenty kilometers of the bar during the night in question, some of whom didn’t even know the participants.

I well remember this “social actions” get-together had to be held in the base chapel because it was the only building large enough to accommodate everyone. And what did the “seminar” consist of? A lecture from our commanding officer and several of his enthusiastic assistants directed pretty much solely at the assembled white airmen. The entire thing was conducted with the presumption that in any conflict between a white airman and a black one, the white was the aggressor and guilty party, the black was the innocent victim whose side of “the story” automatically carried extra weight. It was also made known that even in the event that the evidence bore out the exact opposite, the white airmen had a special obligation to go to every extremity to avoid the conflict in the first place, even if they were in the right or just defending themselves, because “unit cohesion” and “morale” were just too, too important, you see. In other words: white airmen, you ought to allow yourselves to get shoved around for the team if that’s what it comes down to, cause the burden of proof is on you if a controversy of some sort erupts, or fists start to fly.

This “seminar” had, of course, the exact opposite effect: it bred resentment among many of the whites, and a sense of arrogant invulnerability among some—by no means all, to be fair—of the black airmen. They just knew the Air Force was their oyster when it came to such things, and they were right.

The personal fallout for me wasn’t much: I got a “Letter of Counseling” for my participation in the fight, essentially an official pat—one couldn’t even call it a slap—on the wrist. The black airman who first jumped in to help his friend tag-team the white airman got a Letter of Reprimand, the next step up in punishment from a “Letter of Counseling.” The black airman who had started the fight was given an Article 15, the most serious form of non-judicial military punishment. My friend, the white airman who had been initially assaulted and then had done nothing more than defend himself, was dismissed from the Air Force with a less than honorable discharge.

Over a bar fight. Involving a girl. Where no one was seriously hurt or injured.

It was hard then to come to the conclusion that his dismissal from the service had more to do with the race of the person he defended himself against, rather than the fact that he defended himself in the first place and caused a ruckus in the so doing. In the twenty some odd years since the incident, my opinion in that direction has only solidified.

In any event, that was my introduction to officially-sanctioned political correctness—and in my naivety more than twenty years ago I thought it must be solely a military thing. After I left the Air Force and rejoined the civilian world back in the states, I found out just how naive I’d been. By then, such political correctness had spread everywhere, and is now, of course, ubiquitous throughout every nook and cranny of our society.

Now, I hate to add to this already lengthy e-mail, but I’ve got to say I am pretty sure that if you add this to your comments you will receive a small deluge of correspondence the like of which will run “He’s exaggerating!; I was in the USAF thirty years and never saw anything like that!; he’s just a bitter racist making stuff up! We’re not getting the whole story here!” and on and on and on.

Fine. It happened all right, and more or less as I’ve recounted it. Indeed, probably on the “more” side, because I’ve gone to great lengths to tell the story from as neutral a viewpoint as an interested party can.

And I’d bet that if one took a good, long hard peak into the workings of the military today—even in wartime—one would find that the political correctness when it comes to matters such as this has only gotten worse. This is no slur on those of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who put their lives on the line everyday fighting their country’s various engagements; it is a damning indictment of the culture of political correctness that has a strangle hold on their civilian and military leadership, and the bureaucracy they oversee.

(This was born out, for instance, by the fact that numerous other airmen, black and white, stood by and witnessed the fight without getting involved. Those on the scene, black and white, recognized the fight for what it was, two guys fighting over a girl and two friends jumping in to help the other, not some kind of racial brawl)

- end of initial entry -

Derek C. writes:

Like Jason, I was in the Air Force in the ’80s, and not only will I not deny what he’s saying, but I’ll confirm it. Social Actions was notorious for enforcing its PC prescriptions. Getting into a dispute with a minority or a woman was considered a career-ending incident. As a result, a lot of whites had nothing to do with blacks outside of their duties. To a degree, I could understand why this was the case on the base I was at, Travis AFB in California. In 1971, the base had been shut down by rioting black airmen. In response to this and other incidents, the military felt it had no choice but to enforce a PC regimen. Thus, as is the logic of PC, the rules are rigged against whites and males. In any dispute they are assumed guilty until proven otherwise, and even then they’re still forced to live under a cloud. The Air Force doesn’t do this because it hates whites (though some of the Social Actions personnel clearly did), but because they don’t want trouble. In this, they make every effort to appear non-racist, which in the end means enforcing a regime of “institutional” racism against whites. It also included ridiculous genuflections to Afrocentrism. I remember seeing a poster in the chow hall showing great black figures in history, some genuine, others laughably spurious, like Ramses II and Cleopatra.

The blacks and others are aware of this phenomenon. How could they not be? And they took full advantage of it. I had a black friend, who, in a moment of honesty, straight up admitted that, if he got in a dispute with his superiors, he’d play the race card; he would accuse them of racism. To my shame, I was so shocked I let it slide without comment. From then on, I was also far more careful in my friendships and activities with blacks. Fortunately, I never really fell into the extreme pit of resentment others did. I lost count of the times I heard, “I never knew blacks until I joined, and having gotten to know them, I just don’t like them.” What did it for me was that I knew several blacks who were good men and good at their jobs. My squad leader in basic helped me get through a rough patch. The friend I just mentioned was also generally a wonderful person. He never got into any serious problems I know of, so he didn’t play the race card, but given the temptation it offered, I can see how he or someone of lower character would reach for it.

As the military gets more and more diverse (I hear we’re recruiting Ugandans these days), it’s going to become more and more like the old Austro-Hungarian military, full of squabbling groups, eager to assert their prerogatives. The only effective cure to this would be a hardline, neutral assimilationist policy, but I doubt the military will be able to do that, especially if the Commander in Chief is someone like Obama.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Jason S’s anecdote about political correctness in USAFE (the U.S. Air Forces in Europe) in the 1980s comes as no surprise. The Air Force has always been politically attuned because it has so many big-ticket items in the budget. Also it is the youngest service—only independent of the Army since 1947—and a technological one, priding itself on brains rather than the dumb brawn Zoomies assume is the stock in trade of the other services. In its relative youth, the Air Force is less institutionally devoted to tradition and more liberal (just look at its wretched current uniforms, which would be an embarrassment to a commercial airline). Still, what Jason and his friend endured in the Air Force could have happened in any of the services at any time since the Vietnam War and our national surrender to the counterculture.

The Air Force is very proud of its role in breaking color barriers. There are several members of the Air Force’s pantheon of heroes who are in it primarily for being prominent blacks.

Lt.Gen. Benjamin Davis, Jr., USAF, was the first black 3-star in any service and son of the first black general officer (Army), and was by all accounts a worthy officer, but in two combat tours leading fighter squadrons and groups never scored in the air. Almost 30 years after he retired, Bill Clinton promoted him to full General. Can’t imagine why …

Gen. Daniel “Chappie” James, Jr., USAF, was the first black four-star in any service. Although he seems to have been a good public speaker, his only combat tour was as a Colonel in 1967, as Vice Commander of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. James was number two to Colonel Robin Olds, a multiple ace from WW2 and a truly inspiring fighter pilot and combat commander (as well as a football All-American at West Point). Like Davis, James never scored in the air despite being one of the leaders of the Air Force’s highest-scoring fighter wing in Southeast Asia. To be fair, though, MiG kills over North Vietnam were harder to come by than WW2 scores, although Olds added at least four MiGs to his WW2 score. Somehow, James—the scoreless deputy—became a four-star general while Olds—the commander and ace—retired with one star. Go figure … (Personal note: in the mid-1980s I was in the same fighter squadron as James’s son, then-Maj. Daniel James III. Danny was a good pilot, though he didn’t fly much, but not exceptional. He was the only black fighter pilot I knew. Later Danny became the 3-star general in charge of the National Guard Bureau, overseeing both the National Guard and Air National Guard. Again, go figure … )

As for political correctness on less exalted levels, I saw it throughout my time in the Marine Corps and Air Force (actively involved, between the two, from 1980 to 1995). In training programs in both services, it was obvious that minorities and—where they were present—women got second chances after screw-ups and failures that white men did not. When I was in Marine Officer Candidate School, my platoon had four black candidates out of 28 overall—in my platoon, blacks were present in higher proportion than in the general population. With one partial exception, they were among our weakest candidates, but got lavish attention and remediation when other non-hackers were unceremoniously removed. (And this was the Marine Corps, remember; supposed to be only the best.) All were shepherded through, surviving difficulties that would have seen any white candidate dropped from the program, although one—the most promising—refused his commission at the last minute. I saw all of the others later in the fleet. None was doing very well. One had even washed out of Naval Aviator training at Pensacola—during ground school, before ever getting in an airplane! Clearly, the Marine Corps should never have sent him there in the first place.

When my battalion was deployed to the Western Pacific, Marines were having the occasional trouble with fights in bars out in the “ville.” Disproportionately, these dust-ups involved black and Mexican/Puerto Rican GIs. Local tavern-keepers frequently reacted by refusing entry to blacks (whom, it’s true, Orientals generally look down on). Our response was always to put the racist establishments off limits to GIs, rarely to punish the offending Marines.

After I defected, so to speak, from the Marine Corps to the Air Force Reserve, I went to Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training. There, too, enormous institutional pressure existed to shepherd minorities and women through the program to wings. When I was in UPT it was generally understood that receiving an unsatisfactory grade on three training flights (the whole program probably included over 100) put a student pilot at grave risk of being washed out. To fail even a single check ride (formal evaluation at the end of a phase of training; there were six in total) was to put oneself in serious jeopardy—it took an immediate and strong recovery to get out from under the cloud. To fail two was almost always the end of the road. I saw black men fail three and survive; I saw women fail four and survive. I never saw a white man survive failing two. The same dynamic was at work in Air Force Undergraduate Navigator Training, so the pipeline for aeronautically rated officers was fully in the grip of affirmative action by the mid-1980s.

In the 1980s, the Air Force put newly winged pilots into two tracks: fighter-qualified and tanker/transport/bomber. A fighter-qual pilot was, obviously, considered capable of a fighter assignment, while TTBs were precluded from fighters. In those happier times, women did not get fighter assignments, so “fighter-qual” women would stay in the training command as UPT instructor pilots, a job for which one had to be fighter-qual, as did many other new pilots. One woman student I knew (pleasant girl, though that’s irrelevant, who had gone to Wellesley—unusual college, to say the least, for a military pilot) began her Formation check ride—evaluating her ability to fly in close formation—by breaking in the wrong direction: directly into her wingman’s aircraft while he was in close formation alongside hers, only a few feet away. If the instructor in the back seat of that jet had not immediately shoved the stick full forward, bunting underneath hers, she would have killed four people including herself. If she were a he that would have been her last flight in a military aircraft—no male student pilot could screw up that dangerously (on a check ride, no less!) and not wash out. No—she was given a whole slate of remedial rides to try to get her up to speed, she did graduate and was then assigned as an instructor pilot—teaching, among other things, close formation flying!

I think affirmative action was suspended in fighter training courses back then—too self-evidently dangerous, perhaps. I have no personal experience here, because I had no black classmates (and, by definition then, no women) in any fighter training course I did. Once women were allowed into fighter cockpits, though, horror stories of accidents resulting because of institutional pressure to push unqualified women through soon followed. The best known early one was the unfortunate Navy Lt. Kara Hultgreen. Although her instructors had indicated repeatedly that she was not up to flying fighters, she was kept in F-14 training until she killed herself failing to land one aboard a carrier. Over in the Air Force, rather than institutional resistance to this idiotic and unnecessary innovation that cut right at the heart of the Air Force as a fighting service, the biggest cheerleader for girls in fighters was the cretinous Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force himself! Rumors at the time were that McPeak’s daughter wanted to be a fighter pilot, but in retrospect there is little doubt McPeak was comfortable with the Clintonian zeitgeist; he is now B. Hussein Obama’s “defense advisor.”

My last encounter with the PC military was when I moved from Texas to New York at the end of 1994. I was at the time an Air Force Reserve Major in a Texas-based fighter squadron. I was an experienced F-16C pilot, fully current in the aircraft and with a recent combat deployment under my belt. Even though I was pretty sure my new law firm job would mean not enough time to stay in active flying, I spoke to the commanders of the Air National Guard F-16 squadrons in Burlington and Atlantic City. This was just months after the Clinton administration had opened fighter assignments to women; something the “conservative” Bush II administration has perpetuated. At the time, the armed forces were shrinking and fighter squadrons in the ANG and AFRES were closing, so both Vermont and New Jersey had full rosters. Still, both colonels volunteered, without my asking, that if I were a woman they could find room for me, and were under heavy pressure to put one or more token girls in their squadrons. Remember that, at the time, there were no women with fighter experience, so the official position of the Air Force was that a totally unqualified woman would be a more valuable addition to a fighter squadron that an experienced fighter pilot, fully qualified and with recent combat experience in the aircraft the squadron was flying. Here is an example of where the PC determination to force-feed women into fighter cockpits can lead.

In 1994, following the White House, the Air Force made it crystal clear that feminism is much more important than combat readiness. That made it hard to take the Air Force too seriously, because it was so obvious that, right from the Chief of Staff on down, the people running the Air Force did not take flying and fighting—what it’s really all about—more seriously than liberal politics. That was the state of things in 1994. I’m sure matters have not improved since, and short of the complete rejection of liberalism and its equalitarian mandates, I cannot imagine they will improve.

So are you really surprised that one of our NATO allies has a 37 year old pregnant pacifist Defense Ministress? It’s perfectly in synch. It’s not just Lisa Schiffren’s Ethiopian cab driver (notice it never occurs to her to wonder why this Abyssinian should be here in the first place) laughing at our expense. I’m sure lots of Moslems and Mexicans are having a belly laugh over how Westerners “defend” themselves these days.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 17, 2008 10:41 PM | Send