Well, if you count your academy years, a decade of preparation to fighting in the skies.

So we were the second squadron to deploy after Saddam rolled south into Kuwait.

First squadron being an F-15s from Langley.

We were the second squadron to deploy when we took off.

Our squadron commander, one of my heroes, a guy named Billy Deal, he said, look, we don't know our destination because the Secretary of Defense is negotiating for that right now ahead of us.

So we're going to take off with all of the approach plates, which are the, you know, it's how you get into an airport, right? It's the instrument procedures and all those kind of things.

So we're going to have to have approach plates for the entire Middle East in your cockpit.

Talk about the process of evading and ultimately coming into contact with the rescuers themselves.

Yep.

So if you wanted a free fall parachute at the Air Force Academy and pull your own ripcord, you had to have a 2.6 GPA or higher.

Those of us who had less than a 2.6 got to go to Fort Benning and jump with the United States Army on a static line out of the back of a C-130 or a C-141 at the time.

But here's where unanswered prayers come through, right? The fourth jump with the United States Army at Fort Benning is a low altitude mass exit, full combat gear in the middle of the night.

And as soon as you hit the ground, you have to grab all your gear and sprint to the buses to pass the ride.

So here I am in Serbia, low altitude night, full combat gear.

When I hit the ground, I got to grab all my gear and sprint to the trio line to keep from getting – from them finding me.

What advice do you give people who tell you they'd like to grow up and become a pilot? What do you suggest? How do you coach them?

Several?

And we were going to be-- Several.

Yes, members of ex- his extended family.

'Cause remember, a- again, Sutherland Springs is a bedroom community for Randolph Air Force Base, which is one of our largest Air Force training bases.

So the number of people that come through Randolph, it's probably one of the most traveled bases.

So when you talk to airmen, right, and ask them of their, you know, common experiences, many of them will share a period of time when they went through Randolph Air Force Base or Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

So San Antonio is known as Military City USA, uh, is one of the, you know, the, the monikers that, that it's used because there's so much military.

And so I think it mattered to the institution to be able to say, "Okay, when things get screwed up, the best thing to do is to own it and fix it, even when it really hurts." And it's also the best for the people who have been impacted by the failure.

JD, over to you.

Yeah.

This started for us actually when I was director of the joint staff, because my responsibility for the chairman was to put together the packages of all the service nominations for every four-star position, and then come to the chairman with a recommendation that he would take to the Secretary of Defense and then to the president.

And what I was realizing is that we were too new and too blue.

Too new because we were promoting at a rate that was far faster than any of the other services, which in essence removes time for development.

And we were so tribal that the motivation that was set, and this is I think is probably the system that for sure all of our listeners probably grew up in, which is the message was, "Hey, don't leave your tribe." If you leave your tribe for any period of time to go do something really interesting, like get a PhD or go to the academy and teach or go to an exchange tour, your tribe will forget you, and you will no longer be as competitive for promotion.

So if you think about those two things together, too new, race, race, race, get on the fast train, and then stay in your tribe, stay in your tribe, you can see where when it got to the chairman, and the two questions that are asked over history in the chairman's office was, "Okay, who knows this person?" And, "What have they done to make them uniquely qualified for this four-star position?" Well, if you're too new, the answer to question one is nobody knows you because you've been racing and you haven't been in long, you know, as long as the rest of them.

they take away one lesson, what do you think it should be?