2 - AUTHOR'S NOTE

A LITTLE BACKGROUND IN THE FOREGROUND
Author’s Note

Everything you’re about to read is true. All of it.
I made none of these stories up, nor any of the characters in them.
Everything really happened as described. Really…
… to the best of my memory, anyway.

Granted, a single person’s recollection of events is never a perfect resource, especially mine, but that’s the only resource I called upon in the writing of this account. So, yes, it will come with all the slanted perspectives, embellishments of time, and paraphrased dialogue of the world as viewed first through my 19- and 20-year-old eyes, then later retold through my 50-year-old filters. For these events occurred in 1977 and 1978, but weren’t committed to paper until the early to mid 2000s.
And yes, I’ve taken the usual step of changing the names of the very real people that were involved, not only to protect their innocence and anonymity, but also because, for the most part, I’ve forgotten most of their real names by now anyway. To tell you the truth, I’m actually more concerned that some of the fictitious names I’ve chosen for them might have come precariously close to their real names. And if that did happen, then allow me to apologize in advance—I didn’t mean to do that.
But I’ve also taken the additional step of trying to imbue this memoir with not only all of the original emotion, reasoning and rationales of these moments in time, but also with every bit of my own frequently appalling ignorance as well. Sure, I can look back now and understand what happened in the context of unfolding history, or with the 20/20 hindsight of the future looking back on the past. And I could portray these events—and especially these amazing characters—with all the depth and generosity afforded by time and my own evolving maturity.

But I’ve chosen not to do that here.

I’ve made it a point to relive these adventures in the dim, narrow, and often shortsighted light of the moment. And I did this not only out of a personal desire for truth in this depiction, but also because, well—so many of the choices I made and the actions I took at the time were based on that very ignorance, and as such, cannot be explained any other way.
So here it all is, warts, boogers, zits and tears, and everything in between.
All of it. I promise.

Secondly, let’s set the record straight about something else that’s even more important to me than all the “biased honesty” mentioned above. And that is this…
Though this most definitely is the story of my brief but eventful membership in the elite fraternity of America’s special forces, what it is not is a suggestion about my suitability for the job. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Because, to put it succinctly, I sucked at it. And I knew it.
Hence the title of this book.
So let me make sure that everyone gets that, especially the real Spec Ops troops out there who have dedicated their lives—and I do mean their lives—to this very dangerous but vital and noble career choice:

I do not count myself among your ranks.

I am not, and never was, in your league. Not even at the peak of my involvement or enthusiasm. I was a dabbler, and nothing more, a curious onlooker who stuck his nose far enough in the door that I wound up getting completely sucked in, and spent the next year-and-a-half just hanging on for dear life. This wasn’t some gallant crusade on my part, some lifelong dream, or a grand quest for a cause that I deeply believed in. It was just a chance for me to play G.I. Joe to the extreme, to jump out of some airplanes, and to play with some loud toys. That’s all. And I took it. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did. And now… well… now there’s this story to tell.
The funny part is—at least for the purposes of this book—the extent to which I was so monumentally unqualified for the job of Air Force Combat Controller is precisely the extent to which I am so very qualified to describe it now. This is simply because, unlike my dedicated classmates and mission-oriented teammates at the time, I was more of a “regular guy” than they ever were, more of a band nerd than a jock, more of a wannabe than an oughta-be, and everybody knew it. None moreso than me.

They were GREAT. I was just THERE.
So, if you, dear reader, are or ever were a member of this fraternal elite yourself, be you Ranger, Recon or SEAL, Green Beret, CCT or Delta—if this is or ever was your true calling in life—then you have my undying respect and admiration. Truly. I am proud and honored to have known such people as you, to have worked beside you, and I am exalted to have been (however inappropriately) counted among you.
But you probably won’t enjoy this little collection of reminiscences very much.
For one thing, it was a weird time historically. And for another, as I might have mentioned already, I sucked at it.
Sure, our equipment and methodologies were relatively primitive compared to today, but worst of all, I personally wasn’t in it for the right reasons. I wasn’t focused or properly motivated, I had no objective other than to ‘see what it was like,’ and bottom line, I just wasn’t very good at it. I was just in it for the ride… as you’ll soon enough see.
If, however, you are not a member of this elite brotherhood—if everything you know and appreciate about this nation’s finest warriors is what you’ve read in books, or seen in the movies or on the Discovery Channel—well, you might like this a little better. Because this is what it looks like from the inside (or looked like back in the 70s, anyway) through the eyes of someone more like you. Namely, me. If your curiosity had pushed you that one extra step further, and you’d ventured into this arena yourself—just for a bit, just for a taste—this is what you would have seen and done.
This is the story of a regular old slightly weird everyday guy—me, a moderately intelligent and athletic, but otherwise unheroic, ignoble, and generally clueless standard-issue guy—who crossed over, briefly, into a realm of silent greatness, who had to push himself far beyond his every boundary just to even exist among these people, and who, in his very brief exposure to this lifestyle, saw and did more than he ever believed himself capable.
This is the story of A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing.

And finally, one last thing that I think it’s important you know before we get started here—namely, who and what I was before all this happened.

Have you ever seen the movie Empire of the Sun, directed by Steven Spielberg? It’s a fabulous movie—one of his best, in my opinion, and my personal favorite from his vast catalog of stunning masterpieces. It starred a young Christian Bale—who would later grow up to play Batman, in Batman Returns—in an absolutely astonishing tour de force of acting, especially for a kid in his early teens at the time.
For those of you who’ve never seen this film, Christian played the pampered son—or perhaps more like the “spoiled-rotten heir”—to a wealthy British diplomat, in China, just before the Japanese invasion and the outbreak of World War II. He’d always lived in exotic locales around the world, had never known personal hardship, and had always had doting parents, servants, expensive toys, and a thorough, tutored education. He wasn’t a bad kid—he was bright, inquisitive, intelligent, and polite—he was a Boy Scout, and he was big into aviation. But he’d never known suffering, denial or privation, nor violence or loss in his lifetime. And he’d sure as hell never had to survive.
So, he was basically a good-natured but unscarred mama’s boy… just like me.
In the movie, the Japanese invaded mainland China, and in the panicked rush of civilians clogging the streets and bridges of Shanghai, trying to escape ahead of the rolling tanks, our child-hero got separated from his parents, and suddenly found himself alone in a terrifying and hostile world… parents gone, house empty, no servants or even neighbors to call upon—they’d all been rounded up by the Japanese—and with the last of the food rotting in the dead refrigerator.
Then, on the verge of starvation and madness, he was befriended by a pair of scrappy Americans, scroungers laying low and flying under the Japanese radar, played by Jon Malkovich and Joe Pantoliano. And he was with them when they too were rounded up by the Japanese, and sent off to a prison camp outside the city… where they remained for the next 5, 6, 7 years or so, until the end of the war and the surrender of the Japanese.
It’s an amazing story, following this coddled kid’s painful growth into a worldly and self-sufficient survivor. Combined with his love of all things aeronautic—and his absolute worship of the P-51 Mustang, “the Cadillac of the Skies!”—the whole thing just resonated with me like a tuning fork struck right between my eyes.
Because that kid was me at that age.

Although my mother and father were by no means wealthy during my childhood and adolescence—quite the opposite, in fact—they were still loving, attentive, and protective, and had created a home, a “safe zone,” that I could always return to for comfort and security. My mother was a hands-on full-time home-maker, and, with four kids (spanning ten years) in the brood by the time I’d “come of age,” she was a busy and dedicated steward of our developing lives. My father, on the other hand, was a Professor of Geology at the University of Miami, a co-inventor of the modern carbon-14 dating process, a workaholic, and a logical and erudite atheist. So, between Mom’s loving, compassionate, and nurturing encouragement, and Dad’s intelligence, his ability to explain the complex, and his dry and blistering sarcastic wit, I got the best of both barrels all the way up into adulthood.
But I’d never once been in a fight. Not once. I’d never so much as thrown a punch—not even in the near-daily scraps with my punky younger brother—and, truth be told, I didn’t even like contact sports much. I was athletic as hell, mind you—I was nimble, fast (second-fastest in my entire large high school, in fact), strong, and coordinated—but I never liked anything that was “high-impact,” like tackle football… or fighting. So I simply never did those.
I was smart, though—relatively speaking—got good grades (at least until my senior year, when I just quit trying), enjoyed “public speaking,” played the guitar, piano and trombone, and was a member of both the AV and Chess Teams.

Yes, I was that high a degree of nerd, my friends.
I never learned to “drink.” Nothing ‘moral’ about it; just a set of taste buds that utterly rebelled at the horrifically bitter taste of alcohol, in any form. Period. Couldn’t even stand the smell of it. The same with drugs. And that missing piece from the puzzle of my youth, combined with my natural tendency to overthink and fret over everything, meant that I never knew an uninhibited moment in any social situations… so I never got comfortable with them. I never went to any parties, never learned (or wanted to learn) to dance, was ridiculously slow and cautious in developing the few close friendships I ever had, and was terrible with women. I couldn’t get a date with a girl at gunpoint, and I was a virgin until I was 19, when—as Neil Diamond put it—“I became a man at the hands of a woman almost twice my age.”
(Actually, she was exactly twice my age)
So, I was a social oaf and a self-imposed outcast, a teetotaler (except that I hated tea as well), an atheist, and a band geek, all wrapped up in a strong, nimble, six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered, greasy-haired, blue-eyed body. I wasn’t hard to look at, I could be funny at times, and I was even fairly artistic, but in just a few too many ways, I didn’t fit in anywhere. And when my senior year finally rolled around, I needed somewhere to go.

My family had taken a huge roadtrip—from Miami to San Francisco to Seattle, then on to Butte, Denver and Chicago, with a long haul back home again—in the summer of ’74, between my junior and senior years in high school. And one of the stops along the way was a tour of the Air Force Academy outside Boulder, Colorado. I’d always thought that flying fighters would be cool (although, in reality, what I really wanted to be was an arcade pilot, where the job was little more than a competitive and abstract test of skills, not an actual life-and-death struggle for aerial supremacy or the defense of a nation), and Dad was desperate to motivate me to improve my grade point average somehow.
Unfortunately, the gesture backfired… for both of us. The campus, while lovely, was austere and intimidating to me. The curriculum was daunting, to say the least, and the rigid discipline and martial ardor had me ready to bolt down the mountain—on foot, if need be—long before the tour was over. And as it turned out, the loss of this central aspiration of mine really unhinged what little work ethic I had left. Throughout my miserable senior year then, my grades just plummeted. Fact is, I came one “special project” short of failing 12th grade altogether.
But graduate I did, and I left high school at a sprint, determined to never look back. I also forgot all about my dreams of becoming the world’s greatest fighter ace, and concentrated instead on struggling through my first year in college.
I hated college too, though. Most people find that appalling, especially considering that, since my father was a professor at the local university—just one leisurely mile from our house, through the shaded streets of Coral Gables—my tuition (and housing) were free! All my poor, struggling parents had to pay for was my books! And all I had to do was show up interested!

But I just friggin’ hated it. I had no interest in anything, career-wise, never did figure out what my major should be, and after only a semester-and-a-half, in February of 1976, I just quit going.
I fully understood the meaning of The Bigger Picture when my father repeatedly shouted, “But it’s FREE!,” but that didn’t make me want it any more. And when, later that year, I quit the unique job I’d held for some time at the Miami Space Transit Planetarium, he reached the end of his tether, and laid down an ultimatum: if you’re not working or going to school by September, you’ll be paying rent here.
I celebrated this pronouncement by taking the last of what little money I’d managed to save, pooled it with that of my best friend “Eldon” (yes, his name’s been changed as well), and we headed out in my tired old '70 Ford Maverick on a “Last Fling” kind of roadtrip up the east coast. No real plan, other than to see if we could push it all the way up to Montreal, Canada, where they were holding the Olympics that year, before we ran out of money. And though, in hindsight, it wound up being a “funny story”—full of stupid misadventures, the inconvenient repercussions of thundering off into the void without a plan, and limping home, exhausted, broke, blatting along on a blown exhaust gasket, sick to death of that lone ABBA cassette that we’d played over and over and over again in a desperate bid to stay awake, and dead tired of each other—at the time it didn’t seem “funny” at all.
I was actually pretty damned angry and disgusted with myself.
What a loser I was!
Well, one day, a week or two before we’d left Miami on that cursed odyssey, I’d dropped in on an Air Force recruiter, entirely on an offhanded whim, and looking to have just one last question answered by him… namely; was there any way at all for me to become a fighter pilot without a college degree? Maybe some semi-secret “backdoor route,” where you’re judged on your innate flying skills, or your hand-eye coordination, or your spatial recognition and split-second decision-making prowess, or anything other than your ability to maintain a C+ average in school.
The recruiter thought that was pretty funny.
No. In order to be a pilot, you had to be an officer. And in order to be an officer, you had to have a college degree. Period. No special handshakes or secret words or winks from your Congressman—just get that pigskin, then come talk to us.
Fine. Good enough for me. That was all I needed to hear. My flying career in the U.S. Air Force was gone, and I could accept that.
I was rising to head out the door then, when he slapped a long piece of paper, slathered top to bottom in small print, on his desktop, and said, “But why don’t you see what kind of jobs you would be qualified for? Come on. Just for curiosity’s sake. It’ll take you two minutes.”
And I, being the unassertive tower of jello that I was, just couldn’t think of a polite (or believably fictitious) way to squirm out of it (heaven forefend that I should just say 'no thanks,' and leave), and I sat back down to read through the list.
Over 200 different enlisted jobs, 99.5% of which were entirely unappealing. But, since he was waiting and staring into my face while I read, I finally pointed to the .5% one, and said, “That might be interesting.”
He spun the paper around, and read it out loud. “Air Traffic Control. Oo, good one. A tough one. Wanna’ see if you’d qualify?”
“Well, no, I… I’ve got this… thing I’ve got to…”
“Come on. What could it hurt? Go take a written test—it’s free, you pick the date, and they’ll provide the boxed lunch. No strings attached, no signature required on nuttin’! Just for curiosity’s sake… just to see how you stack up.”
He apparently knew an easily cornered weenie when he saw one, because, just to get that visit over with, I knuckled under and agreed to take the damned test. Two weeks later, I slogged through the four-hour knowledge and skill test, and without waiting to learn the results, I headed out with Eldon on our ill-fated road trip the very next day.
And I forgot all about that test… until the day we sputtered and wheezed back into my driveway, and shut down that nasty, cat-piss-smellin’, bulldozer-soundin’ Maverick for the last time… finally… after two hellish weeks on the road.
By then—at the depths of my exhaustion, disgust and self-loathing—I was ready to do something… anything to put my loser-life back on track again. And that’s when that test came back to mind.

They should have the results back by now!
The very next day, I returned to that recruiter’s office. And sure enough, the results were back… and my overall score was high enough that I’d qualified for all BUT two jobs—the two rejects being Vehicle Maintenance, and Accounting (no surprises there). So, if I wanted it, I could sign up that day, and be a full-time practicing air traffic controller by that same time next year! Maybe not quite the same as being a pilot, but I’d get to tell pilots where to go, and at the end of four years, I’d have a whole career waiting for me with the FAA.
Sold!

The point of all this is, I didn’t go into the Air Force following a lifelong dream, or seeking some noble “higher ground” for which to strive. I wasn’t trying to better myself, or dedicate myself to the defense of my homeland. I went in because, at the time, I hated myself too much to keep doing what I was doing, and I didn’t have any other “outs” lined up as an alternative.
Within a month, I was sworn in on Delayed Enlistment, and six months after that, I was headed off for Basic Training—right where this story begins.
On the day that I left Miami for good, I’d never even heard of “Combat Control,” didn’t even know the Air Force had its own “special forces,” and had no inclination toward doing anything other than learning how to talk to airplanes, and telling officers where to go. I’d still never been in a fight, still never lived anywhere other than my parents’ house, and was scared shitless as the day of departure marched closer.

Yep, that was me. That was the guy that “led” those nine other men out the door of that C-130 into the night skies north of Little Rock ten months later.

How the hell did that happen?

That ought to make one hell of a story… don’t you think?




Steve Stipp
December 26th, 2008