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All for one

Nowadays, it’s not so easy to define the pointy end of the spear.

In Air Force culture, the fighter pilot is supposedly the be-all and end-all. If you’re in a fighter cockpit, you deserve credit for doing a job that’s difficult, dangerous and important.

But when the Air Force conducted a survey to identify its “most stressed” career fields, one of the ones it came up with was enlisted airborne cryptologic linguist. That surprised me because I was one of them, once.

The mission is to fly and fight. Air Force leaders don’t say that often enough. But I’m saying it now, not to disparage those who aren’t crew members of F-16s or RC-135s, but to praise everybody who helps put iron into the air.

For every fighter pilot or voice-intercept specialist who pushes the envelope out there in the danger zone, a hundred more people make it happen.

So I conducted a survey. I asked senior officers which troops in the Air Force are the least noticed. Which airmen are most in need of recognition?

The answer: cooks.

That’s right. Cooks. Now, my survey was admittedly unscientific, but this was the career field mentioned first and most frequently by the brass who responded.

“We have contracted out most actual cooking functions,” a colonel at a base in the Pacific wrote in an e-mail message, “but we still rely on services squadron airmen who have been trained to do many related tasks — jacks of all trades in food service planning, supervising and managing dining facilities, among other duties.” And, yes, in some of the difficult places where airmen are in harm’s way, the Air Force still has real cooks.

“All the troops in the services career field get a tip of the hat from me,” a major in a deployed Air National Guard unit wrote in another e-mail message. “It goes back to that saying, ‘An army travels on its stomach.’ Yet because they operate largely behind the scenes, we have become complacent appreciating their contribution to the total effort.”

The major is right. Try conducting an aerial campaign without food.

My survey produced some candidates for a hats-off who may seem to be obvious choices. Pararescue jumpers, high on the list of the “most stressed” career fields, were singled out for credit by officers who responded to my survey, as were combat controllers.

But refuelers and drivers were cited often, too. Let’s not forget that the Air Force now has 7,000 troops pulling “in-lieu-of” assignments with the nation’s ground combat troops. This isn’t the way we ought to be using airmen, but those who are pulling this especially hazardous duty deserve a smart salute.

And who’d have thought of wing command post controllers? One senior officer did. “That career field has taken hits lately,” this officer wrote in another e-mail message. “There is no dedicated officer command post career field to provide oversight. On the enlisted side, the field has a high proportion of cross-trainees who came from other career fields. Wing command post controllers work very long hours, buried in the basement of a command building, catching crap and answering phones. They receive little visibility and no glory, but they get a lot of grief. Their primary job is supposed to be emergency action message handling, but they get stuck answering foolish questions, tracking people down, and getting yelled at a lot.”

Another respondent wrote in an e-mail message that aerial port personnel contribute a lot and receive little acknowledgment. At one important base, an aerial port unit was reduced from a squadron to a flight, slashing resources and cutting people without reducing the workload.

You get the idea. The Air Force is still about flying and fighting. It always will be. But everybody in an Air Force uniform has a role in making that happen.

Today, the Air Force has the fewest troops in living memory. It also has the best. Everybody who wears a blue suit should feel good about contributing to the fight.

Everybody counts.

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The writer, an Air Force veteran, lives in Oakton, Va. He is co-author “Hell Hawks,” a history of an American fighter group in World War II. His e-mail address is robert.f.dorr@cox.net.