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“USAFA ‘wash-out’s’ message to accompany donation”
From: (name withheld)
Subject: USAFA “wash-out’s” message to accompany donation
Date: March 17, 2025 at 1:13:00 AM MDT
To: mikey@militaryreligiousfreedom.org
Mikey:
Yesterday, 3/16/25, I downloaded your book No Snowflake in an Avalanche after running across your Facebook account. The mission of MRFF has resonance for me on almost too many levels to make this note (that accompanies a $250 contribution to your organization, made online) readable lest you lose valuable time doing the work you do.
I attended USAFA as a member of the (graduating class withheld). My “career” there was nowhere near as illustrious as those of you, your sons, and your daughter(-inlaw). I received a “dumbbell” appointment via the athletic department to play football there. My high school grades were okay, and I kicked a little ass with the SAT, so the athletic department didn’t have to go slumming to get me. I did well in BCT, as would anyone who ever played a harsh team sport, and barely got through my first 4th class semester with a 2.0 GPA. I missed one game as a starting defensive lineman because at mid-terms I’d slipped below 2.0 and had to stay away from the team for a week so I could study. When I returned to USAFA after xmas furlough, I was hit with a class schedule that included calculus, advanced chemistry, and mechanical engineering. Though “STEM” hadn’t been coined back then, I was no STEM kid and saw my college GPA headed into the toilet with all the required math/science/engineering. Trying to stay current with subject matter I didn’t understand, I couldn’t leave the squadron to lift weights and train for upcoming spring ball. I boxed heavyweight for the squadron as ordered by the group commander, who was attached to our squadron. The football coach ultimately told me they had no use for a 198-lb. defensive lineman who could barely bench press his weight, and my MoM rating was in the toilet, which brought the squadron’s collective MoM down, too. I processed out a few weeks after spring semester 1973 started, so I never got a chance to meet you. I’d have been in SERE while you were doing BCT, so maybe it would have happened later. Perhaps to allay shame I felt at resigning my appointment, I rationalized that (because of bad eyesight) I’d been DQ’d from flight or even nav training, so I was never going to make rank, anyway. Your USAF career, of course, is testimony to the fallacy in my rationalization. Ultimately, I had to admit I never should have taken an appointment a more appreciative individual could have received; I was done with the US military and the depredations it had inflicted on the people of Southeast Asia. I had ignored my misgivings about the Vietnam war on the front end and succumbed to the compliment a USAFA recruiter had paid me in projecting I was a candidate for NCAA D-1 football.
By the way, Jack Catton (in my class and BCT squadron) was the biggest rah-rah brown-nose I ever met. I couldn’t believe his father was a general. That he became a predatory uniformed fundamentalist is right on brand.
On the one hand, you describe a USAFA I never experienced. We had two Jewish 4th classmen in my squadron; they were just part of the crew and (as far as I could see) experienced no discrimination. Obviously, I can’t vouch for their total experience at USAFA. Women were not permitted there till after the (graduating class withheld) graduated. That said, I witnessed widespread misogyny and what I later came to identify as rape culture, including an incident I heard about afterward that took place involving some of my teammates and the drunken spouse of an officer at Randolph AFB. Her husband was TDY somewhere, and what happened to her should have been prosecuted. Because my room was in another part of the VOQ, all I got was hearsay. I still wonder if I should have reported it.
As my first semester at USAF commenced, doolies were told they had to get themselves to church on weekends. I had left the Catholic church and the Catholic school system two years earlier. The reasons are legion, and I won’t go into them here. I was a militant ex-catholic who knew nothing of Protestantism or Judaism, so those weren’t alternatives. All I knew was I’d been looking forward to Sundays to recover from sleep deprivation. Being forced to attend mass was an infringement on my rights. Unbeknownst to us, though, years earlier Senior West Point Cadet Lucian Truscott IV and others had filed a lawsuit that ended up before SCOTUS on that very issue. Truscott, et al., prevailed before SCOTUS in 1972, so 2-3 weeks into Fall semester, my element leader came around one Saturday evening and told us “some atheist commie assholes” at West Point and Annapolis had gotten the Supreme Court to relieve us of the church-attendance requirement so we could sleep in. Which I did. I never attended another mass except for a wedding or two in later years. No one said anything critical to any of us who chose not to get up and go to church. I’d have likely left sooner had religionist pressure been piled on top of everything else doolies/squats dealt with. I bring that up because Christian evangelism was not an element of my brief time there. Even on the football team, which had a number of players from the South who were big on pre-game prayer, nobody said anything if some of us stood mute when they asked their god to help them win and threw in the Lord’s Prayer. I doubt it was like that when your sons were there.
Over the years I read about the sexual assaults on women cadets in SERE which caused the DoD to move the POW resistance/evasion element off site for USAFA grads. I also read about the in-squadron misogyny, rape, and victim-shaming. Frankly, I see a straight-line connection between Christian evangelism and the objectification of women cadets. They go hand in hand at USAFA just as they do in wider society. After I retired, I became a state-certificated volunteer domestic violence and sexual assault survivor advocate. In our training and experience at the shelter, we see the tenets of conservative Christianity used all the time to justify the abuse of survivors. My main role there is to accompany survivors to court to obtain restraining orders and testify against their abusers in criminal court.
My academic and vocational life after USAFA was checkered. I didn’t get a bachelor’s degree until I was 69 years old and retired for 9 years. After USAFA I transferred to (university withheld) to major in political science; I intended to go to law school. A near-fatal motorcycle accident that summer left me unable to walk without assistance for nearly two years, during which time the relative who controlled what money there was for college (my father had died when I was 14) embezzled it, so I picked up blue-collar and office work for several years. I ended up catching field agent and organizer work for two labor unions for nearly 25 years. I regret the time I spent at USAFA and even (university withheld) since I think I was born to be a unionist; had I jumped into that work in my 20s instead of my 40s, I could have done a lot more good. I lost track of the millions of dollars in wage and benefit increases I bargained for our members over my career. Since my field agent territory is mostly rural, more than once I caught bosses trying to use religion to justify their inequitable treatment of women I represented, and I (figuratively) beat the motherfuckers down. This is in addition to the cases I prepped for victories before the EEOC and our state anti-discrimination agency. I was born to be an advocate even if I never made it to law school. There is nothing sweeter than that letter from an arbitrator putting an unjustly fired union member back to work with a pile of back pay. It’s even sweeter when the employer balks and I got to sit 2nd chair to the union’s lawyer when we persuaded a judge to pile on.
It’s my opinion that if MRFF did not exist, those in the US military would face harsh, unjust existences. There’s a revanchist, authoritarian streak running through US culture ever since Reagan’s first election victory, and it gets worse all the time. Someone has to stand in the gap, which you and your family and crew are doing. I wish I could contribute more. If I didn’t live several states away (location withheld), I’d ask what sort of volunteer work MRFF needs. Not that you personally won’t be around for a while, but I hope there’s a legacy plan for MRFF to carry on.
(MRFF supporter’s name, location, and education withheld)
SEIU/IUOE retired
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