Soldiers. Sailors. Marines. Each Nov. 11, when Veterans Day rolls around, crews of GIs, leathernecks and swabbies get trotted out and rightfully honored.
Somehow the Air Force often gets overlooked, though Air Force vets are not the sort to complain.
“I never feel slighted,” said Tom Kittler, a retired Air Force brigadier general from Northbrook, allowing that, “I think it’s a valid argument.”
Kittler immediately speculated why that might be.
“The Army, the Navy, have been around for quite a long time. The Air Force is relatively new to the show.”
Relatively new, it became a separate branch of the Armed Forces in 1947. Before that, you had the U.S. Army Air Corps.
The Army and Navy cast a wide net. The Air Force is more focused, looking for recruits like Kittler, who joined the Air Force ROTC in 1984 as a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Why? He was already flying, having earned his wings at 16.
“It was my dream to fly airplanes,” he said. “My dad was an avionics engineer. He’d take my Cub Scout troop out to the hangar, we’d climb over the old airplanes. That’s how I got the bug.”
Americans give to the military; the military gives back. Kittler not only got a career out of the Air Force — he went on to become a commercial pilot — but a wife and family: He met his future wife Jennifer because she was an Air Force nurse.
Which put her in a position to understand the demands of the job, like at Christmas 1989.
“My folks were visiting,” he said. Duty called. “We took off Christmas Eve. My parents were aghast — ‘Where is he going? When is he coming back?’ My wife said, ‘He’s going to work; he’ll be back.'”
The mission? Operation Just Cause, the effort to unseat Manuel Noriega and restore Panamanian democracy.
At least that was over quickly. He was in the reserve during the Second Gulf War, called up for a two-year activation.
“That was hard,” said Kittler. “I was away from my girls — I have two daughters,” then 6 and 8. “But you get called, you have to go.”
Does service encourage patriotism?
“Absolutely it does,” he said. “I think the individuals you train to fight with, to go to war with, to spend Christmas Eve on an airplane with, these are your lifetime heroes. You do it for your buddies. You don’t want to let them down. That’s why I’m so involved with the Northbrook Veterans Center.”
Kittler, 64, would prefer today’s piece focus on all vets and their needs.
“We want to spread the word. It’s veterans helping veterans,” he said. “Veterans don’t know about service and benefits. We want to make sure everybody who is entitled to them is knowledgeable.”
The good that Kittler has been able to do includes mentoring Cameron Jones, an Air Force major and member of NASA’s latest class of young astronauts.
“My best friend’s son came to me, when he was 12, and said, ‘Hey Uncle Tom, I want to do what you do,'” recalled Kittler. “This past year, he just got tapped to be the latest of 10 astronauts. He’s very bright, did extremely well at test pilot school. It’s my understanding he will be selected for our effort to get back to the moon. He’s very excited, and I’m very proud of him.”
I observed that while traditionally the American military protects democracy by thwarting foreign enemies, now it is being put into a position where it might have to save American democracy from the designs of domestic would-be tyrants, the way Gen. Mark Milley refused to let Donald Trump turn the armed forces against our own citizens.
“Mark Milley is a great American,” Kittler said. “I agree 100%: No kings. We swore allegiance to support and defend what? Not a guy. The Constitution, the way it was written. It’s not rocket science. It’s baffling to me that half the country — a lot of my friends think this is the way to go. I don’t see it that way.”
I had to ask: What’s it like to fly? Soaring, as the Air Force flight song puts in, “into the wild blue yonder”?
“It is fantastic,” he said, recalling his first solo on a Beechcraft Sport. “The first time, that was that summer, Dad gave me the money to take some flying lessons. The instructor knows, but you don’t really know when it’s coming. You’re going to do three takeoffs and landings. And then he said, ‘Drop me off on the side, you’re up in the air all alone.’ You’ve got this machine, this winged thing you’re controlling.”
He teared up, slightly.
“Flying is remarkable. Nothing beats it,” he said. “Everybody asks me, now that I’m retired, don’t you miss it? I don’t miss it. I don’t miss going to work. I had a great career, a wonderful job. But if I hear an airplane overhead, I can’t not look up. To see where they’re going. How high they are.”