Never Quit by Jimmy Settle

Never Quit by Jimmy Settle

Author:Jimmy Settle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press


11

Strike Two

For a while, I hung around Lackland, awaiting an opening at one of the schools. The break in my orders was long enough that they decided to call me back home to Alaska to continue some of the other training I needed. This training was the in-house Alaska cone stuff. I had just begun the first part of some SERE training, a survival upgrade training on being interrogated, which I was proving adept at after the green feet stunt at Airborne.

Life back in Alaska as an official cone, in the pipeline, came with a small degree of respect from the PJs in the unit but no fewer push-ups. Cone life meant waking up early and hitting the pool by 5:30. The other cones and I would get in a couple hours of pool time before having to report to the section by nine o’clock. This was to stay in shape for dive school while awaiting that call for an opening, and to train the next generation of cones behind me in the pipeline.

I’d returned to an empty house. The time away in the pipeline cost me my first serious relationship. Despite the heartbreak, I was enjoying my time home, newly single, hiking and skiing up a storm. But my time back in Alaska wouldn’t last long.

I was supposed to know when I would be headed to dive school, and I thought I did. The training scheduler in charge of my unit informed me that the first class at the new air force school had started, but they didn’t have any spots for me. “Sorry, Jimmy,” he said. “Maybe in the next class they’ll get you a spot.”

This news was fine with me. I was enjoying being home in Alaska. I started the survival course at the section, and on the middle of the first day of training, the unit training scheduler came in and said, “Jimmy, you ready to go to dive school?”

“Hooyah, Sergeant! Sure am!” I said, lying.

“Great,” he replied. “Your plane is in two hours.”

“Oh! Okay! Cool!” I laughed. But it wasn’t funny.

This was another bit of PJ training in action. Be ready for anything.

Luckily, I was a single guy at that time and it took nothing for me to get ready to fly out. So before I really got to enjoy being home, I was off again. I wasn’t exactly depressed, because the destination, Panama City, Florida, had a reputation that appealed to me. Early reconnaissance from other cones informed me this was where all the beautiful college coeds in the country would frequent to escape the stresses of college life.

On the first day of dive school we got a loose inspection, and then, right off, we were hit with a tough PT test. They were making sure everyone was up to the physical standards for dive school, and that opening-day test was similar to the eight-week standard evaluation at INDOC. I needed to do a minimum of fifty-two push-ups, sixty-two sit-ups, and fifteen forward-grip pull-ups in a minute for each event, and a five-mile run in under forty minutes.



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