Chuck Brown

“Your momma wears combat boots!”

What did that even mean? Why is that a bad thing? I’ll Google it later. 

Anyway, this is about my combat boots, but not my momma.

I was in the Air Force from 1996 to 2000. My service tenure is not a point of pride. It was utilitarian – i.e., I was getting people off my back because I’d flunked out of college. It also was a quiet, boring military stint, which is something a lot of kids who signed up just a year or two after me cannot say.

I became an airplane mechanic because the dad of this girl I dated had been an Air Force mechanic when he was young, and I thought he was kind of cool.

For four nondescript years, I was the worst mechanic in U.S. Air Force history. Fortunately, I knew I was bad, so I just did exactly what my supervisor (who was the best mechanic in the Air Force) told me to do. Ultimately, only one of the planes I worked on crashed and there was, thankfully, no proof that it was my fault. It collided with a German cargo plane and fell deep into the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa.

About the boots. They are steel-toed, they still fit, and they live in my garage. Somewhere between two and ten times a year, I lace them up to go blow the snow off my driveway. When I dig them out, I marvel at how long it has been and how I still feel 18-- even though I have a kid that age now. And then at some point it hits me just how lucky I was to have “fixed” planes at such a quiet, boring time.