 College homecoming, with the annual beer bash the brothers throw for visiting alumni, and of course for themselves as well. Time to belt a brew or two, and a time also that I, Joe Collins, found myself mentally reviewing some conclusions I'd reached. Now the idle chatter between old grads and college chums was a little concerned to me, for I had deeper thoughts. As an upcoming graduate, I had weighed the world in the balance, founded wanting. What it needed was some kind of help from me, and many a bull session had convinced me that a lot of the other guys felt much the same way. I was luckier than many of them perhaps, because I knew something about myself already. I liked my studies, I knew how to learn, and I liked action. I wanted to do things that took me way beyond the books, action things. Now this is action to some, buy and sell, sell and buy, hooray for a two point change. This is action to others, breathing antiseptic 20 hours a day. And this is action to still others, dreams and schemes on paper only. But this was action, real action to me, every time I could steal away an hour. It was even more, it was mind and spirit too. This mother earth is never so blemished or so troubled, that it doesn't look better from up here. Here beyond the reach of Shelley Skylark and Brian's waterfowl, there are neither poems nor mere words to describe it. If you have to ask, as Sachmo said of jazz, you ain't never going to get to know. Every now and then the college found itself overrun with aging decrepit types, the alumni. Some of them dangerously close to 30, ages beyond which the new tradition hath it, they can't trust anyone. But you can't stop them from talking. A glass of beer or two bridges the generation gap among other things. The alum you see here is one Harold Rogers, now captain U.S. Marine Corps. From his dialogue it was obvious he liked his work. And like most Americans, had the standard number of suggestions for improving the state of the world. But declined to take full responsibility for the state it was in. I inherited the world too, he seemed to be saying, but he admitted under a certain conversational pressure that our incursion into the halls of Montezuma was hardly a good neighbor policy. And that today at least, he would visit the shores of Tripoli only as a tourist or as a welcome guest. In the course of a lot of talk, Captain Rogers and I at least knew we had reached certain mutual conclusions. That American life, American challenges, called for new infusions of talent, energy and ideas. At the best way to improve a nation, any nation, an institution, a business, or even a family, is from within. His own Marine Corps he allowed, sounding like a recruiter, which he wasn't, needed the same doses of new talent. New people that America needs as a nation, or if you wish, is a way of life. You gotta bear in mind that a country creates its own institutions, the Marine Corps included. And if the Corps has written a good hunk of American history, remember it could only do this with the full support and sanction of the American people, provided the ideas, the men, and the money. You say you like to think and you like to fly? Mm-hmm. Good. Begin with a flight of imagination. Whereupon Rogers began to talk of the Corps and its men who do the flying. Before the party broke up that evening, I had learned that Captain Rogers' own particular interest was helicopters, where he had tended to emphasize them. Rather coincidentally, I bumped into him between classes the next day, and we continued our talk where it had left off the night before. He invited me to put myself, as it were, at the beginning of the action. Perhaps you're a bit like me, Joe. If so, you like people, and you like new ideas. But you go for the old traditions, too. They remind us that the human race is more than a flash in the pan, but America is a relevant place, not just for this generation and those that are gone, but God willing for those that are yet to come. In a nutshell, that's the whole purpose of the fighting forces. History has proved unnecessary, and it'll be a much brighter future than anyone can foresee now that will prove fighting forces, the power of defense, irrelevant. Captain Rogers! Captain Rogers! To his new audience, Captain Rogers repeated some of his remarks about the military, and everyone's need for it. After which, he continued with a reference to an earlier phrase he had used about imagination. So in this flight of imagination, you and or some of your contemporaries are at the Navy Flight School at Pensacola, Florida. You've already got the flying bug, and no one but you can tell yourself you haven't. But the bug flies no aircraft. You've got to learn how. To understand the engine, you have to understand what's taking place inside of a cylinder. This is a postgraduate course worthy of the name. An example of the auto... Can you imagine yourself getting to this point in time? You can imagine anything. Well, I can't. Me for the corporation life. Letting down, uptight, onto the vice presidency. Well, I can imagine it. Yeah, it's only for three or four years if you want to make a change. Plenty of time to decide what direction that you want to take. Right. If you don't sign up for life, you sign up for a stint of service. You begin with ground school. It's simply a matter of aligning the proper scales on the computer. Ground school gives you the basics of flight. You notice the fuel flow will increase when I go into afterburner about three... There are a few weeks of academic training in flight systems. They include physical conditioning. This kind of exercise is a bit tough on the muscles and sinews at first. The obstacles seem much too high. But after a while, one's body gets rather used to a physical test. Even welcomes it after many hours of mental work in the classroom. You follow these weeks of interesting challenge with land and sea survival training. Now, don't knock survival. It's no small thing in the modern world. And the Marine Corps makes you better than the mass of men when it comes to knowing how to endure and to live. There's nothing like a plunge into the cool brine for practice ahead of any possible real need to know how. You'll be grateful too, not just for the added post-graduate education, but for this capacity to stand the gaffe, whatever the gaffe may be. It's now only a few weeks since you came down this way, but you've crammed a lot of learning and a lot of experience into this fast-moving period. Now you put your learning into practice. You do a lot of flying in the T-34. You get used to the idea that the aerial dimension gives you a lot of room to do your thing in. Then one day, the moment of truth, you solo. This first solo flight is like few other things in life beyond mere words. Exhilarating as it was, it doesn't make you a marine aviator yet. Ground school continues, and you advance to T-28 flight training. Eventually, your precision maneuvers become precision acrobatics. Your aircraft becomes an extension of your senses, your instincts, your intuition, your feel for plane and sky and wind and the land below. Through many hours of learning the precise, measurable, all-important principles of flight, beyond your own senses, the instrumentation becomes an environment of its own. You and they interact. Some have liken flight to poetry, but the man who knows never forgets that flight is also prose, or if you prefer, prosaic. For you no more defy the law of gravity than you can any other unchanging law of the universe. In plain English, you learn not merely to respect your instruments, but to believe in them. From basic instruments, you move on to advanced instruments. The one-time overwhelming appearance of the cockpit has given way to a kind of friendly familiarity, where you are now at home in the air, and being at home, you find you can share your airspace more and more intimately with others. To bring you to this pass, the tireless taxpayers of a mighty nation have invested in your time and talents, and you have done likewise unto them. You are now ready, if you're my particular kind of flyer, to graduate from the fixed wing kind of flying to the rotary wing variety. The A-57 is constructed primarily of aluminum alloy. You are a beginner once again, but only to helicopters not to flying. And it should become familiar with the instrumentation. Even in ground school, the theory that goes before practice is on the higher level you now deserve. The TH-57 trainer gives you the feel of these new wings, of this relatively new, ever-evolving kind of aircraft, that can dash and pounce and hover. Here again you learn and appreciate a wonder of precision flight. You find that the two realms of land and air come together almost naturally because you know how to bring them together. Thus, beginning with a smaller and simpler helicopter, getting to know it inside and out, its touches of special personality for all its mass production hardware, you work upward and onward to more advanced models, greater in size and complexity, learning to land where it's rough indeed, where landing would be out of the question for conventional aircraft, and finally it is almost anticlimactic to say, this is the time when you truly deserve Uncle Sam's rare and special tribute. This phase of your work is in the nature of transition, because you are now ready, qualified, and presumably eager to put your skills to use, as in combat training, ready to go where the action is. Action? Yep. It comes pretty much in seven varieties, for example. Vertical assault. Resupply on the battleground if necessary, or behind the lines. Parachute drops to the troops, or recon insertion. Visual reconnaissance. Reconnaissance duties with the infantry. Medical evacuation. Either way, conventional or hoist. Helicopter gunship duty. Couldn't help reacting to Captain Rogers' description of combat training. I sure as hell aren't stressing the easy part of it all. No, this is work that needs doing. You can't feed it for sure. Significance? Not a bad one-word summation. I talked to Captain Rogers off and on during homecoming. He'd come back to school after all, not as a recruiting officer, but as an alumnus. After we parted, I summed up what we talked about. He had planted a seed. So the Marine Corps, proud as it is, is hungry too. For talent, for ideas, for leadership, not least of all among its aviators. It's quite a confession if you want to put it that way. But I imagine any organization worth its salt is perpetually hungry right now. Or the leadership that it's going to need tomorrow. In any event, on the day of graduation I acted, or perhaps reacted to a personal decision. At this stage in my life, I knew I didn't want those cubby holes, those pigeon holes and paperwork. I knew the action I wanted. I would take on the Marine Corps for a stint or vice versa. So goodbye to school, the stately towers and to those who walked these ways, for the institution has passed out as diplomas. Material hints that youth won't last forever, that the world is dying to close in on you. I'll be trying to see a bit of the world first, and from on high. It'll be easier for me to be a groundling later on in life. If I can do something special now, like learning to fly, straight up and away.