Kickstarter

I'm writing a book detailing 18 years as an airborne U.S. Air Force linguist. I've flown on just about every manned reconnaissance aircraft and have done just about every mission there is. Look at my bio below the rewards to see what I've actually done. This book has two main purposes. One is to highlight a group of people that most people don't even know exists. The other is to reveal a problem that is causing huge damage to our nation, but can be fixed.   

I will write things that are unclassified but VERY embarrassing and revealing of our deficiencies, but sometimes you have to tell the Emperor he has no clothes, even if he gets mad. I will also tell stories of people who defy every aspect of military culture and get away with it. 5 years ago, an Army psychiatrist said that we linguists were the most F###ed up group of brilliant people he had ever come across. He was trying to write a post-doctoral thesis on us until he had to abandon the effort because "dumbing it down to the unclassified level" negated his ability to publish at that level with all the requisite references and statistics. Apparently, at that level, they want documented proof of what he says and you can imagine the government's response to that request given some of the stuff we did. Anyway, he had been practicing for 40 years and said he had "never met a group who had the smarts to be doctors, lawyers, or whatever you want, but would rather grow your hair long in defiance of instructions and sit around here telling us all to go F### ourselves." And he was right. Funny thing is, the Air Force fights to keep us around because they desperately need the skills and we always delivered the goods, saving the lives of numerous aircrews and helping to put an end to thousands of threats around the world, so they put up with it for the most part. In addition to all the truly outrageous stuff we got away with that no other military member (except the elite spec ops guys I worked with) would ever dream of attempting, I'll go into a fair bit of the operational stuff I've done. Of course, I can't reveal classified and some of it may be redacted by the security guys I am legally bound to vet the book through, but most will make it through. Interspersed amongst the "holy crap - you guys did that?!?!", will be a truly concerning story of how the Air Force has utterly failed to retain a talented cadre of airborne linguists and why this is so. Why can't we keep guys and gals in? Why are the language test pass rates so miserably low when we get the best training in the world initially? What has gone wrong at the leadership level to get us to this point? And most importantly, how do we fix it? Actually, the fix is pretty easy and every one of us at the operational level has known about the solution for years, but it is like swallowing glass shards to some in Air Force leadership, so it will probably never get done. I should say I have met many of the Air Force leadership and they are mostly good people who want to do right, but like politics, no one wants to throw their career on the sword to fix it - or they aren't getting the ground-truth info fed all the way up to them. Like Bob Baer (huge respect) did in his book, "See No Evil" about the CIA, I will expose one area that has weakened our country in the hope that the exposure inspires the solution. One thing I will NOT do is endanger any of my friends or peers in the field (I don't like everyone and some of them don't like me - thus "peers not friends" but I will still protect them). Thus, many names will be changed, though they and probably everyone else in the community will know who they are. I might embarrass them (usually richly deserved), but I won't endanger them or their missions. In the end, it will be an entertaining yet serious book that will give you a view through a window few know exists and even fewer have ever seen through. And, finally, to those who might freak out that I may write something that you would consider "traitorous", relax. Not only does everything have to go through security clearing, but I am too much of a patriot to do that.