Speaker 1:
0:01
But I had good mental health, man. That was a mission that mattered. That was the erect, serious stuff and yeah, it was good. It was good all the way around. The only thing that sucked about it was studying for that board, but outside of that it's like the mission mattered. The people were on board. It was the first time where I've kind of seen them put together what we do in an unclassed format and give it to the maintainers, because your e-dogs are the ones that are grinding man, they're the ones keeping the planes up.
Speaker 1:
0:29
I love those guys, and so that was really cool, just because everybody was on board, for a change, everybody. There was not one person out there that was like dragging ass or not wanting to go the extra mile. Just because you could see from the briefs, every time the plane went down, the red line creeped up and when the plane was up, the red line creeped down. For those who've done it, red forces like enemy forces, but it was a visible, tangible difference and that was super cool. But yeah, in this case, dude, it was cool.
Speaker 1:
1:04
I got my feet under me, I was in the position to actually teach and tell people where I screwed it up and just to try to help. Because there's two types of pile, especially in that community. It's like it's sucked for me, so it's going to suck for you, or it's sucked for me and it doesn't need to suck for you. Man, just do it this way. It'll be easier. Not necessarily wrong or the right way is not always the easy way, but you can still help your bros and that's what it was kind of about. So we started to enter that territory a little bit and it felt good.
Speaker 2:
1:39
Good, that's good. Yeah, it's kind of crazy how the culture can ebb and flow and how just one or two individuals can really twist and shape that. So it's good, though it sounds like the experience was definitely a lot better that second time around, and it's especially to your point doing real world stuff as opposed to just going to fly circles around all the time. It makes a huge difference in impact on people's attitude, especially when they know what's going on.
Speaker 1:
2:10
And they knew that to the point where it's like, when we finally got the air medals for the Iraq series stuff, you got your crew being like hey, sir, if you're good, we're good. And that was the highest compliment anybody could have ever paid me, more than any award or anything, was just like you took care of a. If you say it's worth it, we're good to go. And that's kind of the way it was. Going back to primary, even when you got to fail a student, they're like I understand, thank you. And I was like we're not done here, dude, let's go to the sim, let's get this hammered out. And so it was just really, really cool to be around motivated people from the student's perspective and also from the instructor perspective, and people were just good man and the product was good, like we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 2:
2:57
That's good to hear, dude. Yeah, it's kind of the mentality I tried to take with me over to VUP. When I got there, I mean, honestly, I was pretty much burnt out with the situation leaving VP 40. But hey, I got what I wanted. I got Jacksonville, I got the drugs. I was happy. So I went in, going to make the best of it and I quote the infamous Elton John it's just my job five days a week. I'm a rocket man and that's. I mean no bullshit, bro. That's how I took it. Like I went in and I just I did my best. I didn't try to like I said we had a culture of good dudes who, like we all, had a similar experience. Some had it way worse than I did. There were at least I got the fly. Still, I was our DFW workhorse, but we had some dudes who weren't touching a plane.
Speaker 2:
3:41
But hey it was all equal footing once you got here and it was nice to be able to both change the culture around and redeem myself and prove that basically, that situation was a fluke due to a bad culture.
