Thursday, March 21, 2019

United States Air Force: What's Next?

Now that I have a date for BMT, I have to really start preparing. I have been running around 21 miles every week up to this point, and will continue that. We will be ending the lease at our current apartment at the end of April, and my wife will be traveling with her family to South Africa for the first half of May while I finish the last week and a half at my current job.

BMT is in San Antonio, TX at Lackland Air Force Base. It is 8.5 weeks long. There is a possibility that I will stay there for an additional 4 weeks for Aircrew Training before moving to Monterey, CA and the Defense Language Institute (DLI). I will likely be there for 64 weeks learning my new language. I do not know when I will find out what language I will be learning, but with my score of 137 on the DLAB, it will probably be Chinese, Korean, or Russian.

After Monterey, I will go to my job training which could be up to 19 weeks. Location and length will be determined by what airframe I will be working on. Finally, I will spend 3-4 weeks in Washington State for Survival Evasion Rescue and Escape (SERE) training.

After all of that I will be assigned to my first base. I do not know where that will be.

An Airborne Linguist spends the bulk of their time in the air, and I anticipate being sent on deployments frequently. They will typically be between 6-12 weeks long, with a similar time spent at home. Mostly it will be intercepting digital and radio transmissions from potential threats to our air and ground forces. I think it will be very interesting, and kind of fun too!

That's pretty much all I know at this point. Feel free to message me if you have any other questions, and I'll try to remember to update this as I continue along this journey!

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