Jeff Miller grew up in Madison Heights, a suburb north of Detroit, Michigan. His father was a Marine, and his uncles served in the Navy, Army, and Air Force. Jeff joined the Air Force in April of 1994 and served as a master sergeant. He retired from the service, at forty-four, after twenty-four years of service.
An Army recruiter shows up at the house out of nowhere. I invite him inside and he shows me his portfolio of all the amazing and great things he did in Honduras and South America. He can tell I’m excited.
“So,” he says. “What do you think?”
I think I need to get my life straight. I’m eighteen, and the subcontracting job I had with General Motors, sewing leather products for their cars, went south of the border because of NAFTA. My friends are going down the wrong path, and I don’t want to go with them. I think if I stay here in Detroit, my life is going to turn to shit. I think I need to get as far away from Michigan as possible.
“The Army looks great,” I tell him.
When my father comes home from work, I tell him I’m going to join the Army.
“No, son. No Army.”
“What about the Marines?”
The color drains from his face and he swallows several times—the same look he gets when fireworks go off during the Fourth of July.
My father was a Marine, served in Vietnam. Not that he—or my mother, for that matter—ever talked about it. The only reason I know is because I found an old photo album of his. He served four years, all of it pretty much on an aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise.
My father takes a deep breath. He’s a hard man. Growing up, me, my brother, and my sister—we couldn’t do anything right in his eyes. I figured if I joined the military, he’d show me some respect, maybe even say, Hey, I love you, son. I’m proud of you.
“No,” he says. “Absolutely not. No Marine Corps.”
“I’m nineteen. I can do it.”
“You’re not going to join the Army, Navy, or the Marine Corps. If you’re going to do it, you’re going to do the Air Force.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been to almost all the Army and Navy bases. The Air Force bases—the quality of life there is so much better. And you’ll learn a trade, one you can take with you after the service. Besides, your mother made you soft, so the Air Force is perfect for you.”
I think he’s joking about me being soft. I hope he is.
Air Force basic training is the easiest thing in the universe. Once you get over the initial shock of someone yelling at you, it’s like being back in parks and recs. Let’s go on the monkey bars and climb across. Let’s walk over this rope across a pool. You won’t fall. No one is going to swing a rope at you.
My second week in, a career counselor asks me what I want to do. I tell him what I told my recruiter: I want to be a loadmaster. Fly with the aircraft, load ’em up.
The counselor consults his clipboard. “Closest thing I’ve got is air transportation. You’ll like that. Says here you worked at a warehouse for a lot of your high school years. You’ll load aircraft. It’s pretty much the same thing as being a loadmaster.”
It’s not even close.
I don’t fly with the aircraft or do any weights and balances. They have me load everything from explosives and tanks to refueling vehicles, helicopters, humanitarian supplies—just about everything.
Two months later, they send me to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. They put me on the graveyard shift. I don’t see the sun for six months. Then the seasons change, and the daily allotment of five hours of dusk, no sunlight, becomes the northern lights. I discover that Alaska is beautiful—and covered in greenery.
The base is an aerial port, the focal point to get anything out of Anchorage by air. I love my job, which is primarily unloading trucks and shipping everything on special air pallets called metal skids. The six of us stationed here become a close circle, do everything together—hunting and fishing, barhopping at night.
I have ambitions to be a hotshot entrepreneur and own a bar. The Montgomery G.I. Bill will pay for school, so I can go learn how to do it right. Four years later, though, when they ask me if I want to reenlist, I tell them yes. I like my job, my life. I like it very much.
On September 11, 2001, I’m married and working at the BWI Airport in Baltimore, Maryland. Air Mobility Command has a terminal there, and instead of moving cargo I’m moving passengers. Military personnel traveling to Europe or some other forward operating base, or FOB, fly out of BWI.
Before coming here, I worked in California, at the Travis Air Force Base, where I deployed to places like Saudi Arabia and helped open new Air Force bases and airfields. Sometimes we’d get fired at or shelled, but it was always far away, way outside the base. It was like going on a Boy Scout camping trip that might turn deadly. I never was in direct combat.
On 9/11, they shut down the airport. It’s the first time that I actually feel, Holy crap, I’m in the military. I actually may get the opportunity to defend the nation.
This is going to be wonderful.
Then I remember I have a wife and three kids and I’m not so sure.
For the next six years, they send me all over the world. Then, in 2007, I’m deployed to Afghanistan. The Air Force puts me in charge of scheduling airlifts and putting soldiers on planes. No other country comes close to moving stuff like the US. We move foreign troops and equipment for Germany, France, even England.
I’m stationed on a German-led FOB with a team of eleven people. We’re at the height of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. A lot of American Special Forces are on base, as well as Air Force commercial and military cargo craft.
My job is forwarding Air Force property to the correct FOB while also coordinating troops for redeployment or sending them back home. I’m responsible for getting equipment, air certification letters, and people cleared through customs and for calculating the correct load plans for each aircraft to utilize space, which is critical. To fly a large military transport aircraft like a C-5 Galaxy to Afghanistan from the East Coast of the US is a little over a million dollars in fuel and flight costs. The work is mind-numbingly painful but also challenging and important.
Soldiers are getting killed and wounded in record numbers. My transportation group is placed in charge of finding aircraft for our fallen warriors and heroes and delivering them to the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. I have seventy-two hours to get them home—and all the military aircraft are assigned to high-priority missions, Special Forces, and medevacs. Trying to reroute one of our aircraft to pick up the remains is a nearly impossible task, but fortunately I have a little bit more play with the civilian carriers, which normally start their mission in Dover. I enter the necessary information into our system, make sure that the funeral director who will collect the remains knows the state and condition of the body, which means I need to read the death certificates.
They’re very difficult to look at.
And the deaths don’t stop. I’m moving eighteen, twenty-two bodies at a time.
Then our timeline is cut from seventy-two hours to forty-eight. I can’t get any additional equipment or manpower. My people and I have to figure out a way to do it on our own.
We work eighteen, twenty-two hours a day, and we sleep in our tents on the airfield. It’s insanely hot and humid, flash flooding all the time, our computer systems crapping out, and we hunker down and make it happen because we’re dealing with the human remains of warriors, and we’ve got to get them home.
I don’t have, to my knowledge, PTSD or anything like that. When I deployed, I always found great people who made my time memorable even when we were living in a tent in the middle of winter and didn’t have a working heater. But I won’t lie to you: when I got back home, I wanted to go back overseas. I’m retired now, but if they asked me to put on the uniform and go back over there to support the mission, I would do it in a heartbeat.